Student associations mark Tamil Eelam Heroes Day in Canada

[TamilNet, Sunday, 25 November 2012, 23:13 GMT]
Tamil Student Associations (TSAs) in over eight University campuses in Canada engaged in commemorating Heroes Day last week. Annually the TSAs individually commemorate Heroes Day during the week leading up to the broader Tamil Youth remembrance event held on the 25 of November. Commending the solidarity work that Eezham Tamil youth in Canada have been undertaking over the past years, James Clark from the Canadian Peace Alliance said at the event at York last Monday: "Maaveerar Naal is an occasion not only to remember and pay tribute to the martyrs and heroes of Tamil Eelam, but also to reflect on the lessons of the struggle for peace and justice."
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‘UN internal report meaningless without action, long term solution needed’: Tamil activist

[TamilNet, Friday, 23 November 2012, 21:01 GMT]
Criticizing the UN for its deliberate silence which “protected the Sri Lankan state from international criticism and allowed it to strategically conduct a genocidal campaign under the guise of a “war on terror””, Dr. Sam Pari, an Eezham Tamil activist with the ATC, argues in news site Crickey.com that the recently released internal review report of the UN on Sri Lanka is meaningless to the Eezham Tamils without concrete steps in action. Giving an outline of different ways in which the Sri Lankan state is conducting genocide of the Eezham Tamils, she writes “The Sri Lankan regime’s strategy of eradicating the Tamil people through various avenues is only being abetted by the super powers’ silence. What is required is a longer term solution that deals with the root cause — an oppressive force, the racist Sri Lankan regime, intent on erasing the identity of a people, the Tamils.”
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"Multimedia book to unbury facts of Sri Lanka war"

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 21 November 2012, 00:18 GMT]
Benjamin Dix, a former UN staffer who spent four years in Sri Lanka from 2004 till 2008 when Sri Lanka asked all NGOs to leave the island, and who with illustrator Lindsay Pollock, is documenting the effects of Sri Lanka war through the story of a Tamil refugee, in an interview given to TamilNet says, "I felt terrible after the UN evacuation from Vanni and very angry that they international system had abandoned civilians at their time of need....Due to the media blackout on the conflict, I felt that it was very important to tell the stories of the dead and the survivors of the conflict." Arundhati Roy, writes in support of Dix's project, "tens of thousands of tamil civilians who were brazenly and brutally killed and powerful countries which have strategic and business interests in the region are rapidly burying these facts," and that the book will unbury these facts.
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Eyewitnesses to Kumaarapuram massacre summoned to Anuradhapura

[TamilNet, Monday, 19 November 2012, 20:16 GMT]
Witnesses to February 1996 brutal massacre of 24 Tamils by the occupying Sri Lanka Army (SLA) at Kumarapuram vilage in Trincomalee, have been sent summons to appear on Monday in Anuradhapura High Court situated in predominantly Sinhala district, more than 16 years after the genocidal massacre. “This gang rape and massacre of innocent civilians, including children and women, forms part of a system evidence of Genocide against Eezham Tamils,” a lawyer from Trincomalee told TamilNet commenting “justice delayed is justice denied.” Many of the witnesses are poor labourers who do not know Sinhala. The witnesses have also been threatened by the SL military not to appear in the Courts, the sources further said.
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Israel airstrikes kill Hamas military commander

[TamilNet, Friday, 16 November 2012, 09:33 GMT]
The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) began on Wednesday a heavy bombardment of the Gaza strip with a targeted airstrike, killing Hamas military commander Ahmad al-Jabari and a passenger in his vehicle. The IDF cited his involvement in the hostage-taking of Gilad Shalit, an episode in the 2006 war on Lebanon, as its justification. Israel's "Operation Pillar of Cloud" signals the largest escalation in the conflict since 2008-9 Gaza invasions. “This name invokes the Hebrew nation's biblical pre-history - much as Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism conjures the Mahavamsa as an ideological tool in it’s very modern state military strategy,” comments Lorenzo Fiorito, an activist working with solidarity groups in Canada. “The present Gaza offensive has little to do with the individuals it has killed or with millenia-old founding myths - it has to do with the Palestinian claim to statehood,” he adds.
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Autonomy within unitary structure paradoxical: Peter Schalk

