“Race and Class” Siva on ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka

July 12th, 2009

Hello Friends,

Various persons in different capacities have attempted to analyse and comment on the tragic post-independence history of deteriorating ethnic relations in Sri Lanka.

I happened to read an interesting and informative lecture on Sri Lankan ethnic relations by a brilliant left-leaning intellectual of Sri Lankan origin now domiciled in Britain.

AS0712a.jpgMany of the younger generation may not have heard of this octogenarian who is however very well known to those of an earlier vintage interested and involved in the politics of race and class. He was actively involved in anti-racist struggles in Britain.

He is none other than Ambalavanar Sivanandan, director of the London based Race Relations Institute. He was also the founder editor of the much respected journal “Race and Class” of which he is now an advisory editor.

Sivanandan or Siva is also the author of a highly acclaimed novel relating to three generations of Sri Lankans. “When Memory Dies” won the Commonwealth writers prize. Two collections of his varuois essays have also been published.

Sivanandan whose roots are from Sandilipay in Jaffna was educated at St. Josephs College, Colombo and what was then the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya.

The only occasion I have heard Sivanandan speak was in the eighties of the last Century at the “Centre for Society and Religion” headed by Fr.Tissa Balasuriya. He succinctly analysed the “social formations” in Sri Lanka during that lecture. I recall some good-humoured bantering between him and Dayan Jayatilleka in the discussion that followed.

On July 9th Sivanandan explained the roots of ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka in a speech to “Marxism 2009″. I read it on the net today (12th) and felt that I should share it with a wider range of readers interested and concerned about Sri Lanka.

There are some minor errors in his talk like for instance his description of Muralitharan alias Karuna as both eastern province chief minister and member of the Rajapakse government.

These hese lapses do not affect the main thrust of his analytical explanation tracing the course of events in post-independence Sri Lanka.

Of particular relevance and significance is his pithy conclusion “It is for the Sinhalese people I fear now-for if they come for me in the morning, they’ll come for you that night.”

As is to be expected there would be agreement and disagreement with Siva’s views. I do hope the speech would result in a constructive discussion on this forum.

And please, please keep it going as an amiable conversation and not an acrimonious confrontation.

Here then is Ambalavanar Sivanandan’s talk- DBSJ

IRR0710.jpgEthnic cleansing in Sri Lanka

By A. Sivanandan

The Institute of Race Relations’ director explains the roots of ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka in a speech to ‘Marxism 2009′.

‘It’s difficult to talk dispassionately about what is going on in my country, when the horror of what the government is doing to a civilian Tamil population-already shelled and burned out of their existence and now herded into concentration camps and starved of food and medicine-revisits me to the pogrom of 1958 when my parents’ house was attacked by a Sinhalese mob, my nephew had petrol thrown on him and burnt alive, and friends and relatives disappeared into refugee camps. I was a Tamil married to a Sinhalese with three children, and I could only see a future of hate stretching out before them. I left with my family, and came to England.

There is nothing, nothing, so horrendous as communal war, ethnic war. Overnight your friend becomes your enemy, every look of your neighbour is laden with threat, every passer-by is an informant. You walk the streets on tiptoe, casting nervous glances over your shoulder; you are tight, on edge, the sky lowers with menace.

Only one thing is worse-and that is when your government exploits communal differences, stokes ethnic and religious fears, all in the pursuit of power. In the process, it engenders a political culture of censorship and disinformation, assassination of journalists who speak out, extra-judicial killings by police and army, government without opposition-a culture that has to be broken if it is not to descend into dictatorship.

And it is with that in mind that I want to examine briefly the 150 years (more or less) of British rule, the sixty years of independence, the fifty years of ethnic cleansing within that and, within that, the twenty-five years of civil war that have brought Sri Lanka to this pass.

The Portuguese and the Dutch had occupied the Maritime Provinces in the 16th-18th centuries in pursuit of the spice trade and strategic sea routes. But it was the British who from 1815 came to occupy the whole of the country, turned paddy fields into tea estates, dispossessed the peasantry and brought in indentured labour from South India to work in the plantations. English was made the official language and Christianity the favoured religion and a pervasive British culture won over the subject peoples to their own subjection. Incidentally, it is important to distinguish between the Tamils who were brought to Ceylon by the British and the indigenous Tamils who have been there from time immemorial.

Ceylon got its independence in 1948 on the back of the Indian nationalist struggle. Hence it did not go through the process of nation building that a nationalist struggle involves. Instead, it was regarded as a model colony with an English-educated elite, universal suffrage, and an elected assembly-deserving of self-government.

These however turned out to be the trappings of capitalist democracy super-imposed on a feudal infrastructure-a democratic top-dressing on a feudal base. But then, colonial capitalism is a hybrid, a mutant. It underdevelops some parts of the country while the part it develops is not consonant with the country’s needs or growth. Nor does it throw up institutions and structures that sustain democracy. Capitalism in the periphery, unlike capitalism at the centre, does not engender an organic relationship between the political, economic and cultural instances. It is a disorganic capitalism that produces disorganic development and a malformed democracy.

Power, then, was still in the hands of the feudal elite, the landed aristocracy. And almost the first thing that an independent government under D. S. Senanayake, “the father of the nation”, did was to disenfranchise the “plantation Tamils” who were now into their third and fourth generations-thereby establishing a Sinhalese electoral majority in the upcountry areas. This was followed by colonisation schemes that settled Sinhalese peasants in the predominantly Tamil-speaking north-east-thereby changing the ethnic demography of the area. And although elections were on party lines, the parties themselves-with the exception of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) Trotskyists and the Communist Party (CP)-operated on feudal allegiances. Hence the government that ensued was government by dynasty.

The first prime minister was succeeded by his son, Dudley Senanayake, and subsequently by his nephew, Sir John Kotelawela and so on. So that the ruling United National Party, (U.N.P.), was more appositely known as the Uncle Nephew Party.

The breakthrough came in 1956 when the Oxford-educated Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike decided that the only way that a distant relative like him could break into the dynastic succession was to resort to the ethnic politics of language and religion that would guarantee him a ready-made electoral majority. The Sinhala speaking population, after all, amounted to something like 70 per cent (the Tamils around 20 per cent) and they were mostly Buddhists. All he was doing, as a nationalist and patriot was returning power to the people, restituting their ancient rights. And so he came to power on the twin platforms of making Sinhala the official language and Buddhism the state religion. The language policy was to be introduced within 24 hours of his taking office-and all government servants would have to learn to conduct business in Sinhala within a given period if they were to keep their jobs. Sinhala would also constitute the medium of instruction in schools.

Bandaranaike had struck at the heart of Tamil livelihood and achievement. Coming from the arid north of the country, where nothing grew except children, the Tamil man’s chief industry was the government service, and education, English education, his passport. And Britain’s divide and rule policies encouraged and reinforced the growth of a class of Tamil bureaucrats. So that at independence they were over-represented in the administrative services and the professions.

Bandaranaike’s policies were meant to put an end to that but, in the event, they degraded the mother tongue of a people who held up Tamil as an ancient language (which it was) and its considerable literature as their bounteous heritage. In protest Tamil leaders staged a mass non-violent sit-down in front of the Houses of Parliament and were beaten up by government-sponsored goondas for their pains-giving meaning to the phrase sitting ducks.

And there begins the two trajectories of ethnic cleansing: the “legal” and the illegal, the civil and the military, the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary, each overlapping and reinforcing each other. Ethnic cleansing is a process not an isolate, genocide its logical conclusion.

The prime minister, having divested himself of his Oxford bags for national dress, Christianity for Buddhism, English for Sinhala, was caught now between his social democratic principles and his nationalist practice, and proposed to make Tamil a regional language. But his ministers and the Opposition upped the racist ante and the Buddhist monks, whom Bandaranaike himself was instrumental in bringing out of the monasteries and on to the hustings where their influence was decisive, demanded that he return to his original remit. Peaceful Tamil demonstrations were met with police violence, participants travelling to a Tamil convention in the North in May 1958 were taken off the trains, cars and buses and beaten up by goon squads organised by Sinhalese politicians. Attacks on Tamils in their homes, on the street and work-places right across the country followed. Bandaranaike vacillated and a monk shot him dead. The chickens had come home to roost.

From then on the pattern of Tamil subjugation was set: racist legislation followed by Tamil resistance, followed by conciliatory government gestures, followed by Opposition rejectionism, followed by anti-Tamil riots instigated by Buddhist priests and politicians, escalating Tamil resistance, and so on-except that the mode of resistance varied and intensified with each tightening of the ethnic-cleansing screw and led to armed struggle and civil war.

I do not want to go into the details of that sequence here (for those who are interested there is a 1984 article of mine on the IRR’s website which goes into the specifics and is entitled ‘Sri Lanka: racism and the politics of underdevelopment’). It is enough to note the key acts of successive Sinhalese-dominated governments that led to the spiralling cycle of repression and resistance. If Mr Bandaranaike had cut out the mother tongue of the Tamils, it was left to Mrs Bandaranaike to bring the Tamils down to their knees-by using the language provision to remove and exclude Tamils from the police, the army, the courts and government service generally, further colonising traditionally Tamil areas of the north-east with Sinhalese from the South, repatriating the already disenfranchised Indian Tamil plantation workers and, more crucially, requiring Tamil students to score higher marks than their Sinhalese counterparts to enter university-on the grounds that Tamils should not continue to be over-represented in higher education and the professions.

At one stroke, Mrs Bandaranaike had cut the ground from under the feet of Tamil youth. At one stroke she had blighted their future. You take away a people’s language and you take away their identity. You take away their land and you take away their livelihood. You take away their education and you take away their hopes and aspirations. They had seen their parents try reason and reconciliation, but to no avail. They had seen them try non-violent resistance only to be met with violence. They had seen their representatives in the Federal Party running between the government and the Opposition with their electoral begging bowl. And they had seen the Left, the Trotskyists and the CP, who had once stood square against racist laws and for the parity of language, succumb at last to Mrs Bandaranaike’s blandishments of nationalisation in exchange for dropping their call for parity, and join her United Front government.

The Left in Ceylon, and the Trotskyist LSSP, in particular, had hitherto had a noble history. Formed in the 1930s, during the malaria epidemic and led by doctors, they had set up people’s dispensaries in the villages to treat patients free of charge. They had, along with the CP, politicised the urban working class and engendered a flourishing trade union movement. And in 1953, when the UNP government withdrew its subsidised rice ration at a time of rising food prices, they brought out the country in a hartal (cessation of all work) and drove a beleaguered cabinet into the safety of a ship in the harbour. But 1953 also marks the Left’s failure-for instead of pressing home the advantage, a middle-class leadership took fright at the enormity of its own success, agreed to talks and called off the hartal. The moment of revolution had passed, and from then on Parliament became the Left’s pitch-landing them, as I mentioned before, in Mrs Bandaranaike’s racist government. But the final degradation was yet to come. Asked to frame a new constitution, Dr Colin R de Silva, LSSP historian, now made a constitutional proviso for the repatriation of disenfranchised Tamil plantation workers.

There was still the self-styled Marxist Sinhala youth movement, the JVP, the People’s Liberation Front, whom the Bandaranaike government had to contend with. But their insurrection in 1971 was ruthlessly put down and their protagonists murdered by the army and the police. Their politics though claiming to be Marxist stirred up racial animosity by stoking fears of “Indian expansionism”. Their second coming in 1987-89, though laced with anti-Tamil propaganda, was even more mercilessly put down by the Jayawardene government. Today they are the most virulent racists in the Rajapakse coalition government-second only to the Aryanists of the JHU, National Heritage Party of the Buddhist monks.

The degradation of the Left engendered the degradation of the intelligentsia who now turned to middle of the road reformist politics. The Tamil youth looked around and saw no allies in the South. Nothing and no one seemed to work for them. They had only themselves to rely on. They had no choice but to take up arms. (The violence of the violated is never a matter of choice, but a symptom of choicelessness-and often it is a violence that takes on a life of its own and becomes distorted and self-defeating.)

The youths began with robbing a bank or two, stealing arms from police stations-and making their getaway on bicycles. The north, and Jaffna in particular, is not orthodox guerrilla country with mountains and forests to hide in, but its villages-a maze of narrow twisting lanes and by-lanes tucked away behind large dense palmyrah-leaf fences-are bicycle country inhospitable to motor vehicles. Bicycles, besides, were the Jaffna man’s chief mode of transport even in the towns, and “the getaways” were lost among them. And as the frustrations of the police increased and the stories of the hold-ups became legend, the parents and elders closed ranks behind their young. Their generation had been stereotyped as weak and cowardly and they had been brought down to their knees by government after Sinhalese government. Their young had now set them on their feet. They were “their Boys” and “Thambi” (younger brother) their leader. They would keep faith by them, give them sanctuary, let them disappear among their midst-be water to their fish.

