India had larger plans when it backed genocidal Colombo in the UN Human Rights Council. India is now embarked upon a greater genocidal war against its own tribal nations, picking up the footsteps of Colombo, making use of its partnership experience in crushing Eezham Tamils, exploiting the impotency of international community and encouraged by the electoral endorsement from Tamil Nadu. The precarious dimensions of the ongoing war in Central India, vividly brought out by Arundhati Roy in Outlook India this week, need careful study by all Eezham Tamils to device apt political moves for them and for the benefit of entire humanity. The IC, Tamils in India and progressive Sinhalese have to realise that acknowledging Eezham Tamil independence is a test case in reconstructing State outlook that is messing up life in entire South Asia and in achieving wider solidarity of peoples in the region.
One of the grievances of Eezham Tamils at the height of war was about information sabotage in the Age of Information – how successfully the powers managed a war without witnesses, twisted the cause and came out with lies. Some Indian Ministers went on record on this ‘achievement.’
One of them, P. Chidambaram as home minister now, is commandeering a war in similar lines against the long-oppressed tribal nations of his own country and the world as usual is not caring in the name of state sovereignty.
In a setting where the Indian Establishment used Sikhs and Gurkhas to fight a war against Eezham Tamils in 1987, used Kerala diplomats to sabotage the Tamil cause and uses Tamil soldiers to fight Kashmiris and Assamese in the frontiers, it is not surprising that the Eezham Tamils and their diaspora is not paying enough attention to understand what is going on in Dandakaranya in Central India. This is the success of the Establishment ‘for the corporates, by the corporates, of the corporates,’ in the name of democracy.
Sections of Eezham Tamils may think that they are not tribals and the Indian Establishment will treat them differently by taking them as partners. So why jeopardize the Establishment by showing solidarity to the oppressed others? There are some who harp only on Tamil Nadu and don’t extend their vision beyond. There are also sections that believe sooner or later India will be forced to recognize Tamil Eelam due to China’s inroads into the Island. Some envisage that India will ‘empower’ them by giving fresh ‘training.’
All of them have to carefully read what Arundhati Roy portrays in Dawn / Outlook India this week to realise that nothing is more important than Eezham Tamils evolving their own independent polity with wider and progressive outlook, to meet any unfolding eventuality.
Excerpts of the article "Walking With The Comrades" by Arundhati Roy appeared in Dawn and Outlook India this week follow:
The deadly war that is unfolding in the jungle is a war that the Government of India is both proud and shy of. Operation Green Hunt has been proclaimed as well as denied. P. Chidambaram, India’s home minister (and CEO of the war), says it does not exist, that it’s a media creation. And yet substantial funds have been allocated to it and tens of thousands of troops are being mobilised for it. Though the theatre of war is in the jungles of Central India, it will have serious consequences for us all.
On one side is a massive paramilitary force armed with the money, the firepower, the media, and the hubris of an emerging Superpower. On the other, ordinary villagers armed with traditional weapons, backed by a superbly organised, hugely motivated Maoist guerrilla fighting force with an extraordinary and violent history of armed rebellion.
Each time, it seemed as though the Maoists (or their previous avatars) had been not just defeated, but literally, physically exterminated. Each time, they have re-emerged, more organised, more determined and more influential than ever. Today once again the insurrection has spread through the mineral-rich forests of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal—homeland to millions of India’s tribal people, dreamland to the corporate world.
The Indian Constitution, the moral underpinning of Indian democracy, was adopted by Parliament in 1950. It was a tragic day for tribal people. The Constitution ratified colonial policy and made the State custodian of tribal homelands. Overnight, it turned the entire tribal population into squatters on their own land.
Over the past five years or so, the governments of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal have signed hundreds of MoUs with corporate houses, worth several billion dollars, all of them secret, for steel plants, sponge-iron factories, power plants, aluminium refineries, dams and mines. In order for the MoUs to translate into real money, tribal people must be moved.
Therefore, this war.
Remarks Of Tamil Genocide in Sri Lanka:
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Tamils From Ireland - Facebook
The panel of experts being set up by the United Nations as part of an accountability process following the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka will not infringe on the country’s sovereignty, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Tuesday. Mr. Ban told journalists that the establishment of the panel is in line with a joint statement he issued with Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa during his visit to the country last May after Government forces defeated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), according to UN News Centre press release Tuesday
Irish Tamil Forum
Rasaratham Suresh, a Tamil from Jaffna in Sri Lanka travelled a long way from his home town to a country he had hardly heard about before. His story illustrates how a mixture of political turmoil and economic hardship drives people from their home countries. It also shows how travel destinations unexpectedly change.
