Issues

Fires of hatred still burning amongst the Tamil diaspora

By R. Wijewardene

There has never been anything like it. Public euphoria at the prospect of a final end to decades of terror and violence on the island, last week became a series of street parties and impromptu celebrations that threatened to turn Colombo into a non-stop carnival of victory.

News that the entirety of the LTTE’s senior leadership had been annihilated was greeted with scenes of jubilation in every part of the island. Volleys of fireworks rocked the capital, dansalas sprang up on roadsides and kiribath was cooked on the streets – it was like Vesak, Sinhala New Year and December 31st combined and amplified.

Grown men fed each other in the streets and at traffic lights drivers abandoned their vehicles to join the dancing in the streets.

But while many of the island’s inhabitants will undoubtedly rank the days following the announcement of the death of Velupillai Pirapaharan as amongst the happiest in their lives there are thousands of Sri Lankans, people born on this island, who see in the news of the demise of the LTTE only cause for despair and despondency.

For the world’s Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora, a community numbering over 800,000 the announcements regarding the end of the civil war has not been a cause for celebration but rather inspired despondency and disbelief.

Diaspora communities in every part of the world from Australia to the United States have spent decades funding and canvassing support for a violent ‘freedom struggle’ that now appears to be over.

Day of mourning

“This is a day of mourning for our people, we don’t believe that he is dead, but it’s not the LTTE but rather the enormous loss of life – Tamil life in the north, that we are mourning. Everyone here, all the Tamils are grieving while the Sinhalese are celebrating,” explained Subramaniam who publishes a Tamil art and culture magazine in Sydney, Australia.

The Sunday Leader contacted diaspora organisations in every part of the world and everywhere speakers highlighted this sense of division, that while millions of predominantly Sinhalese Sri Lankans celebrate — Tamil communities abroad feel only grief, shock and a profound sense of insecurity.

Expatriate communities have been enormously active organising demonstrations – much publicised fasts, and even violent attacks, in an effort to pressure the governments of their adopted countries to force a ceasefire in Sri Lanka.

But as the guns in the north of Sri Lanka have fallen silent, far from being relieved that the war has come to an end, expatriate Tamils reported feeling only fear and suspicion.

“The Sinhalese and Tamils have reached a parting of the ways — how can half a country celebrate while the other half mourns. I was educated at Royal College, in the south but I no longer feel that I can speak to my Sinhalese friends,” continued Subramaniam.

Fear and suspicion of the Sri Lankan government and even the Sinhalese in general is a recurring theme among members of the Tamil diaspora.

“We have been betrayed again and again – the end of the LTTE is not the end of our aspirations — our struggle for equality. We believe this ‘victory’ is just the culmination of decades of persecution – the celebrations – the sense of triumph at Tamil deaths, it all justifies our struggle,” argued Jana of the Newham Tamil Welfare Association in the UK.

Confined to refugee camps

“For Tamils in the UK our main concern is not for the LTTE but the civilians who have been robbed of everything. These were independent, proud people now they have nothing — they are confined to refugee camps where anything can happen to them; the government has taken everything from them because they are Tamil.”

This intransigent fear, the anger of a diaspora that has shown that it is prepared to finance violence in this country is now arguably the principal challenge facing the government as it attempts to pacify the newly ‘liberated’ land in the north.

As this nation celebrates ‘liberation’ many Sri Lankans are prepared to embrace and accept the government’s promises to build a new unified inclusive nation on the ashes of the Eelam dream, but the diaspora is exposed to an entirely different set of news and propaganda.

 “We hear that Tamils are now living in fear. Because of this ‘victory’ they are being taunted in the streets; in Jaffna the EPDP and the army are forcing people to buy flags at inflated prices and celebrate – celebrate what? The deaths of their own people.”

While the Tamil diaspora has been vilified and portrayed as deeply insincere by the local media the concern the speakers expressed regarding the welfare of Tamil civilians, appeared, in every case to be genuine and heartfelt.

“Today across South Africa Tamils are holding religious ceremonies for the thousands who have died in Sri Lanka,” explained Murugan, a Tamil journalist. “Even though Tamils in South Africa are of predominantly Indian descent there is deep concern about what has happened in Sri Lanka.”

However the lack of alternatives the continued commitment to violence and the doctrine of the separate state is at times genuinely distressing. Not a single member of the Tamil diaspora contacted by The Sunday Leader was interested in a future within a united Sri Lanka.

