Last week Tamils all around the world remembered those who had fallen in the cause of Tamil Freedom. In
Just as importantly, for the first time since the eighties, the Eelam cause is reverberating in the politics of the region. Tamil Nadu has awoken once again to the oppression of the Eelam people and is also rallying to the cause. It is not simply a question of humanitarian concern, though this has prompted an outpouring of human sympathy (indeed, that Indian citizens are providing humanitarian assistance to the Tamils while the Sinhalese cheer on their government’s blockade of the North is indicative of important racial faultlines I the region. So is the vitriol heaped on Tamil Nadu’s leaders by
It is in this context that the LTTE has made its clearest overture to
Whilst some excitedly point out that the LTTE’s overture is a sure sign of its military weakness, those with an intimate knowledge of Sri Lanka’s conflict will be aware that this is but the latest – if the clearest – effort by the LTTE to mend fences. One notable earlier example was in 2002: long before
Amid changing global power distributions – i.e. the rise of new and old regional powers, changes in leadership and in the calculations of great powers, and renewed focus on ‘old’ problems like state repression and genocide, one thing is brutally clear today: the problem in Sri Lanka is not one of non-state terrorism, but of a murderous state project of subjugation of the Tamil people and effacement of their identity. This is why Tamil Nadu has been galvanized into action. In the coming era, the voices of 70 million Tamils cannot be ignored and will impact on governmental calculations in the region and further afield.
For those Tamils who had hoped that enlightened Sinhala leaders would one day emerge to shape genuine compromise solutions, the present dynamics in the island’s south – the undisguised racism, the joy at the bloodshed the government is thought to be wreaking amongst Tamils and the open arrogance – have revealed the impossibility of that hope. Now, just as the Sinhalese have united in their determination to crush the Tamils once and for all, the Tamils must unite in unyielding resistance.
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