Tamils, Muslims need strategic alliance to protect heritage rights in North-East

[TamilNet, Friday, 07 June 2019, 17:16 GMT]
The Tamil Saiva Priest of Then-Kayilai Aatheenam, Thavath-Thiru Akaththiyar Adika’ laar, has urged legal activists to find ways to contain the hostile acts of the Sinhala Buddhist monk from the Velgam Vihara, who has dismantled the foundation of Hindu Pi’l’ laiyaar temple at the heritage site of Kanniyaa hot springs in Trincomalee. The Saiva priest said it was not merely a religious dispute, but rather a cause of preserving the heritage rights. The best option, in his opinion, was to address the issue through the courts. In the meantime, TNA Leader R. Sampanthan was taking up the burning question with the SL President and the Prime Minister. However, both the legal avenue and the political appeals made with collaborative orientation only have minimal impact in the unitary system of genocidal Sri Lanka, especially under the Emergency Regulations, commented legal activists in Trincomalee.
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IC failing to impose mediated solution, ultimately responsible for escalating Sinhala chauvinism

[TamilNet, Friday, 31 May 2019, 22:11 GMT]
Even though one feared the outbreak of an anti-Muslim pogrom immediately after the Easter attacks, silence prevailed for two weeks. Then the mob violence targeted the properties of Muslim traders. It was not an act of immediate responsive impulse, but an engineered move instigated by an organised force. Despite their differences in the scale, there are certain similarities between the 1983 Black July anti-Tamil pogrom and the post-2009 anti-Muslim pogroms, says Batticaloa-based human rights activist Kathir Barathythasan. During the war, the International Community (IC) was acting as a mediator. But, it was also abetting the SL State, causing massive civilian deaths. The IC, now wants the anti-terror legislation to fit its global designs ignoring the drastic internal consequences. The IC must, therefore, be convinced to deliver a negotiated settlement to the national question, he said.
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SL Archaeology Dept steps up controversial construction work in Trincomalee

[TamilNet, Thursday, 30 May 2019, 17:37 GMT]
The SL Archaeology Department, which had stopped the controversial construction of a building at the hill-top of Kanthasaami-malai in the strategically located ancient village of Thennai-maravadi at the provincial border between the North and East, has all of a sudden accelerated the building project hurriedly completing the building, violating the ban imposed by the Divisional Secretariat. Eezham Tamil residents, their Rural Development Society (RDS) and the trustee board of the 400-year-old Saiva Kanthasaami-temple, have complained on Monday and Wednesday this week. Thennai-maravadi was the seat of a Tamil Vanni chieftaincy until the Dutch times in the mid 17th century. The interior hamlet is situated in the narrow strategic corridor linking the Northern and Eastern provinces, 70 km north of Trincomalee city.
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SL military, police go all out against everything ‘Thowheed’

[TamilNet, Thursday, 02 May 2019, 23:54 GMT]
The occupying Sinhala military and the SL police have detained at least 21 Muslims in Mannar up to Wednesday night. Most of the arrested are members of various Thowheed Jamath groups that are different from the National Thowheed Jamath (NTJ), which was created by the Easter Sunday attacker Zahran Hashim. These are multiple organisations such as Ceylon TJ, SLTJ, All Ceylon TJ and United TJ which are not prohibited. Even the hardliners in these groups have faith-oriented difference with the NTJ. However, the SL Police and the military are going after everything that has 'Thowheed' in the name, legal sources in Mannaar said. The personnel carrying out the cordon and search operations are Sinhalese. Meanwhile, the SL soldiers are also desecrating the places of worship by wearing shoes inside the premises, the people complained.
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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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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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Sinhala colonisation escalated in Vavuniyaa North with a multitude of players backing infrastructure

