Tamil village in Trinco survived pogroms and war, now faces structural genocide

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 22 April 2014, 23:52 GMT]
A group of Sinhalese led by a Buddhist monk have been blocking Eezham Tamils of Kangkuveali village in Moothoor division of the Trincomalee district to access their ancient temple of Akaththiyar Thaapanam. The temple, which is mentioned in a local mythological literature called Karaisaip-puraa’nam, was destroyed by an external group of Sinhalese on Tamil Heroes Day in November 2009. Since then, more than 120 Tamil families have been robbed of their livelihood as the Sinhala intruders backed by the genocidal SL military have appropriated 293 acres of lands surrounding the temple at Oddu and Padu-kaadu areas. The attack on the temple and the sustained threat against its reconstruction aim at the annihilation of their existence as Tamils of Kanguveali, complain the villagers, who have owned the lands for centuries and possess land deeds from 1970 and 1985 to document their legal ownership.
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Genocidal Sri Lanka schemes corporate Sinhalicisation choking Jaffna and Vanni

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 15 April 2014, 23:30 GMT]
While the occupying Sri Lankan military has been constructing hotels and resorts along the coastal strips of the occupied country of Eezham Tamils from Ampaa’rai to Puththa’lam for military run affairs, a systematic corporate programme of coastal land grab is being schemed by Colombo’s ministries under the direct supervision by SL presidential sibling Basil Rajapaksa, the minister of ‘Economic Development’ and Namal Rajapaksa, the son of SL president Mahinda Rajapaksa. The latest design is to choke Jaffna by turning the narrow strip of Chu’ndikku’lam sandbar, which links the peninsula with Vanni mainland, into a Sinhala colony with new resorts, prawn farming industry and state of the art houses to tolerate any disaster with the guarantee from the SL disaster management ministry with the backing of occupying SL military.
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Peace Studies philosopher advises Tamils to tell the story with a vision

[TamilNet, Sunday, 06 April 2014, 11:37 GMT]
“Let us say you have one million Tamils in the Tamil diaspora. They used to collect money for the LTTE. They collected a lot of money. Let me put it in very plain simple terms: these one million work on the media of the world and make the story better known,” said 84-year old Peace Studies Professor Johan Galtung, in an interview to TamilNet-Palaka'ni last month. Acknowledging that the Eezham Tamils face genocide and structural genocide, identifying the Mahavamsa mentality in the Sinhala-Buddhists as the impediment for solutions, and at the same time blaming the armed struggle of the LTTE as a mistake, Galtung stood by “federation with a high level of autonomy,” which he had advocated and failed during his 34 visits to the island at the time of the peace talks.
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Guruparan addresses de-Tamilization, dichotomization in Geneva narrative

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 25 March 2014, 04:44 GMT]
“Unless we take a critical stance in terms of what is happening in Geneva and unless we move away from the approach that all roads lead to Geneva in terms of how Tamil problems are going to be looked at, we are not going to identify the alternatives,” Tamil civil society activist and Jaffna University law academic Kumaravadivel Guruparan said while discussing whether the resolution to be tabled in Geneva is part of solution or problem. On the question, if not for this resolution what is the alternative, he said: “If we approach the resolution critically and people are made to understand what the resolution is about, at least the space of identifying the alternative will come about. It is that creation of that space for looking for alternatives that I am arguing for. That will come about only by taking stock a realistic, pragmatic and honest take over this resolution.”
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UNHRC resolution with weak mandate will not help Tamils, says Gajendrakumar

[TamilNet, Monday, 24 March 2014, 23:58 GMT]
Noting that the Resolution tabled at the UNHRC Geneva meeting falls short in establishing a required accountability mechanism through a UN-controlled transitional administration that has the capacity to create an environment to gather evidence of what happened during the war, Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam, the president of the Tamil National People’s Front, said in a press meet held in Geneva on Friday that the weak mandate of the resolution will not only fail to bring about positive changes to Tamil people on the ground, but will also encourage the Sri Lankan government to continue to carry out the sort of actions that they have been carrying out.
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UN uses Tamils to 'learn lessons' but denies justice to their genocide: Ananthi

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 19 March 2014, 12:42 GMT]
The Right to Protect (R2P) concept, accepted by the World Summit in 2005, has totally failed to save Eelam Tamils from the genocidal war in 2009, said NPC councillor, Ms Ananthi Sasitharan at the UN Human Rights Council on Tuesday in Geneva. She addressed the council twice, one of them being in Tamil language. Although the United Nation, which has admitted its systemic failure on the conflict, chose to learn lessons from the failures in the island and came up with the Rights Up Front initiative, it has failed to deliver justice to the victims on whose fate these lessons were learned, Ms Ananthi told the Council. “As the victims of a continued genocide, we are disappointed with the resolutions being tabled at this respected assembly, year after year, failing to address the root-problem, which is genocide,” she told the Council.
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Time for International Investigations, says Camp

