Starting Points: Tamils

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Dec 20, 2009

Tamils in Canada vote for independent homeland in Sri Lanka

In the latest such vote to be held by Tamils of Sri Lankan descent living abroad, members of the diaspora across Canada overwhelmingly voted “yes” on a referendum held Saturday calling for an independent homeland.

By Nachammai Raman Correspondent
posted December 20, 2009 at 11:47 am EST

Montreal, Quebec —

Tamils of Sri Lankan origin across Canada overwhelmingly voted “yes” on a referendum held Saturday calling for an independent homeland in the island nation.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

It's the latest in a series of such votes held in Sri Lankan Tamil communities in Europe and North America, and organizers say the purpose is to apply international pressure on Sri Lanka to devolve more autonomy to Tamils.

Political analysts say this goal is unlikely to be achieved anytime soon, but that the votes may help reinvigorate the pro-Tamil Tiger diaspora in the wake of the Tigers' devastating military defeat this year after decades of fighting.

“The referendum has been organized by groups supportive of the Tamil Tigers,” says Dr. Narenda Subramanian, associate professor of political science at McGill University, who specializes in South Asia. “They’ll use this as a way of revitalizing their pro-Tiger network outside Sri Lanka. They may be laying the foundation for a transnational Eelam government, a legitimate self-governing authority outside Sri Lanka that will one day take over a future Tamil state in Sri Lanka - in the event that ever happens.”

Image via Wikipedia

According to Mr. Subramanian, the decades-long war, which ended last May, only destroyed the Tamil Tigers’ military capacity and activities in Sri Lanka. He says the Tamil Tiger network outside Sri Lanka is still fairly intact, operating covertly under different front organizations even in countries like Canada that have slapped a ban on the rebel group.

Canada vote only the latest

Canada is the third country to be holding such a referendum this year. It is home to the largest Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in the world, an estimated 150,000 people.

The first referendum was held last May in Norway, which is one of the few Western countries that hasn’t banned the Tamil Tigers. Norway brokered the 2002 cease-fire between the Tamil Tiger rebels and the Sri Lankan government, which was torn up formally in Jan. 2008.

The diaspora in France voted on the referendum just last weekend.

The turnout was high in all three countries, according to the pro-Tamil Tiger website Tamilnet, which also reports that the vote was 99 percent “yes” in all three countries.

In the referenda, people of Sri Lankan origin were asked to vote “yes” or “no” on the following statement: “I aspire for the formation of an independent and sovereign state of Tamil Eelam in the north and east of the island of Sri Lanka on the basis that the Tamils in the island of Sri Lanka make a distinct nation, have a traditional homeland, and a right to self-determination.”

The statement itself is drawn from a 1976 resolution adopted by Tamil political parties in Sri Lanka in the face of deteriorating minority rights before the island nation plunged into civil war in 1983. Sri Lankan Tamils only make up about 18 percent of its population. The origins of the ethnic conflict go back to the changing of the country’s language and education policies to favor the Sinhalese majority.

Does the vote matter?

On why it’s necessary to hold a diaspora referendum now on a resolution that was drafted 33 years ago, Senthan Nada, one of the organizers and spokesperson for the Toronto-based Coalition to Stop the War, says it’s a touchstone to determine the future path. “The 1976 resolution calling for an independent state - is this still the way to go forward to find a peaceful and lasting solution? That’s what we want to establish by a democratic vote.”

The referenda will have no effect in Sri Lanka, says Madras-based political analyst Ramani Hariharan, a former intelligence officer working on the Sri Lanka dossier for the Indian army.

“The Sri Lankan government won’t comment on this because they don’t want to recognize this as being influential," says Mr. Hariharan. "It won't change anything in the country.” He says the Sri Lankan government is using its own strategy to win over conciliatory elements of the Tamil diaspora.

According to Hariharan, the real motive of the referenda may just be to fill the leadership vacuum created by the death of rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran and lay claim to the vast financial empire the Tamil Tigers have worldwide. “The Tigers want to create some sort of legitimacy to revive the movement,” he says.

But Nada says that holding the referenda in countries like Canada, rather than in Sri Lanka among its Tamil citizens, is important. “From the viewpoint of the community here, the Tamils in Sri Lanka are disenfranchised," says Nada. "We are trying to voice their concerns because they can’t talk freely.”

Lalitha Chandra, who uses a fictitious name in the fear of reprisal for her views, abstained from voting. She has misgivings about where all this will lead because she has seen her family suffer from the civil war that claimed nearly 100,000 lives.

“I just want peace," she says. "After all these years of fighting, we know that the Sri Lankan government is dead against separation. So, realistically speaking, I don’t know how it’s going to happen, because any solution has to be worked out together between the Sinhalese and the Tamils.”