[TamilNet, Thursday, 18 April 2019, 21:24 GMT]
Elected civic members of Vavuniyaa North Divisional Council (PS) complain that the Sinhala colonisation is relentlessly targeting the eastern side of their division. The occupying Sinhala Army and its home-guards paramilitary act as the guardians of the colony while the extremist Buddhist monks coordinate the systematic expansion. Various SL ministries provide the infrastructure. Besides, a host of actors from a leading socio-economic NGO with Buddhist philosophy to a local extremist group known as ‘Sinhala Power in the North‘ (‘Uture Hela Balaya’ or ‘Utura Rakina Raṭa Surakina Jātika Balaya - Vanni’) facilitate it through different approaches. Also, sections of expatriate Sinhalese, including a retired professor from Australia, have funded the housing projects of the scheme. The Sinhala settlers are being radicalised without any provocation or hostility from the Tamils.
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SLA deployed Tamils as human shields in 1990, activists allege mass graves in Jaffna islet

[TamilNet, Friday, 12 April 2019, 21:01 GMT]
The occupying SL Navy harassed 25 Tamil protesters who had mobilised to wage a peaceful protest against the seizure of their lands at Ma’ndai-theevu, an islet off Jaffna, by photographing and recording them. However, the protesters successfully blocked the survey officials for the second time in two years. After the last attempt in June 2018, on Thursday the SL Survey Department tried again to measure the eighteen acres of residential and agricultural lands belonging to eleven families. The lands in question are already fenced off within the premises of SLNS Welusumana naval base and are declared as a no-go zone by the SL Navy, which wants to militarise them permanently. Ma’ndai-theevu, an islet located at a strategic locality towards the entrance from the Palk Bay into the Jaffna lagoon, needs to be subjected to excavations for alleged mass graves, say Tamil rights activists in Jaffna.
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SL ministry behind Sinhala-Buddhicisation of Muslims' lands in Pulmoaddai

[TamilNet, Monday, 18 March 2019, 20:28 GMT]
The National Housing Development Authority (NHDA), which comes under the SL Ministry of Housing and Construction, has illegally allocated a housing scheme to intruding Sinhala colonists in Pulmoaddai, Trincomalee. The colonists are backed by four Sinhala Buddhist monks and the Sinhala-only Civil Defence Force (CDF), previously known as ‘home guards’ paramilitary. The construction is taking place at 12th Mile Post (Maalaanoor) and the 10th Mile Post (Ea'raa-madu) in Kuchchave'li division of Trincomalee district. The houses are being hurriedly constructed in the same fashion as the lands were occupied in September 2018, when the intruders put up almost 30 huts within a few days.
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Sinhala ‘emperor’ monk wants Muslims expelled from Arisi-malai in Trincomalee

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 06 March 2019, 17:29 GMT]
An extremist Sinhala-Buddhist monk in Pulmoaddai division of Trincomalee has vowed to expel all the Muslims from Arisi-malai area, which he considered as ‘Buddha Pooja Boomi’ of an allegedly fictive ‘ancient heritage’. The monk, Panamure Thilakawansa, was attending the SL courts earlier this year carrying a placard which said ‘I am Chakravarthy’ (emperor). L.H.M. Halid, one of the six families that filed a case against their lands being appropriated, said the latest dispute was about six of forty-six acres of lands in extent.
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Tamils mark Shivaratri at base of hill seized by SL Archaeology Department in Trincomalee

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 05 March 2019, 19:42 GMT]
The uprooted families of the ancient Tamil village of Thennai-maravadi in the northern Trincomalee marked a Pongkal feast on Monday at the base of Kanthasaami-malai. The ritual was staged in objection to the Archaeology Department of the unitary state genocidal Sri Lanka, which was refusing to allow the people to access the temple of their folk-deity, Murukan, at the top of the hill where they used to observe Shivaratri in the past. The move comes amidst tension prevailing at Thirukkoa'nesvaram temple in Trincomalee where the SL Archaeology Department and Sinhala colonisers have desecrated the statue of Sivalingam, which was put up along the pathway to the temple on the occasion of Shivaratri festival. Colombo is trying to convert the hilltop of Kanthasaami-malai into a Buddhist temple, the uprooted Tamils said.
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Colombo accelerates Sinhalicisaton of disputed heritage hilltop in Vavuniyaa