But the romance of the Robin Hood period turned sour and vicious in the late 1970s when the Jayawardene government let the police loose in Jaffna to break up peaceful demonstrations, arrest and torture Tamil youth, burn down the Jaffna bazaar when refused free foodstuffs-and generally lord over it the Tamil people. And this in turn led to the reprisal killings of policemen by the Boys. In 1979 the government passed the Prevention of Terrorism Act and sent the army to Jaffna with instructions to “wipe out terrorism within six months”. The imprisonment and torture of innocent Tamils that followed in the wake of the PTA drove the civilian population further into the arms of the emerging militant groups, all demanding a separate Tamil state, Eelam, the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) the most militant of them.

In 1981 security forces burnt down the Jaffna library, with its “ola” manuscripts and rare literature, the epicentre of Tamil learning and culture. In the same year Gandhiyam, a refugee camp turned farm, set up by a Tamil doctor to restore refugees to some sort of normal life, was over-run by the police-and its organisers killed or imprisoned. In 1983 the Tigers killed thirteen soldiers in Jaffna and the government brought their bodies to Colombo and put them on display before an angry Sinhalese crowd and so provoked “the riots” (pogroms really) that followed culminating in the killing of Tamils prisoners in Welikade jail, awaiting trial under the PTA, by Sinhalese prisoners whose cells the guards forgot to lock!

That’s when the civil war began in earnest-with each side, the government and the guerrillas, ratcheting up the terror count, with the occasional pause for “talks” or peace mediation, during which each side refurbished its forces and came out more intransigent than ever. The government now added an official military dimension to civil ethnic cleansing by letting loose its private armies to terrorise Tamils and drive them from their homes. Refugee camps were attacked, its inmates killed or driven out, Tamil plantation workers were forcibly taken from their houses and dumped hundreds of miles away by thugs in the pay of the Minister of Industries in trucks provided by him. (The state against its Tamils.)

The LTTE’s guerrilla struggle, likewise, had degenerated into ad hoc militarism with suicide bombings and assassinations. And politics went out of the window. The military tail had begun to wag the political dog-and instead of winning people to their cause, whether among the Sinhalese or their own people, the Tigers began to eliminate anyone who stood in their way, be it one of their own dissenters or the Indian prime minister-an act of self-defeat in that it alienated the Tamils of India. Two years later, 1993, they assassinated Sri Lanka’s President Ranasinghe Premadasa. The final self-defeat came in 2004 with the defection of Muralitharan, their military strategist and their second-in-command to the side of the Rajapakse government. And it was the inside information that he and his men provided on guerrilla positions and strategies that helped the government to finally overcome the Tigers. He is today the Chief Minister of the Eastern province and a member of the Rajapakse government and held up as a symbol of the government’s goodwill towards the Tamils, and an indication of its intention to afford them some sort of regional government.

But the President’s own actions since the defeat of the Tigers and, more importantly, the political culture that his government, even more than all the previous governments, has created, belies any such democratic outcome. For what has evolved in sixty years of independence is an ethnocentric Sinhala-Buddhist polity reared on falsified history reinforced by feudal customs and myths, with a voting system that seals the ethnic majority in power for ever-while reducing the party system to a war between dynasties, flanked by monks and militias.

And within that polity the Rajapakse government or, rather cabal (he has three brothers in the cabinet) has instituted a regime of blanket censorship under cover of which it has conducted a ruthless war not just against the equally ruthless Tigers but against harmless Tamil civilians, a “war without witness” someone termed it, while feeding the Sinhalese public with government-manufactured facts and seeing off any journalist who dared to criticise the government. (You will all remember the case of Lasantha Wickramatunga, the editor of the Sunday Leader, who sent a letter to his friend President Rajapakse, excoriating him for murders of outspoken journalists and predicting his own at the hands of government thugs. And so it came to pass.)

What, in sum, we are faced with in my country today, is a brainwashed people, brought up on lies and myths, their intelligentsia told what to think, their journalists forbidden to speak the truth on pain of death, the militarising of civil society and the silencing of all opposition.

A nation bound together by the effete ties of language, race and religion has arrived at the cross-roads between parliamentary dictatorship and fascism.

It is for the Sinhalese people I fear now-for if they come for me in the morning, they’ll come for you that night.’

DBS Jeyaraj can be reached at dbsjeyaraj@yahoo.com

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128 Comments Add your own

  • 1. Shan  |  July 12th, 2009 at 5:59 pm

    Good to read Siva’s views again. I’ve heard him speak lots of times when I lived in England those days.Precise and succint as usual

  • 2. Stanley S  |  July 12th, 2009 at 6:18 pm

    Comrade Siva had integrated into Colombo life . He married a Sinhala girl and worked in a bank those days. The SWRD Bandaranaike govt and policies made him leave the land he loved and seek exile in the land of our colonial master.

    But he was nt a toady. He fought his own anti – colonial, anti – imperialist, anti – capitalist, anti – racist struggle in London. Siva was alwas on the side of the oppressed and down – trodden.

    Lanka’s loss was Britain’s gain

    But good that he left Lanka. Had he lived and struggled against oppression and racism here the white van may have gobbled him up

    He must be nearly 90 now . Good to see him alert as usual until the “anthima satana”.

    Siva was born in Colombo on December 20th 1923………….DBSJ

  • 3. Dilshan F  |  July 12th, 2009 at 6:33 pm

    Ineresting reading. however I would like to point out one issue as of present: recently ( a couple of weeks back ) the Education Ministry published the ‘Z’ score requirement for various districts for each of the university streams. This is in the Daily News. I went through at a glance and found that compared to Jaffna, Kalutara required more marks and Kilinochchi and Mulaitivu required the least. In the light of the published ‘Z’ score I would perhaps like if my tamil friends still feel what Siva has commented upon. whether Tamils Students still need higher grades to enter university? Since this has been one of the issues could someone – DBSJ please analyse the ‘Z’ score and give a conclusion whether Tamils ARE at a disadvantage in the university admission. I am sure that we all need to know this.

  • 4. Rajiv  |  July 12th, 2009 at 7:26 pm

    #3 Dilshan F

    This is (was) precisely the problem. Merit should be the one and the only criteria. It would be a shame if students from the Tamil districts enter universities courtesy of lower cut-offs. If no Tamil, due to poor performance, could gain admission to the portals of higher learning then so be it. Thats certainly right and equitable. Merit should be sacrosanct. Otherwise a JVP type rebellion by dissatisfied southern youth cannot be ruled out. Righting a wrong with another wrong is a sure recipe for further disquiet. The planners and policy makers in Sri Lanka need to breakout of their narrow constraints that hitherto held them hostages to their narrow selfish ends and start working for the people. Well, that day may be far far in the distant future.

  • 5. Tissa Wellappili  |  July 12th, 2009 at 7:32 pm

    Interesting reading but clearly our esteemed London Marxist is out of touch. I heard one of the three Doctors, among the last to leave LTTE hold, from IDP camps explain his journey to become a Doctor eventually to end up as an IDP, in a video interview in the GOSL website. A son of estate labour family he had schooling in Sinhala with Sinhala villagers in the primary school. But for his good luck his family managed to move him to a school in the Jaffna district which enabled him to enter the Medical faculty in Jaffna. None of his Sinhala school mates were so lucky. Clearly learning traditions in the Jaffna district was intact till 90s while it is still absent in Sinhala villages.

  • 6. mani  |  July 12th, 2009 at 7:58 pm

    Well its good dissect the history so that we can learn from our past mistakes. In that sense this article provides an insight to past Tamil griveness’s and the discrimination they as community had to undergo. As Sinhala youth I do appologise to ourTamil brethren for that. Yet it is equally important to look to the future and present scenario, if somebody says that there is massive economic discrimination I do agree but as Sinhala youth who entered the university through Kandy district, what are the special privileges I do enjoy than my northern brothers??? To be frank nothing. If someone says that Sinhalese are more secure in the country and they do not have to face the hassle of police/army security checks, please go back to period of 89/90 where if you were a university student (Sinhala one), came from a village background it was kind of open ticket to a detention centre.

    Problem in this country is not due to race/caste or religion but depending on your class. If your are born to a higher class family you have all the opportunities and privileges no matter what is your race and if your born to less privilege family you have to struggle for everything including basics like food,shelter,education and proper healthcare.

    If this country can create an environment where at least all the people have decent access to their basic needs and the merit is the only suitability I do not think anybody will complain about racial or any other form of descrimination.

  • 7. Vaj  |  July 12th, 2009 at 8:27 pm

    The majority of people of Sri Lanka will never tolerate a dictatorship and the fears are unfounded. Also they will not tolerate terrorists to gain foot hold either.

    The way to respond to any excess or abuse of power is when elections are due. So I hope all these “passionate statesmen” would flock to Sri Lanka to educate the masses.

    The moment the IDP camps were refered to as “Concentration camps”, the writer has lost the plot completely. I won’t be surprised if he again becomes silent for another 10 years after this article.

    I understand the pain the the Tamil people in the war zone would have gone through and also has the comfort of knowing that the rest of the Sri Lanka is caring and supporting them with so much dedication, with what ever resource they can afford.

  • 8. R  |  July 12th, 2009 at 9:02 pm

    Performance of Tamils dropped as a direct result of the war and economic embargo imposed by the government. Schools are closed often, students dissappear, sit exams under fear of aerial bombardments and sheling, and finaly now have to sit for exams from internment camps where there is only one toilet for every 100 people! Mrs. Bandaranaiyake should be very happy now!!

  • 9. Herman  |  July 12th, 2009 at 9:03 pm

    Dilshan

    What Siva is referring to is the standardization method introduced by Mrs. Bandaranaike’s government starting in 1969 for university admissions. This system was strictly media wise and was in operation until J.R. Jayawardene’s government came to power in 1977. You may dismiss this as ancient history but you need to be reminded of this history because it had significant ramifications. Unfortunately it is not well documented because very few had access to raw aggregate marks that was used as basis for university admissions. I recall Professor Chandra de Silva who was a history lecturer at University of Peradeniya wrote a series articles on the admission to engineering faculties to the now defunct news magazine Tribune in late seventies or early eighties.

  • 10. Navin  |  July 12th, 2009 at 9:57 pm

    The author is using too wide a brush to paint here. You cannot compare the current government to that of Mr. SWRDs or to that of Mrs. Sirimavos. Sri Lanka and its people have gone through lot of twists and turns since 1970s. Consequently, the way the people look at things today is vastly different from how the population of 1970-80s looked at them. This constant regurgitating of bad memories from the past and using the past to castigate the positive developments of the late as abysmal, insignificant and unsatisfactory is not a helpful attitude. People should be patient and give the country time to collect itself from the shambles it is in today. The entire north today is literally an open warehouse of modern lethal weapons and littered with land mines, LTTE moles hiding among IDPs, 280,000 IDPs good number of whom have been brain washed against the majority community and god knows what they would do if and when they are let free, not to mention the hostile western countries and regional power politics. Given these ground realities, it would take at least another decade for normalcy to return and we can reasonably guess in what direction the country is heading– whether history would repeat itself, whether it would be come a militarized state (which by the way has never happened in the past) or whether it would become a secular democracy that everyone wants so much.

    Authors views of settlement of Sinhalese in traditionally Tamil dominated areas shows lack of appreciation for history. Is the author of the view that the north and east of the country should be set aside exclusively for the Tamils and those of Sri Lankan origin there again? Though Tamils have dominated that part of the country after Sinhalese kingdom shifted to the south that definitely could not have been the case during Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa period for the proximity of the heart of Sinahelese civilization to Wanni is just too close for them to have not just inhibited those areas but thrived as well. Hence Tamil claim to exclusive rights to the north and east of the country has its limitations. Tamil intellectuals must appreciate this reality. Lately, we are also in no short of doomsday predictors who see Sri Lanka becoming a militarized state. This too is a gross exaggeration of the reality. People like GR, SF and WK are well educated, well respected people (all 3 from Ananda College) and I have a hard time imagining how they would steer the country anywhere near such an eventuality or commit atrocious crimes against all humanity like in Africa or those by LTTE/VP or even those committed by GOSL in 70-80s.

    Sadly, the author too seem to have already concluded that Lasantha was murdered by GR. If GR wanted to get rid of Lasantha its more likely that he would have done that when MR regime was very weak (the military had not payed its dividends at the time) and Lasantha was rocking the boat earnestly to get his favored political party to power; to hell with the country, with the likes of Mangala, Sripathi, Mano, etc. during the budget debate of 2007(?). Had Lasantha and his clan succeeded at that important moment in history VP would still be alive today. Fortunately for all Sri Lankans, he and everyone else who were behind that coup failed. There is absolutely nothing for GR to gain by murdering Lasantha right after the Fall of EP, at a time when MR regimes political clout in the country was ski high. This was a time when Lasantha was not a threat but a mere irritant for the likes of GR, SF. On the contrary, due to Lasanthas investigations into malpractices in the country, he must have had many hundreds of enemies in politics, underworld and of course in the military who may have taken the advantage of the situation. Though we cannot rule out the possibility of GR’s involvement in Lasantha’s case without a convincing investigation which is very unlikely to happen given the relative capabilities of our law enforcement agencies and the underworld, he most certainly is not the only suspect and hardly can be the most likely man to have done it.