Nov 11, 2009

In Sri Lanka, anger over fate of ethnic Tamils held in camps - washingtonpost.com

Image via Wikipedia

Many languishing in camps months after war's end

By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 11, 2009

TRINCOMALEE, SRI LANKA -- Six months after Sri Lanka's decades-old civil war ended with a final assault, about 200,000 people remain trapped in overcrowded government-run camps that were once safe havens for those fleeing the conflict.

Facing pressure from the Obama administration and the European Union, the Sri Lankan government last month launched a campaign to resettle tens of thousands of the minority Tamil detainees. But interviews in the country's war-ravaged north reveal that many civilians have merely been shuffled from the large camps to smaller transit ones and are being held against their will. Others have been released, only to be taken from their homes days later with no indication of where they have gone.

After the army defeated the Tamil rebels in May, top government officials paraded their success on the streets of Colombo, the capital, and the country's leaders made noble promises about ensuring national harmony. Now analysts say the real test of Sri Lanka's success in building a stable, post-conflict society lies in the fate of these scores of thousands of detainees.

Human rights groups say the government is lying about its resettlement efforts; authorities concede they are using the camps as a tool to uncover any remaining Tamil militants but deny they are deliberately stalling civilians' return home.

"We thought this war was over. But for Tamils, it's like going from the frying pan and into the fire," said Devander Kumar, whose brother was released, only to be taken away by police without explanation, one of 30 men in this seaside city who have disappeared soon after their homecoming. "Do we Tamils have to prove every second of the day that we are not terrorists?"

Tamil leaders worry that if civilians end up languishing in the camps indefinitely, the situation will only breed more resentments and risk spawning another generation of rebels. But the government says it needs more time to de-mine vast stretches of land in the north, as well as to repair infrastructure damaged by war. Authorities also say they continue to root out rebels who have blended into the civilian population.

"History will prove us right," said Basil Rajapaksa, who is leading the resettlement process. Rajapaksa is a U.S. citizen and an adviser to President Mahinda Rajapaksa, his brother.

"We need the transit camps to weed out any underground rebels. The Tamil people have had a lot of hardship," he said. "So the last thing we want is to sacrifice their security for the sake of risking even one more sleeper cell or one more attack."

After a fierce military offensive in May, the government declared victory over the rebels, formally known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a well-funded militia that for 26 years fought for a separate homeland in northern Sri Lanka. The United States and other governments have labeled the Tamil Tigers a terrorist organization. The group pioneered the use of suicide bombings and is said to have orchestrated bombings that killed a Sri Lankan president, six cabinet ministers and, in 1991, former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.

The U.S. State Department has called for an investigation into war crimes allegedly committed by both sides during the war's final days. After the fighting stopped, the president commissioned patriotic pop songs extolling the virtues of a prosperous Sri Lanka united under one flag. In the new Sri Lanka, he said, the Sinhalese Buddhist majority would embrace its Tamil compatriots, who are mostly Hindu and make up 15 percent of the nation's 20 million people.

But there is growing frustration among Tamils over the camps, ringed by razor-wire fencing and patrolled by armed guards. There is also anger over the unexplained arrests of military-age men.

On a recent day at a camp set up inside a school here, soldiers held back a group of weeping women who rushed to the gates to greet family members they had not seen in more than a year because they had gotten separated during the fighting.

"The most worrying part of the transit camps is that nobody is allowed to even meet them inside, not even religious leaders or desperate relatives," said V. Kalaichelvan, head of the Consortium of Humanitarian Agencies in Trincomalee. "It's like a wound on the psyche of the already damaged Tamil community."

Mano Ganesan, a Tamil member of Parliament, has filed a lawsuit against the government to allow him and other Tamil leaders to visit both the transit and the relief camps.

"Tamils feel like inmates in their own country. . . . The irony is that the root causes of this conflict are being ignored yet again. That can only mean more Tigers in the future," Ganesan said.

On a 10-hour trip by car from the capital to Trincomalee, one encounters frequent checkpoints, abandoned villages and fields of weeds where once rice and cashew were grown. The transit camps appear overcrowded, with families spread out under trees.

"In the last few weeks, there has been a sincere effort to release more people from the detention camps," said a senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect diplomatic efforts. "But we have so far been unable to track where exactly they are going. We are hoping to see evidence soon that they have actually been resettled."

Sri Lankan officials say the government has begun relocating nearly 42,000 people from the camps. The government also says it will dedicate a large amount of development money to the Tamil-dominated north.

But mistrust prevails. In one village, residents said police had taken away several of their neighbors, who they said were innocent. "One of the major problems with the camps is that the government is not telling people when or why they are arresting relatives," said Gordon Weiss, a spokesman for the United Nations in Sri Lanka. "In a country with a long history of disappearances, just snatching people creates an incredible atmosphere of fear. At the same time, the sinister nature of this war was that so many civilians were militarized, which legitimized them as targets by the other side. That is the tragedy of this conflict."

Aug 16, 2009

Downpours Flood the Camps of Sri Lankan Refugees

By LYDIA POLGREEN

NEW DELHI — Downpours in northern Sri Lanka have flooded camps housing more than 250,000 people displaced by the fighting between the government and the Tamil Tigers, according to aid officials.

