Paper Tigers

Ninety percent of the Sri Lankan Tamils living in Canada entered the country as Refugees in fear of the atrocities of the state machinery.

Opps forgot about that did we in our rush to outlaw the Tamil Tigers. As they have done with Palestine, the Conservatives foriegn policy is to support repressive regimes, under the guise that they are democratic while overlooking their policies of torture and abuse. Canadian Tamils Disappointed by LTTE Listing

Israel and Sri Lanka get Stockwell Day's and Peter McKays support, while those who oppose these regimes are described as 'terrorists'. The massacres conducted by Sharon are forgotten and forgiven by the Conservatives. So to do they forget the JVP government massacre of the Tamils, bodies floating down rivers for weeks, that launched the Tamil Tiger resistance.

Sri Lanka, once a role model for third world democracies, is now for the last 20 years, a scene of obdurate violence and war ( See Broken Palmyra, The Tamil Secessionist Movement in Sri Lanka (Ceylon):A Case of Secession by Default? , Sri Lanka:The Arrogance of Power: Myths, Decadence & Murder on this site). The long simmering ethnic crisis, which metamorphosed into a full-scale war, has now gone through several phases. From 1956, the Tamil community was at the receiving end of several bouts of ethnically motivated violence that had the connivance of the State. This compounded the increasingly blatant discriminatory policies of the Sri Lankan State. Ethnicisation of the political landscape has resulted in a polarization that now appears difficult to disentangle.

The intransigence and opportunism of the Sinhalese polity in its turn gave boost to an insensitive Tamil nationalist politics that was high on rhetoric. The chauvinist camp among the Sinhalese capitalized on this, playing on the fears of the Sinhalese. Though a majority in Sri Lanka, the Sinhalese are in relation to the Tamils a minority in the region. Both communities had launched into a confrontational political course and for both internal and external reasons, the rights of the Tamils and their quality of life suffered progressive degradation.

The armed struggle of Tamil youth to achieve a separate state, which commenced in the 1970s, attracted an unprecedented number of Tamil youth to its banner following the government sponsored pogrom of July 1983 which left about 2000 Tamils dead. India, fearing the Sri Lankan government's canvassing of Western military assistance, provided arms and training to the Tamil militants. Various militant formations sprang up. The internal and internecine killings by the militant groups, introduced a new horrifying dynamism that altogether changed the character of the struggle.

In July 1983 President Jayawardene of Sri Lanka and his government were implicated in the worst bout of communal violence against the Tamils,which was followed by India covertly backing the Tamil militancy. Arbitrary violence by the almost exclusively Sinhalese government forces led to a mounting toll of massacres and disappearances of Tamil civilians running into the thousands². As a means of territorially marginalising the Tamils, the government also took the first steps towards militarily-imposed settlements of marginalised Sinhalese in predominantly Tamil areas,such as Manal Aru (Weli Oya), along the lines of the trans-migration policies of the militarised regime in Indonesia³. The regime in Colombo enjoyed very little sympathy abroad and large sections of the Sinhalese watched with alarm as democratic freedoms were trodden under and the country plunged headlong into militarisation of its polity. By 1985 the legitimacy of the Tamil separatist cause stood at its peak. The University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) (UTHR(J))

Or the continued massacres of Tamils that are conducted by the 'democratically' elected State, which is in fact a Terrorist State.

International human rights groups expressed concern on the failure of Sri Lankan justice system to bring the culprits of a massacre in a rehabilitation centre, where young Tamil Tiger suspects were being held, to justiceBBCSinhala.com

Terrorism, Counterterrrorism and Challenges to Human Rights Advocacy: 2nd April 2006The University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) (UTHR(J))

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