  • 11. Dexter  |  July 12th, 2009 at 10:11 pm

    # 7 Vaj,

    “..rest of the Sri Lanka is caring and supporting them with so much dedication, with what ever resource they can afford”

    Very true, but that doesn’t eliminate the fact that a clear majority of them are held against their will in the camps and atrocities are happening

    Simple truth, if nothing to hide there is no need for this iron clad censorship.

    Yes people are helping them, but the perpetrators of atrocities and injustice, in Sri Lanka is the state, not the people of any ethnicity. Be optimistic that they are being helped, but at present they are being held by the govt, don’t point to LTTE any more.

    And due to this, the writer’s description of “concentration camps” is not entirely incorrect.

    I thought of sharing a response NY Times columnist Nick Kristof wrote in response to a reader question recently, on ‘atrocities and best of humanity, side by side’:

    The Nature of Humanity

    Q. You have reported on some of history’s greatest inhumanities-genocide in Darfur, the child sex trade, and Israeli-Palestinian slaughter, to name a few-but have also witnessed individual acts of surpassing humanity and uncommon moral courage. How has your view of human nature changed since your career began, and has your reporting made you more cynical about humankind’s future, or more optimistic?

    A: “Oh, I’m an optimist to the core. I’m not sure that my reporting made me an optimist; I may just have a malfunctioning body that floods my brain with serotonin. The truth is that when you go to Darfur or Congo or the brothels of India, you see some of the worst atrocities imaginable-but side by side with the worst, you see the best of humanity.

    I meet aid workers-including many local people-who are risking their lives to help others. I see the nurse in Somalia who has started her own hospital. I see the Polish nun in Congo who is keeping alive all the orphans of the community. I see a young Indian woman working amid the thugs of Bihar to fight sex trafficking. These are some of the bravest, most heroic people I could ever imagine, expressing their humanity by trying to keep others alive and in good health, and so I come back from the hellholes truly inspired.

    In contrast, here in the States, I seem some people for whom there is no expression of their humanity greater than driving a cool car or owning the latest iPod. And that’s what I find truly depressing.’ -Nicholas D. Kristof (NY Times columnist)

  • 12. Ilaya Seran Senguttuvan  |  July 12th, 2009 at 10:22 pm

    Grateful to DBSJ for sharing this with us. That culture when Ceylon “let the (communal) genie out of the bottle (Lee Kuan Yew)” removed from our midst multi-thousands of talented Sivas from the Tamil, Sinhala, Burgher and other communities. That the good of the island and its diversity remains foremost in their minds is to remind ourselves of the analogous thoughts of Rupert Brooke “there is some corner of a foreign field that is forever England” The author succinctly captures our history from the 50s to date in his epilogue “What, in sum, we are faced with in my country today, is a brainwashed people, brought up on lies and myths, their intelligentsia told what to think, their journalists forbidden to speak the truth on pain of death, the militarising of civil society and the silencing of all opposition. A nation bound together by the effete ties of language, race and religion has arrived at the cross-roads between parliamentary dictatorship and fascism.”
    Perhaps in a future effort Mr Sivanathan may find time to comment on the corrosive role of the Buddhist hierarchy that is a parallel political power as well as India’s presence; the inevitability of China playing a more visible role together with its own proxy in the region Pakistan using the fastly multiplying Muslim reality here.
    ISS

  • 13. Fran  |  July 12th, 2009 at 10:23 pm

    We heard from a man who lived in a placed called ceylon, then fast forward to 2009 a land called Srilanka, pause it during the process and think. Did we learn anything. why so much blood letting , destruction and brain drain from that land. isn’t it from the flawed nation building and pandering to a wrong group of “patriots”.
    Are we heading for prehistoric life when the world is progressing by breaking barriers.
    Are we going to end up as a case study for wrong reason.

  • 14. Navin  |  July 12th, 2009 at 10:26 pm

    #4 Rajiv.

    Merit should be the one and the only criteria…

    Please open your eyes to the disparity in educational facilities available to students in different parts of the country be they Tamils from Wanni or Sinhalese from the Uva province. All people, regardless of where in the world they are born are born with equal abilities. That is most certainly not represented in our A/L scores. Besides, there is no point in mulling over issues that were resolved 30 years ago.

  • 15. Velauthan  |  July 12th, 2009 at 10:29 pm

    This article is factually and historically incorrect. If this is the “best” that he can do, he should go back to the library, and perhaps begin with Dr. Jane Russell’s detailed study of Communal Politics in the Donoughmore Era. Then there are other works, including the writings of Wilson, Kerney, K. M. de Silva, Roberts and others. Then you will learn that (i)D. S. actually supported giving citizenship to the Indians – but it was the specter of trade unionism and mayhem in the estates which frightened the Establishment politicians – so the Marxists, with Brace Girdle affair etc, are to blame for the tightening of the lapses.. See also Nadesan’s speech in the Senate in 1949 on this issue. The Indian citizenship act was drawn up by Kandiah Vaithyialingam , probably with inputs from Ivor Jennings. It approved citizenship to anyone with 7 years residence – a very liberal piece of legislation for the time, as noted later by the Privy Coucil (ii)In 1948 the Ilankai Thamil Arasu Kadchchi had already in the Maradana declaration stated that the Tamils must “drive the invaders out of the Traditional Homelands”. Federalism was only in English – Arasu (sovereignty) was wat Chelva and Naganathan aimed for. They never tried to sell federalism to the sinhalese and build bridges between communities. Instead, from day one they did everything to polarize the two communities. Seananayake adroitly dealt with evrything by consultation behind the curtains. he planned to solve the language problem as well as the Buddhist commission report by similar methods. Unfortunately for us he died, and Kothelawala was set upon by Tamil politicfians who got him to offer equal status to Sinhala and Tamil, in a speech he made when he was invited to Jaffna. That precipitated a critical situation which lead to inflamed language politics. The B-C pact was denounced in jaffana as well and Tar Brushing of Sinhala letters and civil disobedience was carried out by the ITAK EVEN AFTER the BC pact. So why would the Sinhalese trust this “Federal party” which said something very different in Tamil? I believe that the extremely racist politics started by Ponnambalam in the 1930, and pushed even further by Chelvanayagam who prevented any possibility of ethnic bridge building, should take the major share of the blame for the way the ethnic question evolved in Sri Lanka. These Upper Caste Tamils from Colombo simply wanted to use the poor, lower class Tamils as pawns in their political games for Arasu, and pushed the matter to violent bloodshed, claiming that they are “ready for state terror” and even distributing wooden pistols at “peaceful” sathyagarhas. Why didn’t the ITAK hold even one meeting in the Hillcountry or the south explaining the advantages of Federalism to all concerned? Because it didn’t believe in Federalism. It believed in “ARASA” – i.e, Raashta” in Sanskit and arasu in Tamil.

  • 16. Brian Wickramanayake  |  July 12th, 2009 at 10:41 pm

    Our country needs someone in the likes of Mahathir mohammed to make the full use of the resources our country has. Even mahathir had his faults, remember how he threw that opposition leader in jail on sodomy charges. Well despite his faults Emperor Mahinda is all what we have and the only strong leader in the sri lankan political horizom. So instead of trying Mahinda bashing we should give the man the chance to develop the country!

  • 17. nandasena  |  July 12th, 2009 at 10:42 pm

    Re: comment #7

    “I understand the pain the the Tamil people in the war zone would have gone through and also has the comfort of knowing that the rest of the Sri Lanka is caring and supporting them with so much dedication, with what ever resource they can afford”.

    The govt. has the moral obligation to look after these people in the same way as they look after the “sinhalese” population, there is no question of “whatever resource they can afford” If the government does not have the resources they should have allowed the Tamils from the vanni to go where ever they wanted to go!! The government should have allowed the NGO’s to look after them!! The government policy of “give us the money, but don’t tell us what to do” attitutude is suspicious!! How come the government has the resouces to plant budhist temples and army camps all over the place, but has no money to feed these people who were made destitute deliberately by the GOVERNMENT which is supposed to safeguard them.
    If the Government cannot protect them and look after them, let them GO!!! Self determination for the Tamils is the way to go!!! They don’t want to live on the mercy and whims and fancy of the Sinhalese!!!

    “Majority of …….a dictatorship and the fears are undounded”

    Don;t you think that what we have in Sri Lanka is dictator ship? I am sure the commentator #7 is a supporter of MR & Co. from the way he writes!!

    Most Tamil people don’t have the freedom of movement, freedom of thought, freedom of even for reading or writing, or speaking, or making a livelihood. They don’t have the freedom to vote!! The elected representatives don’t have the freedom to go to their electorate or to talk to their constituents!! How can you expect them “to respond to “any excess or abuse of power”? In the North and East they have loaded guns pointed at them all the time and in Colombo they have the white vans ready to pick up any body who does not agree with the ruling class!!

  • 18. Ariya  |  July 12th, 2009 at 10:54 pm

    I am bit tired of all this BS that tries to come out for nothing! There is NO Prabakaran and will never be. So, the stories of IDP camps should stop, otherwise let all the Scarlem Tamils come and clear the mine fields with their own bare feet!
    If the Scarlem Tamils get blown up, its not a big problem, because its their own mines.
    I do find your blog as being one that KEEPS the fire going, than one of reconciliation. I also got carried away by that Mohan Sekaram’s email, but now I see, what was hiding behind it.
    If you want to something positive, then change the tone of your blog, DBSJ

    Ariya,I wont take it amiss if you do yourself a favour and keep away from this blog………..DBSJ

  • 19. Ariya  |  July 12th, 2009 at 10:56 pm

    Various persons in different capacities have attempted to analyse and comment on the tragic post-independence history of deteriorating ethnic relations in Sri Lanka.

    This is how you start your blog, and it shows what troubles you, DBSJ!

    For sometime, I thought you were genuine, but you are not!

    Does not the tragic post -independence history of Lanka trouble you at all, Ariya?……DBSJ

  • 20. Panhinda  |  July 12th, 2009 at 11:11 pm

    #6 mani dear

    /*
    Problem in this country is not due to race/caste or religion but depending on your class. If your are born to a higher class family you have all the ….
    */

    funny how universe is formed isnt it? there will always be people having more than you. there are those who have less than you also. for example you may have a pair of legs and some aren’t that fortunate. imagine if the disabled guy wanted one of your legs?

    you revolved against the bourgeois in 1956 chasing away siva here. siva then turned around made things worse for everyone. revolution is not the way buddy, living within your means or work harder is the way to go.

  • 21. Maha  |  July 12th, 2009 at 11:11 pm

    Vaj #7,
    “The moment the IDP camps were refered to as “Concentration camps”, the writer has lost the plot completely.”

    The writer’s use of the term “concentration camps” is absolutely correct. The minimum dictionary qualification for something to be declared a concentration camp is that it forcibly houses large groups of people, usually but not necessarily of a persecuted minority, with inadequate facilities.

    The Nazi concentration camps, which included mass gassing of people, is an extreme form of a concentration camp–it is not the definitive form. There doesn’t have to be mass killing of people for something to be declared a concentration camp.

    Nevertheless, wouldn’t prolonged incarceration of people without adequate facilities lead to loss of lives? People have already died in the IDP camps due to inadequate medical, hygiene and food supplies. So, to continue maintaining such camps shows an intent to kill.

    “I understand the pain the the Tamil people in the war zone would have gone through and also has the comfort of knowing that the rest of the Sri Lanka is caring and supporting them with so much dedication, with what ever resource they can afford.”

    The rest of Sri Lanka’s so-called “caring” support of the IDP camps is what allows the state to prolong the existence of the IDP camps. If the rest of Sri lanka continue to provide supplies, these camps could become permanent homes for these people, with guns permanently trained on them.

    The rest of Sri Lanka should show their “care” by protesting in the streets against the incarceration of innocent Tamils in the camps, instead of providing supplies. Then, afraid of loss of votes and lacking money to keep the camps going, the government will be forced to release the Tamils. The truth is that Tamils are incarcerated in concentration camps because the rest of Sri Lanka wants them there to assure the safety of the rest of Sri Lanka.

    The truth is also that many of the Tigers who the rest of Sri Lanka fear are still holed up in the IDP camps are either dead, already imprisoned, being rehabilitated, or have fled the country through diaspora relatives buying their passage out of the camps and out of SL. So what you have left in the camps are the innocent poor Tamils.

  • 22. R .N Salgado  |  July 13th, 2009 at 12:28 am

    To echo his remarks about commentator #7, commentator # 17 must be an LTTE supporter.

    Re commentator #21, he is technically correct about the definition of concentration camps. The concentration camp was invented by the Brits during the Boer war to imprison Africaaner families. However, since the holocaust in WW II, the term concentration camp has taken a different connotation, and the purpose of the camps in Sri Lanka are certainly not the same as the Nazi’s. The GOSL could have easily wiped out most of these civilians during the war if they desired.

    With all due respect, here’s why there are more than a few minor errors in Siva’s article/speach.

    1. Sri Lanka’s independence movement began as early as the turn of the 20th century and was not just a bi-product of Indian independence.

    2. Again in terms of a comparison to India, what’s the difference between SL’s dynasty and the Nehru-Ghandi dynasty that still exists today?

    3. Ethnic cleansing: It is well known that the LTTE and diaspora Tamils supported ethnic cleansing of both Muslims and Sinhalese from the North and East.

