MIA, Goldcoast bound, speaks for Tamil refugees

[TamilNet, Sunday, 06 January 2013, 00:05 GMT]
Jaffna born music phenom, Maya Arulpragasam (popularly known as MIA), called the "the most provocative pop star of her age," by the British Guardian, and who played a big role in raising the plight of Tamil refugees, again spoke out for the Tamil asylum seekers in Australia as she landed in the Gold Coast, near Brisbane Australia today to join The Chemical Brothers as one of the headline acts at the Summafieldayze music festival, reports from Australia said. "You know, it's really difficult to work out the future of a minority group [Eezham Tamils] that is considered disposable. Can you just let them in? It's a big enough country....I don't think it's about isolating those people. It's about embracing them because that's the future," MIA was quoted as saying in a local paper.
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US institute honours genocide-accused SLA’s Demining Unit

[TamilNet, Sunday, 21 October 2012, 17:11 GMT]
The Marshall Legacy Institute (MLI), an American non-profit organization based in Virginia, has honoured a ‘Humanitarian Demining Unit’ team of the genocide-accused SLA as the best Mine Detection Dog team for the year 2012 at its annual “Clearing the Path” event, at Washington on October 10. Eezham Tamil activists, however, criticized the move as a legitimization of the structural genocide occurring in the occupied Tamil homeland in which SLA’s demining unit also plays a part.
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Mass graves surface along bunkers in Mu'l'livaaykkaal

[TamilNet, Monday, 01 October 2012, 22:21 GMT]
An official who recently visited the outskirts of Mu'l'livaaykkaal with the soldiers of the Sri Lanka Army told TamilNet this week that he had personally witnessed skeletal remains of hundreds of slain people surfacing along the few kilometers long, L-shaped bunker, running from Vadduvaakal to northwards along the land of the genocidal onslaught. A vast area is still not cleared and is strictly prohibited from access to anyone except SL military officials. “There are booby traps and UXOs. Rotten automatic rifles and RPG ammunitions are lying around in the area. When I walked across a bunker, I was able to sense that it was a bunker of mass slaughter. As the bodies buried underneath have rotten, the soil was going under as we walked across,” he said. Meanwhile, some other mass graves show the use of chemicals that have burnt even the bones to become ashes, journalists report.
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Pamu'nu-gama, Aava'nam

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 18 September 2012, 19:01 GMT]
The village in an endowment land or assigned land of hereditary right

The business place of stalls and services, or the place assigned by a deed
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Witness to Genocide documentary wins two awards in India

[TamilNet, Sunday, 02 September 2012, 19:41 GMT]
One of the big winners of the 2012 exchange4media News Broadcasting Awards (eNBA) in India on Friday was ‘I Witnessed Genocide : Inside the Killing Fields of Lanka’, a key documentary produced last year by Headlines Today Television on the plight of Eezham Tamils in Vanni. The New Delhi based station's special correspondent Priyamvatha and cameraman Ashok Bhanot were the first international journalists to travel to Vanni, undercover, to report on the survivors of the 2009 genocide. The documentary has won under two categories for Best Current Affairs Programme and Best News Coverage – International.
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Headline Today's “I witnessed Genocide” wins journalism award in New Delhi

[TamilNet, Thursday, 29 March 2012, 06:01 GMT]
Indian television Headlines Today journalist Priyamvatha's investigative reports from Vanni last year titled "I Witnessed Genocide: Inside Sri Lanka's killing fields," has won the prestigious "Best Investigative Report" award at the 2012 News Television Award in New Delhi, media sources in Chennai said.
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De-miners locate remains of cluster bomb in Ki'linochchi

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 21 March 2012, 20:32 GMT]
A container allegedly deployed by the Sri Lanka Air Force (SLAF) to carry cluster bomblets has been recovered recently by the de-miners of the humanitarian de-mining agency Halo Trust near a house at Thiruvaiuyaa'ru, 3 km east of Ki'linochchi town, media sources told TamilNet on Wednesday providing a photo displaying the container placed at the office of the Halo Trust. The markings on the case have been masked by painting, allegedly by the SLAF before the bombardment, a practice observed following the exposure of SLAF deploying banned weapons in 2009. Despite the systematic destruction of crucial evidences of war-crimes and genocide in the occupied country of Eezham Tamils following May 2009 by the Sri Lankan military, humanitarian de-miners have obtained parts of cluster bombs that were heavily used by the Sri Lanka Air Force (SLAF) during the war, the sources further said.
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Colombo threatens Tamils in contact with visiting US delegation