[TamilNet, Thursday, 15 November 2012, 14:17 GMT]
Sri Lanka’s ambassador in France, Dayan Jayatilleke, calling for “autonomy within a unitary structure,” at a seminar in Paris earlier this month was a political-populist statement, responded Professor Emeritus Peter Schalk, who participated the seminar arranged by Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). A unitary structure excludes autonomy. A social scientist would not have uttered such a sentence, Prof Schalk said, in a note sent to TamilNet on Thursday. Calling CNRS partial in providing propaganda platform to Colombo, he said that the violence by the governments of Lanka is structural and genocidal that is practiced over the decades and not just an occasional aberration or some nuts.
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UN consistent in ‘leaking’ on Sri Lanka

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 14 November 2012, 04:21 GMT]
An internal review panel report on the UN ‘s conduct in the final months of the Vanni War has found the UN guilty of “systematic failure” in Sri Lanka, according to the report leaked to the BBC on Tuesday. The practice of ‘leaking’ information and reports on Sri Lanka is consistent with the UN ever since the times of the Vanni War, and this only shows how the UN is still not straight forward in remedying the genocide of Eezham Tamils it abetted in the island, commented a new generation Tamil politician. He cited the leaked documents of the UN on the casualties in Vanni War in March 2009 and the UNSG panel report that was leaked to media before being made public in April 2011. BBC cited sources that the executive summary of stark conclusions in the current draft report will be removed in the final report.
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'World failed Eezham Tamils'

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 13 November 2012, 21:39 GMT]
With the much delayed report authored by U.K.'s Charles Petrie on the review of UN inaction during the 2009 Mu'l'livaaykkaal massacre due to be released to the U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon tomorrow, UN Dispatch, a website that covers the U.N., chronicles the "massive and system wide failure to prevent the slaughter of an estimated 40,000 ethnic Tamils in five short months in the winter and spring of 2009," and says, like what the UN has done, "[a]nti-genocide constituencies around the world ought to also undertake the same hard-hitting self examination" on the failure to first prevent, and later the failure to expose the mass atrocity against Eezham Tamils.
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ILPS conference in Canada discusses liberation struggles and state oppression

[TamilNet, Sunday, 11 November 2012, 21:36 GMT]
The three-day Canadian conference of the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) culminated on March 10. The public discussion series at Toronto’s Ontario Institute for the Study of Education comprising several topics, was organized to coincide with the Second General Assembly of the ILPS-Canada. Krisna Saravanamuttu, a second generation Eezham Tamil, was one of several activists who delivered strategic analyses of state tools against liberation movements, under the topic “The War on Resistance,” to an audience of approximately 25 activists. Presentations advanced perspectives on Tamil, Palestinian, Indian, and Quebecois social movements. Among participants originally of Latin American, Kashmiri, Philippine, Quebecois, and Anglo-Canadian origin, second-generation youth members of the Tamil community made up a prominent proportion of attendees to this event.
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Dublin tribunal takes up genocide investigation

[TamilNet, Saturday, 03 November 2012, 01:22 GMT]
“In April 2013, a panel of international experts will be convened as Judges of the 'Permanent People's Tribunal' to examine reports submitted by many specialised working groups on the accusation of the crime of Genocide against the Government of Sri Lanka and on the accusations against various international actors who had supported and prepared the conditions for the Sri Lankan Government to implement this alleged crime,” said a joint statement issued by the 'Permanent People's Tribunal' (PPT) based in Rome on Friday. The move is supported organisationally by the 'Irish Forum for Peace in Sri Lanka' (IFPSL) based in Dublin and the International Human Rights Association based in Bremen (IMRV). Dublin Tribunal was the first independent international undertaking that recognised the need to look into the case of genocide in the island as early as in January 2010.
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‘Independent civil society activism best tribute to Thamilchelvan’: Tamil Nadu writer

