Let Prince do dirty work at CHOGM: Boyle

[TamilNet, Thursday, 09 May 2013, 00:29 GMT]
While Colombo media advanced the theory that Queen Elizabeth's age was factor in her skipping the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting [CHOGM] in Colombo, and the British media opined that the Queen was slowly scaling down her royal responsibilities and transferring duties to Prince Charles, Professor Francis Boyle who teaches law at College of Law, University of Illinois, surmised that the reason for Her Majesty the Queen skipping Colombo was, as a constitutional monarch, the Queen was not willing to be seen with genocidal Rajapaksas. "Let [Prince] Charles do the dirty work. He is not head of anything. So his being there [in Colombo] will not insult anyone or anything but himself," Prof. Boyle said in a note sent to TamilNet.
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International aid complicit in Colombo’s structural genocide of Eezham Tamils

[TamilNet, Saturday, 04 May 2013, 21:22 GMT]
The occupying Sri Lankan State has stepped up Sinhala colonization in the cultivation areas that lie between Nedungkea’ni and Ma’nalaa’ru in Mullaiththeevu district. Thousands of acres of cultivation lands, belonging to resettled Tamil people in Karai-thu’raip-pattu division, lie in the area, where the occupying SL military has been blocking access to the owners of the land to even visit their lands. But at the same time in recent days, hundreds of workers have arrived from the Sinhala South and electricity supplies are being put up to accelerate the extension of Sinhala colonization of the area, Tamil civil officials in Mullaiththeevu told TamilNet. The international aid providers not stopping the process are openly in complicity with the structural genocide of Eezham Tamils, the officials further said.
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Copper plates tell on charities of Jaffna and Vanni at Chithamparam

[TamilNet, Friday, 03 May 2013, 06:46 GMT]
A copper plate grant issued by the chieftains of Vanni in the Dutch times, refers to an earlier charity; a mutt built by the King of Jaffna, Pararaja Sekaran at Chithamparam in Tamil Nadu, and on the charities made by chieftains of different parts of Vanni to another mutt built by a Vanni chieftain, Kayilaaya Vanniyan, at Chithamparam. The present conditions of the royal mutt of the Kingdom of Jaffna, called Iraasaakka’l Thampiraan Madam and the Vanni Chieftain’s mutt called Kayilaaya Vanniyan Madam at Chithamparam are not known today. The copper plates in the custody of a family at Ka’l’liyang-kaadu in Nalloor, Jaffna, were deciphered and published earlier by Dr S. Gunasingham of Trincomalee and by Prof S. Pathmanathan. A mutt at Chithamparam, in the name of the Ka’l’liyang-kaadu village is in completely ruined conditions today.
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Eezham Tamil activist elected to represent youth wing of German left party

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 01 May 2013, 23:56 GMT]
Balakrishnan Koculan, a 29 year old Eezham Tamil youth activist, was elected to represent the official youth wing of the German Die Linke party on Sunday. In the 6th Federal Congress of the Left Youth -Die Linksjugend [`solid] held at Magdeburg in Germany, Mr. Koculan along with seven other activists were elected by 200 delegates of the youth organization from across several states in Germany, with Koculan getting 52.63% of votes. Speaking to TamilNet, Mr. Koculan urged Tamil youth in the diaspora to challenge the unjust approach of the global establishments towards the Eezham Tamils’ struggle, stressing the necessity of building alliances with progressive forces.
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Australian Labor MP calls for CHOGM boycott

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 30 April 2013, 07:18 GMT]
Breaking ranks with his Labor party in Australia, John Murphy, a federal backbencher, has called for the boycott of Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM). "All the empirical and other evidence today indicates an arrogant reluctance by the Sri Lankan government to deal properly with these very, very serious allegations and so I've reached the conclusion that the best step would be for our country to boycott CHOGM," Australian media has reported the MP as saying. Tamil political observers watching Canada’s open stance against holding the Commonwealth summit in Sri Lanka and Australia extending open support for going ahead with the summit, as an outcome of the West’s ‘carrot and stick policy’ towards the Sri Lankan State.
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Indo-US manoeuvrings impact TNA's political future

[TamilNet, Sunday, 28 April 2013, 23:30 GMT]
The sophisticated competition between the Establishments of the USA and India in winning Colombo to their side exploiting the plight of the genocide affected nation of Eezham Tamils, has resulted in divisions among the constituent parties of the Tamil National Alliance. The exploitations now revolve around the provincial council elections. Informed sources said that EPRLF Varathar-wing has been recently consulted by New Delhi. Likewise, the son of the late SJV Chelvanayakam and a son of the late A. Amirthalingam have also been consulted by India to back up the ITAK faction that has been aligning with India. Informed circles further told TamilNet that the US officials have been disappointed with the ITAK alignment with New Delhi.
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Tamils were not the ‘favoured’ under British colonialism: Theva Rajan