    4. Standardization did not require Tamil students to “score higher marks than their Sinhalese counterparts for uni admission”. It attempted to level the playing field for rural students who didn’t have access to good schools by requiring students in urban districts of all ethnicities to score higher marks than students in rural districts. (An aside: He also derides Mrs. B who was the World’s first female head of government and one of the foremost leaders in the non-aligned movement of which all Sri Lankans/Ceylonese should be proud.)

    5. The Ceylon Tamil elite who looked down upon the Indian Tamils was just as eager to send them back to India.

    These are just a few of the errors in Mr. Siva’s article, proving that it is just another piece of sophistry created by the Tamil diaspora which is ever ready to distort the facts to promote their hopeless cause. My advice to them is to get a clue and either mind their own business or to take positive actions to help their Tamil brethren in a unified Sri Lanka.

  • 23. RS Wickramasinghe  |  July 13th, 2009 at 12:30 am

    The fact Sri Lanka’s population grew from 8 million after independence to 15 million barely 30 years later must remain square and central in this discussion. We must never forget that history is shaped by changing demography. Would Sri Lanka’s divisions both ancient and recent have fomented into outright violence if its population had not doubled within a generation? Could politicans profit from fomenting division without population pressures first?

    Hunger has always been the true stock of conflict’s tinderbox.

    How many now go hungry and neglected in camps of the Wanni and Mannar whilst politicians squabble and squander for their own agendas? What is the fury for this fate, fomenting both within and abroad, for better or for worse?

    The only way Sri Lanka can overcome the pressure of demography is by engaging the outside world and acquiring its economic, intellectual, technological resources. That is the only way to make the pie bigger, reduce the number and ways it is divided, both ancient and new, and learn how to divide it fairer.

    Otherwise if my my share of the pie is shrinking I will try and steal yours. When the pie is being divided among more mouths, my share of the pie is shrinking.
    If people in power are dividing it unfairly I will have the norm to steal yours

    Sri Lanka was and may yet once more live in a malthusian reality. The success of its leaders will be judged by how they were able to build a society that guarded against it.

  • 24. Panhinda  |  July 13th, 2009 at 12:56 am

    #21 maha,

    you need to have a balanced view of the world i feel.

  • 25. jperes  |  July 13th, 2009 at 12:57 am

    I am tired of hearing this same old story. Discrimination against the Tamils. The concentration on the Tamil IDPs. What about the Muslim IDPs over a 100000 who were unceramoniously kicked out of the North by the LTTEwith the help of the Tamil Diaspora. Arent they in camps for the last 19 yrs?Where have all the do gooders been for the last 19 yrs. Why this emphasise on the Tamils. Re area rule were not the Tamils of the Wanni and Eastern province not beneficiares? Were not the sinhalese in colombo in the same plight as the Tamils of Jaffna re University admissions. How can this be discrimination agaist the Tamils. Unfortunately the world and the Tamils have begun to believe in their own propaganda.

  • 26. ECHO  |  July 13th, 2009 at 12:59 am

    Not bad this 86-year-old gentlemen still has lots of firepower.

    First of all, he insulted our land by saying that only children could be raised in North and East. Hello! North and East have more resources than Israel.

    I agree with him that all SL governments after independence only care about the Sinhalese than Sri Lankan. And because of this policy, SL has already paid a heavy price.

    Finally this article did not mention any of the mistakes our great grandparents made that pissed off Sinhalese people.

    Now the word has changed. If you make a mistake, first apologize it then take responsibility for your actions and then move on.

  • 27. .nihal pathirana  |  July 13th, 2009 at 1:12 am

    In take to medical faculties in australia are limited students get 98% marks have been regected as some get over 99% but few places are been reserved for refugees and islanders from rural areas. well i know two sinhala one from colombo who was in a private medical college and another from panadura were alloweed to continue their studies under the UN charter because they were refugees. If u look at it two local studensts were deprived entering university.including my daughter too.She did a paramedical field today a research scientist.according to Tamil propaganda in Srilanka giving uni. to under privilage from backward districts is discrimination to Tamils.those days under standadisation most students from killinocchhii and batticalo and vanni Tamil students entered medicine and engineering under this scheme.I can remember when i was a student of st. Svlversters college we had only one good phyciscs teacher for the whole of kandy district. as many go for tutionAll our teachers were tamils from Madras university. but all dedicated teachers which i still have a respect for them. I came to australia because i could not find a school for my son in 1987 when he was just five. I was a director of goverment scientific department and tried. I did not want to do the wrong thing by making bogus adresses and electricity bills bankstatements etc- to gustify the requirements to enter colleges in colombo I was so frustrated i resigned from my post and came to australia. Tamils and sinhalese have the same problems

  • 28. duminda Kumarasiri  |  July 13th, 2009 at 1:44 am

    Lasantha was not a journalist, he was a businessman.

  • 29. Thushan  |  July 13th, 2009 at 1:51 am

    DBSJ

    from reconciliation to nowhere ??????

    Must start somewhere no?……………DBSJ

  • 30. priyadev  |  July 13th, 2009 at 2:04 am

    Srilanka has a problem, the burden of history. The US and Australia get on with their lives and development because they have no past to think of..the boundaries in Europe got so smudged after two world wars that they were able to band together economically as a single entity, the European Union and have forsaken the past. So have India and China. But what are we doing, getting old men whose only active memories are historical, to rake up the past and muddy the future for the young men of today! Stop it please. There were bad decisions by all..the Sinhalese who were discriminated against trying to change the position fast, and the Tamils who were favoured by the British trying to retain the status quo at any cost. Yesterday is history, today is what matters and in tomorrow is the future where the young will live their lives with hope. Why are we today’s elders queering the pitch for them by focussing on the past? This is madness by demented minds.

  • 31. Amazed  |  July 13th, 2009 at 2:14 am

    Velauthan #15
    “D. S. actually supported giving citizenship to the Indians – but it was the specter of trade unionism and mayhem in the estates which frightened the Establishment politicians – so the Marxists, with Brace Girdle affair etc, are to blame for the tightening of the lapses.”

    Your kind of reasoning involves ascribing blame to those who lost, the victims of history, rather than to the winners, who had free agency in what they chose to do. This is the kind of reasoning that says a woman is to blame for her rape because if she didn’t dress attractively, then the rapist wouldn’t have been drawn to her.

    Why were DS and establishment politicians frightened by the specter of trade unionism? Not because of the class war and the threat this posed to the wealth-making ability and power of their own elite class? Why shouldn’t the Marxists and the peasant classes have been agitating to get some of the wealth and power of the nation as opposed to giving it all to the elite class?

    GG Ponnambalam was a racist? He stood for 50% representation of ALL the minority groups. Do racists stand up for the representation of groups other than their own?

    I suppose in your head, standing up for equal rights of a minority group in a democracy is to be a racist!

    You criticise Sivanandan for his account of history, but you are actually claiming that Sri Lankans’ situation today is caused by the minority? You’re saying that 20% of the population is responsible for the actions of 80% of the population in a one-man, one-vote system?

  • 32. Tharaka  |  July 13th, 2009 at 3:03 am

    I think writers on opinion on university placement is very subjective. Rather than these sinister motive there were genuine reason why that sort of strategy is adopted. That is to nullify the competitive advantage has on some student populations. Due to this standardization not only tamils even colombo elites too suffered. This gave great motivation for most under privileged students not only in Sinhala areas but also rest of north and east apart from Jaffna.

    As at now 40% in Engineering and Medical streams are chosen on merit quota and rest on regional representation based population ratio of students. I got in to engineering faculty on merit quota but I still feel this method should continue as long as disparities in standard of education exist. We can progressively increase merit quota. Thats all right. Some streams like art this method is already abolished.

  • 33. Emdeejay  |  July 13th, 2009 at 3:13 am

    I agree totally with the previous writer Priyadev.These old Sri Lankans ,no matter what ethnic group they hail from,have to learn to go to retirement with their dogmatique past and let todays genaration get to the driving seat.It’s time that these oldies of the world realised that they are out of toutch with reality.Peoples all over the planet are struglling to educate their children and make them compititive in a ever changing world.So you oldies living in western capitals specially,leave Sri Lanka to tha Sri Lnakans living in SL,to manage their lives& stop meddling as you have done enough damage already !!!!

  • 34. cassandra  |  July 13th, 2009 at 3:18 am

    Interesting very interesting but significantly, he fails to mention the race based politics of the Tamils. It is instructive to note that of the parties that contested the 1947 elections the two major parties from the North were both race based the Tamil Congress and the Illankai Thamil Arasu Katchi (loosely translated to the Federal Party). Also, a point worth noting is the latter party was formed in 1949 7 years before the Sinhala Only Act of 1956, which is cited as the major instrument of discrimination against the Tamils. The point I am making is that the secessionist sentiment has pervaded Tamil political thinking in Sri Lanka for a very long time and goes back to even pre Independence days, even to the time of Ponnambalam Arunachalam. Another point I wish to make is that resort to violence is not always the last resort after peaceful means have been tried and failed but is the first option (indeed, the only known course of action) with those naturally disposed towards or nurtured in a culture of violence. Specifically, I would argue that for the likes of Prabhakaran, violence will have been the only means known for settling disputes, much like burglars and thieves choose their trades without previous attempts at legitimate endeavour.

  • 35. Pavithra  |  July 13th, 2009 at 3:32 am

    “The Tamil mans chief industry was the government service, and education, English education, his passport.”

    Mr.Siva is absolutely right about his view on Education of the Tamils. If only S.W.R.D had not introduced Sinhala as the official language of this country, all of us could have co-existed peacefully in our home-land.
    Most Hindu-Tamils & the Sinhala -Buddhists are not narrow minded regarding their religious values. I as a Hindu went to the Pansala in my sub urban town to worship Lord Buddha during Wesak & likewise host of Tamils did same. Even now you find the Sinhala Buddhists worshiping in Hindu Temples.
    3.Dilshan F –for your information.
    In 1972 when Standardisation & the selection to the Uni on “District Basis” was introduced,most brilliantstudents from Jaffna who gained 4″A”s or 3″A”s & 1″B” were deprived of entering the Uni, where as Sinhala students wo secured 4 “S”s gained admission.
    This was the cause of the Student population getting agitated in the first place.They organisd processions in the North & East & burned the Effigy of Dr.Badi-udin Mohamed the Minister of Education under Srima Govt.
    On contrary to this District quota system, 40 students entered the Medical Faculty in 1972 or 1773 precisely with a lower aggregate & this batch was called the “Visvanathan Batch”. One student out of this batch of 40 Medics was the daughter of Dr.Visvanathan from St.Bridget’s Convent (if i’m not mistaken). Do you like to know who this Dr.Visvanathan was? He was the Family Physician of the elite Bandaranayakes- Srima’s Doctor.
    By this to a certain extent we should endorse the view of 6.Mani that “If your are born to a higher class family you have all the opportunities and privileges no matter what your race is”.
    Subsequently during the UNP Regime some reforms took place in the education system & we found the Tamils from Batticaloa & Trincomalee gaining entrance to the Universities.
    Finally this “z-Score” system was introduced. I wonder how it works but a true case is, in 2001 a Muslim girl from Kinniya in the Trincomalee district entered the Law Faculty in Colombo with the results of 1″C” & 3″S” where as a Brilliant Sinhala student from Colombo’s leading College got rejected with her all 4″A”s. She managed to go to UK for higher studies. Where is justice here?
    The Ultimate looser is our Country & our people as we are producing more & more LOW QUALITY PROFESSIONALS who are the Builders of our Nation.
    Isn’t it sad? We have dug our own Grave.
    The Conclusion is the Politicians have ruined our nation in order to fill their coffers. They achieved their target by brain washing the innocent people & set up one community against another. Thus our country is not fit to be independent & to be governed by any race of our Land.
    The best possible solution would be- I would rather reserve my comment.

  • 36. Sri Lankan  |  July 13th, 2009 at 3:55 am

    I am yet to read a balanced article on the ethnic issue of Lanka.None is evidence based.authors cannot resist the expression of their speculations rather than been based on facts.Well that is natural.

    anyway I think what is more important is for us to think as Sri Lankans,not as Tamils or Sinhalese…There are wonderful Sinhales wonderful Tamils and wonderful muslims etc…And to rebuild the country.I am a sinhalese but my best friends were Tamils…We never had trouble cos we had the understanding the flexibility….Let us think beyond the horizons for a better future…for a better Sri Lanka for our children….

  • 37. appuamy  |  July 13th, 2009 at 4:07 am

    DBSJ is turning out to be a kind of mystery…..
    Blowing hot and cold with the same breath.

    mmmmm!You can feel my breath,blowing hot and cold eh? Up, close and personal, Aah?…….DBSJ

  • 38. bnaipal  |  July 13th, 2009 at 4:18 am

    The truth is, the Tamilians in the IDP camps need help. The international aid organisations should be given free access. What has Mahinda to hid?
    The Indian Govt. under the petticoat of Sonia Gandhi has turned a blind eye in true Gandhi form.

