New Delhi with ‘cultural presence’ not concerned about Chinese ‘heritage archaeology’ in Kayts

[TamilNet, Thursday, 16 August 2018, 21:53 GMT]
Even after losing Trincomalee to the grip of the US Pacific Command, which recently renamed itself as the United States Indo-Pacific Command, the New Delhi Establishment has no qualms of increasing Chinese presence in Jaffna. Informed media circles that interacted with Colombo-based diplomats of New Delhi as well as with Indian journalists well-connected to the Indian National Security Advisor, said there were no reservations about Chinese corporates accessing Poonakari nor about the ‘archaeology’ of Chinese at Allaip-piddi, a locality in the island of Oo'raaththu'rai (Kayts). “China accessing Poonakari for fishing and Kayts for isolated heritage purpose is not a security threat. We are already in control of the highest view of the area, and New Delhi is not worried of Chinese digging the coast of Kayts,” a diplomat said without specifying the “highest” lying locality of Indian control.
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SL military, police engineer land disputes between Tamils and Muslims in Trincomalee

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 15 August 2018, 20:48 GMT]
A systematic pattern of SL Police encouraging Tamil-speaking Muslims from Ki'n'niyaa division to seize the lands of Eezham Tamils and the intelligence officers of the occupying SL military instigating Tamil land-owners to act against the Muslim settlers engaged in clearing agricultural lands, owned by Tamils in Mahaweli river delta. A recent dispute went to the extent of a physical clash in Ve'l'lai-ma'na'l area, sources in Trincomalee said. Some of the disputed lands belong to the Tamil farmers from Kaddai-pa'richchcaan, Cheanaiyoor and I'raal-kuzhi in Moothoor division. SL Police in Ki'n'niyaa was backing the Muslim settlers, while Sinhala military intelligence unit from the SLA camp located near Kaddai-pa'richchaan bridge in the northeastern sector of Moothoor division was instigating Tamil owners to confront the Muslims.
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Militarisation of Jaffna Fort dashes hope of establishing Tamil antiquity: Saiva Pontiff

[TamilNet, Sunday, 12 August 2018, 23:17 GMT]
“Since Buddhism has been accorded with the foremost place as a religion patronised by the State, we are unable to claim our rightful stakes [in the island],” said Sreelasree Somasunthara Parmaachchaariya Chuvaamika'l, the pontiff of Nallai Aatheenam in Jaffna. “We have no means of asserting our distinction; We have no State of our own; Unfortunately, our people are also yet to emancipate themselves,” he said. Commenting on SL Military claiming the Jaffna Fort as its property, the Guru Maha Sannithaanam of Nallai Aaatheenam noted such militarisation would be detrimental to the Tamils establishing their ancient heritage in Jaffna. In his view, the SL military was more preoccupied with the security aspect than claiming ownership to the Fort. However, the military presence there would be a hindrance for Tamil heritage related affairs, he said.
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New Delhis' suppression of Tamil Nadu equally detrimental as geopolitics of West

[TamilNet, Saturday, 11 August 2018, 23:34 GMT]
The latest happenings in the quasi-federal state of Tamil Nadu in India, need to be perused in a broader historical context, grasping the ever-raging conflict between the Centre being the dominating New Delhi Establishment and Tamil Nadu. The oppressed people of Tamil Nadu have been unable to strike power of balance with it, argues Norway-based Eezham Tamil anthropology academic Athithan Jayapalan in a recent paper. The underlying hegemony has also been one of the significant impediments to finding a confederal or, at the least a federal, solution to the national question of Eezham Tamils in the island situated along the southern tip of India. The New Delhi Establishment is adamantly upholding the unitary character of the genocidal state of Sri Lanka, even at the cost of its national security, and it has no qualms in sacrificing the self-determination and sovereignty of Eezham Tamils.
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Tamil Nadu police detaining leader of May 17 Movement condemned in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Friday, 10 August 2018, 21:43 GMT]
Thirumurugan Gandhi of May 17 Movement, who has been in Europe for almost three months closely working with Eezham Tamil diaspora and exiled Sinhala activists in Europe, was detained twice in India this week when he returned home from Europe. The right of Tamil Nadu activist is being oppressed in his own country because he was standing up for the rights of Eezham Tamils and other oppressed nations, said Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam, the president of Tamil National Peoples Front. The TNPF organised a protest to raise awareness on the matter among Eezham Tamils in front of the bus stand in the city of Jaffna on Friday.
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Autopsy: Jaffna University students, slain by SL Police in 2016, not shot from behind

