TNPF leader speaks on independent, concerted, Tamil foreign policy

[TamilNet, Sunday, 24 August 2014, 02:32 GMT]
Realising that our struggle has long been used by powers in their engagements with the island, we as a nation must work towards a concerted foreign policy, although we don’t have State, said Tamil National People’s Front (TNPF) leader Mr. Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam in an interview to TamilNet on Saturday. In meeting the challenge of achieving this, we should incorporate Tamil Nadu in creating a power centre in a geopolitical sense and the dynamics will change very quickly. Compared to the Congress, the BJP is little bit more blunt and more strident in containing the nationalist nature of the struggle. This is the carrot to the Sri Lankan State and the TNA is a co-partner. The TNPF leader argued for a breakthrough by addressing the situation in three ways.
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Colombo accelerates Sinhalicisation of Kagnchi-kudichchaa’ru in Ampaa’rai

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 20 August 2014, 23:22 GMT]
The occupying Sri Lankan State, which seized the control of the ancient Tamil villages of Kagnchi-kudichchaa’ru and Thangka-vealaayutha-puram in Thirukkoayil division in Ampaa’rai district from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) after the end of war in East in 2007, is now scheming a Sinhala settlement in the two villages, Eezham Tamil villagers told TamilNet on Wednesday. A Buddhist monk, accompanied by two Karuna Group paramilitary operatives visited the villages three days ago vowing to put up a Buddhist temple within a month between the two villages, they further said.
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Alcohol becomes genocide weapon deployed by occupying Sinhala State

[TamilNet, Thursday, 14 August 2014, 05:13 GMT]
Thriving alcohol business ‘licensed’ by genocidal Sri Lanka in the occupied country of Eezham Tamils, especially after the end of the LTTE-run civil administration, is conceived as a potential ‘counterinsurgency’ and structural genocide weapon, besides sucking money of a war-torn people, commented social activists in Batticaloa district. Responding to an incident that took place in the district this week, in which a poor, female-headed family, brewing country liquor was shot by raiding Sinhala police of a State that promotes its alcohol business, the social activists were coming out with the larger dimensions of the alcohol crisis in the district.
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Vadamaraadchi East villagers capture SL Navy trooper for rape attempt

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 13 August 2014, 21:21 GMT]
The villagers of Vinaayakapuram at Vettilaik-kea’ni of Vadamaraadchi East in Jaffna captured a Sri Lanka Navy (SLN) sailor, who had entered into the house of a former LTTE member and attempted to sexually abuse his wife in the early hours of Wednesday. The neighbours, who were alerted by the shouting of the woman around 1:00 a.m. rushed to the spot and captured the Sinhala-speaking man after chasing him for a while. The villages severely assaulted the culprit before handing him over to the SL Police with the demand of immediate remand. The villagers also provided the photograph of the captured SLN soldier to the media as the SL Navy was harassing them to get the man released without going to the courts.
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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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BJP’s bypass ‘geopolitics’

[TamilNet, Sunday, 03 August 2014, 19:03 GMT]
New Delhi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) comes out with a comical ‘geopolitics’ bypassing India’s own Tamil Nadu State and the nation of Eezham Tamils at the closest proximity, to build a ‘Ram Sethu’ to genocidal Sri Lanka, and in that process concedes to the total annihilation of the nation and territoriality of Eezham Tamils. Even though the inroads of China and Pakistan are cited as usual, and now added with citation of US interference as well, the DNA of the thinking of New Delhi and some of its South Indian articulators on the question of Tamils has to be carefully understood by all Tamils. There is no alternative to Tamils proving their geopolitical strength in all justifiable ways possible.
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Citing China, Colombo blackmails USA to continue genocide abetment