  • 39. Daya  |  July 13th, 2009 at 4:28 am

    Tamils talk about a “homeland” , but when arrangements were made for the estate Tamils to go back to their “homeland” NONE of them wanted to go.There are more than 50% of the Tamils living outside the envisaged “homeland” , but I bet all my wealth not 1% will go back to the “homeland” if ever one is created.

  • 40. Murugan  |  July 13th, 2009 at 4:39 am

    really interesting read. Thanks DBSJ

    A very good analysis of the last 60 years.

    I hope that the period of communal warfare is finally behind Sri Lanka.

    The writer correctly indicates that Sri Lanka is no longer a democracy. It appears that the ruling party (ruling family) is willing to control and use the media in order to hold onto power forever.

  • 41. Wasantha Ranagala  |  July 13th, 2009 at 6:40 am

    Dear Siva

    Under the bridge lot of things have passed. Do you believe that taking issues back to the by gone era would ever resolve the issues at hand. Sufferings of IDPs and concentration camps are just repeating what those who are living by foreign funded orgs exaggerated. In repeating them you only push the misery they suffered under Sun God for none achievable Eelam to an extended length.

    Let them restart their lives in their original homes once the mines laid by Sun God are removed. Talk about ethnic cleansing with adding the Muslims and Sinhalese who were chased away by the terrorists ably supported by the present IDPs for a mythical Eelam. That would bring some respect to your preaching.

    If Tamils continue to talk in this line they would soon lose the overwhelming sympathy they earned from genuine Sinhalese and instead only earn the wrath. Sorry to say the above but thats the harsh reality.

  • 42. Marzook  |  July 13th, 2009 at 6:42 am

    It is the self-centred and power-seeking attitudes of those who controlled the political process of the country on the eve of independance and thereafter, for the achievement of which they resorted to adopting ad-hoc policies in governace, economy, education, etc. were the cause of the instability beginning with the 1952 hartal, the 1971 insurgency, Tamil militancy and terrorism, adoption of three constitutions within only thirty years with the third being amended 17 times. All these led to the unfortunate blood shed. At least from now on there should be a clear vision for the country. Whether this could be expected from the present breed of politicians is a doubt. All the people; Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims and others, we have suffered enough and cannot suffer anymore. All should unite to direct the political process in the country in the right path for us to live in peace and harmony. The people should take control of the politicians and should not be under the control of politicians.

  • 43. Dilshan F  |  July 13th, 2009 at 6:45 am

    To Pavithra, Herman & Rajiv, thank you for commenting on the ‘Z’ score and standardisation. Thanks to DBSJ history is also taught. frankly I didnt know about the standardisation. As many have confirmed its as bad as apartheid. I am very proud that my ‘Tile Baas’s son from Kalutara entered Engineering Faculty he had to obtain high ‘Z’ score. this just proves that ones standing is no barrier to one proving himself. But I would still like some of our Tamil friends here to comment on the present Uni admission based on the ‘Z’ score is fair.Tamil Sahodara Sahodarekalin neelanyai Sallmudiyuma Thayavusaithu. – I hope I got that right !

  • 44. Dilshan F  |  July 13th, 2009 at 7:00 am

    Todays Morning show hosted by Hudson there was a telephone conversation with Mrs Amirthalingam. As youngster I have heard that some claimed of some racial comments she had made in the good old days which I cannot say here. She claimed that the LTTE killed her husband and when she talked about the IDP and their facilities her line was softly disconnected. Anyway my comment is about the IDP that Siva is talking about. I also couldnt understand the fear the GOSL had in sending them back. In a recent interview with the Hindu the President had stated that he didnt want a post Saddam Iraq here in Sri Lanka. Now its clear. everyday the Military is unearthing tons of ammunition. While I hope that demining and unearthing of ammo be completed soon, my prayer is for the IDp to return home as soon as possible.I do not find the GOSL attitude wrong given the Iraq situation but that does not mean that IDP have to suffer more. I am aware that a tremendous effort is done by all GOSL, NGO and other organisation to make the IDP have a reasonable life. But nothing like Home – eh?

  • 45. Pearl Thevanayagam  |  July 13th, 2009 at 7:04 am

    Before we talk about what the Sinhalese or the British did to the Tamils we should explore what ethnic Tamils did to their own community and the Upcountry Tamils.

    Did we not abide by the caste system when even in India this is being officially abolished. Not only did we pride ourselves on our superiority to other castes (which is utter nonsense considering how the male members of the household surreptitiously sired children with their servants and set up second homes with or without the knowledge of their spouses. Ergo no Tamil can claim they are of this caste or that caste).

    Then before DS disenfranchised Upcountry Tamils, we treated them worse than the slaves.

    Here in the UK the British are dumbstruck by our stupid caste-consciousness even in schools which led to gang fights.

    I have no doubt Siva can do a lot for race relations. But we need to educate our own people to throw out this age-old myth that one caste is superior to the other.

    So let us sweep our own garden before we start accusing others.

  • 46. mani  |  July 13th, 2009 at 7:33 am

    Comment 20 Panhinda

    Well mate I never rooted for a revolution and of course I do understand every body cannot have equal amounts of everthing.What I said is at least everybody should have equal access to basic needs, so if they have the commitment they can prosper in their selected fields.

    Personally speaking I studied in a private school and moment I left the university I was able to secure job in the private sector but I know lot of my batchmates (some even with better grades) cannot still find a decent job due to poor command of English. That is the reality. I am sure if these guys had the same opportunity as me to learn English they would have been far better-off.

    So my argument is that every child in this country should have access to education without a disparity. Every child should have access to food so that they wont be malnourished (but I am not asking strawberries for all!!), every citizen should have access to proper health care and every father/mother should have the ability to provide a shelter to their children (again not a luxury villa?? Just a basic house with running water/electricity)

    If the elected government can provide these basic needs I am sure nobody will complain about discrimination.

  • 47. asoka2  |  July 13th, 2009 at 8:51 am

    This phrase is so true…

    “It is for the Sinhalese people I fear now-for if they come for me in the morning, theyll come for you that night.”

    Some of you were arguing about merit based entrace system to the uni. This works if the whole country has equal resources. But everyone knows that this is not the case in SL.

    I was upset of the system at the time, because i was from colombo and there were students with a lower score from other provinces were able get into Engineering while I could not. But I soon realized that these students were on par with their peers eventhough they were handicapped by not being fluent in English.

  • 48. citizensl  |  July 13th, 2009 at 9:00 am

    comment 33
    “So you oldies living in western capitals specially,leave Sri Lanka to tha Sri Lnakans living in SL,to manage their lives& stop meddling as you have done enough damage already !!!!”

    Amen to that.

    All these diaspora guys living as refugees in Toronto do is whine and complain. 56, 83 complain complain….the tamil diaspora funded tamil terrorism….Tamil Terrorism LOST. Now be good little refugees, grow up and deal with it.

    its not 83 anymore it’s 2009….time for tamils, sinhalese and muslims to live as SRI LANKANS and chart a new course. If tamils become terrorists again well the lesson for us sri-lankans is clear….negotiating with terrorists don’t work (90, 94, 2002) but crushing them works wonders (2009).

    The sun god and the suicide bomber took the tamils up the garden path…..so how about you nearly dead old men go to sleep and let the tamils living sri-lanka try a different approach? like finally living as SRI-LANKANS

    the diaspora can keep whining on these blogs and protesting on the western streets….if you guys don’t like SRI-LANKA by all means create our eelamoid dream in Toronto……but remember the eelamoid dream ain’t gonna happen on SRI-LANKAN soil…..we learned our lesson in 2009 (as well as the painful/shameful lesson of 83).

  • 49. Velauthan  |  July 13th, 2009 at 9:15 am

    Velauthan (#15) replying to Amazed (#31).

    G. G. Ponnamabala DID NOT have the mandate to represent all the minorities or all Tamils. The Eastern Tamils under Tambimuttu had rejected his 50-50 stand. The Muslims had refused to join GGP’s group. T. B. Jaya rejected all overtures of the Ponnambalam group.
    G.G. P had even argued that there were equal numbers of English educated people in the Tamil community and the Sinhala Community, and that the vote should be restricted to such people, and then the 50-50 stand becomes valid. He opposed Universal Franchise, and worked with Governor Stanley in 1935 to stop the enfranchizement of the Indian Estate tamils as required by Donoughmore.
    The enfrancizement of stateworkers that began under Donoughmore was thus stopped in 1936 persuant to an order in Council. Thus when estate workers voted in the first elections and returned a number of CWC memebers, it was an illegal act. nThey had no right to vote as they were Indian citizens.

    Ponnambalam also rejected the “Ceylonese” concept of Senanayake, Arunachalam Mahadeva etc, and instead claimed that he was “a proud Dravidian” (See Handard , 1935, column 3045). The period 1960-2009 has been dominated by increasing falsification of history by the LTTE and also by the Marxists. Fortunately, both these violent fascist groups have no support in society and they have been liquidated and maginalized. Their attempts at violence and terror have backfired.

    It is time to return to the historical sources and understand what happened. The problem of the Indian Estate workers was debated ad nauseum in Parliament in1949 (see the Handard reports), then it was taken up in the supreme court, and finaaly referred to the Privy council.
    The privy council even commended the legislation.
    The Estate workers were indented labour who should have returned to India at the end of their contracts. Those who had lived 7 years was given the right to vote by the citizenship act. Such previlage is not accorded even today to workers in Switzerland or USA. Many people had voted in the first parliamentary elections but they had NO right to vote. So the claim that they were “DISENFRANCHIZED” was pure nonesense, as pointed out by the suprem court and also by the privy council. The court cases were launched by the Arasu Kadchchi.

    The Marxists also found the citizenship act painful to them. It upset their plans for mayhem in the state sector. Chelvanayagam, an arch Caste hegemonist who had previously supported Peri Sundar’s position thtt Indian workers are “low caste” and should not be given the vote, now changed tune as he found a chance to attack Ponnambalam and edge over him in Tamil racism.

    Amazed would perhaps be even more amazed to hear that the first Sinhala-Tamil race riot took place in 1939 and that it was instigated by G. G. Ponnambalam. Go to the Government Archives and pull out the newspaper known as “HIndu Organ”, June 19, 1939 and read a full report. This has also been discussed in various research papers of the Ceylon Studies Seminars at Peradeniya, and in books by Dr. Russell and others.

    Our Tamil leaders, driven by their hubris and their thirst for Arasu power, refused to play the role of a powerful minority and wanted to become the full rulers over the land and enjoy the position they had under the British.. It did not work. It would have been similar to an attempt by the Jewish Moneyed class in New York attempting to impose Yiddish in the USA claiming minority rights.

    In 1976 the Indian tamils led by Thondaman DID NOT accept the Vaddukkoddai resolution. In 1977 the TULF won a majority in the North but NOT in the eastern province. The North and the East have NEVER been politically together!

    Historical truth is more amazing than the propagated fiction that passes off as truth. Read the Hansard, the research literature, and the newspapers of those times yourself.

  • 50. M.Thiru  |  July 13th, 2009 at 9:17 am

    Thank you for posting Siva’s analysis. This is timely because of the back drop : Few days back only there was a news item saying MR would prefer national integration through intermarriages between the two ethinic groups.

    Here Siva a progressive person who is an epitome of Mahinda Chinthanaya on national integration, who left the country well before July 1983 write something based on his experience ( similar to prominent journalist Prof. Elie Wiesel’s ), see the sentiments expressed in the comments section by our educated SAHODARAYAS who still refuse to accept and learn from the mistakes/ blunders made by the ruling elites since 1948.

    I may be proven wrong but the way thingas are developing, My view is the unitary SL is heading towards an army or authoritiarian rule with the backing of some regional & global powers.

  • 51. Maithri Gunsekara  |  July 13th, 2009 at 9:46 am

    Hi all,
    I feel the freedom of speech is a concept most living in SL have trouble with. These blogs allow us to express our views and thoughts as free people so stop trying to judge the bloggers or DBSJ.
    I agree with *35 low quality professionals can be produced by an artificial system. Just look at our Parliment, does it take a Degree to know that 100 ministers is a very expensive and a bad joke at our peoples expense.
    I feel the very low moral threshold imposed by the likes of the above 100 and the greedy wannbe’s of the UNP,JVP,JHU etc. are now going to destroy the slim chance of peace and reconciliation we have by keeping the emergency laws in force and dealing with the IDP’s in poor relative fashion.
    I cant wait to see equality and justice for all those who live in SL but sadly feel the chilling statement made by Siva “It is for the Sinhalese people I fear now-for if they come for me in the morning, they’ll come for you that night.’
    looks very much like the reality.
    Maithri.

  • 52. RAM  |  July 13th, 2009 at 9:54 am

    But the Presidents own actions since the defeat of the Tigers and, more importantly, the political culture that his government, even more than all the previous governments, has created, belies any such democratic outcome. For what has evolved in sixty years of independence is an ethnocentric Sinhala-Buddhist polity reared on falsified history reinforced by feudal customs and myths, with a voting system that seals the ethnic majority in power for ever-while reducing the party system to a war between dynasties, flanked by monks and militias.