[TamilNet, Friday, 02 November 2012, 23:20 GMT]
Arguing that Sri Lanka’s genocidal war on the Eezham Tamils and the protracted genocide post-2009 was possible only due to the system of global injustice, Tamil Nadu based writer, poet and civil society activist Meena Kandasamy urged the Eezham Tamils in the island, the people of Tamil Nadu, the Tamil diaspora and other solidarity groups to form a ‘global civil society’ so as to politically and ideologically counter the designs of the establishments, in a commentary sent to TamilNet. Writing on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the assassination of S.P. Thamilchelvan, Ms. Kandasamy opines that such activism would be the best tribute to the legacy of the late political leader of the de-facto state of Tamil Eelam.
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War-displaced without housing assistance now stranded roofless by heavy rains in Batticaloa

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 31 October 2012, 23:50 GMT]
Batticaloa district Tamil National Alliance parliamentarian Mr Pon Selvaraja has said that the Sri Lankan state has not taken any step till today to provide permanent housing schemes for people affected by war and natural disasters in the Batticaloa district. In 2006, all civilians fled from their houses to elsewhere for safety when the occupying Sri Lanka Army launched multi-barrel artillery attacks (MBRL) towards Paduvaan-karai. The displaced only received Tarpaulin roofing sheets from NGOs. The SL government omitted the names of the victims from the list of displaced families disabling them from receiving cash relief or dry rations. The argument put forward by the Colombo government at that time was that the occupying Special Task Force (STF), a notorious commando unit under the SL police deployed in combat operations, was providing protection to the displaced people.
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Colombo’s genocide-stabilizing approach to diaspora patronized in London

[TamilNet, Saturday, 27 October 2012, 04:23 GMT]
A meeting of the diaspora with a group of cross-party parliamentarians of the genocidal regime in Colombo is hosted in London on Saturday to discuss the recommendations the group has presented to the Colombo government and political parties after its earlier meeting with the diaspora in London in last December. The report lamenting lack of highlight on the positive actions of the Colombo regime, recommends for a diaspora ministry or department in Colombo. The report confines preservation of Tamil identity to local administration mechanism and demilitarisation only to the level of allowing day-to-day activity of Tamil civilians. The recommendations were envisaging foreign investments besides urging implementation of the LLRC recommendations.
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Tamil politicians, activists protest against SL military attacks on civic leaders in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Thursday, 18 October 2012, 01:20 GMT]
Tamil politicians and civil activists on Wednesday protested condemning the brutal attack Sunday on Paramsothy Vasanthakumar, the elected chairman of Nalloor Piratheasa Chapai (PS). Vasanthakumar was on his way to prepare a legal suit after lodging a formal complaint against the illegal SL military occupation of 5 acres of land belonging to the civic body when he was attacked. The attackers, alleged to be the operatives of the SL military intelligence, had followed Mr Vasanthakumar in motorbikes, assaulted him using sharp iron rods at Kokkuvil and forcibly removed the legal documents on the SL military occupied land together with a sum of money. The protestors on Wednesday openly blamed the SL military intelligence in Jaffna for carrying out a systematic campaign of terror, targeting elected civic leaders in the peninsula.
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Media questions fate of missing report on UN inaction during Vanni war

[TamilNet, Sunday, 14 October 2012, 18:25 GMT]
Nearly a year has passed since a heavily criticized UN Secretary General, had asked the former Executive Director of the UN Population Fund, Thoraya Obaid, to submit a review within 4 months on UN inaction during the 2009 Vanni massacre. However, in an un-announced change in the committee leadership, UK's Charles Petrie replaced Thoraya Obaid. Even Petrie, is now engaged in Norway's Myanmar Peace Support Initiative (MPSI). But, the report on the UN in Sri Lanka is yet to come out. Where is the report, asked the Inner City Press, on Friday. Answering the question, the UN spokesperson, Martin Nesirky, confirmed the incompletion and non-availability of the report.
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‘A right way and a wrong way to protest’

