Colombo awaits UN approval to seize 25-fold larger extent of sea than its landmass

[TamilNet, Saturday, 24 November 2018, 14:52 GMT]
While waging the genocidal onslaught on Eezham Tamils in 2009, the SL State filed a submission to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS), on 08 May 2009, seeking to extend the outer limits of the continental shelf, reportedly by 1,000 nautical miles from the baselines from which the breadth of its territorial sea. The SL State is claiming the marine area to the effect of twenty-five times of its land area, covering a vast expanse of the south of the Bay of Bengal. The SL State submitted the report with the assistance (grant and credit) from Norway's Development Agency, the NORAD. Several other western countries also backed the move while the SL State was committing a genocide and the LTTE vessels were being systematically destroyed in the high seas with the intelligence information coming from the USA.
Full story >>

India's RAW behind ‘Tiger identity erasure’ campaign

[TamilNet, Friday, 23 November 2018, 21:15 GMT]
The foreign intelligence agency of India, known as the Research and Analysis Wing’ (RAW), has advised its counterpart in the island to transform Tamil Eelam Maaveerar Naa'l (Heroes Day) as well as all other remembrance days of the LTTE members and cadres into remembrance days bereft of identity, politics and valour. The only way to do this is getting rid of terminology associated with the LTTE, Tamil nationhood, the concept of Tamil valour. Usage of the terms ‘maaveerar’ and ‘Eelam’ should also be avoided, the RAW has advised, according to informed paramilitary sources in the island.
Full story >>

Thileepan Remembrance in Jaffna underscores need for new emancipation strategies

[TamilNet, Thursday, 27 September 2018, 08:24 GMT]
All Tamil parties and movements that orientate their politics on the national liberation of the nation of Eezham Tamils actively took part in an emotional event participated by hundreds of Eezham Tamils on Wednesday at Nalloor in Jaffna. Lt Col Thileepan (Rasaiah Parthipan) sacrificed his life through a 12-day fast-unto-death without food and water in 1987. He was the political head of the LTTE in Jaffna when New Delhi intervened with its military force after entering a State-to-State agreement with Colombo. Thileepan's sacrifice was a crucial historical event in the political emancipation of Eezham Tamils as it exposed the real agenda of the intervening power, which was calling the shots in the island during the times of the Cold War.
Full story >>

Drastic reduction of funds hampers resettlement of uprooted Tamils in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Friday, 14 September 2018, 22:25 GMT]
The uprooted people from SL military occupied Valikaamam North in Jaffna are still languishing in 34 camps. However, the occupying unitary state of genocidal Sri Lanka has allocated barely 250 million rupees (USD 1.5 million) for resettlement of the internally displaced people in Jaffna district in 2018, Tamil civil sources in Jaffna said. For comparison, 5,500 million rupees (USD 32.7 million) was allocated in 2016 - 2017, the sources said. Mr S. Muralitharan, the additional District Secretary who deals with land affairs, has admitted the figures on the expenditure on resettlement.
Full story >>

UN silence on Mannaar killing fields questioned, legal activists urge Bishops to act

[TamilNet, Sunday, 02 September 2018, 16:31 GMT]
The victims of Mannaar killing fields could be families that were fleeing from Peasaalai and other places to Tamil Nadu in India during the times of Eezham War II which lasted from 1990 to 1995, legal activists working with the enforced disappeared families told TamilNet on Sunday. Since there is a systematic pattern and the massacres seem to have been deliberately committed against unarmed civilians fleeing from the war zone, these are Crime Against Humanity of the first-degree according to any standard of the International Criminal Law, they said. The UN system, particularly the Geneva-based Office of the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR), well aware of Colombo's drive to dodge international forensic analyses of the exhumed human skeletons, also keeps mum, they complained.
Full story >>

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.
Full story >>

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.
Full story >>

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.
Full story >>

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.
Full story >>

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.
Full story >>

Tamils need native movements to confront Colombo-centric environmental exploitations

[TamilNet, Thursday, 05 July 2018, 23:49 GMT]
Many recent reports from the eastern coast of the North-East indicate a widespread pattern of various corporate and state-centric exploitations targeting the natural resources of the territorial sea and the coast of the North-East. Colombo-based corporates and traders are exploiting export-related businesses, be it sea cucumber export to China, fake mangroves and minerals to the USA and Japan, or mining sand for shipping to the neighbouring state of Maldives. On top of this, Colombo-centric State-to-State relationships originating from geopolitics-driven ‘development’ narrative, as well as military to military ‘exchanges’, are challenging the sovereignty of Eezham Tamils in a big-scale along the territorial sea and the strategic cost.
Full story >>

Sinhalas have come in big way, as opening of Kandyan Kingdom: Rt Rev Jebanesan

[TamilNet, Thursday, 28 June 2018, 23:38 GMT]
Tamils had been the first inhabitants and an original people of this island. Although some historians accept that fact, the present Sinhala historians do not take it. Back in the old days, when H.C. Ray was the professor of history at the University of Ceylon, he used to refute the claim that Tamils were interlopers. The interlopers were the Sinhalas and not the Tamils, he used to say. However, one is unable to resonate that fact anymore, says Rt Rev Dr S Jebanesan, the former Bishop of the Jaffna Diocese of the Church of South India, in an exclusive interview to TamilNet. The tyranny of the ‘majority’ is dominating the post-colonial political discourses and the case of ‘Sri Lanka’ is a classic example of this trend, the scholar of philosophy, theology as well as the Tamil and English languages, said.
Full story >>

Swiss ruling, a precedent-setting victory for Right of Self-Determination oriented freedom fighters

