Bollywood has long been guilty of distorting historical narratives for commercial appeal. But when such distortion targets an oppressed people’s liberation struggle, it transcends fiction and becomes a political act. Over the past decade, India’s Hindi-language film and streaming industry has repeatedly vilified the Tamil Eelam liberation movement, portraying it as terrorist fanaticism rather…
In Sri Lanka a white van without a number plate is a symbol of terror and the disappearances that occurred in all parts of the country.
Commissions on Disappearances in the South during the last few years of the 1980s have documented at some length how armed men, travelling in white vans without number plates abducted thousands of people who were never seen again. These reports are available at www.disappearances.org.
Now such vans have reappeared and do so frequently in the Jaffna peninsular.
This is the statement issued by Co-Chairs of the Tokyo Donor Conference - Norway, the European Union, the USA and Japan – following their meeting in Brussels on September 12, 2006.
The arrests in the United States and Canada last month of a handful of Tamil expatriates in connection with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) shocked the Tamil Diaspora communities there and elsewhere. Those arrested were charged with a number of crimes, including attempting to buy missiles and rifles for the LTTE and, incredibly, with attempting to bribe US officials to lift the ban on the LTTE.