More hardened

Extraordinarily the views of the younger generation many of whom had been born outside Sri Lanka were often even more hard-line than those of the older expatriate Tamils.

“The struggle will go on, even without Pirapaharan, without the LTTE. A separate state for Tamils is an idea that cannot be defeated. As long as Tamils are denied their freedom the attacks, the violence will continue, that’s all we can say,” said a speaker from the Young Tamil Association in France, which has organised a series of much publicised fasts in the French capital.

These voices of fear and hatred are ones that many in the government and broader Sri Lankan society would like to dismiss as irrelevant. Simply the propaganda of those who need the LTTE and the armed struggle to continue in order to maintain their residence visas in the West.

But this off hand dismissal is simplistic — many if not most of the Tamils demonstrating in Europe and elsewhere are naturalised citizens, their commitment to separatism and the armed struggle is fuelled only by their conviction that the Tamils of Sri Lanka cannot coexist with the Sinhalese.

Three decades of war funded by Tamils abroad is testament to the influence the Tamil diaspora is able to wield even from thousands of miles away and distant as they maybe the Tamil diaspora has proved that it is anything but insignificant.

Recent pro LTTE demonstrations have rocked capitals around the world and were a demonstration of the organisation and commitment that defines the diaspora. Ultimately however there is no hiding the fact that the demise of the LTTE has thrown Tamil communities worldwide into confusion.

Hatred, fear and mistrust

But the hatred, the fear, the mistrust still voiced by Tamil community leaders abroad remains perhaps the principal danger to peace and stability on the island. Over the past three decades these communities have financed several wars on this island and they may yet be prepared to finance another.

While the LTTE’s Eelam wars may have ended the ethnic conflict in the island will end only when the hatred, fear and the suspicion held by several sections of Sri Lankan society are broken down.

And only by convincing the expatriate Tamil community to stop financing hatred and fear in Sri Lanka can the government and the country hope to make progress in the reconciliation process this island now desperately needs.

 To put a final end to divisions in Sri Lanka it is now imperative that steps are taken to convince Tamil communities outside of Sri Lanka that a future is possible within a unified if not necessarily unitary state.

 Over the past decades the diaspora as much as the LTTE proved itself a powerful and intransigent foe – one that unlike the LTTE remains highly motivated and undefeated. The biggest challenge confronting the government and the country at present now regards how to set about turning this foe into a friend.

The money and campaigning zeal of the diaspora fuelled a destructive armed struggle to divide Sri Lanka for 26 years – the same energy and wealth used to further the development of the island could yet herald a new dawn for the country.

The West’s duplicity rears it’s ugly head

By Faraz Shauketaly

Sri Lanka’s success in crushing the terror perpetrated by the LTTE appears to have met with a tepid response from the West. Despite unequivocal evidence that the LTTE co-founder, Velupillai Pirapaharan was killed by the Sri Lankan forces, the international response went beyond incredulity.

Demanding DNA verification, doubting the identification by a former close aide, it was the same agencies that took at face value without corroboration LTTE claims of government attacks on civilians. The Tamil diaspora living in these countries had demonstrations, damaged property, paraded the LTTE flag, carried banners and posters of Pirapaharan and caused as much mayhem as they possibly could, completely disregarding the democratic laws of such countries as Britain, France, the United States and Canada.

This was, after all not the ANC we saw being supported on the streets of London and neither was Pirapaharan held in the same esteem as Nelson Mandela.

This was despite the fact that the LTTE was an organisation that had been proscribed by each of these countries. Indeed, these very countries would never tolerate let alone permit, an organisation such as al Qaeda, to gather in Parliament Square, bandying about portraits of Osama bin Laden and waving militant flags. The closest that al Qaeda supporters have got to demonstrating in London, is quite possibly on a soap box at Speaker’s Corner — apart from that, the authorities in the West are ever mindful that these groups like al Qaeda are perpetrators of terror and extremism. The effects the LTTE had on Sri Lanka’s tranquility – if not its development this past quarter century – is proof indeed that the LTTE too were equal if not more subversive than their Arab counterparts.

Powerful neighbour

Sri Lanka’s President and his ministers heard the pleas of David Miliband, the visiting British Foreign Secretary and his European counterparts. They heard too the pleas of their powerful superpower regional neighbour, India. In language that bore no ambiguity at all, it was made perfectly clear that the Sri Lankan forces had come much too close for any let up to be considered.