[TamilNet, Friday, 15 June 2018, 21:07 GMT]
Zurich-based legal experts, who represented the former LTTE-associated activists in Switzerland involved in the fundraising to the struggle of Eezham Tamil independence, have praised the recent verdict in the Swiss Federal Criminal Court as a precedent-setting victory. The decision is a victory for the Right of Self-determination oriented national liberation armed struggles that get wrongly classified as terrorism due to international politics, Marcel Bosonnet, one of the legal experts who defended the Tamil activists told TamilNet in an interview on Friday. The judges felt that there were not enough concrete proofs to consider the LTTE as a criminal organisation. This ruling is outstanding and is much better-placed than the EU ruling as it challenges the international politics based terrorism classification with a principled legal question, Tamil legal activists in Switzerland said.
Full story >>

Occupying SL military forged land documents with fake signatures: landowners

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 06 June 2018, 18:13 GMT]
Thirty of forty land-owners of 59 acres of lands along the Nanthik-kadal lagoon in Mullaiththeevu district have categorically refuted the claim being advanced by the occupying military of genocidal Sri Lanka that they had agreed in writing to accept alternative lands or money as compensation in return for the properties that have been seized by the occupying Sinhala military. The military has provided forged documents to P. Senthil Nathan, the additional secretary of the SL Resettlement Ministry.
Full story >>

Disillusioned sections of Saiva activists transform into Hindutva extremists in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Saturday, 26 May 2018, 21:02 GMT]
Alarming hate-speech evidence has emerged in Jaffna on Thursday causing concerns among the Tamil national grassroots circles that a new brand of North Indian Hindutva extremism is induced into the Tamil society challenging the secular Tamil nationalism at one of its bedrocks. The latest controversy and a hate speech highlighted in Tamil language media come as a reaction to the insignificant issue of 33 cows getting purchased for meat by a slaughterhouse in Chaavakachcheari following the due civic procedures in Jaffna. The Hindutva-influenced sections were staging a protest against what they termed as Islamic slaughter of cows regarded as sacred animals by Buddhists and Hindus.
Full story >>

Extremists among Sinhalese burnt Tiger flags in South, racism says Fr Sakthivel

[TamilNet, Thursday, 24 May 2018, 12:32 GMT]
A section of Sinhala extremists in the South has burnt Tiger flags after an organised campaign in the social media by certain elements that are believed to be from the SL military intelligence wing operating in the North. Propaganda has been waged through the social media, intentionally spreading false information to the South that the Northern Provincial Council had lowered the Lion flags to half-staff on Mu'l'livaaykkaal Tamil Genocide Remembrance Day.
Full story >>

SL Police harasses Eezham Tamil refugees returning home from Tamil Nadu with lawsuits

[TamilNet, Saturday, 19 May 2018, 09:55 GMT]
Eezham Tamils who fled the island in their young age during the times of war are now returning home with their children who are born in Tamil Nadu. Unable to wait for the lengthy and costly process of securing passports, they are taking too much of risks and face harassments from the occupying SL Navy and SL Police. However, they continue to hire boats to reach their homeland unable to tolerate the humiliating conditions prevailing in the camps such as Ma'ndapam refugee camp in Tamil Nadu. Many of them have heartbreaking stories to narrate. Due to poverty, they are unable to bear the costs associated with an official return. The UNHCR, which is the UN refugee agency tasked with a formal role to take care of their resettlement, is ineffective, they say.
Full story >>

Mining firm facing resistance in Thirukkoayil shifts exploitation area with fresh tactics

[TamilNet, Sunday, 13 May 2018, 16:18 GMT]
Damsila Exports Pvt Ltd., a big company exporting phlogopite mica and other minerals from the island, has shifted its plan of excavating Ilmenite resources in Thirukkoayil North of Ampaa'rai district after the people mobilised against the move in December 2017. The company is now trying to deceive the people along the southern sector of the same division, Tamil activists in Thirukkoayil said. Damsila Exports is the premier mica mining and export company headquartered in Colombo. It is exporting phlogopite mica from the island under semi-processed and powder form to Japan, China, Germany and India. At present, about 65% of phlogopite mica product is sent to Japan according to the website of the company.
Full story >>

Colombo released lands with one hand to take away more with the other

[TamilNet, Saturday, 12 May 2018, 10:07 GMT]
On the one hand, the SL Government is waging propaganda claiming it is releasing pockets of lands in Valikaamam North in Jaffna. But, on the other hand, it is seizing more lands citing a war-time Gazette notification from 07 August 1987, complained A. Gunabalasingham, the president of Valikaamam North Rehabilitation Society. Gunabalasingham's reaction comes on Saturday as the Divisional Secretary of Valikaamam North, S. Sivasri, issued a fresh notice to report those whose lands (in the former High-Security Zone) were coming under the Gazette Notification 465/14, to his office at Thellippazhai.
Full story >>

Making decisions rooted in native political space

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 03 April 2018, 23:25 GMT]
The binary choice in Colombo-centric politics will always be between the devil and the deep blue sea as far as Eezham Tamils are concerned, commented Tamil political activists in Jaffna observing the latest happenings in the North as well as in the South. Eezham Tamils should not conceive their central political space succumbing to the electoral politics of the genocidal unitary system, which is promulgated by the Mahawansa-mindset and the international injustice sustained by geopolitical manoeuvrings. The Tamil-speaking people should instead invest their efforts on evolving a native and unified political space centred in the North-East with the diaspora, Tamil Nadu and global solidarity dimensions which extend beyond their territorial boundary, they said.
Full story >>