SL State-run sea cucumber farming becomes major threat to Tamil fishers of North

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 14 May 2019, 20:58 GMT]
The occupying unitary state of genocidal Sri Lanka is scheming to shrink the coastal fishing access to Eezham Tamil fishers in the islets and along the west coast of Vanni, where the resettled Tamils are already struggling with limited access to their coastal belt due to militarization and other activities from the South. Several new locations have been identified by the SL state-run National Aquaculture Development Authority (NAQDA) and the SL National Aquatic Resources Research And Development Agency (NARA), informed sources at Jaffna District Secretariat told TamilNet on Tuesday.
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Academics across continents mark Tamil genocide remembrance in Dublin, discuss global injustice

[TamilNet, Friday, 10 May 2019, 23:34 GMT]
Irish, Cypriot, Rwandan, Palestinian, Rohingya, Korean and Colombian academics were taking part in an academic conference and a commemorative event on the tenth year of 2009 Mu’l’li-vaaykkaal Tamil genocide in Dublin, Ireland on the 02nd of May and on the 08th of May. The reflections made at these events provided both insights from lived experiences of genocide as well analysis of the situation before and in the aftermath of May 2009. The geopolitical context of Mu’l’li-vaaykkaal, attempts to de-politicize Tamil resistance and consolidate the ongoing structural genocide institutionalized through the unitary state of genocidal Sri Lanka were discussed in detail in the events making comparisons with the oppressions elsewhere in the world.
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Blake's Colombo lecture reminds Tamils of bureaucracy abetting 2009 genocide

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 08 May 2019, 16:57 GMT]
Former US Ambassador Robert O. Blake was visiting Colombo on Tuesday to deliver a lecture titled ‘US Foreign Policy towards China and South Asia and what it means for Sri Lanka’. He was advising Colombo to tackle the response to the Easter Sunday attacks by drawing lessons from the 2001 Bush Administration and form an intelligence coordinating body of technocrats not to miss any single lead of information on potential attacks. Former SL Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa was precisely doing that during the war, he said. He also warned against over-reacting as the US did after 9/11 by expanding government surveillance without appropriate constitutional checks. On geopolitics, Mr Blake was enticing Colombo to engage with China, the USA and other countries in parallel, a paradigm which enabled Colombo to annihilate the military power of Tamils through a genocidal onslaught in 2009.
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Arts Faculty student leader urges principled action from Jaffna lawyers

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 07 May 2019, 13:45 GMT]
The president of the Student Union of the Art Faculty at the University of Jaffna, Mr Rajaratnam Krishanth, has urged the lawyers, particularly the head of the bar association in Jaffna Ms Shantha Abimannasingham P.C., who is also the notary public Council Member of the Council of the University, to take up the wrong PTA detention of Jaffna University Student Union. The matter should also be taken up with the U.S. Embassy and other diplomatic missions in Colombo, he said. The action for releasing the JUSU leaders must be a broader one, he said. The students were awaiting the legal outcome on May 08 before initiating a struggle, he said. In the meantime, all other avenues must be pursued in parallel, he said. TNA's Sumanthiran and Civil Society activist Guruparan are already done their part, the fellow students told TamilNet.
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SL Police detains Tamil student leaders of Jaffna University after SLA cordon

[TamilNet, Friday, 03 May 2019, 12:13 GMT]
The occupying SL Army has detained the main Tamil student leaders of Jaffna University after deploying a large-scale cordon and search operation along with the SL Police under the pretext of securing the premises from Islamist attackers on Friday. The SLA, using the Emergency Regulations, wants to stop the student mobilisation towards the 10th year remembrance of Tamil genocide on 18 May, fellow student leaders told TamilNet. Jaffna University Student Union President 25-year-old T. Thivakar, who hails from Mullaiththeevu and JUSU Secretary 24-year-old S. Babilraj are the two leaders detained. It is the first time that the SLA has been deployed in a big cordon and search operation inside the University of Jaffna, JUSU members 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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SLA exerts pressure on ex-LTTE members to act as informants after Easter attacks