[TamilNet, Sunday, 12 February 2012, 23:56 GMT]
Some of the eyewitnesses in Vanni, who met the visiting US delegation headed by Stephen J Rapp, the ambassador-at-Large for war crimes at the US State Department, on Thursday and Friday, have been harassed by the occupying Sri Lanka Army in Mullaith-theevu after the US delegation had left the region, sources in Mullaith-theevu told TamilNet Sunday. The SL Army has questioned a parish priest, inviting him to their camp consecutively for three days, and at least five parents who had allegedly complained about their missing sons and daughters have also been questioned by the SLA. While diplomatic circles in Colombo wonder at what the USA is up to in the island, Tamil circles are worried at pre-emption hatching in the establishments of the USA and India.
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US delegation visits Vanni on fact-finding mission

[TamilNet, Friday, 10 February 2012, 23:47 GMT]
Ahead of a scheduled visit by Robert O’ Blake, the US assistant secretary of state for the South and Central Asian affairs to Colombo, a team led by Stephen J Rapp, the ambassador-at-Large for war crimes at the US State Department, was on an official visit to the occupied Tamil homeland on Thursday and on Friday. The delegation was collecting witness testimonials from the war-crimes affected civilians in Mullaiththeevu and Ki'linochchi districts. Despite the heavy deployment of SL military intelligence operatives, the people were narrating how cluster and chemical munitions were deployed by the Sri Lankan military against civilian targets.
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Tamil sovereignty alone can check protracted genocide: Jose Maria Sison

[TamilNet, Thursday, 19 January 2012, 13:28 GMT]
“The Eezham people have a very direct obligation of fighting for their own sovereignty against a state that presumes to have a unitary power over them,” stressed veteran Filipino left ideologue, Prof. Jose Maria Sison. In an exclusive interview to TamilNet on Sunday, Prof. Sison spoke on the questions of sovereignty of the Eezham Tamil nation, the protracted nature of genocide that Sri Lanka imposes on Tamils in their homelands, the principled position of leftists on the national question, and on the imperative to look beyond both the human rights and reconciliation paradigm. Prof. Sison, a long standing activist of the left movement in Philippines, criticised the Sri Lankan government’s military strategy as ‘barbaric’ and western governments for supporting this, and welcomed the Tamil Sovereignty Cognition declaration that aims to build solidarity among progressive forces.
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‘Galle literary festival, backed by establishments, gives mask of normalcy to genocidal Sri Lanka’

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 17 January 2012, 06:49 GMT]
The Galle Literary Festival, which is scheduled to begin Wednesday is reported to involve diverse participants with the funding from a variety of corporate houses and Western embassies in Colombo. But the prevailing opinion in Eezham Tamil circles is that such occasions and the participation of high profile writers only serve the purpose of providing cultural and ideological legitimacy to the Sri Lankan state and the structural violence it imposes on the Tamil people. While the moral thing to do would be to boycott this literary festival that gives a mask of normalcy to a genocidal state, the least the socially and politically committed writers who are attending the event can do is to recognize that what Eezham Tamil nation has faced and is facing genocide, a Tamil academic in Colombo told TamilNet.
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Sri Lanka exclusion zone likely contains mass graves: British MEP

[TamilNet, Saturday, 10 December 2011, 15:41 GMT]
Richard Howitt, a British Member of European Parliament (MEP), after leading a delegation socialist MEPs to Sri Lanka where they were allowed to visit to the edge of the demarcated Exclusion zone, said "he believes there are many bodies of dead civilians buried in exclusion zones where the final fighting of the civil war took place in 2009," BBC reported. Howitt said that there should be full access to the exclusion zone.
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Pongku Thamizh in Geneva reinvigorates call for Eezham Tamil Independence

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 20 September 2011, 14:11 GMT]
More than 5,000 Eezham Tamil activists across Europe confluenced Monday in what the organizers of the event described as successful Pongku Thamizh rally in front of the United Nations Office in Geneva in Switzerland where 18th session of the Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is taking place. “We demand the Human Rights world to denounce Tamil Genocide in the island of Sri Lanka in both word and deed,” an exiled Tamil activist with a personal experience of the genocidal war, who met the representatives of the UNHRC at its 18th Session, told TamilNet. Professor John P. Neelson, an experienced scholar on the international dimensions of the conflict in the island and Stéphane Gatignon, a mayor from France, who asserted that he had come to the rally reflecting the interests of 30,000 Tamils in his constituency, met the representatives of the Human Rights Council with the Tamil representatives.
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Champoor power plant, an ominous threat to public health