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 08 August 2018, 17:07 GMT]
Civil rights activists based in Colombo have recently released post-mortem reports of two Jaffna University Tamil students, whom the SL Police in Jaffna shot and killed in October 2016 at Kokkuvil. The autopsy confirms earlier media reports of gunshot fire going through the chest of the motorbike driver, and the other student sitting behind succumbing to injuries caused by the crash immediately after the firing. The reports also disprove the allegations made by the SL Police that they had fired at the students only after they failed to stop. They were not shot from behind. It seems like they were shot from the front or from their right side by a policeman who aimed at them with his automatic rifle, probably after being tipped off from another check post in advance, commented fellow students at the University of Jaffna.
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Colombo wants to seize lands of Muslims near Mannaar Fort

[TamilNet, Monday, 06 August 2018, 21:41 GMT]
The occupying Colombo has now started to claim ownership to the lands of Tamil-speaking Muslim residents, who have been resettled in Koanthaip-piddi area, where the Dutch Fort of Manaar is situated. SL Archaeology Department and SL Wildlife Department have started to harass the Muslims after seizing the lands of Eezham Tamils under the so-called claims of protecting heritage and conservation. SL Cabinet Minister Rishad Bathiudeen and SL Deputy Minister for Rehabilitation & Resettlement K. Kader Masthan are equally powerless as the Northern Provincial Council Chief Minister Justice C.V. Wigneswaran in safeguarding the land rights of the people against the occupation from the conservation agencies of the unitary state of genocidal Sri Lanka, Tamil-speaking political observers in Mannaar said.
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NPC Minister responds to SLA Commander, British Archaeologist on Jaffna Fort controversies

[TamilNet, Sunday, 05 August 2018, 21:45 GMT]
The recent statement made by Lt Gen Mahesh Senanayake, the SL military chief, who claimed the SL military as the rightful owner of the Jaffna Fort, was invalid, illogical and a fabricated one, said Education Minister of Northern Provincial Council Sarveswaran Kandiah, in an exclusive interview to TamilNet this weekend. “There is no rule stating that all the fortresses [in the island] should belong to the [SL] military,” Dr Sarveswaran said. Senanayake should mind his own business by confining himself to the leadership of the elected leaders in a democracy and by refraining from intervening in the civil affairs in the North-East, the NPC minister said. He was also responding to British Archaeologist Professor Robin Coningham's proposition of ‘visitor experience’ and ‘tourism’ shaping the so-called post-conflict future of Jaffna through advancing tangible and intangible heritage.
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Jaffna Fort belongs to SL military, proclaims Commander of genocidal Sri Lanka

[TamilNet, Thursday, 02 August 2018, 10:55 GMT]
“When you say it is a fortress, it is military,” proclaimed Lt Gen Mahesh Senanayake, the commander of the occupying military of genocidal Sri Lanka, who made a special appearance to make his point at the Fort of Jaffna on Wednesday. Currently, only 11 SLA personnel are stationed inside the premises, and that too under the cover of giving protection to the archaeological excavation site. However, Mahesh Senanayake dubbed the latest move to re-militarize the Jaffna Fort as a ‘battalion change’. The controversy comes as the British archaeologists and their funders abroad as well as the government of the Netherlands doing colonial-heritage reconstruction and geopolitics-driven archaeology at the Jaffna Fort in collaboration with the unitary State at a heightened paradigm of the cultural, developmental, educational, heritage and structural genocide against the nation of Eezham Tamils.
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Intruding engine boats destroy ecosystem of Kokku'laay lagoon

[TamilNet, Monday, 30 July 2018, 20:21 GMT]
Native Eezham Tamil fishermen in Kokku'laay complain that their fishing ecosystem will be destroyed within the next two years if the fisheries authorities of the occupying unitary state of Sri Lanka continue to allow the intruding fishermen from other districts to deploy boats fitted with engines. The intruders use diesel,l petrol and kerosene and have no concerns of the ecosystem as it is not their environment, says Tamil fisherman representative M. Mariyathas, who is a survivor of genocidal onslaught on Vanni in 2009.
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Coningham discovers Jaffna as premillennial maritime trade centre, but at which price?

