Britain in Jaffna

Britain must play its role in re-establishing the Tamil homeland’s connections to the world.

The recent news that a number of international actors are seeking to establish an official presence in Jaffna is to be welcomed. India has sought to open a consulate while the United States has indicated plans to establish an ‘American Corner’ on the peninsula. Given the size and importance of the British Tamil Diaspora it is now imperative that Britain also works to establish an office in Jaffna with visa processing facilities.

Britain is home to one of the most established and flourishing centres of the global Tamil Diaspora. The British Tamil Diaspora is well integrated into its host country but maintains important familial and political connections to the homeland. There is a constant flow of people between the Tamil areas and Britain for family re-unions, visits and for study and business.

A British office in Jaffna would hugely facilitate this flow and would also stimulate the development of the Tamil homeland by re-establishing connections between the Tamil speaking areas and global flows of culture, trade and people. At present, Tamils are compelled to travel to Colombo and face expenditure while risking arbitrary arrest and extortion merely to arrange travel overseas.

An official presence in Jaffna would ease the process of overseas travel and could also work to support British Tamils visiting their homeland. This need not be a burden to British tax payers as the costs of maintaining the office could easily be met by the volume of visa processing fees.

The opening up of direct connections between Jaffna and the world is also important to breaking Colombo’s asphyxiating control of the Tamil speaking areas.

Although the Rajapaksa regime repeatedly parrots its commitment to ‘development’ in the Tamil areas, it places huge restrictions on the free movement of goods, people and information between the Tamil areas and the world. While demanding ‘development’ funding for ‘reconstruction’ and ‘rehabilitation’ in the Northeast, the Sri Lankan government continues to insist that development and investment flows centrally through Colombo.

The Rajapaksa’s stance is not novel; it’s a continuation of the ‘development’ policies followed by all previous Sinhala governments towards the Tamil speaking areas. Historically Sri Lanka’s ‘development policy’ towards the Tamil homeland has involved more or less successful attempts to coercively erase the north east’s Tamil cultural and demographic identity using large scale and internationally funded infrastructure and colonisation projects. At the same time Colombo has deployed its centralised planning and licensing policies in an effort to stifle Tamil economic activity and channel it into a subordinate and dependent position within a Colombo and Sinhala centric logic.

The Rajapaksa regime is no different in its ambitions but it is operating within a very different global environment. There is no longer any international interest that is served by supporting Colombo’s centralised and ethno centric Sinhala Buddhist development vision. It is unclear that Colombo will be able to find generous donors willing to subsidise for years to come the economically unprofitable and politically counterproductive colonisation of Tamil land by Buddhist monks and the Sinhala urban and rural poor.

At the same time the past decades of anti Tamil oppression have also fuelled Tamil emigration and produced the global Tamil Diaspora. In an important sense the very existence of the Tamil Diaspora has re-opened the Tamil homeland’s economic and political connections to the outside world that post independence Sinhala governments sought to destroy. Much to Colombo’s evident frustration, the Tamil Diaspora exists beyond the long arm of Sinhala oppression and has its own ideas about the development of the Tamil homeland.

During the Norwegian peace process the Tamil Diaspora more than amply demonstrated its commitment to the reconstruction and rehabilitation of the north-east. The Rajapaksa regime would like to discipline and harness the Diaspora’s energies and resources in support of its own Sinhala Buddhist vision. Having slaughtered tens of thousands of Tamils and reduced to rubble the Diaspora supported development of the Vanni, the Rajapaksa regime now demands that the Tamil Diaspora steps forward and shells out to support Colombo’s development plans.

While this type of extortion might have worked in the economic climate of the cold war world, it is no longer structurally feasible. Sri Lanka’s attempt to maintain an economic, social and cultural monopoly of the north-east is fiscally and politically unsustainable.

The Tamil homeland will over time recover its economic, cultural and social links with the rest of the world. The British Tamil Diaspora can facilitate this process by working to establish an official British presence in the Jaffna peninsula.

A politically sustainable and economically sound development of the resources and capacities of the north east must now involve an opening up of the north east to global flows that can tap the Tamil Diaspora’s considerable reserves of finance, political commitment and knowhow. A connection with Britain is an important economic and political component of this process.