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 30 April 2019, 23:12 GMT]
The occupying Sinhala Army in Jaffna is trying to set Tamils against the Muslims in the peninsula by attempting to recruit former LTTE members to work as informants. On Tuesday, more than fifty ex-LTTE members were instructed to attend a meeting at the SL Army's 512 Brigade camp at the Sinhala Maha Vidyalaya in the city of Jaffna. The SLA officers were offering biscuits with a soothing talk, an ex-LTTE member who attended the meeting said. A former LTTE political division member openly stated in the meeting that he had joined the movement to serve the cause of the people and not to operate against any people. However, the SLA officers were attempting to turn the argument to their favour saying that the Tiger members knew their society well and it should be in their interest to serve the public interest by detecting the strangers, who were infiltrating to seek safe havens in the North.
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SLM Hanifa remembers Sivaram's insight, warns of more challenging times ahead

[TamilNet, Sunday, 28 April 2019, 14:42 GMT]
The inhumane terror attacks on Easter Sunday have worsened the chauvinist paradigm prevailing in the island and exposed it as the terrain for global power politics. None of the three powers, the USA, China nor India would be doing anything meaningful for the merger of the North-East or to secure the rights of the people here, said veteran writer SLM Hanifa, interviewed by TamilNet on the occasion of the 14th remembrance of the late Senior Editor of TamilNet, Maa-manithar D. Sivaram (Taraki), on Sunday. Unlike those who passionately talk about Tamil-Muslim unity and do nothing on the ground in practice, Mr Hanifa, a long-term friend of Sivaram, is one of the very few, who have been working for Tamil Muslim unity at the grassroots level in the East.
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Colombo's COIN backfires, solidarity key to ensure Tamil-Muslim territoriality: Diasporic academic

[TamilNet, Thursday, 25 April 2019, 16:30 GMT]
The growth of Wahhabism in the island has only served Colombo, and its external backers' interests in weakening the possibilities of unified Tamil speaking peoples' resistance to the unitary state, argues Norway-based Eezham Tamil anthropology academic Athithan Jayapalan in an article following the serial Easter Sunday bomb attacks in the island. The Wahhabis were contributing to the severing of the ties held by Tamil Muslims to their territory, and in the case of north and east, to their Tamil neighbours by targeting, destroying or marginalising traditional Tamil Muslim Sufism in the island in the past. “Time has again come for Tamil – Muslim solidarity and alliances to bloom, to arrest divisive measures of the Colombo state and external powers,” to counter the dangers of the future, he writes narrating the trends of the past and his experiences during the field trips to the island.
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Unity between Eezham Tamils and Muslims key to true freedom: Exiled Sinhala academic

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 24 April 2019, 18:43 GMT]
Whoever carried out the Easter Sunday attack seems to have implemented, knowingly or unknowingly, the grand plan of fully integrating the Sri Lankan state into the geo-strategic imperial complex led by USA, UK, India and China by sharpening the globally imposed imperial faulty lines, says Professor Jude Lal Fernando of Trinity College, Dublin, in a comment to TamilNet on Wednesday. With the Easter Sunday attack on Christians (Sinhala and Tamil), many have lost their lives. The entire Muslim community has been demonized and Islamophobia has been heightened. Sinhalese do not know what they do – really like those who carried out the attack on Easter Sunday, he says. “The only wake up call can come from a strong unity between the Eelam Tamils and Muslims on the island who can truly resist the colonially carved state,” says the exiled Sinhala activist who hails from Negombo.
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People of all walks of life victims in ‘chosen island’ of geopolitics, religious extremism

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 23 April 2019, 23:12 GMT]
The families and the relatives of the victims of the serial terror attacks on Easter Sunday mourned their dead with mass burials and an island-wide day of mourning with three minutes of silence on Tuesday. At least 45 of those killed were children, according to the figures gathered by the United Nations. As the death toll from the bombings rose to 321, the Syria-based Islamic State group, which had lost all its territorial control in Syria and Iraq, claimed that it stood behind the serial terror attacks, publishing photos and a video of the attackers. In the meantime, reports also said that the US Indo-Pacific Command had wrapped up a joint naval training, four days earlier than it was scheduled to conclude in Hambantota.
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West influencing regime-change politics responsible for worsening situation: Fr Sakthivel