[TamilNet, Saturday, 13 October 2012, 13:42 GMT]
In May 2009, before the civil war in Sri Lanka came to a fiery end with Sri Lanka armed forces killing tens of thousands of unarmed Tamil civilians in what has been labelled as the "crime of the century," several thousand Canadian Tamils, in protest, blocked the busy Gardiner Expressway angering Canadian motorists, and drawing condemnation from politicians. Gillian Philipupillai, a second generation Canadian Tamil, in a research paper, explores the position of diasporic Tamils in the "white settler state" through a focus on colonialism, movement, violence and sovereignty, and concludes, "[b]y racializing Tamil protesters as an intrusive mob of illegal occupiers, the Canadian state normalized and further justified mass Tamil civilian deaths and casualties on their homelands in the state of Sri Lanka."
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‘Sri Lanka model of COIN sets a dangerous precedent for humanity’

[TamilNet, Thursday, 11 October 2012, 18:26 GMT]
After the International Community of Establishments working in tandem with a genocide-intending Sri Lankan state oversaw a brutal military solution over the armed struggle of the Eezham Tamils in May 2009, the ‘Sri Lanka model’ of dealing with insurgencies is now being incorporated into the science of Counterinsurgency (COIN), opines RM Karthick, observing what dangerous ramifications this could have for struggling peoples worldwide in an article published on Sanhati, an Indian online journal, on Wednesday. Outlining internal and external factors in shaping the conflict, using the politico-military analysis of the late TamilNet senior editor ‘Taraki’ Sivaram, the author explains how internationally coordinated measures against the LTTE and the genocidal intent of Sinhala nationalists led to Mu’l’livaaykkaal and the systemic repression of the Eezham Tamils in their homeland that followed.
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Solheim’s politics, UN role in SL criticized at Frances Harrison’s book launch event

[TamilNet, Saturday, 06 October 2012, 07:24 GMT]
Even as Erik Solheim tried to sell stories that the LTTE leadership was responsible for the Mu’l’livaaykkaal massacre at the book launch event of Frances Harrison’s ‘Still Counting the Dead’ at London on Friday, solidarity activists and members from Eezham Tamil diaspora in the audience criticized his role as a failed peace-broker and the unjust role of the UN and the International Community of Establishments in leading to the genocidal massacre of the Eezham Tamils in May 2009. Ms. Harrison’s book, which presents the different types of atrocities that the Eezham Tamils endured at the hands of the Sri Lankan forces through case histories, also had some insights on the silence of world powers as the Sri Lankan government carried its onslaught on the Eezham Tamils.
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‘Surrendering a struggle’: Biafran lessons to Tamil Eelam

[TamilNet, Friday, 05 October 2012, 15:56 GMT]
In an article published in The Guardian on Tuesday, famed novelist Chinua Achebe, who hails from the Igbo community in Nigeria, opines that decades after Nigeria’s genocidal war on the short-lived state of Biafra, the Igbo people still face monumental problems under Nigerian rule. The Nigerian-Biafran war ended after the internationally aided Nigerian offensives on the Igbo people, which resulted in the death of around 2 million, compelled the leaders of the armed resistance for Biafra to capitulate. Whether the Solheim clique in the Western establishments who now claim that they could have saved civilian lives by facilitating the ‘surrender’ of the LTTE leadership in 2009 had the same intentions for the Eezham Tamil nation, ask Tamil political activists.
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Creating historical fiction on Mu'l'livaaykkaal massacre

[TamilNet, Friday, 05 October 2012, 02:32 GMT]
Dr. Julian Vigo, an American academic currently living in the U.K., who authored a report based on eye-witness accounts from twelve United Nations humanitarian workers who were working on the ground during the last phases of war in Sri Lanka that ended in May 2009, in an interview to TamilNet, apportions blame to the United Nations organs operating in Sri Lanka at the time of the massacre at the killing fields of Mu'l'livaaykkal, and says, "I am interested in how historical fictions (if we are to take the media as the recorder of history) are created around the issue of Sri Lanka's dead and the way that international organizations eschew responsibility for their role in the 40,000 dead while finger pointing to Colombo."
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