SL police opens fire on Tamil villagers in Batticaloa, two women wounded

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 12 August 2014, 20:25 GMT]
Two Tamil women were admitted to Batticaloa Teaching Hospital Tuesday night with gunshot injuries after SL policemen, who went in civil to ransack illicit brewers had opened fire on the villagers at Panai-a'ruppaan, located 15 km west of Kokkaddich-choalai. Two Sinhalese policemen and two Tamil men were also rushed to hospital with assault injuries. Only 25 families live in the remote village of Panai-a’ruppaan. Some of these female-headed families have been running illicit ‘kasippu’ breweries after they had lost their husbands and their livelihood. They were not involved in such activity under the LTTE-run civil administration, civil sources in Kokkaddich-choalai told TamilNet on Wednesday. The episode on Tuesday was only a tip of the iceberg, they said.
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Occupation of grazing lands in Batticaloa is big scale Sinhalicisation: EPC Councillor

[TamilNet, Thursday, 07 August 2014, 08:40 GMT]
Colombo is engaged in a sinister move to Sinhalicise and colonise a large territory of the Batticaloa district with Sinhalese, Eastern Provincial Council (EPC) Tamil National Alliance (TNA) councillor K. Thurairajasingham told TamilNet. The area consists of more than 30 Tamil villages that come under the Koara’laip-pattu South (Kiraan) and Ea’raavoor-pattu (Chengkaladi) divisions. The Sinhala colonisation project is taken forward through militarisation. Buddhist monks and Sinhala politicians from Ampaa’rai and Polonnaruwa districts are deployed by Colombo to give political leadership to the Sinhalicisation phase of the project.
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Vaiko condemns BJP’s ‘poisonous’ nexus with genocidal Sri Lanka

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 29 July 2014, 18:01 GMT]
The General Secretary of MDMK, Mr Vaiko, on Tuesday condemned Indian participation at an annual military conference organized by genocidal Sri Lanka in August. The annual 'Defence Seminar' is conceived by the SL State as a gimmick venue to market its military corporatism project to the external forces under the banner of geo-strategic location of the island. Mr Vaiko has described Indian participation as ‘unpardonable‘, according to a news report by the Press Trust of India (PTI). The BJP government's move to participate in the seminar comes after it rejected entry to the members of the UN panel appointed by UN Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) head Navanethem Pillay to conduct an inquiry into alleged war crimes and human rights violations by the SL government and its military forces.
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Sinhala-Buddhist land grab threatens Muslims at Thoappoor in Trincomalee

[TamilNet, Saturday, 19 July 2014, 23:46 GMT]
The divisional secretary of Serunuwara in Trincomalee district has issued letters to more than 35 Tamil-speaking Muslim families to vacate their lands at Naavatkaadu (Selvanakar) village near Thoappoor. The Muslim families are residing in the lands with necessary papers for decades and they have engaged in agriculture in the lands since 1960. However, Colombo’s officials claim that 85 acres of lands were taken over by the SL State and declared as ‘Arachaeological Reserve’ already in 1962. Now the Muslims have been given instructed to vacate from their lands before August 30.
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Tamil civil society urges Pope to call for de-militarisation of Tamil homeland

[TamilNet, Monday, 14 July 2014, 15:33 GMT]
The Tamil Civil Society Forum has handed over an appeal to Pope Francis on Sunday through Vatican's diplomatic representative to the island, urging the Pope to openly call upon Colmbo Government to stop militarising and colonizing Tamil lands, to restore the troop presence in the North and East to pre-war levels, end violence against women, honestly address the problems of the disappeared and the abducted including Rev. Fathers T. N. Jim Brown and G. A. Frances Joseph, accelerate the process by which surrendered detainees and all those who are in in communicado detention are released and allow people to remember the dead. The TCSF has also forewarned His Holiness Pope of the possibility that the Government of Sri Lanka may utilize this visit to serve its political purposes and has urged the Pope to visit Mu'l'liavaaykkaal and Madu Church during his visit to the island.
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Australian HC issues interim injunction against deportation of 153 Tamil refugees

[TamilNet, Monday, 07 July 2014, 10:58 GMT]
Following an urgent hearing of an application from refugee advocates in Australia, the High Court in Austrlia has refused to allow the Australian Government to hand over the 153 Eezham Tamil refugees to Sri Lankan authorities, delivering an interim injunction until Tuesday afternoon, news reports from Australia said Monday. The latest development comes following a controversial move by the Australian authorities that handed over 41 asylum seekers back to the Sri Lankan military after the so-called processing of their asylum applications at the sea.
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Pogrom spreads to Colombo district while ‘Sri Lanka’ claims normalcy