[TamilNet, Monday, 22 April 2019, 23:46 GMT]
The serial terror attacks on the churches and the hotels during the Easter Sunday has sparked fear of repercussions among the Muslims in Colombo, Negombo and the suburbs of the capital. They fear that a preplanned backlash could come from the forces operating among the other communities, Colombo-based human rights activist and Tamil Catholic priest Fr M. Sakthivel told TamilNet on Monday. In general, the people are also afraid that there might be other bombs as a bomb went off in Colombo on Monday while the SL Police was about to defuse it, he said. The priest who knows the grassroots situation prevailing in the South of the island said that the outside forces, particularly the West, which has been heavily intervening in the affairs of the island with a regime-change agenda, was to be blamed for the deteriorating security conditions of the non-Sinhala-Buddhist peoples in the island.
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Linguistic discrimination, insensitive iconography used to establish Sinhala Buddhist hegemony

[TamilNet, Monday, 15 April 2019, 23:44 GMT]
“Three things that cannot be hidden for long in the North-East are the sun, the moon and the genocide,” commented a photojournalist documenting post-2009 structural and heritage genocide in the occupied traditional homeland of the Eezham Tamils. Not only the Sinhala military and the intruding extremist Buddhist clergy from the South but all the ministries and the departments of the unitary state system of Colombo are implementing their projects in the North-East without respecting the diversity and cultural sensitivities involved. Often, the underlying agenda of establishing the Sinhala Buddhist supremacy is visually exposed very quickly, the journalist said referring to the flag and plaque sites erected in the ‘Semata Sewana’ model villages being put by the ‘National Housing Development Authority’ (NDHA), which comes under the SL Ministry of Housing, Construction & ‘Culture Affairs’.
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Tamils discriminated in demarcation of education zones in Ampaa'rai district

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 10 April 2019, 21:25 GMT]
The Eastern Provincial Council passed a resolution almost thirty months ago approving creation of two new Education Zones in Ampaa'rai district. Now, the SL colonial Governor to the Eastern Province, MLAM Hizbullah is launching one of them, Poththuvil with predominantly Tamil-speaking Muslims. However, the other approved proposal of creating Kalmunai Central Education Zone by joining the Tamil schools from the zones of Kalmunai and Chammaan-thu'rai has not been implemented. In the meantime, a Sinhala Education Zone, Uhana has been separated from Ampara. Poththuvil is being separated from Akkaraip-pattu, which is also a Muslim majority zone. Tamil Education Directors in Ampaa'rai complain that the proposals of Tamils are being sidelined in the province.
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Analyst: Transitional justice will never work, SL State institutionally genocidal

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 09 April 2019, 17:20 GMT]
Eezham Tamils should not fall prey to the advocacy coming from the Western countries that prod them into the roadmap of unworkable transitional justice in the island, Jaffna-based Senior Lawyer and Political Analyst S.A. Jothilingam told TamilNet on Tuesday. The Tamils have almost lost their trust in the UN institutions after witnessing the events unfolding at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. If the UN system, also politically siding with the political establishment, could not deliver justice to the crimes committed against the Tamils in the island, it would not be able to resolve the political conflicts anywhere else, he reiterated. The Western states involved in the geopolitical race against China want to make concessions to the UNP government. In their greed for securing strategic interests, they are sacrificing the justice owed to Tamils, he said.
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Tamil Nadu politician's family continues ‘Sri Lanka’ investment, disregards criticism