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 18 March 2014, 01:03 GMT]
Sri Lanka "looks to be drifting toward authoritarianism. Journalists are terrified and intimidated by arrests and mysterious assaults on those critical of the government....The once-independent judiciary has learned not to challenge the government's edicts. The war-heavy defense establishment carries out many internal security functions, and "white vans" have become synonymous with the disappearance of dissidents who speak out against the government," writes Donald Camp, a retired foreign service officer at the US Department of State, adding, "after five years of stalling by the government [Colombo], it is time for an international investigation to do what Colombo has been unwilling to do."
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New Delhi FM wants Tamils to talk to Colombo for India to have leverage

[TamilNet, Thursday, 13 March 2014, 07:20 GMT]
The New Delhi Establishment’s Foreign Minister, Mr. Salman Khurshid, in answering a question after his address at the SOAS in London on Wednesday, said, “Tamils should have a dialogue with the government. Then only we can have a leverage on Sri Lankan government.” With a record on complicity in Colombo’s genocidal war and on-going structural genocide of Eezham Tamils; record on tilting the balance in favour of Colombo, and with a long record on setting diktats to the Tamil leadership on what to talk, New Delhi now expecting Tamils to start ‘dialogue’ is for the confirmation of the genocide and for bailing out Colombo from international investigations, Tamil activists in London commented.
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US draft ‘positive’ on many counts in making Tamils ‘learn lesson’

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 11 March 2014, 01:26 GMT]
The US draft tabled at the UNHRC has to be recognized for its positive aspects in disguise that make Tamils learn historic lessons, commented Tamil activists for alternative politics in the island. The draft opens eyes on the ultimate culprits who actually led Eezham Tamils into Mu’l’livaaykkaal and continue to lead them into accepting structural genocide; on the extent of USA’s confidence in the inherent orientation for subservience and gullibility among Eezham Tamil ‘articulators’; and on the extent of the infiltration the USA has made into various facets of Tamil Nadu – from Brahministic media to ‘original’ Dravidian movements, and from ‘communism’ to various caste politics, the activists in the island said.
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Tamil politicians demand international investigation at Jaffna protest

[TamilNet, Sunday, 02 March 2014, 23:36 GMT]
When Sinhala prisoners protested in Kandy, Namal Rajapaksa, the son of SL President went to the prison and ordered a report on the condition of prisoners. But, when Tamil political prisoners and prisoners of war, subjected to torture on a daily basis, stage protests, no one from the SL government cares about visiting them, said Sundaram Mahendran, the head of the Colombo based Committee on Missing Persons on Sunday when addressing the people protesting against the mysterious death of a Tamil prisoner Gopithas Visuvalingam, a British citizen who was imprisoned in Colombo since 2007. The protest was staged in the morning of the funeral day of the victim Gopithas, who is a father of two from the UK.
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SL military seeks to appropriate market complex at Tamil suburb of Trincomalee

[TamilNet, Friday, 28 February 2014, 23:02 GMT]
The occupying Sri Lankan military in Trincomalee has sought to permanently appropriate the land and the buildings of Malaiyaruvi, a building complex constructed in 1994 by the Trincomalee Town Council to establish a public market at the Power House Road, where Eezham Tamils reside in large numbers. Recently, the SL military has approached Mr Sirimewan Dharmasena, the land commissioner at the Eastern Provincial Department asking the latter to undertake surveying of the lands.
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NPC member presents data exposing extent of genocidal land grab in Vanni

[TamilNet, Friday, 21 February 2014, 23:09 GMT]
Colombo has seized at least 30,000 acres of residential and agricultural lands for Sinhala colonization in Mullaiththeevu district alone after 2010, according to the data presented by Northern Provincial Council (NPC) member Thurairasa Raviharan, who moved a resolution condemning the demographic changes at the NPC. The land grab in Sinhalicised Gajabapura in Oddu-chuddaan is also being expanded to the ancient village of Othiya-malai, Mr Raviharan said adding that the Colombo government was using the Mahaweli ‘Development’ Porgramme’s L Scheme to occupy the lands in Mullaiththeevu district. Othiyamalai is situated 25 km beyond the reach of Mahaweli waters, he said.
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Colombo sabotages Tamil fishermen understanding across Palk Strait

