New Delhi continues to interpret aspiration of Eezham Tamils as threatening its sovereignty

[TamilNet, Thursday, 16 May 2019, 23:13 GMT]
Eezham Tamils should get the clue from New Delhi's latest proscription of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) that the idea of Tamil Eelam remains strong even though the LTTE was institutionally destroyed a decade ago through a genocidal onslaught, commented Tamil activists in Jaffna. The Indian Ministry of Home Affairs proscribed the LTTE for five more years issuing a notification through the Gazette of India on Tuesday. The announcement observed that “[t]he LTTE’s objective for a separate homeland (Tamil Eelam) for all Tamils threatens the sovereignty and territorial integrity of India, and amounts to cession and secession of a part of the territory of India from the Union and thus falls within the ambit of unlawful activities”.
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Mullai GA gives in to pressure from top, allocates lands to Sinhala colonists

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 15 May 2019, 21:35 GMT]
Mullaiththeevu District Secretary (Government Agent) Ms Rupavathy Ketheeswaran appears to have bowed to pressure from the Colombo establishment to allocate a housing scheme for the Sinhala colonists in Mukaththuvaaram in Kokku'laay, says civil activist and a former UN Field Officer V. Navaneethan. While defending the rights of the private Tamil land-owners, the GA seems to have promised to allocate three acres of public lands to the encroaching colonists. The GA who visited the area after the Sinhala protesters laid siege to her office on 13 May, was under pressure to promise the public land plot of three acres to be transferred to the colonists to set up a housing scheme. She was accompanied by SL military officers and the police as well as Survey Department officials, news sources in Mullaiththeevu said.
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Sinhala colonists protest against Tamil officials in Vanni

[TamilNet, Monday, 13 May 2019, 18:57 GMT]
More than one hundred Sinhala colonist families staged a protest laying siege to the Mullaiththeevu District Secretariat on Monday opposing the Tamil officials, including the District Secretary (GA) Ms Rupavathy Ketheeswaran, for objecting their illegal occupation of the lands. Even after the district secretary had met them, the protesters were blockading the entrance. The SL Police was not acting against the protesters. The SL military and police, who blocking Tamils from gathering to commemorate the 10th year of 2009 genocide that took place in the district citing Emergency Regulations, were not acting against the Sinhala protesters, the officials at the District Secretariat told TamilNet.
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Colombo attempts to Sinhalicise Tamil village using sympathy following Easter attack

[TamilNet, Saturday, 11 May 2019, 20:15 GMT]
Occupying Colombo’s ‘National Housing Development Authority’ (NHDA) was silently scheming to launch a housing scheme for Sinhala colonists in Mukaththuvaaram in Kokku’laay West village (GS/GN) area of Karai-thu’raip-pattu administrative division of Mullaiththeevu district on Saturday. However, the move was temporarily postponed following strong objections from the Tamil land-owners. The violent colonists, backed by the occupying SL Navy are Sinhala Catholics. They have been occupying the place during the times of war and after. Mukaththuvaaram is a strategically located village at the northern tip of the lagoon-mouth of Kokku’laay. The provincial border between the North and East runs through the lagoon.
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Academics across continents mark Tamil genocide remembrance in Dublin, discuss global injustice

[TamilNet, Friday, 10 May 2019, 23:34 GMT]
Irish, Cypriot, Rwandan, Palestinian, Rohingya, Korean and Colombian academics were taking part in an academic conference and a commemorative event on the tenth year of 2009 Mu’l’li-vaaykkaal Tamil genocide in Dublin, Ireland on the 02nd of May and on the 08th of May. The reflections made at these events provided both insights from lived experiences of genocide as well analysis of the situation before and in the aftermath of May 2009. The geopolitical context of Mu’l’li-vaaykkaal, attempts to de-politicize Tamil resistance and consolidate the ongoing structural genocide institutionalized through the unitary state of genocidal Sri Lanka were discussed in detail in the events making comparisons with the oppressions elsewhere in the world.
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Western diplomats must act to free Jaffna University student leaders: Political Analyst

