Vavuniyaa protesters: Colombo wages new war through genocidal archaeology

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 21 August 2018, 22:56 GMT]
Eezham Tamils in Vavuniyaa took to the streets on Tuesday, opposing the move by the SL Archaeology Department to seize their hilltop of ancient heritage at Vedukku-naa'ri. The protesters vowed to fight against the unilateral move by the unitary state to Sinhalicise their ancestral heritage. “From annihilation of Language through setting fire to Jaffna Library to the slaughter in Mu'l'livaaykkaal, the process was genocide,” a placard said. “Today, it is Vedukku-naa'ri, tomorrow it will be Nedunkea'ni Aiyanaar,” questioned another slogan.
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Colombo schemes Sinhala-Buddhicisation of Tamil heritage site in Vavuniyaa North

[TamilNet, Sunday, 19 August 2018, 21:33 GMT]
The occupying unitary state of genocidal Sri Lanka has prohibited Eezham Tamils at Oldu-madu village in Vavuniyaa North from accessing 157-meter-high hill called Vedukku-naa'ri. The issue became a hot topic on 10 August, a day before the annual religious ritual of Aadi Amaavaasai (the new moon of the Tamil month July-August) observed in remembrance of the ancestors by the Saivites (Hindus). The SL Police blocked the Poosaari (non-Brahmin priest) of the village-deity, based on a complaint made by the SL Archaeology Department on 07 August. The SL Police has instructed Poosari and the villagers to keep away from the hilltop. Only after the repeated pleas, they were allowed to access their temple once on 11 August. Now, they have to face heritage genocide on their own, V. Poobalasingam, a grassroots leader in Olu-madu told TamilNet.
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SL Forest Department seizes permit lands of 600 Tamil families in Madu

[TamilNet, Saturday, 18 August 2018, 23:10 GMT]
The SL Forest Department has started to grab the lands of more than six hundred Eezham Tamil families, who have been residing in their permit lands for more than three decades in Madu Divisional Secretariat division of the district of Mannaar district. The grounds had been appropriately allocated to the families through Land Kachcheari forty and fifty years ago, and many of the families have seen their third generation in the residences located in the lands. However, the SL Forest Department, which comes under the direct rule of the occupying unitary state in Colombo, has systematically deployed Sinhala forest officers and field assistants from South to seize the lands of Eezham Tamils, say grassroots activists in the division.
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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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Tension prevails in Naayaa'ru, intruding Sinhala fishers set fire to fishing huts of Tamils

[TamilNet, Monday, 13 August 2018, 22:32 GMT]
Sinhala fishers from South, who are occupying the coast of Naayaa'ru in Mullaiththeevu district have set fire to eight fishing huts Monday night around 11:30 p.m. causing destruction to millions of rupees worth fishing equipment, including three boat engines and fishing nets of Eezham Tamils. The coordinated attack comes one day after SL Fisheries Minister visited the protesting Tamil fisher associations in Mullaiththeevu and promised to revoke the fishing licences provided to fishers from external districts to engage in fishing along the coast of Mullaiththeevu. Despite the promise from the SL Minister, Sinhala poachers continued to engage in diving using lights on Monday, and the Tamil fishermen blocked them.
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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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Kalaignar Karunanidhi passes away at 94

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 07 August 2018, 16:58 GMT]
Former Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu State and the Chief of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), Muthuvel Karunanidhi, popularly known as ‘Kalaignar’, has passed away at the age of 94 in Chennai, TamilNadu, on Tuesday. Apart from his acumen in adjusting policy to the prevailing circumstances and persistent role in dialectically shaping the politics of Tamil Nadu, Kalaignar was also a veteran writer, playwright, scriptwriter, poet and an orator contributing to Tamil literature and cinema. His demise marks the end of a political era, represented along with the late former chief minister personalities such as C.N. Annadurai (Anna), M.G.Ramachandran and J Jayalalithaa, all of whom originated from the secular Dravidian movement, which emerged as a counter-hegemonic force in Tamil Nadu politics in the early 20th century.
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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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Tamil fishers continue to siege DFAR office in Mullaith-theevu amidst threats from SL Police

[TamilNet, Friday, 03 August 2018, 15:29 GMT]
Hundreds of Eezham Tamil fishers laid siege to the district office of the SL Department of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (DFAR) in Mullaith-theevu on Thursday as the SL Assistant Director at the office has failed to take action against the destructive fishing and poaching by the fishers coming from other districts, and particularly those who come from outside the North-East. The protest, which started off with a march of demonstration, gained momentum as the protesters broke the fences of the district DFAR office, entered its premises and laid siege to the building. On Friday, the SL Police was preparing to file cases against the participants accusing them of causing destruction to public property, informed sources in Mullaith-theevu said. However, the protesters continue to keep the DFAR office besieged.
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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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TELO councillor of NPC questions ‘achievements’ of TNA hierarchy

[TamilNet, Friday, 27 July 2018, 18:34 GMT]
35 years have elapsed since pogrom of Black July, which was waged against the Eezham Tamils with the sponsorship of the UNP regime at that time. The incumbent SL Prime Minister, Ranil Wickramasinghe of the UNP, was a cabinet minister at that time when his fellow cabinet ministers were actively backing the pogrom. The late J.R. Jayawardene, who was the president at that time, came with the infamous declaration ‘war for war, peace for peace’ and escalated the pogrom. This month, Ranil Wickramasinghe has been visiting Jaffna to deceive the Tamil people with so-called development, says NPC Councillor Vinthan Kanagaratnam of the TELO. He called it a shame that the TNA parliamentarians were collaborating with the UNP-SLFP government even after failing to win anything tangible from them.
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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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