[TamilNet, Friday, 14 February 2014, 22:23 GMT]
Amidst an existing understanding between the fishermen societies of Eezham Tamils and Tamil Nadu fishermen, who met recently in Tamil Nadu, that Indian fishermen could engage in fishing in the Palk Strait till March 15 without hindrance, the navy of the occupying Sri Lanka has arrested 116 Tamil Nadu fishermen in the territorial waters of the Eezham Tamils within the past 12 days, news sources in Jaffna said. In the meantime, the Indian coast guard has detained 25 fishermen from the island, 20 Sinhalese from South and 5 Eezham Tamils, who were engaged in day and night fishing in the deep waters of the strait, sources in Tamil Nadu said.
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Kantha'laay
(Gangaa-tataaka),
Giritha'le
(Giri-tata-vaapi)

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 12 February 2014, 07:16 GMT]
The reservoir of the river

The reservoir with a hill in it
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Padaviya/ Pathi-vaavi

[TamilNet, Monday, 10 February 2014, 00:03 GMT]
The tank of the town
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Buddhist monk, Sinhala squad appropriate lands along Batticaloa-Ampaa'rai border

[TamilNet, Friday, 07 February 2014, 21:35 GMT]
Under the cover of ‘preventing’ wild elephants from entering the residential areas of the border villages situated between Batticaloa and Ampaa'rai district, a group of Sinhalese are engaged in putting up a new fence with the hidden agenda of appropriating the lands of Eezham Tamils in Kachchatkodi Suvami-malai and Kevu'liya-madu villages of Paddippazhai division of Batticaloa district. A Sinhala name, Bambara-kanda, has been introduced to the Suvaami-malai hillock, according to the Tamil villagers who have an ancient Saiva temple there.
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Colombo deploys Indian assistance to commit structural genocide on Eezham Tamils

[TamilNet, Thursday, 06 February 2014, 16:37 GMT]
The housing assistance provided to war-affected uprooted families in the North and East is being used to colonise the Tamil homeland with Sinhala settlers from South in Mullaiththeevu district, says Tamil Councillor of the Northern Provincial Council Mr Thurairasa Raviharan. While the resettled Tamil families are deprived of housing at Chaa'lampaik-ku'lam in Mullaiththeevu district, Sinhalese settlers are being provided brand new houses constructed with Indian assistance, he said. This is not only a betrayal by India, but also a recognition of the structural genocide being committed by the Sri Lankan State, Mr Raviharan told media.
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Colombo bargains China connections in return for US favour

[TamilNet, Sunday, 02 February 2014, 14:36 GMT]
Colombo has been lobbying the members of the US Congress through a Washington DC based advisory and strategy firm, citing its geo strategic location, the China factor and a ‘fast growing’ economy. A Europe-based source has provided TamilNet a letter of invitation sent by Robert J. Thompson, the chairman of the Thompson Advisory Group, which helps governments to solve global strategic problems, to US Congresswoman Gwen Moore on 21 January 2014. “China is making major inroads already in Sri Lanka, but our distinguished visitors wish to make sure that relations with the United States are improved even more strongly,” the letter states attaching a trade routes map projecting the island's geostrategic location.
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Current realities of demographic genocide in Batticaloa

[TamilNet, Sunday, 26 January 2014, 22:52 GMT]
The demographic genocide of the East is carried out in determined and orchestrated ways by the occupying Sinhala military, Buddhist monks, Sinhala land-grab settlers, police, home guards, so-called civil coordinating officers of the military, SL Ministers and by a Provincial Council that is put into the scene by all the actors, both local and international, say farmers in Batticaloa on the lose of their pasture lands and cattle to the Sinhala genocidal settlers. The occupying Sinhala military is pivotal to all the miseries that are taking place, they complained. The height of the current genocidal realities could be seen in the example of a Tamil minister of Rajapaksa refusing to speak to them in Tamil and in demanding them to speak through translators at a meeting in Colombo, the Batticaloa farmers further said.
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Colombo deploys Sinhala workers from South at irrigation schemes in Batticaloa

[TamilNet, Saturday, 25 January 2014, 22:27 GMT]
After firing 26 local workers who have been employed in both the divisions of Irrigation Department on a temporary basis for more than 13 years, 10 new workers, including 8 Sinhalese from South have been employed on permanent basis by the Colombo government in the Batticaloa, civil sources in Batticaloa said. When questioned, the SL ministry in Colombo claims that it has employed the new workers after examining their qualifications. But, the intention behind the move is to get the Sinhala workers to facilitate Sinhalicisation of border villages in the district that come under the irrigation divisions of Navakkiri and U’rukaamam (Rugam), the civil sources in Batticaloa said.
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