[TamilNet, Thursday, 09 May 2019, 18:04 GMT]
The West needs to be reminded that the Tamil Christians were at the receiving end of the Easter Sunday most probably because the hierarchy of the Tamil National Alliance and the Tamil leaders, in general, had been explicitly leaning towards it after the end of the genocidal war in 2009. The unitary state in Colombo has now clamped down on the Tamil student leaders of the Jaffna University by deploying the Emergency Regulations totally out of proportions in a heavily politicised and chauvinistic manner using the situation after the Easter Sunday attacks, said Jaffna-based Senior Lawyer and Political Analyst S.A. Jothilingam on Thursday. His comments to TamilNet come a day after the Magistrates’ Court in Jaffna was unable to act on the release of the students as their release required explicit action by the SL Attorney General under the Emergency provisions.
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Blake's Colombo lecture reminds Tamils of bureaucracy abetting 2009 genocide

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 08 May 2019, 16:57 GMT]
Former US Ambassador Robert O. Blake was visiting Colombo on Tuesday to deliver a lecture titled ‘US Foreign Policy towards China and South Asia and what it means for Sri Lanka’. He was advising Colombo to tackle the response to the Easter Sunday attacks by drawing lessons from the 2001 Bush Administration and form an intelligence coordinating body of technocrats not to miss any single lead of information on potential attacks. Former SL Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa was precisely doing that during the war, he said. He also warned against over-reacting as the US did after 9/11 by expanding government surveillance without appropriate constitutional checks. On geopolitics, Mr Blake was enticing Colombo to engage with China, the USA and other countries in parallel, a paradigm which enabled Colombo to annihilate the military power of Tamils through a genocidal onslaught in 2009.
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Arts Faculty student leader urges principled action from Jaffna lawyers

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 07 May 2019, 13:45 GMT]
The president of the Student Union of the Art Faculty at the University of Jaffna, Mr Rajaratnam Krishanth, has urged the lawyers, particularly the head of the bar association in Jaffna Ms Shantha Abimannasingham P.C., who is also the notary public Council Member of the Council of the University, to take up the wrong PTA detention of Jaffna University Student Union. The matter should also be taken up with the U.S. Embassy and other diplomatic missions in Colombo, he said. The action for releasing the JUSU leaders must be a broader one, he said. The students were awaiting the legal outcome on May 08 before initiating a struggle, he said. In the meantime, all other avenues must be pursued in parallel, he said. TNA's Sumanthiran and Civil Society activist Guruparan are already done their part, the fellow students told TamilNet.
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Muslim activists in Jaffna caution Tamils about sinister designs of southern chauvinism

[TamilNet, Saturday, 04 May 2019, 21:16 GMT]
Jaffna-based Muslim grassroots activists have urged Tamils to be cautious on what they read on certain Tamil-language media outlets, which show signs of succumbing to the hidden agenda of the forces in South seeking to set the Tamils against the Muslims. Senior trader and grassroots activist Mohammed Uzinar Tahir and Jaffna Municipal Council member Muththu Muhammathu Nibahir were reacting to false and twisted news reports. They were also responding to the propaganda that the SL military was wooing some ex-LTTE members to collaborate with it as informants. The SL military's latest move is seen as Colombo Intelligence establishment's political counter-insurgency seeking to create communal disharmony among the Tamil-speaking people in Jaffna and elsewhere in the island. The activists were talking to media on Friday.
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SLA exerts pressure on ex-LTTE members to act as informants after Easter attacks

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 30 April 2019, 23:12 GMT]
The occupying Sinhala Army in Jaffna is trying to set Tamils against the Muslims in the peninsula by attempting to recruit former LTTE members to work as informants. On Tuesday, more than fifty ex-LTTE members were instructed to attend a meeting at the SL Army's 512 Brigade camp at the Sinhala Maha Vidyalaya in the city of Jaffna. The SLA officers were offering biscuits with a soothing talk, an ex-LTTE member who attended the meeting said. A former LTTE political division member openly stated in the meeting that he had joined the movement to serve the cause of the people and not to operate against any people. However, the SLA officers were attempting to turn the argument to their favour saying that the Tiger members knew their society well and it should be in their interest to serve the public interest by detecting the strangers, who were infiltrating to seek safe havens in the North.
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SLM Hanifa remembers Sivaram's insight, warns of more challenging times ahead