[TamilNet, Saturday, 12 January 2019, 22:38 GMT]
A team of technicians from the SL Archaeology Department were deployed to copy stone inscriptions found at the disputed heritage site of Vedukku-naa'ri hill-top in Vavuniyaa on Thursday and Friday. The members of the group were claiming that they had come following special requests from the District Secretary of Vavuniyaa, a Sinhalese, and the secretariat of the SL President Maithiripala Sirisena, said Thamilchelvan Thurairajah, an elected councillor at the Civic Divisional Council of Vavuniyaa North, who confronted and interacted with the team on Thursday. Two armed Special Task Force commandos and two police officers were providing ‘security’ to the technicians to carry out the recordings on Thursday and Friday. They were also making some other measurements at the hilltop, the witnesses said.
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Top military post for genocidaire Sinhala commander, Quisling acid-test to Tamil academic

[TamilNet, Thursday, 10 January 2019, 23:18 GMT]
Two appointments recently made by the president of the unitary state of genocidal Sri Lanka have evoked much attention. One is the appointment of a Tamil person, Dr Suren Raghavan, who has been serving him for some time, as the Governor of the Northern Province; and the other is the appointment of Major General Shavendra Silva as the new Chief of Staff of the Sri Lanka Army. The appointments manifest in a classic setting of the genocidal Mahavansa-and-Mahaweli mindset of the Polonnaruwa-Anuradhapura establishment of Maithiripala Sirisena, commented Tamil political observers in Jaffna. The intentions behind the appointment of a Tamil academic, who is loyal to Sirisena and ‘acceptable’ to the Maha Sangha of the Sinhala Theravada Buddhist establishment, should be easy to grasp, they said.
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Tamil dairy farmers face two-frontal attacks in interior Batticaloa

[TamilNet, Friday, 04 January 2019, 17:11 GMT]
Ex-paramilitary Karuna Group, which is aligned with former SL President Mahinda Rajapaksa has been gunning down the cattle belonging to dairy farmers at the pasturelands of Paalai-vaddavaan (Paalai-madu) in Paduvaan-karai, the interior northwestern part of Batticaloa district which was protected by the LTTE before 2007 from Sinhala colonisation coming from Polonnaruwa, the home district of Mr Sirisena. In the meantime, Sinhala encroacher ‘home guards’ paramilitary men have stolen eight calves within the last 20 days. The SL police are taking the side of the encroachers and demands the Tamil dairy farmers to identify the ‘thieves’ to register a complaint. The calve thefts have taken place at Mayilaththa-madu pasture land, which is located within two kilometres from the Paalai-madu tank, where the former paramilitary men who have been firing at the cows.
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Sinhala extremists set to install 25 Buddha statues in Tamil-Muslim division of Trincomalee

[TamilNet, Saturday, 22 December 2018, 15:12 GMT]
The extremist Sinhala Buddhist establishment has increased activities of genocidal land grab in Trincomalee North through the SL Archaeology Department in the recent weeks. The monks are using Sinhala paramilitary (Civil Defence Force), Army and Navy personnel in civilian clothes to put up concrete structures in the seized lands. The intruders are waging heritage genocide as they aim systematic transformation of all hill-tops, and rocky or cave-areas with traditions of folk deities, Saivist or Tamil Mahayana Buddhist Saivist traces into Sinhala Theravada Buddhist installations through placing brand new Buddha statues. Twenty-five new Buddha statues are going to be brought into Kuchchave'li in Trincomalee North, a division with predominantly Tamil-speaking people, civil officials from Pulmoaddai said on Friday.
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SL military threatens to re-introduce discriminatory pass system in Batticaloa North