Interview by Jakub Boratynski
On a chilly February morning, the refugee reception centre in Debak near Warsaw is nearly empty. The day before, a large group of Somalis was moved to another centre in southern Poland. That's why Rasaratham Suresh does not have too many customers in the canteen where he sells cigarettes, candies and beer so we sit at an old wooden table and talk.
Last autumn, the 31-year-old Tamil arrived in a country he had hardly heard of before. Coming from a well-off middle class family in Jaffna, Rasaratham earned a degree in electronic engineering from the University of Colombo. He later married Kalevani, his high school sweetheart, who teaches the traditional Indian dance Bharatha Natiyam. Rasaratham says he never wished for anything extraordinary, just a simple, peaceful existence and a happy family life. He took seriously what his father, a former political activist, used to tell him: "Tamils do not have it easy. So study hard and find a good job." But it did not quite work out that way.
"Problems started when I was looking for my first job," he recalls now. "Any employer who realized that I was a Tamil no longer wanted to talk to me. Any young Tamil like me was automatically suspected of being a member of the Tamil Tigers" – the army of the separatist movement in northern Sri Lanka.
Rasaratham, like many Sri Lankans of his generation, eventually found a job in one of the Persian Gulf countries. But he returned home after he received more and more worrying news about the safety of his family in Jaffna. In October 1991, his house was bombed. Kalevani survived by chance because she had gone to the kitchen just before the blast. "Before that incident we had problems but we could still stay in our house," Rasaratham said. "When that was destroyed and we lost everything, I really felt like a refugee." After that, as the frontlines continually shifted, so the Rasarathams were constantly forced to move from one place to another in search of safety.
In June 1994, during a routine police check in Colombo, Rasaratham was arrested and held for two weeks. He was released after his family paid the equivalent of $1,000, only to be arrested again in similar circumstances in August 1995. He says as a young Tamil, he was doomed to have problems either with the government or with the Tigers who tried to recruit young Tamils. "I neither wanted to work for the government nor was I keen on fighting for the Tigers," he says.
"My little daughter had a serious hearing problem as a result of the shelling. I was really afraid for her," he said. It finally made him decide to get out of Sri Lanka. This cost him $20,000, practically all the savings his brother had made while working in a restaurant in the mountain resort of St. Gallen in Switzerland. The money went to a smuggler in Colombo who euphemistically called himself a 'travel agent.'
Everything then happened very quickly. He recalls taking a taxi to the airport, where he showed his brand new passport and ticket. "The 'travel agent' had told me that everything was O.K. and I shouldn't worry," Rasaratham laughs sarcastically, "I really was not worried at that point. I thought that the $20,000 would get me to Zurich." To his astonishment the signs at the airport where he and his family landed read MOSCOW. In the arrival area, they were approached by a Russian who spoke little English but nevertheless collected the 'balance' of the money owed the so-called travel agent.
They spent five days in total isolation in a house on the outskirts of Moscow before being bundled into a car for 36 hours and finally dumped at another large house already full of Sri Lankans, Indians and Bangladeshis. "We were crammed into this house like sardines in a tin can," he says. "A guy brought us some water and biscuits. The 'Made in Poland' label on the packet of biscuits told me where I actually was."
Rasaratham was finally taken by the Polish police to a reception centre in the town of Debak where he "spent the first three months just sleeping and eating. It was very depressing." Eventually one of the centre's social workers, Mrs. Ania, asked him to run the canteen where he now earns 200 zloty ($70) per month and escapes the boredom just a little. His wife and daughter Anushika have joined him and life is getting better. "It's very simple," he says. "Here, we don't hear bombs and machine guns."
Asked whether he would like ever to return home, he responds, "Sri Lanka is my only mother country. One day I will go back there. We still have 50 acres of land which is now in the war zone." He points to his friend who has joined us at the canteen's table and says emphatically: "He is a very, very rich man. For generations they had accumulated so much land. Do you believe that if our country was peaceful we would have any economic problems?"
Rasaratham talks a lot about the future. A Polish businessman offered him a job. Mrs. Ania has told him that he could have his engineering degree recognized in Poland. And as more Sri Lankans start to settle in Poland, his wife could perhaps start giving dancing classes. At heart, whether in Sri Lanka or Poland, Rasaratham is an optimist. That is in sharp contrast to many asylum-seekers striving to make it to western Europe.