[TamilNet, Friday, 18 July 2014, 00:15 GMT]
In the global geopolitical situation of today, China is gaining in ‘Sri Lanka’ by recognising its ‘potential’ and by not caring for the human rights yardstick, while the USA is falling behind by not doing so, was the message genocidal Sri Lanka wanted to convey in the USA through its ambassador and through a visiting parliamentarian and coordinating secretary to Mahinda Rajapaksa. If the island is allowed to continue any further under a single State that is congenitally genocidal, there will be no end to its blackmailing humanity indefinitely, through its so-called geopolitical importance by alternately inviting greedy Establishments of the world. If humanity wishes to teach a lesson to geopolitical terrorism, the paradigm-setting target is ‘Sri Lanka’, responded Tamil activists for alternative politics.
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British State complicity in genocide of Eezham Tamils explored in new report

[TamilNet, Thursday, 10 July 2014, 23:24 GMT]
Phil Miller, a researcher for Corporate Watch in London, who gave expert evidence on ‘British State complicity in genocide of the Tamil people’ at the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on Sri Lanka (Bremen Session), has brought out an updated report titled “Britain's Dirty War against the Tamil people - 1979–2009” published by the International Human Rights Association Bremen. “This report draws on original research conducted at the UK National Archives and from Freedom of Information requests, as well as pooling together disparate information that is available in the public domain,” Phill Miller says in the preface. Dr N. Malathy, a key member of NESoHR and author of ‘A Fleeting Moment in my Country’, who survived the genocidal onslaught on Vanni, introduces the report by Philip Miller to TamilNet readers.
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‘Sri Lanka Army not a counterinsurgency force’

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 09 July 2014, 21:53 GMT]
Observing that the Sri Lanka army “cannot be separated from the wider political culture of entrenched Sinhala nationalism and militarism in which it exists” and the LTTE “was not a typical insurgency and is better considered as a de facto quasi-state with institutions covering taxation, policing, judiciary and public services”, it is unwise to consider the SLA as a counterinsurgency force, argues Rob Pinney, researcher at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. In a paper published on Small Wars Journal on 23 June, the Mr. Pinney further concludes that “failure to address the political grievances of the Tamil population is likely to imperil the prospect of a durable peace.” A Tamil analyst, however, alludes to genocidal nature of the unitary Sinhala state as the prime reason of its “failure” to provide a political solution.
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Isaippiriyaa remembered in Tamil Nadu as icon of Tamil resistance

[TamilNet, Friday, 27 June 2014, 23:19 GMT]
Activists across Tamil Nadu gathered at the city of Mathurai on the occasion of 'International Day in Support of Victims of Torture' on Thursday, paying tribute to slain LTTE media specialist Shoba alias Isaippiriyaa and thousands like her, who faced torture, abuse and death at the hands of Colombo’s genocidal military. Condemning the section of personalities within the UN and the international Establishments for their complicity in Tamil genocide, the Tamil Nadu activists further asserted that a sovereign Tamil Eelam alone was the remedy for the injustice and crimes committed against Eezham Tamils.
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Eezham Tamils and duplicity of West’s human rights campaigns

[TamilNet, Thursday, 26 June 2014, 23:28 GMT]
The progress in women security achieved through liberation movements in Asia are more substantive than any that was achieved or could be achieved by the campaigns of the West-activists. Yet, why do they ignore the former and focus only on the latter? Is it because it gives the West-activists and by implication those in the West in general the moral high ground to look down upon the “others”, asks Dr. N. Malathy, in an article sent to TamilNet. Discussing the topic through the Eezham Tamil case study, and comparing the West-activists’ campaign on child soldiers then and sexualised violence against women now, she is bringing out the duplicities and deficiencies inherent in the human rights campaigns run by West-activists.
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Navi Pillai asserts investigation undeterred by non-cooperation

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 25 June 2014, 23:49 GMT]
Reiterating her encouragement to “government and people of Sri Lanka” to cooperate with the OHCHR investigation, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ms. Navanetham Pillai added that the investigation would still go ahead undeterred if such cooperation was not forthcoming, reported UN Human Rights News Release on Wednesday. There are two facets to the sabotage of any investigation of truth. One is the freedom given to the Colombo government to engage in all sorts of intimidation, and the latest is the use of PTA, as revealed by a London meet on Tuesday. But the other, and the more precarious one, is certain powers grooming the genocidal Sinhala military into a neo-lascarin force for imperialist agenda in the region, commented Tamil activists for alternative politics in the island.
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UK shields Sri Lanka’s genocidal rape committed on Tamils