[TamilNet, Friday, 14 December 2018, 22:09 GMT]
The occupying Sinhala military is trying to re-introduce the discriminatory pass system which it deployed against the dairy farmers in the interior villages of Batticaloa district. The move is aimed at colonising the area with Sinhala settlers, and the SL military wants to chase away the Tamil farmers and the cattle herders through various harassments. The SL Army stationed at Tharavai military base has started to harass the Tamil cattle owners this week and instructed the cattle herders to register the details of cattle owners at their camp. Tharavai is located 40 km northwest of Batticaloa city.
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SL military wants Cooray to liaise with Tamil diaspora industrialists from islets off Jaffna

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 11 December 2018, 22:31 GMT]
The occupying Sinhala Navy and its intelligence wing have drawn a plan to recruit and deceive the business elite among the Tamils in the Northern Province, particularly the Tamil diaspora industrialists who hail from the islets off Jaffna, with the propaganda of ‘development’, informed sources at Ooraath-thu'rai (Kayts) told TamilNet this week. Under the pretext of facilitating infrastructure investment from the Tamil diaspora, the SL Navy wants to maintain its hold and open up the islets for more Sinhala tourists from the South with a large-scale trade and cultural Sinhalicisaiton of the islands. As part of this military conceived programme, the SL Governor is actively engaged in collecting details of Tamil diaspora industrialists and business owners, who are exiled in the West from the islets, the sources further said.
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Monks incite SL paramilitary to Sinhalicise Tamil heritage site in Trincomalee North

[TamilNet, Sunday, 09 December 2018, 23:16 GMT]
An extremist section of the Sinhala-Buddhist Theravada monks establishment, which has been trying for more almost ten years to claim the ancient Tamil village of Thennai-maravadi as a heritage and archaeology site of Sinhala Buddhism, abandoned their attempt to erect a Buddhist temple at the lands of the Tamil village deity of Kanthasaami. However, the monks left behind noticeboards claiming the Saiva (Hindu) temple lands, where they conducted the excavations, as coming under the purview of the SL Department of Archaeology. Recently, on 30th November, Sinhala paramilitary personnel of the so-called ‘Civil Defence Force’ have put up foundations for a building inside the demarcated lands. If the seized properties of the Hindu temple come under the SL Archaeology department, how could the CDF personnel start constructing structures inside the grounds, the resettled Tamils questioned.
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Tamil, Sinhala policemen slain in Batticaloa

[TamilNet, Friday, 30 November 2018, 10:31 GMT]
Unknown attackers have killed two SL policemen, a Tamil and a Sinhalese, who were manning a check post near Valai-i'ravu bridge, 5 km south-west of Batticaloa city in the early hours of Friday. 23-year-old Ganesh Dinesh, a Tamil policeman from Periya-neelaava'nai in Ampaa'rai was found shot and killed and bound to his chair outside the check-post. 34-year-old W N L Prasanna from Udugama in Galle was found dead at his bed inside the post with cut injuries to his throat. Residents said the killings could be related to a dispute between the police and a criminal gang operating with its backing. However, Colombo media was quick to blame it on Rajapaksa-aligned ex-paramilitary V. Muralitharan alias Karuna.
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India's RAW behind ‘Tiger identity erasure’ campaign

[TamilNet, Friday, 23 November 2018, 21:15 GMT]
The foreign intelligence agency of India, known as the Research and Analysis Wing’ (RAW), has advised its counterpart in the island to transform Tamil Eelam Maaveerar Naa'l (Heroes Day) as well as all other remembrance days of the LTTE members and cadres into remembrance days bereft of identity, politics and valour. The only way to do this is getting rid of terminology associated with the LTTE, Tamil nationhood, the concept of Tamil valour. Usage of the terms ‘maaveerar’ and ‘Eelam’ should also be avoided, the RAW has advised, according to informed paramilitary sources in the island.
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