    The greater danger for Srilanka is in the geopolitical changes that is going to happen in the South Asian region. The ethnocentric politics in Srilanka will lead the geopolitical change in creating a big Tamil mass to develop polarized political thinking against Sinhalese in communal lines across Park straight, which in turn would reflect in Indian foreign policies with changing times that is going to have long term implications.

    It is for the Sinhalese people I fear now-for if they come for me in the morning, theyll come for you that night.

  • 53. Expatriate  |  July 13th, 2009 at 10:58 am

    Mr. Sivanandan is right on target despite some trivial errors.

    Now what can Tamils do?

    Plan A: Urge progressive elements of Sinhalese society to pressure the regime to release IDP’s and treat Tamils with equal rights. Hope they can force the Rajapaksa regime to change its ways. In other words, ‘reconciliation’ as many are saying.

    However, what are the chances that it will succeed, even in the long run? The very history that Mr. Sivanandan talks about shows that progressives among the Sinhalese have shown no inclination to challenge the racism of their fellow Sinhalese in large numbers. We all know how Dayan Jayatilleka and Rajiva Wijesinha supported and defended the war and provided cover for the mendacity of the brutish Rajapaksa brothers, becoming potentially war criminals themselves. We also know how even Michael Roberts came to the defense of this regime, albeit not wholeheartedly.

    I suggest that Tamils need a Plan B. I would rather not talk about the details in this forum, but Tamils in the Diaspora should gather and come to a serious agreement on what action they can take if the IDPs are permanently held in camps, are allowed to continue to die in the thousands, and the regime carries on its racist policies with hardly any restraint.

    # 31 Amazed :

    Forget #15 Velauthan. This is the old guy who writes as Sebastian Rasalingam in newspapers and blogs, fixated on the word’ Arasu’ in ITAK; in his mind, Sinhalese treated him better than the way Tamils did; Caste conscious Tamil society had treated him badly as an “untouchable” in the 1940s and 50s. I am sympathetic to the fact that caste in Jaffna was an abomination at that time, even though I wasnt born then, but he gets everything wrong based on his bad experiences. If ITAK wanted separation and not federalism from the beginning, why would they have gone through all the negotiations, and why would they have waited all those years for the Vaddukkoddai resolution? The truth is that SJV and GG might have played competitive politics, but neither really wanted a separate country in those years; I can speak authoritatively on this as a grand uncle of mine was an MP close to SJV at that time, and GGs close relatives were our neighbors; my grand uncle was somewhat progressive and helped the temple entry movement, etc.; he and his colleagues in ITAK had no real desire for a separate country.

    Of course they had become captives of youth anger by the mid 1970’s and matters went beyond their control.

    But it is safe to ignore the claims of Sebastian Rasalingam alias Velauthan. We dont need lessons from him.

  • 54. Amazed  |  July 13th, 2009 at 11:17 am

    Cassandra #34
    Ethnicity-based political parties formed by minority groups are not racist. They’re fighting for minority rights. Such parties specify the particular community whose interests it wants to protect. Racism is about fighting for supremacy over other communities, not for equal rights.

    Political parties formed by the majority do not need to name themselves after their community in order to pursue majoritarian politics. They usually announce themselves as “national” but nevertheless practice communitarian politics of the majority group. That’s racism because it is about ensuring the domination of the majority community over minorities. We have seen this several times in Sri Lanka, haven’t we, where so called “united” and “national” parties have championed Sinhalese chauvinism?

    As for Prabhakaran being nurtured in a culture of violence, yeah, he grew up during the time of state massacres of the JVP and Sinhalese massacres of Tamils. No doubt that influenced him.

  • 55. Fauzer  |  July 13th, 2009 at 12:01 pm

    Peace.

    It is painful to be reminded of the injustices suffered by Tamils, post independence. But like a lot of comments here, we can’t be stuck on in the past too much. I know that many of the ‘democratic west’ have had very bad histories indeed and some are still causing serious harm to people in parts of the world and calling it fair.

    Sri Lanka has many many faults, but there are precious few who point out the good things about Sri Lanka.

    I am perhaps too young and probably too limited in knowledge of history to comment on most of the writers finer points and iferences. But from my personal experience and views, I reject his claims of ethnic cleansing of Tamils, and his claim that Standardisation, as it is at present, is designed against Tamils.

    Standardisation is a form of affirmative action. You can agree or disagree on its merits and / or its design.

    I am a Tamil speaking Muslim, from a village / town around Kandy. I was able to get into a leading Colombo school thru the government’s grade 5 ’scholarship’ test. Now, parents around that school could have argued that the scholarship test was discriminatory against their children, who’s place I might have taken up instead.

    There were of course many Tamils in my class from all over the country.

    If studying in Colombo was beneficial in so many ways, it had its downside too, now I had to score a lot more to get into Uni, than I might have otherwise had to do if I had studied in Kandy, but you won’t find me complaining about standardisation. I am ever so greatful for an education system, while not being perfect, has given me so much and set me up to go and do other things in life.

    A search for ‘affirmative action’ on Wikipedia lists the following countries as having it in one form or another;

    usa, canada, brazil, india, sri lanka, japan, china, malaysia, new zeland, finland, france, germany, norway, uk, macedonia, and south africa. although not mentioned there, i know australia has it too, and prsumably other countires if one would care to do some research.

    human beings must continously endevour to make better – one’s ownself, his / her family, community, country, and the world. at the same time the group that habitually portray sri lanka as a hopeless basket case are not helping, and I suspect, their intentions are not to help either.

    in my view, as long as LTTE were around, whether they got Eelam or not, there would have been no real peace for any body in the island. I think we now have the best chance of real peace and prosperity. how about putting all our energy in what we can do now and in the future?

  • 56. Thangachi  |  July 13th, 2009 at 12:56 pm

    Quite a detailed and well written out article.

    However its quite one sided and biased for OBVIOUS reasons.

    U mention Brainwashing from the government. OK FINE LETS AGREE.

    Why havent you flipped that argument to the LTTE brainwashing there own children to kill them selves?

    How about Brainwashing the Diaspora to protest for there protection when the SLA was about to Anhialate them?

    How about the Brainwashing of the IDPs by the LTTE to keep them with them as a human shield?

    HOW ABOUT shooting at your OWN TAMIL people (IDPs) while running to the army cleared areas?

    Whats sad is there is VIDEO footage of LTTE herding IDPs with guns and shooting at them while trying to flee and when u SHOW this FOOTAGE to the DIASPORA they are sooo BRAINSWASHED they dont even adress that fact.

    All that is said is govt this govt that! WELL this govt u keep blaming FED there own enemy while fighting them, WHY? because of IDPs.. Sent water medicine to the ENEMY for the IDPs ( tamils) sake.

    EVEN now millions of ruppees are SPENT on these IDPS daily by this so called RACIST government.

    On behalf of the govt id like to Apologize for keeping these IDPs for longer as we just finished a 30 yrd old war and would LIKE TO SCREEN them all and WEED OUT terrorist so THIS SHIT wont HAPPEN again to the motherland.

    No mention of the racist govt sending food to the tamil IDPS or SAVING Them from the LTTE who were shooting THEM..

    what a one side BS article.. and DBS u should be ashamed for posting such horse shit.

    DBSJ RESPONDS:

    Aney Nangi (you are certainly not Thangaichi ). The manner in which you have commented (and I thought it was going to be a constructive, amiable conversation)shows how “well” you have comprehended Sivanandan’s talk. I dont think any attempt by me to explain matters would have any positive impact either.

    But just one thing.

    You say the article is “BS” (bullshit?) and then ask me not to post horseshit. Now tell me what kind of shit is this. Bullshit or horseshit? make up your mind. I will bow to your superior judgement. I can see that you are very knowledgeable about shitty matter (s).

  • 57. Pearl Thevanayagam  |  July 13th, 2009 at 3:57 pm

    Velayuthan,
    I am afraid I have to take my hats off to you for giving us well researched insight into the political manoeuvring of our Tamil politicians.

    I only vaguely remember studying about Solbury and Donohgmore commission in Grades Seven and eight. Other than that we dropped history for science studies.
    However, today’s children only know history from 1983 onwards where media was blitzed and they heard one-sided news depending on where they lived.

    Tamil diaspora do not want to know about the Sinhalese and vice versa.

    It is incumbent on historians like you to make efforts to tell our children the truth.

    Otherwise we are heading for a situation similar to that of the Jews.

  • 58. confused confucius  |  July 13th, 2009 at 4:58 pm

    Where did all the struggle took the tamil people ????
    Nowhere
    Was the condition of the Tamil people in the 50’s worse than the Apartheid, Holocaust or pre 1850’s of the Black people.
    And see where are those people now?
    Now look at the Tamil people where did they start and where have they finished?

    “Eppidi iruntha naan, ippudi aawittane”

  • 59. Rajiv  |  July 13th, 2009 at 8:39 pm

    #43 Dilshan

    I agree that the current system has benefited Tamils domiciled in designated districts. But from an ethical point of view its not fair and ultimately induces a brain drain to the detriment of the country. Sri Lanka needs its best and the brightest regardless of their linguistic affiliations. As #14 Navin alluded to there are certainly regional disparities in terms of infrastructure and facilities. But the right thing to do is to create a level playing field for all and NOT move the goal post to help the “weak”.

  • 60. Ciero  |  July 13th, 2009 at 9:10 pm

    “It is for the Sinhalese people I fear now-for if they come for me in the morning, theyll come for you that night”

    How true, they are already here, we see more assaults and kidnappings of not only journalists but others as well. many unresolved deaths, arrests, kidnappings and threats-think only Tamils are affected? Ask the horrified family of Kelaniya Pradeshiya Sabha Chairman Prasanna Ranaweera.

  • 61. Navin  |  July 13th, 2009 at 10:18 pm

    #53. Expatriate

    I suggest that Tamils need a Plan B. I would rather not talk about the details in this forum, but Tamils in the Diaspora should gather and come to a serious agreement on what action they can take if the IDPs are permanently held in camps, are allowed to continue to die in the thousands, and the regime carries on its racist policies with hardly any restraint.

    Wow! If your statement is any indication of the thinking of the likes of SJV and GG, no wonder they had separatism in their minds all along. Its people like you who think Tamils can get whatever they want, whenever they want, in exactly the way they want, regardless of what the Sinhalese think, that will never allow this problem to be solved.

  • 62. Panhinda  |  July 13th, 2009 at 10:57 pm

    dear mani,

    /*
    know lot of my batchmates (some even with better grades) cannot still find a decent job due to poor command of English. That is the reality. I am sure if these guys had the same opportunity as me to learn English they would have been far better-off.
    */

    that was why they were given sinhala-only. you mean they still cannot find a job? so what do you propose? make sinhala-only globally? you should ask your uni buddies to adapt to global realities than trying to bend the world according to their own narrow maxist whims and fancies.

  • 63. karan  |  July 13th, 2009 at 11:35 pm

    Re#53 Expatriate,I wish it is so easy to ignore caste issues in Jaffna,Remember Chellan Kandaiyan former mayor of jaffna and how LTTE prevented him from the official opening of Jaffna library( 2003 i think) function.But then again we are so averse to learning from mistakes.As you yourself acknowledge we do not need lessons from him( velayuthan).I do not agree with all of his comments but to imply caste issues are no longer there in our community is to live in cuckoo land!

  • 64. Bandara Atapattu  |  July 13th, 2009 at 11:35 pm

    Surprisingly, no one seems to ask to which extent the IDPs are responsible for their own present misery. Would it have been possible to sustain VP’s terror machine for 25 years, without these masses? Does anyone thank MR & Co for freeing them from LTTE clutches that used them as human shields? Why is it everyone asking the Sinhalese to demonstrate on the streets asking the government to release the IDPs? Why don’t the Tamils take the initiative? And why didn’t the Tamils take to the streets, when LTTE was slaughtering innocent civilians, simply because they happened to be borne as Sinhalese? Why?

  • 65. RS Wickramasinghe  |  July 13th, 2009 at 11:47 pm

    Wow!

    What a vigorous discussion Sivanandan’s article has provoked, perhaps the most important I have read on this blog.

    To Velauthan,

    You have pointed out that the Tamil leadership prior to 1970’s were active participants in the machiavellian machinations of the State that were later deemed as sinhalese racism, and that their complicity reflected agendas and that arose from divisions and positions within the Tamil community.

    Pearl Thevanayagam has agreed with this.

    The conclusion implicit is that the idea of a “Tamil Freedom” struggle lacks basis.

    So why then did the conflict accelerate in the 1970’s. Is it that young people who became radicalised were totally fooled by the feudal barony of the Federal Party?

    You can fool all of the people some of the time, or some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.

    is it possible that other factors were at play?

    What about population pressures of hunger and overpopulation?

    Why was there a massive revolt against government among young sinhalese in the south at the same time there was a revolt among young Tamils in the North? Both of these revolts were terroristic in nature.

    Mere coincidence? Did they really have separate mothers i.e eelamism and vimukthi, or the same? Hunger and overpopulation?

    Jeyaraj is right when he says the future of the Tamils is inextricably intwined with the Sinhalese. From dress to food to values, even in their violence the two communities are a mirror image of each other.