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 11 June 2014, 22:49 GMT]
Britain, which was actively in complicity with the genocidal war conducted without witnesses against Eezham Tamils, now in a global summit convened in London this week, shields the systematic genocidal rape committed on Tamil women too. The Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, organized by British Foreign Secretary William Hague and the high profile Special Envoy of UNHCR, Angelina Jolie, with delegations from 140 countries and ministers from 100 countries including the US Secretary of State, was highlighting the cases of all but the Tamils. “Regrettably, Foreign Secretary Hague has forgotten about the courageous survivors of sexual violence in Sri Lanka,” said Bianca Jagger.
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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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SL military blocks people from attending protest in Mullaiththeevu

[TamilNet, Thursday, 05 June 2014, 23:05 GMT]
Tamil National Alliance (TNA) and Tamil National Peoples Front (TNPF) politicians joined a protest held in front of the Mullaiththeevu District Secretariat on Thursday demanding legal hearings into habeas corpus petitions from the families and relatives of persons, who are reported missing after the families had handed them over to the occupying Sri Lankan military during the final days of the genocidal onslaught on Vanni in May 2009. On Thursday, the Sri Lankan military in Mullaiththeevu was blocking the kith and kin of the missing persons from attending the protest, which was led by Ms Ananthy Sasitharan, an elected councillor of the Northern Provincial Council (NPC) who represents the voice of the kith and kin of the missing persons.
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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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Hold Gotabhaya accountable for war-crimes, writes NYU Professor of Law

[TamilNet, Monday, 02 June 2014, 03:14 GMT]
"Even if Gota[bhaya Rajapakse] never sees the inside walls of a US prison, the White House could send a powerful signal of its commitment to accountability by formally investigating and, if the evidence is there, indicting Gota[bhaya]," writes Ryan Goodman, Professor of Law at New York University School of Law in the on line forum called Justice and Security which provides rigorous analysis of U.S. foreign policy, national security and law. "Because of Gota’s citizenship the US would also be less vulnerable to accusations of meddling. And, indeed, the US administration could also suspend its own criminal inquiry, in a very public way, on the ground that it will give Sri Lanka’s political establishment an opportunity to do the right thing. Congressional members can very publicly support the initiation of a full-blown criminal inquiry by the Justice Department," Goodman said.
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Machiavellian ‘Prince’ of Sri Lanka?

[TamilNet, Saturday, 24 May 2014, 04:09 GMT]
The Prince, a short treatise written by Niccolo Machiavelli in about 1527 as an advice to the Governor of Florence, to win his favour presents doctrines which have a striking similarity to those adopted by Rajapaksa, with unapologetic obeisance from Colombo elites. While historians and political scientists argue on the true objectives of the book, the term "Machiavellian" is near universally used to refer to amoral, unscrupulous, and devious power games in the conduct of States. Rajapaksa’s calculated acts to destroy the Tamil nationalist struggle by first killing thousands of Tamil civilians in the "crime of the century," and then continuing the structural genocide in the NorthEast, with the complicit West unable to arrest the Sinhala state machinery, appear to be policy actions directly pulled out from The Prince.
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Girl slain with Isaipiriya in SL military captivity identified

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 20 May 2014, 04:56 GMT]
A girl seen held captive together with LTTE journalist Shoba (Isaippiriyaa) by the genocidal military of Sri Lanka and later seen slain, has been identified as 19-year-old Ushalini Gunalingam from Yoakapuram, Mallaavi in Vanni, news sources in Ki’linochchi told TamilNet Monday. The girl was not a LTTE fighter, although she had been recruited by the movement in 2008 for a few months, according to the relatives of the victim.
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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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