[TamilNet, Sunday, 29 July 2018, 23:28 GMT]
“If you think of the history of Jaffna Fort within [the timespan of] a day, the colonial period only starts at [the final] three minutes to midnight. All of the rest of that period is a history of before colonial contact. It is a history, which identifies that Jaffna Fort is engaged in Indian Ocean Trade. [...] Most significantly, we have evidence that Jaffna was core within the Indo-Roman trade. So, [within] 200 BC and 200 AD, we have Jaffna at the centre of the Indian Ocean trade,” stated the British Archaeologist Professor Robin Coningham at a workshop cum press conference held at the University of Jaffna on Saturday. However, he was also reiterating the nature of the attached politics and the paradigm behind, which was nothing else than heritage-genocide as far as the Eezham Tamils are concerned, commented political activists in Jaffna.
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Maithiripala ‘coordinates’ relentless land grab at massive-scale in North-East

[TamilNet, Saturday, 28 July 2018, 22:49 GMT]
Occupying Colombo's Forest Conservation Department and Wildlife Conservation Department have grabbed tens of thousands of acres of lands in the eight districts of North-East. These departments, coming under the unitary state system based in Colombo, are refusing to hand over even a few hundred of acres of these lands to the Divisional Secretariats and other mechanisms, which are also controlled by the same unitary system. A meeting convened by the SL Presidential Secretariat on Friday ended up strengthening further the position of the SL Forest and Wild-Life departments, Tamil officials who attended the meeting said. The Ministry of ‘Mahaweli Development’ and Environment, to which SL President Maithiripala Sirisena is the responsible minister, plays a central role in determining the extent of lands that could be released back, the officials told TamilNet on Saturday.
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Traces of torture surface, 5 children among slaughtered victims in Mannaar killing fields

[TamilNet, Thursday, 26 July 2018, 21:54 GMT]
The human skeletons recovered so far until Wednesday at the premises of Cooperative Wholesale Establishment in Mannaar indicate that five among the dozens of victims were children below the age of six, based on their milk teeth. As the skeletons were found very close to adults in a cluster, the majority of the children could have belonged to a single or couple of the victim families, those who witnessed the excavations told TamilNet on Thursday. Further, the cut injuries sustained by the victims seem to have been caused by metallic objects with sharp edges, they also said. The latest findings come in addition to the earlier witnessed gunshot-like holes in the skulls.
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Tamil man murdered in Polonnaruwa, Sinhala farmers exploit poverty-stricken Tamils

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 25 July 2018, 19:24 GMT]
A Sinhala farmer at Welikanda of the Polonnaruwa district in the North Central Province has allegedly beaten to death a Tamil houseworker, who hailed from Vaazhaich-cheanai of Batticaloa district in the Eastern Province. The Sinhala authorities in Polonnaruwa have managed to suppress the news of the brutal incident from the focus of the Tamil politicians, the journalists and the rights activists for almost three months. This week, the Mathivathy, the wife of the 35-year-old victim, Pathmanathan Muruguppillai, revealed the details to Tamil rights activists in Batticaloa. Pathmanathan was a father of three. After the time of the LTTE, the poverty-stricken sections of Tamils in Batticaloa are being treated much worse than second-class citizens as there is nobody to defend their interests, the rights activists who are looking into the case since Tuesday, told TamilNet on Wednesday.
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Remembering 35th Black July with Tamil resolve