The rain, which fell heavily for much of the afternoon on Saturday, sent rivers of muck cascading between tightly packed rows of flimsy shelters, overflowed latrines and sent hundreds of families scurrying for higher ground.

The flooding raised fears for the safety of the displaced, who are being held in closed camps guarded by soldiers. Monsoon rains are expected to begin in little more than a month, and many aid groups worry that the hastily built camps will not survive the inundation.

“If only three or four hours of rain cause this much chaos, only imagine what a full monsoon can cause,” said David White, country director for Oxfam.

The camps occupy vast tracts of formerly forested land near the northern town of Vavuniya. Because the ground on which many of the camps were built was cleared of trees recently, the soil is soft and porous. It turns into mud almost instantly, making it nearly impossible to get trucks through to deliver food, water and medicine, aid officials said.

Life in the camps was already tough, but the rain has made it almost unbearable, according to people who have visited the camps in the last 24 hours. The pegs holding down plastic tents have come loose, leaving some families without shelter. Latrines have collapsed, sending waste spilling into nearby rivers. Silt has clogged water treatment plants that are essential for providing drinking water and preventing the spread of waterborne disease.

Groundviews, a citizen journalism Web site in Sri Lanka, published photographs that showed a grim scene of mud and squalor. Aid workers said that they were able to restore some services, like food deliveries, and get temporary shelters for families that lost their tents.

The people in the camps are displaced ethnic Tamils. Most were trapped, along with the last fighters of the Tamil Tiger separatist group, on a narrow strip of land in northwestern Sri Lanka. Government troops wiped out the senior leadership of the rebel group after a fierce battle in May. Thousands of civilians died alongside the fighters, according to the United Nations.

Those who survived fled to camps around Vavuniya, where they have been held ever since. The government has said it cannot allow the displaced people to go home because the areas they fled are sown with land mines, and because Tamil Tiger fighters remain hidden among them. Human rights organizations and several Western governments have criticized the government’s handling of the displaced, calling it tantamount to internment.

As the heavy rains approach, the government will need to move much faster to get displaced people out of the camps, Mr. White said. The government has pledged to get most of the displaced out of the camps by the end of the year.

“Really, we have run out of options and the only option that is left is to speed up the resettlement process,” Mr. White said.

Jun 30, 2009

Twittergasms

by Alexander Cockburn

How much easier it is to raise three--or 3 million--rousing tweets for the demonstrators in Tehran than to mount any sort of political resistance at home! Here we have a new Democratic president, propelled into office on a magic carpet of progressive pledges, now methodically flouting them one by one, with scarcely a twit or even a tweet raised in protest, aside from the gallant efforts of Medea Benjamin, Russell Mokhiber and their comrades at the healthcare hearings in Congress.

At the end of June US troops will leave Iraq's cities, and many of them will promptly clamber onto military transports and redeploy to Obama's war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There's been no hiccup in this smooth transition from the disastrous invasion of Iraq to Obama's escalation farther east. The Twittering classes are mostly giving Obama a pass on this one or actively supporting it. Where are the mobilizations, actions, civil disobedience? Antiwar coalitions like United for Peace and Justice and Win Without War (with MoveOn also belatedly adopting this craven posture) don't say clearly "US troops out now!" They whine about the "absence of a clear mission" (Win Without War), plead futilely for "an exit strategy" (UFPJ). One letter from the UFPJ coalition (which includes Code Pink) to the Congressional Progressive Caucus in May laconically began a sentence with the astounding words, "To defeat the Taliban and stabilize the country, the U.S. must enable the Afghan people..." These pathetic attempts not to lose "credibility" and thus attain political purchase have met with utter failure, as the recent vote on a supplemental appropriation proved. A realistic estimate seems to be that among the Democrats in Congress there are fewer than forty solid antiwar votes.

Not so long ago Sri Lankan government troops launched a final savage onslaught on the remaining Tamil enclaves. In the discriminate butchery of Tamils, whether civilians or fighters, estimates of the dead prepared by the United Nations ran at 20,000 (the report was suppressed by the current appalling UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon). I don't recall too many tweets in Washington or across this nation about a methodical exercise in carnage. But then, unlike those attractive Iranians, Tamils tend to be small and dark and not beautiful in the contour of poor Neda, who got out of her car at the wrong time in the wrong place, died in view of a cellphone and is now reborn on CNN as the Angel of Iran.

About Alexander Cockburn

Alexander Cockburn has been The Nation's "Beat the Devil" columnist since 1984. He is the author or co-author of several books, including the best-selling collection of essays Corruptions of Empire (1987), and a contributor to many publications, from The New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly and the Wall Street Journal to alternative publications such as In These Times and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. With Jeffrey St. Clair, he edits the newsletter and radical website CounterPunch, which have a substantial world audience.