The decision to hold this year’s International Indian Film Academy (IIFA) awards in
The controversy that has rightly erupted was inevitable. Few decisions can be more dismissive of human suffering than to hold three days of glamorous celebration amid the horrors consequent to
The hosting of IIFA event in
Before Sinhala domination began in the late 1940s, the Tamil homeland had been connected in myriad ways to global flows for millennia. Quite apart from the time of South India-based imperial networks, even during Western colonial rule the Northeast was well connected to the rest of the subcontinent and other parts of the world. Since the island’s independence from
Amid the international community’s efforts today to bypass Sinhala state’s obstructions and secure access to the Northeast, what is often missed is how the Sinhala state’s denials of visas and travel permits to the Northeast, or ‘clearance’ to invest in, develop or otherwise link the Northeast to the world, is part of an inherent racialised logic. The point is illustrated, for example, by the state’s violent disruption in 1974 of the World Tamil Research Conference when it was hosted in
For several decades - and from well before the war started - the Sinhala dominated state has systematically diverted international aid, investment and trade access to the South while excluding and marginalising the Northeast. What happened to international humanitarian assistance after the 2004 tsunami is a case in point. The only exceptions, meanwhile, have been Sinhala colonisation projects in the Northeast. (Ironically, it was
Unless the Sinhala stranglehold on the Northeast is first broken, the Tamils will continue to be largely – and deliberately - excluded from global economic flows. It is in this context that the growing call by the Tamils and others for an international boycott of
This, consequently, is the central logic of the Tamils’ continued insistence on the primacy of their right to self-determination. It cannot be forgotten that the demand for Tamil Eelam arose in the mid-seventies from the need to escape
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