[TamilNet, Saturday, 27 April 2013, 23:44 GMT]
It is noted that D S Senanayake advised the British to grant independence to Ceylon early, citing that the Tamils will be problematic as they were followers of Gandhian principles led by the Jaffna Youth League that agitated for full independence, writes Mr. A Theva Rajan in New Zealand, commenting further on a TamilNet feature last Saturday that refuted a repeatedly told myth about British colonialism favouring Tamils. The feature, “Tehelka report misled on British treatment of Tamils,” challenged a recent statement by Ms Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga that the frustration of Tamils was due to lost privileges they had enjoyed under British favouritism aimed at ‘divide and rule’. The myth, constructed by Sinhala polity to justify State-conducted genocide in the island has misled a recent report by Tehelka too.
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Fraser supports CHOGM boycott as CMAG ducks action

[TamilNet, Saturday, 27 April 2013, 00:42 GMT]
Former Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser joined calls on the federal government to boycott the Commonwealth summit, CHOGM, in Sri Lanka, as its Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group (CMAG) failed to discuss Sri Lanka on its formal agenda during CMAG's meeting in London Friday. The deliberations on Sri Lanka fell into the “Other Matters of Interest to Ministers”, which are not made public, a news media monitoring the CMAG reported. Meanwhile, Minister Baird, Canada’s Foreign Minister, said he was appalled that Sri Lanka seems poised to have the honour and responsibility of hosting the Commonwealth summit meeting in November. Speaking at London after the CMAG meeting, Canada’s Foreign Minister John Baird alluded to Sri Lanka hosting the CHOGM as ‘evil’.
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CPI urges TN government to initiate Eezham Tamil heritage centre at Chithamparam

[TamilNet, Friday, 26 April 2013, 15:33 GMT]
Speaking at the Tamil Nadu State Assembly on Friday on the budget allocations of the Ministry of Tourism and Culture, Communist Party of India’s Tha’li constituency member, Mr. T. Ramachandran urged the Tamil Nadu Government to initiate an Eezham Tamil Cultural Centre at Chithamparam by taking over and protecting the enclave of Eezham Tamil Mutts in Chithamparam. The Mutts date from the times of the Kingdom of Jaffna. King Pararaja Sekaran, who ruled in the 16th century, before the advent of the Portuguese, built the earliest known among them. Most of the Eezham Tamil Mutts at Chithamparam are located as an enclave around a large tank called Gnaanap-pirakaasam, excavated by the ascetic Gnaanap-pirakaasar who came from Jaffna in the 17th century.
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Toronto conference discusses international injustice on Tamil PoWs

[TamilNet, Sunday, 21 April 2013, 06:09 GMT]
The illegal confinement and brutal treatment of Tamil prisoners of war by the Sri Lankan state and the injustice by the International Community of Establishments (ICE) in facilitating this was elucidated by youth activist Krisna Saravanamuttu at the event ‘Criminalization of Dissent’ on the occasion of Palestine Political Prisoners’ Day held at the University of Toronto on Wednesday. Mr Saravanamuttu also gave examples of how former PoWs with legitimate claims to asylum were rejected by Western governments, noting that this put them at further risk from genocidal Sri Lanka. Activists from other communities also shared their opinions and experiences on other cases of incarceration for political reasons. Speaking to TamilNet, Issam Alyamani, veteran Palestinian activist, urged Eelam Tamils in the diaspora to make the release of Tamil prisoners of war and political prisoners as a priority.
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Sikh resolution passes, Tamil resolution not tabled at NDP national convention

[TamilNet, Friday, 19 April 2013, 11:24 GMT]
The biannual national convention of the New Democratic Party held in Montreal, Canada from April 12-14 passed a resolution recognizing Jaswant Singh Khalra, a Sikh activist who was allegedly abducted and killed by the police in the Indian state of Punjab in 1995, as a human rights defender. However, a resolution submitted from Scarborough-Rouge River calling for, among others, an independent, international and impartial mechanism in Sri Lanka to ensure justice for the Tamils and a UN conducted referendum to determine their political future, failed to make it to the tables of the convention. While Tamil activists who attended the convention argue that the resolution could have been passed had it been pushed by the Tamil NDP MP from Scarborough-Rouge River, Ms Sitsabaiesan, a NDP source claims that the resolution was brought in late but the MP made sure that it was in the policy book.
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Kerala researcher speaks on facets of Indo-Eezham discourse

[TamilNet, Thursday, 18 April 2013, 07:35 GMT]
“Eelam and Kerala share similar history. We were ruled by the same colonial powers, the Portuguese, Dutch and later English. Kerala is not very far from Eelam and the war in Eelam was something happening right in front of our eyes. Yet Eelam never became the agenda before any political organizations in Kerala. Keralites were in the streets in solidarity with Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan. This never happened in the case of Eelam,” said Dr Vinod Krishnan from Kerala in an exclusive interview to TamilNet this week. Dr Krishnan, an academic researcher involved in studies related to social exclusion in South and Southeast Asia, is currently attached to the Centre for Research and Education for Social Transformation (CREST) in India.
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Colombo revives colonial rule to monitor foreign tourists

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 17 April 2013, 20:26 GMT]
Citing an obscure 1886 ordinance of the colonial times of British Ceylon, that has been largely ignored for decades, the Sri Lankan Police now says that it will monitor foreign tourists’ whereabouts in the entire island, a report by the International Business Times said Wednesday. The news report in the IBT has come while Eezham Tamils world over have been campaigning against tourists visiting the Sri Lankan ‘killing fields’.
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Tamil activist Neethan Shan elected to represent NDP at federal level