Interview by Jakub Boratynski
On a chilly February morning, the refugee reception centre in Debak near Warsaw is nearly empty. The day before, a large group of Somalis was moved to another centre in southern Poland. That's why Rasaratham Suresh does not have too many customers in the canteen where he sells cigarettes, candies and beer so we sit at an old wooden table and talk.
Last autumn, the 31-year-old Tamil arrived in a country he had hardly heard of before. Coming from a well-off middle class family in Jaffna, Rasaratham earned a degree in electronic engineering from the University of Colombo. He later married Kalevani, his high school sweetheart, who teaches the traditional Indian dance Bharatha Natiyam. Rasaratham says he never wished for anything extraordinary, just a simple, peaceful existence and a happy family life. He took seriously what his father, a former political activist, used to tell him: "Tamils do not have it easy. So study hard and find a good job." But it did not quite work out that way.
"Problems started when I was looking for my first job," he recalls now. "Any employer who realized that I was a Tamil no longer wanted to talk to me. Any young Tamil like me was automatically suspected of being a member of the Tamil Tigers" – the army of the separatist movement in northern Sri Lanka.
Rasaratham, like many Sri Lankans of his generation, eventually found a job in one of the Persian Gulf countries. But he returned home after he received more and more worrying news about the safety of his family in Jaffna. In October 1991, his house was bombed. Kalevani survived by chance because she had gone to the kitchen just before the blast. "Before that incident we had problems but we could still stay in our house," Rasaratham said. "When that was destroyed and we lost everything, I really felt like a refugee." After that, as the frontlines continually shifted, so the Rasarathams were constantly forced to move from one place to another in search of safety.
In June 1994, during a routine police check in Colombo, Rasaratham was arrested and held for two weeks. He was released after his family paid the equivalent of $1,000, only to be arrested again in similar circumstances in August 1995. He says as a young Tamil, he was doomed to have problems either with the government or with the Tigers who tried to recruit young Tamils. "I neither wanted to work for the government nor was I keen on fighting for the Tigers," he says.
"My little daughter had a serious hearing problem as a result of the shelling. I was really afraid for her," he said. It finally made him decide to get out of Sri Lanka. This cost him $20,000, practically all the savings his brother had made while working in a restaurant in the mountain resort of St. Gallen in Switzerland. The money went to a smuggler in Colombo who euphemistically called himself a 'travel agent.'
Everything then happened very quickly. He recalls taking a taxi to the airport, where he showed his brand new passport and ticket. "The 'travel agent' had told me that everything was O.K. and I shouldn't worry," Rasaratham laughs sarcastically, "I really was not worried at that point. I thought that the $20,000 would get me to Zurich." To his astonishment the signs at the airport where he and his family landed read MOSCOW. In the arrival area, they were approached by a Russian who spoke little English but nevertheless collected the 'balance' of the money owed the so-called travel agent.
They spent five days in total isolation in a house on the outskirts of Moscow before being bundled into a car for 36 hours and finally dumped at another large house already full of Sri Lankans, Indians and Bangladeshis. "We were crammed into this house like sardines in a tin can," he says. "A guy brought us some water and biscuits. The 'Made in Poland' label on the packet of biscuits told me where I actually was."
Rasaratham was finally taken by the Polish police to a reception centre in the town of Debak where he "spent the first three months just sleeping and eating. It was very depressing." Eventually one of the centre's social workers, Mrs. Ania, asked him to run the canteen where he now earns 200 zloty ($70) per month and escapes the boredom just a little. His wife and daughter Anushika have joined him and life is getting better. "It's very simple," he says. "Here, we don't hear bombs and machine guns."
Asked whether he would like ever to return home, he responds, "Sri Lanka is my only mother country. One day I will go back there. We still have 50 acres of land which is now in the war zone." He points to his friend who has joined us at the canteen's table and says emphatically: "He is a very, very rich man. For generations they had accumulated so much land. Do you believe that if our country was peaceful we would have any economic problems?"
Rasaratham talks a lot about the future. A Polish businessman offered him a job. Mrs. Ania has told him that he could have his engineering degree recognized in Poland. And as more Sri Lankans start to settle in Poland, his wife could perhaps start giving dancing classes. At heart, whether in Sri Lanka or Poland, Rasaratham is an optimist. That is in sharp contrast to many asylum-seekers striving to make it to western Europe.
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