[TamilNet, Sunday, 28 April 2019, 14:42 GMT]
The inhumane terror attacks on Easter Sunday have worsened the chauvinist paradigm prevailing in the island and exposed it as the terrain for global power politics. None of the three powers, the USA, China nor India would be doing anything meaningful for the merger of the North-East or to secure the rights of the people here, said veteran writer SLM Hanifa, interviewed by TamilNet on the occasion of the 14th remembrance of the late Senior Editor of TamilNet, Maa-manithar D. Sivaram (Taraki), on Sunday. Unlike those who passionately talk about Tamil-Muslim unity and do nothing on the ground in practice, Mr Hanifa, a long-term friend of Sivaram, is one of the very few, who have been working for Tamil Muslim unity at the grassroots level in the East.
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Colombo's COIN backfires, solidarity key to ensure Tamil-Muslim territoriality: Diasporic academic

[TamilNet, Thursday, 25 April 2019, 16:30 GMT]
The growth of Wahhabism in the island has only served Colombo, and its external backers' interests in weakening the possibilities of unified Tamil speaking peoples' resistance to the unitary state, argues Norway-based Eezham Tamil anthropology academic Athithan Jayapalan in an article following the serial Easter Sunday bomb attacks in the island. The Wahhabis were contributing to the severing of the ties held by Tamil Muslims to their territory, and in the case of north and east, to their Tamil neighbours by targeting, destroying or marginalising traditional Tamil Muslim Sufism in the island in the past. “Time has again come for Tamil – Muslim solidarity and alliances to bloom, to arrest divisive measures of the Colombo state and external powers,” to counter the dangers of the future, he writes narrating the trends of the past and his experiences during the field trips to the island.
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Unity between Eezham Tamils and Muslims key to true freedom: Exiled Sinhala academic

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 24 April 2019, 18:43 GMT]
Whoever carried out the Easter Sunday attack seems to have implemented, knowingly or unknowingly, the grand plan of fully integrating the Sri Lankan state into the geo-strategic imperial complex led by USA, UK, India and China by sharpening the globally imposed imperial faulty lines, says Professor Jude Lal Fernando of Trinity College, Dublin, in a comment to TamilNet on Wednesday. With the Easter Sunday attack on Christians (Sinhala and Tamil), many have lost their lives. The entire Muslim community has been demonized and Islamophobia has been heightened. Sinhalese do not know what they do – really like those who carried out the attack on Easter Sunday, he says. “The only wake up call can come from a strong unity between the Eelam Tamils and Muslims on the island who can truly resist the colonially carved state,” says the exiled Sinhala activist who hails from Negombo.
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People of all walks of life victims in ‘chosen island’ of geopolitics, religious extremism

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 23 April 2019, 23:12 GMT]
The families and the relatives of the victims of the serial terror attacks on Easter Sunday mourned their dead with mass burials and an island-wide day of mourning with three minutes of silence on Tuesday. At least 45 of those killed were children, according to the figures gathered by the United Nations. As the death toll from the bombings rose to 321, the Syria-based Islamic State group, which had lost all its territorial control in Syria and Iraq, claimed that it stood behind the serial terror attacks, publishing photos and a video of the attackers. In the meantime, reports also said that the US Indo-Pacific Command had wrapped up a joint naval training, four days earlier than it was scheduled to conclude in Hambantota.
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West influencing regime-change politics responsible for worsening situation: Fr Sakthivel

[TamilNet, Monday, 22 April 2019, 23:46 GMT]
The serial terror attacks on the churches and the hotels during the Easter Sunday has sparked fear of repercussions among the Muslims in Colombo, Negombo and the suburbs of the capital. They fear that a preplanned backlash could come from the forces operating among the other communities, Colombo-based human rights activist and Tamil Catholic priest Fr M. Sakthivel told TamilNet on Monday. In general, the people are also afraid that there might be other bombs as a bomb went off in Colombo on Monday while the SL Police was about to defuse it, he said. The priest who knows the grassroots situation prevailing in the South of the island said that the outside forces, particularly the West, which has been heavily intervening in the affairs of the island with a regime-change agenda, was to be blamed for the deteriorating security conditions of the non-Sinhala-Buddhist peoples in the island.
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207 killed, 450 wounded, series of bomb blasts target churches, hotels on Easter Sunday

