The Tamil political leadership should join the “extra-parliamentary” agitations across the North-East in order to achieve the political goals of power-sharing, accountability and demilitarisation, argued journalist J S Tissainayagam in an article for the Asian Correspondent last month.
Over 250,000 Australians have been campaigning to stop the deportation of a Tamil family from Australia to Sri Lanka. Despite their campaign for fairness, “the Morrison government still insists on denying assistance to the Biloela family,” Meggan Devery writes for Independent Australia. “In early September, Scott Morrison rejected calls from across the nation to resettle Priya, Nades and their two young daughters back in their hometown of Biloela. Dismissing the ‘public sentiment’ surrounding the issue, the Prime Minister maintained that ‘if you make the wrong calls on these issues, then you...
The deafening din of explosions; chaotic coughs through the black smoke; mechanical murmurs of invading tanks, as the international community looks away. The indigenous civilians of the land - retreating in tears. Forced to leave their homes without the remains of loved ones, for family members and martyrs are not distinct. Through their pain, they strive to survive clutching to the dream, that the homeland they loved was not lost. As they navigate the forced disorder, they maintain the belief that the oasis they had built will not be drained. Does this tragedy sound familiar?
Former Chief Minister of the Northern Province, CV Wigneswaran, has written in response to the recent arrests of suspected LTTE sympathisers in Malaysia and Sri Lanka, concluding that he expects said arrests are but “political antics and/or electoral gimmicks!”
In an article for the Jacobin, former Australian senator Lee Rhiannon, draws upon Ben Hiller's new book "Losing Santhia: Life and Loss in the Struggle for Tamil Eelam", and argues the need to stand in solidarity Tamils who have faced genocide by the "exclusivist, chauvinist Sinhala-Buddhist state".
Sinhalese majoritarianism remains a problem in Sri Lanka, said anthropologist Syed Mohammad Ali, calling on it to be “rolled back” to achieve reconciliation on the island. Writing in The Express Tribune, an English-language daily based in Pakistan, he compared the history of the island to that of Rwanda, stating that...
The spectre of the LTTE is “is always raised by the Sinhala-majority political parties, ahead of an election” notes R.K. Radhakrishnan in Frontline magazine on Tuesday, after a former Tamil fighter was arrested in Kilinochchi this week. "Although there has been no terror incident involving the Tamils in Sri Lanka since the conclusion of the war between the Sri Lankan state and the Tamil Tigers in 2009, the LTTE bogey is always raised by the Sinhala-majority political parties, ahead of an election,” he writes. “It is no different for the presidential election to be held on November 16.”
Harini Sivalingam, lawyer, community activist and PhD candidate at York University, wrote about the arrival of the Ocean Lady and Sun Sea in Canada ten years ago, carrying Tamil refugees who "fled horrors in their homeland in search of safety, security and stability." "Immediately upon arrival, these refugees were detained, locked up, and interrogated, many of them for lengthy periods of time. In the case of the MV Sun Sea (which arrived carrying 492 Tamil men, women, and children 10 months later in August 2010), families were separated, and children were detained." "In contravention of...
Sri Lanka’s former defence secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa may evade accountability for war crimes if he wins next month’s presidential elections, warned Beth Van Schaack, stating that plaintiffs pursuing cases against him in the USA are “racing against time”. Van Schaack, the former Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor of Human Rights at Stanford Law School and former Deputy to the Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues in the Office of Global Criminal Justice at the US State Department, went on to state, “Should Gotabaya prevail in the election next month, justice may again be delayed for those...
Chris Slee, a refugee rights activist in Melbourne and a founding member of the Tamil Refugee Council, wrote on how Sri Lanka continues to be an island where Tamils are under threat as the Australian government looks to deport a family of four this week. See extracts reproduced below. Read the full piece on Green Left here . On September 18 the Federal Court will hear an appeal by a Tamil family against their impending deportation from Australia to Sri Lanka. The family fears being sent back to Sri Lanka, because of their traumatic experiences there (Priya saw her fiancé burnt to death by...