    How does the reality of hunger and the threat of hunger produce fear psychosis? How does it feed divisions, and provide fresh impetus to foment violence by opportunistic politicians looking to take the heads of feeling?

    Hunger and overpopulation, Not a sexy explanation, certainly one which defies grand deterministic narratives of marxist dialectic class logic, or ancient civilisational divisions, and one which seems to dilute the assumption that leaders have complete agency and therefore responsibilty over creating history.

    Last week the UN published a report identifying hunger as the major factor which has underpinned all the major conflicts of the 20th century.

    Demography has also shown that where there is a high proportion of young men to older people in a population strata, there is also a greatly increased likelihood of terrorism.

    This is true from Iran to Pakistan to Palestine today.

    Of course that does diminish the reality of racism both past and present, and the need for major reform to provide safeguards in law and institutions to prevent tensions which are present in all societies from fomenting into violence.

    But it also means we should not lose sight of what the big picture is and the basic human needs that we must all work to meet.

  • 66. confused confucius  |  July 14th, 2009 at 1:59 am

    CAN WE DO ANYTHING ?
    CAN ANYONE DO ANYTHING?

    PUTTING POLITICAL PRESSURE IS THE ONLY WAY BUT

    CAN YOU PRESSURIZE CHINA??

  • 67. banu  |  July 14th, 2009 at 3:07 am

    Pretty good analysis but the writer has conviniently forgotten certain important facts,

    1.1972 uni standardization didnt mean that tamil students had to score “HIGHER ” marks it was for the sake of rural students who didnt have facilities but he’s partialy correct beacuse it meant JAFFNA or COLOMBO students had to score higher than students from Mullaitivu or kilinochchi.

    2. It was the high caste tamils of jaffna and colombo who opposed to giving any rights to upcountry tamils.

    3.In 1977 the upcountry tamils got voting rights.

    4.In 1977 Tamil was also made a state language.

    5.Ethnic cleansening(butchering is the correct word) of sinhalese and muslims in north,east and north central till very recently by Tamil tigers

    6.The concept of two countries was developed long before independence and before any of those racist acts and riots.

    7.In 1983 after the riots in the south broke out a similar thing against the sinhalese happened in the north.
    (Even though not to a extent like the south and no one was killed and it was so much a scaled down version but some sinhalese were beaten up, one case was of a student who came back home only wearing his underwear ! )

  • 68. banu  |  July 14th, 2009 at 3:09 am

    nothing racial, just trying to have a balance view

  • 69. banu  |  July 14th, 2009 at 3:31 am

    to # 35 pavithra

    why do u say a SINHALA student with 4 s passes got in to uni but not the jaffna student ? even a TAMIL student from mullaitivu who got 4 s passes got in instead of the jaffna student.Correct me if i’m wrong

    Shame on u for trying to stem up racism.

  • 70. Tamilan-Sydney.  |  July 14th, 2009 at 3:38 am

    >>27. .nihal pathirana | July 13th, 2009 at 1:12 am
    In take to medical faculties in australia are limited students get 98% marks have been regected as some get over 99% but few places are been reserved for refugees and islanders from rural areas.

    Get the facts correct Nihal. 98% or 99% mentioned here are PERCENTILE rank and not the real ranks.

    If you compare the same, Sri Lanka’s entry levels are higher.

    Many parents here do not want to show that what their kid got was percentile rank;

  • 71. banu  |  July 14th, 2009 at 3:42 am

    the Z score system is very fair.

    i’m a student from colombo who did AL’s in maths stream even though i got a comaratively good Z score (1.5) i was not able to get in to engineering from my district(which reqiured 2.0 ) even though many rural students(ex -monaragla,nuwaraeliya,mullaitivu,kili) were able to with just having z scores of just 0.8 or 0.9.

    i wasn’t disheartend i just studied more and got a Z score of 2.6 the next time around and got in .So do i complain NO so whats the fuss?

    These rural children doesnt have anything at all this is there only chance and us living in colombo are much better off, so please dont complain.

  • 72. shankar  |  July 14th, 2009 at 4:57 am

    to comment 5 tissa

    the doctor you mentioned did not enter medical college because he was from jaffna, but because he scored very high marks and came 109th in the island. you obviously heard the whole interview but with typical shrewdness omit and distort. if sinhalese dont enter it is because they dont study hard enough or their class teachers are not that dedicated. intelligence is not a factor because the sinhalese are intelligent. why dont you rectify the weak points without trying to bring down the other fellow. i am reminded of the joke where in hell there are pitholes according to countries. only the srilankan one did not have a security guard. when asked the devil replied “we dont. need to worry about the srilankans. when someone tries to escape the others drag him down.

  • 73. Amazed  |  July 14th, 2009 at 5:15 am

    Velauthan #49

    You have this notion that history reveals its own truth in a transparent fashion, so you urge me to read the media reports of the time and to comb through the hansard reports. Also, your idea of history is that of the story of individuals, of heroes and villains clashing.

    I have read enough views of GG Ponnambalam to see that history is not quite settled on who he was and the nature of the legacy he passed on. History is usually a story told from someone’s perspective, although current historical scholarship tries to correct this by seeing the past through multiple various lenses to grasp the complexity of the moment. You see GGP as a racist, who was also obsessed by caste. I could go through the same archives and say that his alleged racism and casteism was a political strategy to obtain equal rights. The British created a colonial class elite based on english-language education, with Tamils and Sinhalese enjoying equal power. Once the idea of universal franchise was floated, it would have terrified Tamil politicians because now the Tamils would have to live as a minority community. Given that situation, it would have been strategic for GGP to oppose universal franchise and giving the vote to the lower castes, not because he was a firm believer in caste, but simply as a tactic to keep the voting numbers equal,or certainly more equitable, between the two communities.

    But ultimately, I don’t see history as being about personalities. One needs to look at structural causation of historical events, including the structural causation of actors like GGP and DS. What were the conditions obtaining in the 1930s that made it possible for a GGP and his ideas to emerge? That’s why I find Sivanandan’s account more satisfactory–because he deals with structural causes such as the haphazard overlay of capitalism over a feudal system of social relations, how that created political dynasties and the racialism that continue to rule today in SL. You want to attack GGP but the racism/racialism was in the system he inherited. Sociologist Pradeep Jeganathan has done some fine work in charting the formation of “Sinhala” and “Tamil” as ‘races’ during the colonial era: he contends that they did not identify as such in the pre-colonial era and that Tamil and Sinhalese are in fact British colonial fabrications that were politically entrenched in the independence period. Also, the 1930s were a period of European nationalisms, and GGP was caught in that.

    History also moves on and it would be silly to equate GGP’s alleged racism with that of the Tigers and their notion of a Tamil Eelam in one straight line of development. The Tigers emerged in the 1970s, four whole decades later out of a different historical context of massacres of Tamils, burning of their library, discrimination, Sinhalese chauvinism of the state itself, etc.

    I wonder too about this focus on Tamil nationalism/racism now, with the Tigers dead, and the Tamils practically reduced to begging for a living. Somebody suggested that they may be the Jews of the future! Really, is that what this bombed out community looks like? Not like destitute human beings? For people to pile this history of racism on disenfranchised poor Tamils (the wealthy and middle-class have largely fled the country) requires some racialised thinking itself.

    The study of history should be empowering and liberating, rather than lead to further oppression. What does Velauthan’s version of history point to but further persecution of Tamils? Sivanandan’s, by contrast, tells us the answer lies in breaking the mould of dynastic politics, greater democratization and a more uniform access to capitalism.

  • 74. shankar  |  July 14th, 2009 at 5:18 am

    dbs

    i agrree with you that this was a high quality article from a well educated man. his commentery on swrd was quite accurate. if swrd used the 70 per cent sinhala bhuddhist factor to his advantage what were our tamil leaders doing. instead of sitting duck satyagrahas they should have sent a clear message to swrd, that if he is going to use percentage politics so are we.

  • 75. Nissanka  |  July 14th, 2009 at 7:31 am

    Thank you Navin 10 for your reply. I think you wrote everything I wanted to say.

    It is a pity Siva did not mention much about the atrocities
    committed by VP & Co. Tamil Diaspora celebrated every time a lot of Sinhala blood was spilt. The topic at dinner parties in London, Melbourne Toronto etc,. was how successful the boys and their suicide bombs were.
    The more Sinhala blood was spilt, the more money was donated for the LTTE by the diaspora. Such was the hatred they had for the Sinhala. But look at the Sinhala people. Even after all these killings still the IDPs are supplied with all sorts of things from here down south.
    because we know the difference between the ordinary tamil person and the terrorist.

    However, lets hope that MR can deliver what he is preaching and there will be peace and harmony for everyone to live in peace.

    Bye for now.

  • 76. Saman  |  July 14th, 2009 at 8:23 am

    The comments welcome, however times have changed and continue to change rapidly. I am sinhala and live in rural SL and have many transactions in the predominantly Sinhala areas. An above average rate of these transactions are with ethnic tamil people who appear on the face of it to have integrated into the fabric of their adopted places of living, (not Colombo I might add) They appear to me to be successful and prosperous.

    I am merely making an observation here, that all races in SL can live in harmony, and actually more harmoniously than sinhala people themselves who in my experience seem to be constantly at war with their relatives or neighbors.( I dont know if my tamil friends are more united, but as they are a minority in my area, they are more likely to help each other to improve their economic prospects)

    I believe what we need is a little thinking through of our actions, as well as why we believe what we believe, and then may find it surprising that we harbor prejudices without real merit. That is the moment we can come of age and let history be just that, and try to really build our collective lives, using rational thought and justice.

    We can then extinguish the brainwashing that takes place, as well as the abuse of power by the elected and appointed representatives that make the lives of ordinary people very difficult. The moment we believe we are being picked on because of race, we ask for trouble, as it is not race, but the rule of tin pots dictators over people they perceive are lesser mortals, just because they are believed to be less powerful.

    This cuts across race, as I have faced prejudice when I am perceived to be a poor peasant, and being totally differently treated when I am perceived to be one of means, and can question the tin pot’s action with authority.

    We are focusing I believe on the wrong problem. A quiet revolution is more powerful than one with bells and whistles. It takes over hearts and minds without the perpetrator realizing he is completely outfoxed and then not in control of his own destiny anymore.

  • 77. shankar  |  July 14th, 2009 at 8:28 am

    to comment 71 banu

    are you saying someone gets 1.5 and does not get entrance and someone else gets .9 and gets entrance and that is fair. what is the logic in that. by davaluing the quality of undergraduates you have a whole heap of people only having paper certificates. the private sector does not want them. they prefer to take nongraduates and train them. why is that? because they have to earn their money the hard way and once burnt they dont want to touch these guys anymore. so the goverment has to pack them into the public service which is bloated beyond belief. so you are depriving a good chap of a job and giving a certificate to a guy who is not going to get the job. frustration all over the country.

  • 78. kovanam  |  July 14th, 2009 at 11:17 am

    The truth is…
    “we are faced with in my country today, is a brainwashed people, brought up on lies and myths, their intelligentsia told what to think, their journalists forbidden to speak the truth on pain of death, the militarising of civil society and the silencing of all opposition.”

    The consequence is….

    “It is for the Sinhalese people I fear now-for if they come for me in the morning, they’ll come for you that night.”

  • 79. confused confucius  |  July 14th, 2009 at 12:07 pm

    THE Z SCORE LAUGHTER
    ————————————-
    I don’t understand why everyone is worried about the Z scores. It doesn’t matter what form your results come (Malu Banis, Anamalu, Dead tamil tigers, Z score, absolute score, District ranking or Sri Lankan ranking)………. what matters is what’s
    A. your national ranking in that particular field if you are considered under the MERIT system or
    B. Your district ranking if you are considered under the district system

    Obviously there is a difference between the “Pahe shishyathwaya passed, bright boy from Royal College” and the “Pahe shishyathwaya failed boy who studied in a border village or from Mullaivaikkal college” it doesn’t mean that Royal College boy has more or less IQ or Vice Versa.

    I am pretty sure that most of the bright people who dominate this country are from some sort of a high “Z score” college but the outcome is a “SH** SRI LANKA”

    This is the absolute results of our assessment process and the statistics.

    What we need are a group of people who are more humane, patriotic (Not the chauvinists of the patriotic band wagon), and people who like to take care, protect and uplift the roots from they rose, to the current dominance.

    OR……. You can earn a lot of money (by running to and fro from private hospital – just an eg:) and go to hell or born again as a “Mee Haraka” whatever you like to choose

  • 80. Stephen Jones  |  July 14th, 2009 at 12:18 pm

    The article contains numerous historical inaccuracies.

  • 81. Stephen Jones  |  July 14th, 2009 at 12:29 pm


    6.The concept of two countries was developed long before independence and before any of those racist acts and riots.

    7.In 1983 after the riots in the south broke out a similar thing against the sinhalese happened in the north.

    Lots of mistakes here. The Sinhalese were evacuated from Jaffna by Jayawardene, who feared reprisals, not as a result of actual reprisals.

    The concept of two countries came to the fore in the seventies, after the 1972 constitution. The discussion before independence was about guarantees for non-Sinhalese in a unified Sri Lanka.