[TamilNet, Sunday, 21 April 2019, 09:17 GMT]
At least 207 people, including foreign tourists, have been killed in Colombo and Batticaloa in a series of bomb blasts that targeted worshippers, who were attending Easter Sunday services at three Christian churches. Most of the victims at the churches were Tamils. The bomb blasts have also targeted three hotels in Colombo. Thirty-five victims were foreigners. Around 450 people have sustained injuries. Fourteen of the 28 victims killed at the Zion Church in Batticaloa were children playing outside the church, medical sources at Batticaloa Teaching Hospital told TamilNet. Two more attacks have been reported at Dehiwale and Dematagoda in Colombo. The attacks on Christians and foreign nationals almost coincide with US - Sri Lanka naval exercise along the Hambantota port, which is owned by China under a 99-year lease.
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Colombo closing down schools with less than 50 students tantamounts to educational betrayal

[TamilNet, Friday, 19 April 2019, 23:23 GMT]
The education of the students living in the rural and remote villages in the North-East would be severely affected if the SL Government goes ahead with the proposed move of closing down schools with less than fifty students in the island, said former Education Minister of Eastern Province S. Thandayuthapani on Friday. The resettlement has not been fully completed even though ten years have elapsed since the end of the war. It also takes time for the people to resettle in a meaningful way. The move to cut down the access to education is an educational betrayal, Mr Thandayuthapani said. The international actors, such as the World Bank and the IMF who provide ‘development’ assistance to the SL State are also betraying the Tamils in the North-East if they were giving input to the SL Government to close down the schools with fifty or less of students, he said.
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Sinhala colonisation escalated in Vavuniyaa North with a multitude of players backing infrastructure

[TamilNet, Thursday, 18 April 2019, 21:24 GMT]
Elected civic members of Vavuniyaa North Divisional Council (PS) complain that the Sinhala colonisation is relentlessly targeting the eastern side of their division. The occupying Sinhala Army and its home-guards paramilitary act as the guardians of the colony while the extremist Buddhist monks coordinate the systematic expansion. Various SL ministries provide the infrastructure. Besides, a host of actors from a leading socio-economic NGO with Buddhist philosophy to a local extremist group known as ‘Sinhala Power in the North‘ (‘Uture Hela Balaya’ or ‘Utura Rakina Raṭa Surakina Jātika Balaya - Vanni’) facilitate it through different approaches. Also, sections of expatriate Sinhalese, including a retired professor from Australia, have funded the housing projects of the scheme. The Sinhala settlers are being radicalised without any provocation or hostility from the Tamils.
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Uprooted Tamils in Karanthaay enter their lands in dispute with SL authority

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 16 April 2019, 22:20 GMT]
The Coconut Development Authority (CDA), which comes under the unitary occupying system of Colombo was claiming 90 acres of lands that belong to private land-owners at Karanthaay village near Mukamaalai, which was a ‘Forward Defence Line’ during the times of war. The lands were to be released back to the rightful owners in 2012-2013 when mines clearance in the area came to an end. However, the SL CDA was quick to claim the lands despite the owners proving their ownership. On Tuesday, the land-owners entered their lands and put up temporary huts. They said the SL authority was trying to convert their properties into state-owned farm without resolving the dispute of ownership.
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Linguistic discrimination, insensitive iconography used to establish Sinhala Buddhist hegemony

[TamilNet, Monday, 15 April 2019, 23:44 GMT]
“Three things that cannot be hidden for long in the North-East are the sun, the moon and the genocide,” commented a photojournalist documenting post-2009 structural and heritage genocide in the occupied traditional homeland of the Eezham Tamils. Not only the Sinhala military and the intruding extremist Buddhist clergy from the South but all the ministries and the departments of the unitary state system of Colombo are implementing their projects in the North-East without respecting the diversity and cultural sensitivities involved. Often, the underlying agenda of establishing the Sinhala Buddhist supremacy is visually exposed very quickly, the journalist said referring to the flag and plaque sites erected in the ‘Semata Sewana’ model villages being put by the ‘National Housing Development Authority’ (NDHA), which comes under the SL Ministry of Housing, Construction & ‘Culture Affairs’.
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