Colombo’s brutal suppression of Tamil Heroes’ Day counter-productive to stated objectives: Tamil MP

[TamilNet, Sunday, 06 December 2020, 15:44 GMT]
Emboldened with a two-thirds majority in the SL Parliament, the regime of Rajapaksa has chosen to suppress Tamil remembrance days, particularly the Maaveear Naa'l (Tamil Eelam Heroes’ Day) this year. The Rajapaksa regime was short-sighted in using the opportunity to showcase to its southern audience that it was more determined than its predecessor in blocking November 27 Remembrance. However, the brutal manner in which the SL State and its judiciary suppressed the collective remembrance events received more attention not only among the Tamil youth in the North and the East but also in the South, said ITAK (TNA) Parliamentarian from Batticaloa Shanakiyan Rasamanickam. “I received phone calls from Up-Country Tamil youth from Deniyaya and Matara in the down south to Kandy and Colombo,” he said adding that even fifteen and sixteen-year-old youth were posing questions.
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Another Buddha statue placed near Trincomalee private bus stand

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 18 June 2019, 18:38 GMT]
A group of persons led by a Sinhala Buddhist monk installed a Buddha statue at the auto-rickshaw parking place located near the private bus stand in Trincomalee city on Sunday morning when the occupying Sinhala soldiers and the settlers were marking Poson Full Moon Poya. The 75 cm high Buddha statue, placed inside a glass cover, has replaced a smaller figure at 20 cm height, Tamil residents said. The move was part of a systematic plan, they said. The smaller statue had been placed at the locality after 2009. Now the extremist section has installed the statue with glass cover, which usually precedes the installation of a giant Buddha statue, the people said.
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Swiss youth group brings out publication on de-facto state of Tamil Eelam

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 01 May 2019, 23:35 GMT]
A Swiss-based Tamil youth group has come up with a print compilation, titled “Structures of Tamil Eelam: A Handbook”, based on online and textual research on the LTTE-run de-facto state of Tamil Eelam. The compilation, made by a 20-year-old author, is structured into eight parts and twenty-six chapters with articles and photographs. “Almost ten years since the destruction of Tamil sovereignty through the global conspiracy conducted at Mullivaikkal, the ongoing nature of Tamil genocide reiterates the need for Eelam Tamils to understand the fundamentals of our struggle in formulating a legitimate path for a permanent political solution for the Tamil struggle,” says the preface of the book. Prominent Tamil and Sinhala diaspora activists and writers of first generation N Malathy (New Zealand), Ana Pararajasingham (Australia) and Viraj Mendis (Germany) have praised the work.
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Sivanesan Memorial Hall declared open in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Sunday, 01 February 2015, 18:40 GMT]
A memorial hall has been declared open in Jaffna on Saturday in commemoration of Maamanithar K. Sivanesan, a Tamil National Alliance (TNA) parliamentarian who was assassinated in a targeted claymore explosion by the Deep Penetration Unit of the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) on 06 March 2006 inside LTTE-controlled Vanni. Sivanesan worked tirelessly to improve the conditions of the deprived sections of population among the Eezham Tamils for a long time. He played also a key role in the democratic mobilization of the Tamil masses at the grassroots level.
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Transcend SA model, SL State and West’s mechanisms in seeking justice: Fr Rajan

[TamilNet, Thursday, 02 January 2014, 07:04 GMT]
The South African model that betrayed its people is now taken up by Colombo just to save war criminals. It is futile for Tamils to expect justice from any future government of SL State. Tamils also have to reconsider approaching their struggle once again through West’s mechanisms of justice. The current TNA failed to combine moderate politics with the politics of struggle. Steering Tamil national polity for crumps can’t be justified as ‘diplomacy.’ Tamil intellectuals have to think beyond the trap of ‘Transitional Justice’ and investigate potentialities of the concept Post-Transitional Justice, which is non-state, multi-sited, multi-actor and multi-referential, said Fr Elil Rajan, advocating Chile model, at a gathering in Batticaloa last week that remembered slain TNA parliamentarian Mr Joseph Pararajasingham.
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Mission seeks answers to killing of Tamil MPs

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 09 July 2013, 23:57 GMT]
Members of the Inter-Parliamentary Union's [IPU’s] Committee on the Human Rights are to begin a three-day mission, 9-11th July, to Sri Lanka to advocate investigations into the attempted assassination of an opposition Tamil MP, as well as seek answers on the unresolved cases of two other Tamil MPs killed in Sri Lanka, a press release issued by the IPU said. The mission is being led by the Vice-President of the Human Rights Committee, Chilean MP Juan Pablo Letelier. The timing of the visit, ahead of the Commonwealth meeting in Colombo, by an organization which has not been vocal on Sri Lanka's human rights record, raises questions on the motives of the key players behind the mission, political sources in Colombo said.
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NESoHR revives reporting, highlights collective rights