[TamilNet, Saturday, 21 June 2014, 22:55 GMT]
While genocidal Sri Lanka was telling the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) that it had restored ‘normalcy’ after what it described as ‘communal tension’ in Aluthgama and in Beruwala, an unidentified squad set fire to a Muslim-owned cloth store in Panadura (Paa’nan-thu’rai), a town in Colombo district, in the early hours of Saturday. In the meantime, the Sri Lankan Minister of Justice, a Muslim leader collaborating with the ruling Rajapaksa regime, who is under the pressure from his community, termed it as an attack on Muslims while the SL police was trying to project it as an accident.
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Anti-Muslim violence is systematic pogrom, not communal riot

[TamilNet, Friday, 20 June 2014, 21:09 GMT]
After waging war against the nation of Eezham Tamils, there is a clear, systematic pattern of violence against the Muslims in the island of Sri Lanka during the last two years, said the State president of the Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI), Mr KKSM Tehlan Baqavi, in an exclusive interview to TamilNet this week. The Tamil Nadu politician of the pan-Indian Muslim political party urged the world to pay particular attention that the Buddhist extremist Bodu Bala Sena is a creation of the SL military system led by Gotabhaya Rajapaksa. There is a clear nexus between the military and the extremist force, he said. There is also a serious question why the pogrom is getting instigated at this juncture, despite the global focus on the records of the SL State, he said.
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Sinhala Buddhist monk attacks Muslims for use of Arabic

[TamilNet, Sunday, 15 June 2014, 01:08 GMT]
“There was information the Arabian language too, was being used in Muslim-majority areas in the eastern province, […] roads and lanes are being displayed only in the Tamil and Arabian languages there. Extremist forces are trying to promote the use of the Arabian language among the Muslims,” Colombo media reports cited Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) central committee member, Ven. Passaramulla Dayawansa Thera saying earlier this month. The very Sinhala language itself evolved in a similar process of Buddhism introducing a religious language, Pali, to overlap with the proto-Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic tongues prevailing in the island. Later, a myth was created that the Sinhalese came with their language from North India to get ‘polluted’ by ‘South Indian invaders’, responded an academic in the island.
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Art, literature, should enlighten masses on larger forces at work

[TamilNet, Monday, 09 June 2014, 23:29 GMT]
When the last king of Kandy in the island of Ceylon, who belonged to the Telugu-speaking Nayaka dynasty of Madurai in Tamil Nadu, was conquered and captured by British imperialism in 1815, history, literature and plays written on him by both Sinhalese and Tamils in the island were focussing only on a historically still unproven point that he killed the children of the Sinhala chieftain Ehelapola who joined the British and made the chieftain’s wife to pound the heads of the children in a mortar. That was the highlight of all the plays on the king, performed to this date. None of the writers or playwrights saw the ultimate culprits or the larger dimensions of the onset of colonialism. That was the success of British colonialism.
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‘Proliferation of micronarratives assists the logic of counterinsurgency’

[TamilNet, Saturday, 07 June 2014, 23:48 GMT]
In the context of the Tamil Eelam liberation struggle, when a “micronarrative” discourse about gender, caste, region or other “special interest groups” claims autonomous status, “when it divorces itself from the primary contradiction between the Tamil nationalist metanarrative and the Sri Lankan state, it only ends up fracturing a resistance movement against genocide” argues Karthick RM. In an article published on Indian journal Sanhati, providing examples of how such differences were used to fracture the Eezham Tamils liberation struggle in the past and the present, he shows that such “dissidence” only assists the logic of counterinsurgency (COIN). Drawing from classical and contemporary COIN experts and from the writings of psychologists, Mr. Karthick also observes how such micronarratives and a defeatist mentality complement each other.
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Sri Lanka State identity needs denouncement, as mass-grave polity is congenital

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 03 June 2014, 23:28 GMT]
“Sri Lanka: The Island of mass graves,” says editorial of Asian Human Rights Commission’s journal for Feb–April 2014. The editorial by Nilantha Ilangamuwa traces the ‘mass grave’ statecraft of ‘Sri Lanka’ since early 1970s. Generalisation of the mass graves and equating them with labels such as JVP and LTTE, is fundamentally misleading, and would not resolve the issue of State in the island, as the former was state terrorism’s response to a political question and the latter was naked genocide to respond to a national question, to which even the JVP was a party. The Tamil graves are largely not LTTE graves, but graves of ordinary members of a nation. If there is anything common that all in the island have to denounce, that is the very ‘Sri Lanka’ state identity, commented Tamil activists for alternative politics.
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Panan-wala

[TamilNet, Monday, 02 June 2014, 21:18 GMT]
The carpenter's forest
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Tamils should project universality in Mu'l'livaaykkaal remembrance