Sri Lanka had suffered for close on 26 years and with victory in sight, it was the turn of the Sri Lankans to be incredulous at the inequity of the requests. Ironically, David Miliband was making his request of the Sri Lankan government, just as an US air strike in Afghanistan went horribly went wrong causing the deaths of innocent women and children. A very embarrassed President Obama had to open his meeting with the Afghanistanis with an apology for the collateral damage.

The quaintness of the English language is called upon to explain away the deaths of innocent women and children in Afghanistan and Iraq and regularly in the Palestinian state. How equitable is the call to refer Sri Lanka’s own collateral damage to International Tribunals investigating the possibility of war crimes?

The Sri Lankan Defence Secretary’s US citizenship is cited as an avenue to circumvent the fact that Sri Lanka is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court in a lob-sided attempt to pander to the lobbyists representing the LTTE. Will this attitude really help the fight against international terrorism? Will it be useful in providing urgent relief to the internally displaced in Sri Lanka? Can we waste time when misery is the order of the day?

The Tamil diaspora has for the past 26 years been more or less forced to support the LTTE financially either due to the fact that many left behind relatives in Sri Lanka’s north or in the hope that Pirapaharan would deliver a separate state carved out of the tiny island nation. In the 1990s when the LTTE controlled nearly a third of Sri Lanka’s land mass, it might have appeared that the diaspora were backing the favourite. Yet, 26 years later they as indeed the world at large are appalled at the suffering of their brethren and the predicament they find themselves in.

The time is right for the Tamil diaspora – if indeed they care for their kith and kin and not to protect their immigration status in the West, where they live mainly as refugees – to engage in constructive and genuine humanitarian relief assistance by sending their millions of dollars to a cause that is certainly far more worthy than that espoused by the LTTE leadership.

The West calls on Sri Lanka to hurry up with the political changes required to bring equality to all Sri Lankans alike. With due respect, the Sri Lankan President has only just discharged a duty that all his predecessors had failed in — including the Leader of the Opposition, the architect of the failed Ceasefire Agreement — who with predictable opprobrium was not even present in parliament to share the national joy of the Presidential parliamentary statement proclaiming that victory.

More urgent

President Rajapakse, with the victory and importantly, the death of Pirapaharan, firmly under his belt, and indeed with the confidence that comes with that, will now turn his attention to something that needs his urgent attention now, rather than later: the plight of nearly 300,000 of his citizens in 42 temporary camps. That is far more urgent than political solutions which are, in any event imminent. 

As the Sri Lankan government pauses rightly to take stock of the unique position it now finds itself in – despite the self-imposed predicament Western democracies say they are in – President Rajapakse will no doubt consider what lies ahead. Colombo is committed to permanent policy changes which will foster communal harmony in Sri Lanka. The changes must be far reaching and all encompassing.

The majority Sinhalese and the minority Muslims too have issues in terms of living in the north of their country. Colombo’s task is not easy but certainly, the Wind of Change is blowing its way and it is only Colombo who will have the ability to tweak the sails of peace on this island. 

West considers ‘punishing Sri Lanka’

The West is certainly dragging its feet: they speak of the urgency of aid to the internally displaced, yet they have sidelined Sri Lanka’s local relief agencies and Sri Lanka’s government too. Instead of being warm, sincere and encouraging in their appreciation of the President and his government for their success in crushing one of the world’s most ruthless terror organisations whose tentacles stretched internationally, whose terror changed the course of India’s politics and who advised Arab terrorists in the use of the suicide bomb weapon, they – the so-called democratic West – seek to punish Sri Lanka if not bully and coerce it – by delaying the granting of a loan sought from the International Monetary Fund.

The West is all but pandering to a defunct terror organisation instead of working in harmony with a democratically elected government. The US administration was quick off the block in granting Pakistan aid of over USD 110 million to help with humanitarian issues in the Swat Valley as they fought wretched battles to rid the world of the al Qaeda menace. There is no such urgency for Sri Lanka despite their stunning victory over the LTTE.

President Rajapakse by virtue of his swift victory is now a man in a hurry: he will be forced to rely on China, Iran and perhaps Libya, very soon if he is to successfully alleviate the suffering of his 300,000 plus internally displaced population. The West will need to realise that democratic ideals and humanitarian aid are not their sole preserve.

The Sri Lankan President got it right when he declared in parliament that Sri Lanka will have to hatch a homegrown solution to its problems: just like they did with the War on Terror. And, judging by the jubilation displayed by the Maha Janathawa across this ancient land, there’s nothing wrong with that.