[TamilNet, Friday, 09 September 2011, 11:20 GMT]
The signing of the agreement in Colombo Tuesday to build a 500MW coal power plant in the pristine surroundings of Koddiyaar Bay in Trincomalee District, by India and Sri Lanka marks the development of an environmentally destructive project in the east, civil society sources in the east said. A coal power plant of the magnitude planned for Champoor could produce 3,700,0000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, which is a main cause of global warming, will present great danger to the future generations of the Eezham Tamils of the Koddiyaarpuram region, civil sources in the east said.
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Vanni survivors recount mass killings, rape in Headlines Today documentary

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 10 August 2011, 04:05 GMT]
In a world exclusive report aired Tuesday, India’s Headlines Today (HT) television broadcast eyewitness accounts of mass slaughter, the use of chemical weapons and cluster bombs, and torture, rape and sexual humiliation in internment camps by Sri Lanka’s military. The accounts were gathered inside Vanni from survivors of the catastrophic violence of 2009 by one of HT’s investigative reporters, P. Priyamvatha, who traveled undercover into the region – described by the channel as “the most densely militarized place in the world.” She conducted her interviews in Tamil. Responding to the documentary, titled ‘I witnessed genocide’, Sri Lanka’s High Commissioner to India condemned it as “tendentious, unsubstantiated, inflammatory” and questioned Priyamvatha’s bona fides.
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Headlines Today to air new documentary: Inside Lanka's Killing Fields

[TamilNet, Monday, 08 August 2011, 17:28 GMT]
New Delhi-based news channel, Headlines Today, which has brought wide media focus in India on Sri Lankan war crimes after broadcasting the Channel 4 documentary, Sri Lanka's Killing Fields, followed with a debate recently, on Monday said it was to broadcast an exclusive documentary of its own on Tuesday, titled "I witnessed Genocide: Inside Lanka's Killing Fields". The new documentary to be aired on Tuesday will feature eyewitness accounts of shelling and aerial bombardment of designated safe zones, hospitals and other civilian targets, rape, sexual harassment at IDP camps, use of chemical bombs, use of cluster munition, denial of food and medicines to civilians etc., media sources in New Delhi said.
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War and aftermath raise questions over Tamil strategy of engagement with powers

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 05 July 2011, 05:41 GMT]
LTTE and Tamil nationalism were perceived by some powers as getting into the way of their geo-strategic interests. Therefore ‘peace and stability’ means stabilising the Sinhalese regime by crushing LTTE’s military challenge – that was done – and bringing Tamil nationalism to heel, which process is ongoing both in Sri Lanka and among the Tamil diaspora, writes Dr. S. Sathananthan in an article he sent to TamilNet. The power-abetted genocidal war and the aftermath facilitations given to Colombo to complete the genocide into a structural one, raise serious questions among Tamils over the nature of their strategic engagement with some powers.
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European United Left upholds Tamil right to self-determination including secession

[TamilNet, Thursday, 02 June 2011, 12:52 GMT]
A conference organised by the European United Left/Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) at the EU Parliament in Brussels on Wednesday, resolved that it supported “the right to self determination of the Tamil-speaking people, up to and including separation, if that is what they wish, while safeguarding the rights of all minorities” and demanded the SL state to shut down the military bases of the “army of occupation” in North and East and sought a political solution addressing the “national and democratic aspirations” of the Tamil people. Heidi Hautala, Green MEP and Chair of EU Parliament's Human Rights Sub Committee, a key speaker at the event, called for a GUE/NGL fact finding mission to the island of Sri Lanka. Vaiko, the leader of the MDMK in Tamil Nadu and Sinhala and Tamil political activists from the island and the diaspora took part in the event.
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Calls for war-crimes probe escalate as Tamils commemorate massacre

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 18 May 2011, 02:49 GMT]
Amid increasing calls by world's premier human rights NGOs, newly elected Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu for independent international investigations into alleged accusations of war-crimes committed by Sri Lanka on Tamils, Tamil expatriates in several countries in the West are preparing to commemorate the massacre of Tamil civilians during the final phase of Sri Lanka war. In the United Kingdom, youth groups are organizing a vigil in Trafalgar Square and planning protest campaigns against visiting Sri Lanka cricket team, while in the U.S. in a show of unity, multiple Tamil organizations are participating in a protest and vigil in front of the United Nations building. Organizers of both events said they are expecting a large turnout.
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Nu'naavil

[TamilNet, Friday, 18 March 2011, 05:57 GMT]
The pond of Nu’naa trees
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