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 24 July 2018, 07:51 GMT]
This week, Eezham Tamils in the homeland and the Tamil Diaspora mark the 35th anniversary of the collective trauma of the ‘Black July’, the SL state-sponsored genocidal pogrom that claimed the lives of more than 3,000 Tamil residents in the south of the island in 1983. The key lesson learned throughout the years of the pogroms, massacres, genocidal war and finally the post-war structural genocide, which is aimed at dismantling the existence of Eezham Tamils as a nation, is a hard reality. The genocide originating from the Mahawansa mind-set always gets its way, not because of the strength of the Sinhala nation, but mainly because the external State actors sustaining the Colombo-centric approach, is that lesson. Thus, the collaborationists and the negotiators among the Eezham Tamils were always doomed to failure, Tamil political observers in Jaffna commented.
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Role of powers with colonial legacy, abetting contemporary Sinhalicisation, requires scrutiny

[TamilNet, Sunday, 22 July 2018, 20:33 GMT]
The National Housing Development Authority (NHDA), which comes under the occupying unitary state of genocidal Sri Lanka, is silently transferring 5 acres of lands to the notorious British-trained ‘Special Task Force’ (STF) to expand its commando post into a permanent camp to defend the controversial Sinhala colony at the strategic entrance to Jaffna at Naavat-kuzhi. The colonisation scheme, initiated during the rule of Rajapaksa brothers, received state-patronisation after the regime change backed by the West. The colony is planned to control the arteries of the city and to Sinhalicise Jaffna city itself. The trend is also evidenced in the latest move by the occupying Colombo to station its troops at the Jaffna Fort, which is ‘developed’ with the blessings, funding and research coming from the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
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British archaeologists, Indian contractors abet Colombo's concealment of mass graves in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Saturday, 21 July 2018, 21:44 GMT]
Human skeletons, including that of children, believed to belong to the massacred Eezham Tamils during the times of genocidal war, have been discovered at two separate locations in the city of Jaffna between 15th and 20th of July. At the Jaffna Fort, bones of a child along with a golden ring engraved with the initials ‘SA’ has been recovered. Following this discovery, the officials of Colombo's Archaeological Department have sent Tamil excavators home while allowing the Sinhala and the British excavators to proceed with the work. On Friday, another alleged mass grave discovered at Naayanmaar-kaddu in Ka'l'liyang-kaadu in Jaffna seems to be an extension of the Chemma'ni killing fields from the times of Chandrika Kumaratunga's genocidal rule of Jaffna in the mid-1990s.
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Skulls with bullet-like holes excavated in Mannaar mass grave, women and children among victims

[TamilNet, Thursday, 19 July 2018, 23:22 GMT]
Human skeletons of massacred people including children and women embracing each other have emerged in the 37 day-long excavations of the brutal massacre site discovered at the entrance to the Tamil-speaking city of Mannaar island, which has been under the control of the Sinhala military. There was no doubt the slain victims were subjected to a brutal massacre, said an excavator on condition of anonymity. The excavators have discovered gunshot holes in the skulls. A young person's skeleton was found along with the skeleton of an embracing adult, visibly exposing the brutality of the massacre. So far, the unearthed skeletal remains give a head count of 29. However, the extent of the killing field is still expanding, possibly reaching out of the premises.
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SL Forest Department seizes agricultural lands of Eezham Tamils in Paduvaan-karai

[TamilNet, Monday, 16 July 2018, 22:48 GMT]
The so-called Forest Conservation Department of occupying Colombo has seized a small pond, known as Ka'lik-ku'lam, and almost 500 acres of lands in the vicinity of Unnichchai 6th Mile Post. The Eezham Tamil villagers have been using the area for Cheanai (slash-and-burn) cultivation for decades. The villagers, who have resettled after the end of war and who also received housing through the ‘National Housing Development Authority’, complain that they are unable to continue with their livelihoods of agriculture, fresh-water fishing and animal farming as a direct consequence of the latest occupation, which has been carried out by the SL Forest Department.
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Families of enforced disappeared vehemently oppose OMP sittings in North

[TamilNet, Sunday, 15 July 2018, 19:14 GMT]
The sittings by the deceptive ‘Office of the Missing Persons’ (OMP) held in Jaffna and Ki'linochchi this weekend received strong opposition as the families of enforced disappeared, who have been protesting for more than 500 days, conclusively rejecting the OMP as a farce. The protesters in Jaffna did not stop with their symbolic protest outside the building. They also protested inside the hall where the sitting went on with a few attendees. Finally, the SL police were invited to control the situation.
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