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 16 April 2013, 00:58 GMT]
"As regards [Canada’s] foreign policy on Sri Lanka, I will continue to advocate for recognizing the political aspirations of the Eezham Tamils in the homeland and to push for justice for genocide and war crimes committed on the Tamil nation by the Sri Lankan state,” said 34-year-old Eezham Tamil activist Neethan Shan, who has been elected to represent Ontario at the federal level for the New Democratic Party (NDP) on Saturday.
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Kamal Haasan, Prakash Raj strengthen ‘encyclopaedia’ myth on Sambar

[TamilNet, Monday, 15 April 2013, 20:57 GMT]
A Vijay TV programme for ‘Winning One Crore’ on Monday, anchored by Prakash Raj and participated by Kamal Haasan, both celebrities of Indian cinema, said the famous Tamil Nadu food preparation Chaampaar (Sambar) got its name from the Maratha ruler Shahuji at Thanjavur, who invented the recipe and named it after Sambhaji, son of the Maratha king Shivaji. Chaampaar (Sambar) got the name as it is prepared by making Champaaram (ground paste of spices) and the use of the word Champaaram is found in Tamil inscriptions predating Shahuji or Sambhaji, Eezham Tamil academic circles told TamilNet, citing inscriptions and the usage of the words Champal in Eezham Tamil and Sambol in Sinhala for the paste made of spices together with coconut.
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Plight of UAE refugees expose human rights deception of IC, UN

[TamilNet, Sunday, 14 April 2013, 08:08 GMT]
No country in the West should have any problem with providing political asylum to the fleeing Tamil Journalist Ms Lokini Rathimohan, currently held at detention in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), rights activists in the island concerned with the protection of journalists fleeing genocidal Sri Lanka told TamilNet. As the journalist's name and photos have been published in the international media now and as there have been write-ups in the hostile press in Colombo suggesting to the SL government to get her deported to Colombo to ‘disprove’ the killing of Isaippiriya, a colleague of Lokini at the National Television of Tamileelam (NTT), the need to assure Lokini's security has become much more important than ever before, the activists further said. In the meantime, a former administrative official at the NTT confirmed that Ms Lokini was not an LTTE member, but was an employed journalist.
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Joke and a fraud, Boyle slams Kerry's New Year message

[TamilNet, Friday, 12 April 2013, 11:46 GMT]
Noting the new U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry's New Year Statement that included, "[t]he New Year brings with it a new opportunity for all Sri Lankans to join together in the spirit of peace and reconciliation," Professor Boyle, an expert in international law and a keen watcher of the treacherous conduct of the international community in watching the genocide of Tamils unfold in Sri Lanka, said, "Kerry [is] lumping the Tamils in with the genocidal Sinhala. It would be like Kerry congratulating the German Jews together with the German Nazis on the German New Year."
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Australian detainees demanding release enter fifth day of hunger-strike

[TamilNet, Friday, 12 April 2013, 10:33 GMT]
27 asylum seekers, including 24 Eezham Tamils, kept in Broadmeadows detention centre in Melbourne, Australia are entering the fifth day of hunger-strike demanding release. The Tamil refugees had arrived in Australia by boat in 2009 and have been in detention ever since as the Australian government considered them a ‘security threat’, even as they get support from Australian media and civil society activists. They include 4 women and 7 children below the age of ten, some still toddlers. Speaking to TamilNet from the detention centre, a 40 year old detainee said that despite being recognized as refugees by the UNHCR, there was no move by any international agency or by the Australian government to release them into normal society. “We are like a people without a future. Some individuals in depression are also feeling that suicide would be better than such a life,” he said.
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NZ Intelligence alleged of monitoring former Green MP for involvement in Tamil question

[TamilNet, Thursday, 11 April 2013, 16:50 GMT]
New Zealand's Security Intelligence Service (SIS), which is part of the so-called Five Eyes intelligence network, comprising the intelligence agencies of Australia, Canada, Britain and the USA, was alleged of monitoring former Green party politician Keith Locke, who has been sympathetic to the Tamil cause. Mr Locke believes the SIS began covert operations on him in 2003, when he travelled to Sri Lanka, reports The Dominion Post. The former Green Party politician has demanded apology for illegal spying and that all 88 New Zealanders who were being spied on should be notified if the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) has illegally snooped on them.
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Colombo answers Indian political visit by simultaneously inviting Pak defence visit

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 10 April 2013, 12:00 GMT]
While representatives of a section of Indian political parties were on a fact finding mission to the island, meeting various Tamil political, civil society, chamber of commerce and former civil members in Jaffna on Tuesday and Wednesday under the aegis of the Indian High Commission and the Indian Consulate in Jaffna, the SL government in Colombo is engaging with a high level Pakistani Defence delegation comprising 19 members who are on a one-week visit to the island. The visit by Pakistani defence delegation follows the visit of the Chinese Deputy Minister of Intelligence last week.
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