[TamilNet, Monday, 08 April 2019, 22:13 GMT]
Despite mounting criticisms, Silver Park Oil Refineries Pvt Ltd, owned by a Tamil Nadu politician's family, has begun its investment by transferring USD 400,000 to the SL Board of Investment, reports in Colombo said on Sunday. The forces, which have tricked the family of Tamil Nadu politician into the most massive single foreign direct investment ever in the history of the island so far, are aiming at blocking Tamils from waging a global BSD campaign against the SL State, Tamil activists in Jaffna said responded on Monday. SL Deputy Minister of International Trade and Development Strategies, Nalin Bandara was revealing the details of the initial transaction and forecasts of the USD 3.85 billion investment at a special media briefing held at the SL Information Department on Friday. The SL Minister was saying that the project would add USD 7 billion to the annual export earnings.
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Monks groom SL police on misusing UN rights intended for controlling hate speech

[TamilNet, Saturday, 06 April 2019, 22:59 GMT]
The Magistrate of Polgahawela in the South has detained an award-winning Sinhala novelist on the charges of inciting ‘religious hatred’ for his short story on homosexuality among the Theravada Buddhist monks. The monks got the SL Police and the judiciary to invoke the clauses of the SL State's ‘compliance’ to International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) which prohibited religious hatred to remand 33-year-old Shakthika Sathkumara on 01 April. Meanwhile, Jaffna Magistrate Peter Paul, a Tamil who hails from the up-country, delivered a blow to the SL ‘Terrorist’ Investigation Division on the issue of Freedom of Speech and the SL State's ‘compliance’ to ICCPR on Friday. To set everything into context, a Tamil short story, Pali-peedam, authored by the late Eezham Tamil creative writer S. Ponnuthurai (Es Po) four decades ago is reproduced at the end of this news feature.
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SL State appropriates lands of Tamils in Batticaloa under ‘Mahaweli’ scheme

[TamilNet, Friday, 05 April 2019, 22:31 GMT]
Eezham Tamil land-owners in four interior GS divisions in Kiraan and Chengkaladi divisions of Batticaloa district are facing an imminent threat of losing upto 90 per cent of their paddy lands and 99 per cent of other lands which they owned for decades. Their areas are being absorbed into the Mahaweli colonisation programme under cover of ‘development’, say Tamil farmers. Agrarian Services Centre official at Kiraan T. Jeyaraj has informed the farmers that they would be only allowed to retain 2.5 acres of paddy lands and 0.5 acres of lands for homestead per adult person in their families as their lands were being taken over by the Mahaweli authority, the farmers said.
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Colombo's next step of genocide: urbanising and linking Mannaar-Trinco belt with South

[TamilNet, Thursday, 04 April 2019, 23:46 GMT]
SL Prime Minister Ranil Wickramasinghe was talking about the process of urbanisation and about setting up an economic corridor linking Colombo and Trincomalee. Mr Wickramasinghe was addressing media, intellectuals, and public servants on Wednesday. “The region from Mannar to Trincomalee would be brought under development. The road network linking Mannar, Trincomalee through Kandy and Dambulla and Colombo and Hambantota, would promote developed economic zones,” Daily News reported Wickramasinghe as saying. Responding, Tamil activists for alternative politics in Jaffna said the UNP regime, after consolidating itself in Colombo and Geneva with the collaboration of ITAK, is now going to accelerate the structural genocide against the nation of Eezham Tamils through so-called urbanisation.
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Sumanthiran's rationality exposes Wigneswaran's gullibility

[TamilNet, Monday, 01 April 2019, 22:11 GMT]
ITAK Parliamentarian and President Counsel M.A. Sumanthiran, a proven ‘revisionist’ of Eezham Tamils’ external right of self-determination who sophisticatedly denies Tamil genocide, has now assailed former NPC Chief Minister Justice C.V. Wigneswaran, who mistakenly or deceptively ended up harping on IIGEP as a precedent-setting argument to justify the illogical demand for hybrid courts. After Sumanthiran's intervention, which was highlighted by Jaffna daily Kaalaik-Kathir on 31st March, Wigneswaran issued a new statement on the same day – this time in Tamil only – and said he was not asking to set up a group like the IIGEP. His initial statement also pointed out that the act of IIGEP dissolving itself was an example why an international investigation was necessary in the island, he reiterated.
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