[TamilNet, Friday, 14 June 2013, 20:30 GMT]
“Tamil Eelam today is a crucible of ‘excess of power’ - Lankan President with unchecked executive power, the very heavy presence of his military in Tamil Eelam and the Prevention of Terrorism Act still in place almost four years after the defeat of the LTTE,” says the latest Human Rights report issued by the North East Secretariat on Human Rights (NESoHR). “The leading human rights groups are hoping to deal with this situation of ‘excess of power’ only through appeals to individual rights. Indeed their mandates restrict them from dealing with it in any other way,” the NESoHR, which was formed during the internationally mediated peace process as the Human Rights body of the Tamil Nation, said on Friday, reviving its reporting on human rights in the country of Eezham Tamils and launching an international wing for dissemination of its reports.
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NESoHR book on Tamil massacres prior to 2009 published in German

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 02 October 2012, 23:21 GMT]
A compilation of large-scale massacres from 1956 to 2008, brought out by the North East Secretariat on Human Rights (NESoHR), has been translated to German. The book, “Damit wir nicht vergessen” will be launched at Frankfurt Book Fair this month. The publication has an important historical dimension as it presents the massacres prior to 2009 genocidal onslaught in a historical dimension, says Emeritus Professor Peter Schalk in Uppsala, Sweden, sending an introductory note to TamilNet. “In a shortened time perspective those violations of human rights [in 2009] may appears as an occasional and random deviation of a particular Government of Sri Lanka or as committed by individual offenders. We have good reasons to assume that this massacre by the government represents a planned cultural and physical genocide over a long time,” he further says adding that a Chinese translation is desirable.
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Solheim joins orchestration against independence of Eezham Tamils

[TamilNet, Thursday, 17 May 2012, 05:13 GMT]
Spelling out the current orchestration against the independence of Eezham Tamils, the former Norwegian minister and failed peace facilitator, Erik Solhiem said that international support is not for a new separate state in Sri Lanka, but for a multicultural, multiracial and multireligious state. Given the age-old understanding of the phrase in the context of the island, Solheim in other words was only implying support to the annihilation of the ancient nation of Eezham Tamils. Solheim, recently removed from ministerial position by his own party was invited to address a gathering in Oslo on Tuesday, by a 2012-registered Tamil organisation led by Yogarajah Balasingham alias Basharan, who was rejected by Norwegian Tamils in the diaspora elections. Sharing the stage with Solheim was visiting TNA parliamentarian Suresh Premachandran.
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Eezham Tamil Diaspora activists in UK question SL reconciliation motives

[TamilNet, Monday, 19 December 2011, 00:41 GMT]
While structural genocide continues unabated in the homeland of the Eezham Tamils, certain well funded Sri Lankan NGO’s that harp on peace and reconciliation are steadily pursuing a war by other means on the Eezham Tamil Diaspora. Programmes initiated by organizations like the One Text Initiative, which receives generous funding from foreign donors as well as support from the Sri Lankan state, in the name of ‘engaging with the Sri Lankan diaspora’, are attempting to marginalize the Eezham Tamil diaspora polity that is pushing for international investigation into genocide committed by the Sri Lankan state as well as recognition of their political sovereignty. This agenda was evident from a recent meeting in London where such proponents of reconciliation were challenged by Eezham Tamil activists of various shades.
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Solheim hijacks thrust of Norway report

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 22 November 2011, 03:39 GMT]
Norwegian minister Erik Solheim, while speaking in Oslo 11 November at the release of the report evaluating Norway’s failed peace process in Sri Lanka, tried to hijack the philosophical thrust of the findings of the report and this brought him into confrontation with the evaluation team leader, Gunnar M. Sørbø. Mr. Erik Solheim tried to defend the main criticism in the report and the stand of Sørbø that Norway should have quit the peace process to signal the world of the impending dangers. Arguing that nobody expected a military solution succeeding, Solheim painted the picture of a star-crossed and epic-style tragedy that everyone has to be now contended with in a philosophical way, and said that the stand of Sørbø was ‘arrogant’. Solheim’s speech made Sørbø to remind that the issue was of life and death and Norway should have had contingencies ready.
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‘Saving a state that refuses to be saved’

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 20 April 2011, 02:40 GMT]
A perusal of the leaked UN report would show that the outlook is to ultimately save the Sri Lankan state by providing it with an escape avenue through a minimum penalty of accepting a ‘concurrent’ international mechanism to investigate the war crimes. But the reactions coming from Colombo only show that such an undue consideration on the part of the UN and the IC towards Sri Lanka is futile as state has never been orientated in the island for peaceful unity or for being genocide-free. Perhaps a chance has now been given especially to the Sinhala masses to demonstrate their choice between supporting a criminal regime that tries to save its skin by citing love to a genocidal `mother country´ and recognizing the love of both the Sinhalese and Eezham Tamils towards their mother countries in order to pave way for true reconciliation, writes A. Vijayshankar of Tamil Nadu who is now in Norway.
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Canada orders deportation of Mrs. Parajasingham