[TamilNet, Sunday, 18 May 2014, 07:08 GMT]
The Jaffna University Science Teachers’ Association (JUSTA) on Saturday condemned the Colombo government for oppressing Mu'l'livaaykkaal remembrance. One of the obverse impacts recognised by the JUSTA is that “it might lead to latent nostalgia for the LTTE, despite the anger against its holding the civilians hostage in the last stages of the war.” The JUSTA statement reeks of a deceptive twist deployed by the agencies of the West in covertly passing the blame. New Delhi was overt in oppressing any remembrance when its FM chose to visit Jaffna on the 2009 Heroes Day. Tamils should not slip in recognising and projecting the global struggle dimensions of remembering Mu'l'livaaykkaal, commented a Jaffna University academic.
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Tamils resisting demographic genocide at North-East border, stricken by poverty

[TamilNet, Thursday, 08 May 2014, 23:10 GMT]
The Sri Lankan State is accelerating Sinhala colonization with the aim of permanently wedging the demographic contiguity of the northern and eastern provinces at Kokkuth-thoduvaay, a strategic village situated in Mullaiththeevu district. “Nobody has listened to our repeated pleas for freeing our lands. We went from divisional offices to SL president placing our appeals. We have also done our maximum in mobilising against the demographic genocide,” says civic member K. Sivalokeswaran from Kokkuth-thoduvaay North. Now, the Eezham Tamils, who have resettled in the village are stricken by poverty, similar to what the world has witnessed in Somalia, he says. All the agricultural lands owned by Tamils have been appropriated. The residential areas where Tamils managed to resettle are also being appropriated by Colombo, he says.
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Uyangoda revisited on Tamil nationhood, self-determination

[TamilNet, Sunday, 04 May 2014, 13:42 GMT]
In a pioneering and incisive article published 35 years ago in a Colombo-based monthly journal Lanka Guardian, Jayadeva Uyangoda, currently a professor at the Department of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Colombo, articulated the Tamil Nationhood and corroborated Tamils right to self-determination based on the Marxists-Leninist principle. His article, condemning the Sinhala Left’s failure to grasp the National question in the island is remarkably applicable in the present context of protracted genocide and military occupation, and displays the resilience of Sinhala chauvinism, which is endemic to the Sri Lankan left, opines a Tamil diaspora student of Anthropology, reproducing the article authored by Professor Jayadeva Uyangoda in the Lanka Guardian of 15 March 1979.
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Idiotic racism in Colombo University ‘medical research’ published in India

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 30 April 2014, 23:13 GMT]
“The Sinhalese are probably the descendants of the original inhabitants of the Island, but their origin is also traced to Northern India. However, there is disagreement as to whether they came originally from the North West or North East part of India. The Sri Lankan Tamils are the descendants of Tamils from South India who came to the Island and settled down at various times in the past when Sri Lanka was invaded by South Indian rulers. The Moors are the descendants of Arab traders,” says a ‘medical research’ undertaken by the Department of Pharmacology and by the Department of Human Genetics Unit of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Colombo that is published in the Indian Journal of Human Genetics.
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NPC chief minister joins Sinhala State in mutilating Tamil names

[TamilNet, Monday, 28 April 2014, 04:42 GMT]
The Northern Provincial Council Chief Minister C. V. Wigneswaran’s official letterhead, bearing his address, notes the place name Chu'ndikkuzhi as Chu'ndukku'li. In the Sinhala rendering it has become Chundukuli. A large number of Tamil place names have already been Sinhalicised or mutilated by the signboards placed by the occupying genocidal military in the country of Eezham Tamils and now Wigneswaran is also contributing to the trend, commented Tamil academic circles in Jaffna. There was a time when Jaffna enjoyed reputation even in Tamil Nadu for flawless use of Tamil.
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Tamil academic responds to denial of Eezham Tamil nationhood

[TamilNet, Monday, 28 April 2014, 03:40 GMT]
“The self determination and the nationhood of Eelam Tamils, is neither to be debated by Colombo centric individuals nor to be decided in Colombo. It is a right, which resides upon the collective will of the Eelam Tamil people to the North-East,” writes Norway-based Eezham Tamil anthropology academic, Athithan Jayapalan, responding to Colombo’s diplomat Dr. Dayan Jayatilake writing in a Colombo media that “There is no Tamil nation in Sri Lanka, but there is a Tamil minority in Sri Lanka. There is however a Sinhala nation in Sri Lanka. That is the only ethnic community on the island, which can claim the status of a nation as such.”
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Mannaar Bishop questions SL defence attitude behind blocking prison visit

[TamilNet, Friday, 25 April 2014, 09:30 GMT]
Stonehearted persons and officials in the island are a hurdle to the possibility of bringing reconciliation between the Tamil and Sinhala people, Bishop of Mannaar Rt Rev Rayappu Joesph told TamilNet this week citing how the Sri Lankan Defence Ministry scuttled a joint visit by him and the Bishop of Anuradhapura Rt. Rev. Dr. Norbert Andradi to Anuradhpura prison when the religious leaders were scheduled to visit the 60 Tamil political prisoners to deliver a message of hope and some basic assistance on the Easter Sunday. It is this attitude, which is prolonging the limits of achieving harmony and reconciliation between the Sinhalese and Tamils, the Bishop said.
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