[TamilNet, Friday, 15 April 2011, 03:41 GMT]
Canada has ordered the deportation of the widow of Joseph Pararajasingham, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) parliamentarian shot dead during at Christmas Mass in 2005 at packed church in the then Sri Lankan government-controlled Batticaloa town, the Toronto Star reported. Canada says 74 year old grandmother, Mrs. Sugunm Joseph, is a member “by association” of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), because her husband was a member of the TNA, the largest Tamil political party of Eezham Tamils in the island. Mr. Parajasingham was killed just weeks after President Mahinda Rajapaksa assumed office after the elections in November 2005.
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No security guarantee for Tamil parliamentarians: TNA MP

[TamilNet, Thursday, 10 March 2011, 07:58 GMT]
Over the attack on his vehicle at Nochchiyagama on Monday, Tamil National Alliance Ki'linochchi district parlimentarian S. Sreetharan said in Parliament on Wednesday, “It is clear that there is no security guarantee for MPs in this country. How can a Tamil here expect security from the state?” He further stated that while he was passing Medawachchiya on Monday at 5:30 p.m., a white colored van without a number plate overtook their vehicle. When they approached Ullukku'lam the said vehicle was parked on the side of the road and three men got off from the vehicle and fired at them using small weapons. In return, his security guards fired back before the assassins threw a grenade at his vehicle and fled the scene.
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Kokkaddichchoalai massacre of 65 Tamil civilians remembered

[TamilNet, Saturday, 29 January 2011, 12:13 GMT]
The twenty fourth annual remembrance of Kokkaddichchoalai massacre was held Friday in Batticaloa. The Sri Lanka Army, which is almost all Sinhalese, killed 65 Tamil civilians in a prawn farm located about 10 km off west of Batticaloa city on 28 January 1987. The SLA burnt down the farm and huts where Tamil laborers were staying.
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This is a struggle for all of us: Vikramabahu tells Heroes Day congregation

[TamilNet, Sunday, 28 November 2010, 12:57 GMT]
Tamils were killed by successive Sinhala chauvinistic governments and at last but not the least by the Mahinda regime. Not only Tamils but also thousands of Sinhala youth who were sent for aggression in the Tamil homeland and attack Tamils died in an alien land. The misery created among the Sinhalese will also show its reaction in future. This is a struggle for all of us. Yes, we have gone through defeat. Now we have to get up and fight to overthrow this chauvinistic military regime to have democracy in the land, said Dr. Vikramabahu Karunaratne, Secretary of the Nava Sama Samaja Party (NSSP), who was a star speaker at the Maaveerar (Heroes) Day gathering in London, Saturday. The event attended by more than 50, 000 diaspora Tamils paid homage to the heroes who laid down their lives fighting for the liberation of Tamil Eelam.
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Cancellation tactics make potential candidates withdraw from TGTE elections

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 11 May 2010, 13:14 GMT]
Four candidates, including two who had come within the first five in the poll conducted 8 days ago for the TGTE in the London South West Constituency, withdrew their candidature Monday after there were delays in announcing the results. Dr. N.Sathiyamoorthy, Mr. A.Vairavamoorthy and Mr. David Joseph, candidates sharing a common opinion said in their withdrawal letter that "even though it was hard for us to come to this decision, we feel it is necessary to make such decision to take our struggle to the next level through the TGTE, without giving any room for the Sri Lankan state or the IC to shame our Tamil Nation." The election committee delayed the announcement of the results citing ‘complaints’ and there were behind the scene manoeuvrings by certain members of the CWG that conducted the elections, in selecting candidates without a re-poll, said a journalist who did not wish to be named.
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TNA MP: Low turnout reflects Tamils losing faith in political system

[TamilNet, Saturday, 10 April 2010, 01:34 GMT]
Tamil National Alliance (TNA) spokesperson Suresh Premachandran has been quoted by The Island as saying that the very low turnout of Tamils in North and East in the 7th parliamentary elections of Sri Lanka signalled that the Tamil voters were losing faith in the political system. The TNA MP from Jaffna further said that the majority of Tamils who participated in the elections had endorsed the TNA manifesto for the resolution of the conflict and speedy re-settlement of the uprooted civilians.
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Sydney launch of CJPD's book on Sri Lanka

[TamilNet, Saturday, 27 March 2010, 22:41 GMT]
“Sri Lanka 60 Years of 'Independence' and Beyond" a publication by Switzerland based NGO, Center for Just Peace and Democracy (CJPD), and edited by Program Director at CJPD, Ana Pararajasingham, was launched at the popular Gleebooks bookshop in the heart of Sydney Friday. John Murphy, Member of the Australian Parliament, David Feith, an academic attached to Monash University, and Professor Bruce Kapferer who were contributors to the publication, and Gordon Weiss, the former UN diplomat, attended the event.
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“All military camps in Jaffna peninsula will be scrapped if UNP wins” – Ranil

[TamilNet, Friday, 19 March 2010, 16:25 GMT]
Ranil Wickremasinghe, leader of United National Party (UNP), who arrived in Jaffna accompanied by his wife said that all the military camps in Jaffna peninsula will be scrapped except Palaali Sri Lanka Army (SLA) camp, in the UNP election campaign meeting held in Jaffna Veerasingham Hall Friday. “High Security Zones are no longer necessary in the peninsula and the people evacuated from these places will be immediately resettled in their own properties if UNP becomes the ruling party in the general election,” he further said.
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