  • 82. Stephen Jones  |  July 14th, 2009 at 12:43 pm

    Velauthan

    The disenfranchizement of the Estate Tamils was a disgraceful piece of legislation, and was passed because Ponnambulam and Senayake wanted to restrict the left wing vote bank (and of course there is also Senayake’s bizarre but well documented prejudice against Indians in Lanka).

    To call them indented labour who should have gone home is really a disgraceful comment. The only person, apart from the Federal and Marxist parties, who come out of this with any credit is Nehru, who refused to have anything to do with it. Unfortunately his daughter didn’t have his high moral standards, which is why we got the Indira-Sirimavo pact, and India started to accept those who had been expelled.

  • 83. wesley  |  July 14th, 2009 at 12:53 pm

    In comment # 59 Rajiv says:
    I agree that the current system has benefited Tamils domiciled in designated districts. But from an ethical point of view its not fair and ultimately induces a brain drain to the detriment of the country. Sri Lanka needs its best and the brightest regardless of their linguistic affiliations. As #14 Navin alluded to there are certainly regional disparities in terms of infrastructure and facilities. But the right thing to do is to create a level playing field for all and NOT move the goal post to help the “weak”.

    It is important to realise that rural students are disadvantaged not just in the quality of facilities, infrastructure and teachers. Attitudes of rural parents towards education are another factor. A rural family or an urban squatter family may have 8 kids living in a ghetto house with parents because of poverty tend to be less interested in education and more interested in getting the kids to quit school early to contribute to the family income. In contrast to urban parents who take great pains to get their kids into the best schools, find the best tution classes for them, constantly encouraging them to study and making sure their kids socialise with the right crowd, rural kids because of the mindset of their parents, grow up in an environment that is just not conducive for studies. Changing rural parents attitudes ( regardless of whether they are Tamil or Singhalese ) often takes longer than providing better infrastructure.

    While on the topic of attitudes or mindsets I’m going to digress a bit and mention rural education and the extent Malaysia went to change mindsets. Malaysia had realised that children in rural areas simply did not have the environment that was conducive for learning or developing progressive values. Creating schools in rural areas was not enough, because after school hours, the environment they returned to – crowded small homes, uneducated parents, the children whom they played with, never helped broaden their minds. Now just like Colombo has elite schools like Royal etc, major towns in Malaysia had similar schools, many of them former missionary schools. What the government did was to bring many of these rural pupils and place them in such schools in urban areas. Near these schools they built residential hostels. Additionally, new totally residential schools with all facilities were built in towns for them, and pupils were only allowed to return home to their villages during school holidays.

    Yes, creating a level playing field is important, but understand that creating that level playing field ( whether it is with regards to infrastructure, facilities or inculcating progressive values in rural folks) takes time, and during that time rural students should not be left at a disadvantage with respect to urban students, because of the dangers that situation can lead to.

    Yes, some brain drain among the urban educated or more specifically, money drain due to urban students, unable to get places in local universities going overseas for studies is always possible. To some extent Malaysia has overcome this, by allowing private universities ( which charge higher fees ) to operate.

    From an ethical point of view, it is very important that affirmative polices are in place for these rural folks, otherwise very serious rural – urban tensions can result. When the whole country is an urban area or city state like Singapore, then only meritocracy become feasible.

    In comment # 65 RSW asks: Is it possible that other factors were at play? What about population pressures of hunger and overpopulation? Why was there a massive revolt against government among young sinhalese in the south at the same time there was a revolt among young Tamils in the North? Both of these revolts were terroristic in nature.

    Mere coincidence?

    No its not a coincidence – Sri Lanka very foolishly followed socialist economic policies in the 1950’s to late 1970’s instead of focusing on job creation by inviting foreign direct investment and allowing privatisation, which SE Asian countries like Malaysia ( who only got independence in 1957 ) did. Sri Lankan politicians as well as economic advisers ( Sinhalese and Tamil ) of that era are to be blamed for this.

  • 84. Pramod  |  July 14th, 2009 at 1:46 pm

    Who is to blame for the current predicament of Srilanka? Good or bad.

    70 % of Sinhalese?

    13 % of Tamils ?

    Prabhakaran?

    Jayavardhane?

    Bandaranaika?

    Selvanyagam?

    Ponnambalam?

    It looks Rajapakshe is maintaining the staus quo.

  • 85. Dinesh Gopalapillai  |  July 14th, 2009 at 2:08 pm

    There is still discrimination in university admissions. The Government has simply replaced standardization with a specific admissions quota (15%) that favors rural Sinhalese students. If there was ever any justification for Tamils taking up arms, it need not be that the State made mistakes… it is that the State never learned from those mistakes and continues with its racist policies.

  • 86. Expatriate  |  July 14th, 2009 at 2:45 pm

    #61-Naveen,

    I don’t see any outrage from you that the entire population of the Vanni is internment camps. No condemnation of the scorched earth excesses; of the white van abductions and murders; of the maiming of large numbers of innocent civilians. And yet, you want me to consult you on the way I can help these IDPs or think about ways of ensuring that justice is served on this regime? And that is going to ’solve’ the problem?

    Listen, any talk of reconciliation is predicated on the condition that Tamils will live as equals. They won’t be kissing your ass. If you can’t stand that, you are the one advocating separatism. I have no time for people like you.

  • 87. Expatriate  |  July 14th, 2009 at 3:05 pm

    63. karan,

    My point is not that casteism has vanished in Tamil society. It is that Velauthan aka S.Rasalingam has for long been talking in support of the oppressor of Tamil people based on his hatred of the people in Tamil society who had oppressed him. There are even questions about his truthfulness because while he claims to be an old man living in Toronto, he writes to other blogs saying he was able to visit the IDP camps in the Vanni courtesy of officials. That is reason enough to believe that lurking behind these names is a charlatan who is paid to support this regime. Never in his writings have I seen any condemnation of the wretched excesses of this war; no feeling for the suffering masses of Tamil people, some of whom must be from the very community that he claims to be oppressed by casteist Tamils. Everything he says is in support of the Rajapaksa regime. Does that make him credible at all? I have reliable information that some of the people who write like him, including one economist from Point Pedro, are paid by the current SL regime. So people need to be wary of this character.

  • 88. One Observer  |  July 14th, 2009 at 5:59 pm

    This S. Rasalingam chap (#15) is a curious character. I have come across him elsewhere. The manner in which he justifies Sinhala atrocities is shocking. Here is how Mr. Rasalingam justifies racist riots against Tamils:

    “Should I remind Mr. Kumaran that the first Sinhala-Tamil Riot occurred in 1939, in Navalapitiya, and spread to Passara, Maskeliya and to many other towns, when the Colonial government stepped in and stamped it out?

    The riot was sparked by the inflammatory racist speech of GGP in Navalapitiya, attacking the Sinhala Buddhists and the Mahavamsa (see The Hindu Organ, June 1, 1939 and other newspapers of the time). ”

    ——

    So according to S. Rasalingam, for every Sinhalese act of brutality, there is a Tamil serpent lurking in the corner! If it’s a riot, then the serpent is a speech. Federalism did not work because Tamil leaders were only interested in “polarizing” the two communities. BC Pact did not work because of a few gallons of paint. What logic this fellow comes with! BUT I would like him to explain why Chelva the great “separatist” waited until the 1970’s to support the Tamil homeland demand. Why did these caste-conscious Vellars wait till 1983 for armed struggle, if the separate state idea was there in their minds from the 1948?

    By the way, I would like to remind S. Rasalingam of the 1915 Sinhalese riots against Muslims. Perhaps he can find a Muslim serpent to justify that one too.

  • 89. Navin  |  July 14th, 2009 at 9:58 pm

    # 86. Expatriate:

    #61-Naveen,

    I dont see any outrage from you that the entire population of the Vanni is internment camps. No condemnation of the scorched earth excesses; of the white van abductions and murders; of the maiming of large numbers of innocent civilians. And yet, you want me to consult you on the way I can help these IDPs or think about ways of ensuring that justice is served on this regime? And that is going to solve the problem?

    Truth is there was never a plan A. Even if there was one, it was simply initiate plan B!

    Im not outraged by Wanni people living in camps today for its not the work of Sri Lankan state! They are suffering today because of those Tamils who had more faith on your plan B and thought they had the might to subjugate the Sinhalese into giving everything they ever wanted. Besides, though your arrogance doesnt allow you to see what the government is doing to give these people a new life, I do. I see light at the end of the tunnel; you dont.

    Do I need to remind you the events that led to the war after MR got electedbus loads of soldiers that got killed by your Makkalei Paddei in Jaffna and elsewhere? How your leader refused to negotiate on flimsiest of excuses? How they closed the Marwil Aru and deprived water to 15,000 farmers? How they tried to assassinate SF? Hence its people like you who initiated plan B and relied on your boys to deliver the goods that are responsible for the scorched earth excesses not us ordinary Sinhalese who your boys thought fit to blow up every once in while. Besides most importantly, MR was elected by your boys. Not by the Sinhalesedont forget that!

    White Vans? Well, I think GR gave a fitting answer to that question: In US these are called covert operations and here they are called abductions. Its a matter of terminology. As long as there are terrorist cells in the city actively executing your plan B, there shall be white vans. White vans are the response to actions of your boys. If you want to blame anyone for that, blame themnot us.

    The problem is not the fact that Tamils dont have equality in Sri Lanka but people like you have a warped definition of equality. For you, equality was what you had under the British. For you getting equality is having a parliament that reserves 50% of its seats for 25% minority! Need I say more?

    I meet many Tamils in my work and I serve them in the same way I serve Sinhalese or Muslims. There may be those scoundrels that discriminate against Tamils but they are not the majority nor does the majority sanction their actions. On the contrary, the dispute is over how much political power the Tamils are entitled to. The question of how much will not arise if you work for the common good of every one. Then you can have it ALL. Unfortunately, your leaders lack the courage and magnanimity to work towards that ultimate goal. Your boys saw to it that people like LK who wanted to take that path never succeeded. Deny it if you like, but had LK been alive today he would have been the prime minister. Still, for you he is not a Tamil but a traitor. Hence I guess it wont matter much even if he were to become the PM.

    Of course partitioning the country is fine as long as we can come up with a proper partitioning. A partitioning that sets aside 2/3rds of the coastline and 40% of the land mass for exclusive use of 13% of the population even if we ignore all the historical aspects, distribution of other resources like minerals etc., is a hard sell to any community unless they are deaf, blind and outright dumb. For people who ask for equality, you sure have a funny calculus.

    Listen, any talk of reconciliation is predicated on the condition that Tamils will live as equals. They wont be kissing your ass. If you cant stand that, you are the one advocating separatism. I have no time for people like you.

    If you want reconciliation, then first get rid of your superiority complex. If you think you can get what you want by intimidating the Sinhalese– by dangling your plan B, and then go try that. If you want the Sinhalese to give the preferential treatment you got under the British, then go fly a kite.

  • 90. Amazed  |  July 14th, 2009 at 10:08 pm

    Saman #76
    You speak a lot of good sense. But how do we go about carrying out this “quiet revolution”, changing a society’s prejudices, making them drop their beliefs in race and move towards multiculturalism? Education would be the most obvious way but then the state controls education. How can we change the current curriculum to achieve this?

    Would it help for a new political party to emerge, one that stands on the platform of multiculturalism and fields candidates who equally represent all the various communities? For eg, if 100 candidates need to be fielded for an election, they should field 20 Sinhalese, 20 Tamils, 20 Muslims, 20 Burghers and 20 of other groups, or at least something like that. This would show the electorate they were serious about multiculturalism. It would also open doors wider for minorities to enter politics on the national rather than ethnic ticket.

    Maybe my idea is stupid, but I hope others will contribute more ways to achieving the “quiet revolution” that Saman talks about.

  • 91. RS Wickramasinghe  |  July 15th, 2009 at 12:54 am

    Amazed and Saman,

    The quiet revolution will come with the sense that everyone working together will create prosperity for all

    It will come when people do not live in fear.

    It will come when scarcity no longer involves hunger – in the era of globalisation, the people of the North and East have lived under the shadow of hunger from embargo and all the debilitating and permanent deficits it robs of young people’s future.

    Last of all it will come when people control their reproductive potential.

    If we have these things we will escape Malthusian reality in the passage of time the many feudal divisions that define Sri Lankan society will break down – caste, class, regional parochialism, religious communalism, ethnic rivalry.

    All will see the greater example of what working together can achieve.

    Some of this only the state can create by reforming the systems of society. Much more of it the state can only get in the way of creating.

  • 92. Dilsh  |  July 15th, 2009 at 12:58 am

    #89 Navin

    I like your reply

  • 93. RS Wickramasinghe  |  July 15th, 2009 at 1:03 am

    Saman and Amazed,

    Human populations automatically find a stable equilibrium in the environment.

    It is modernity that complicates and frustrates and defeats this process, even in its best intentions.

    Therefore, we must revise modernity in the light of all we have learned about states and societies, populations and demography in the light of post-modernity, and move Sri Lanka into the same.

  • 94. shankar  |  July 15th, 2009 at 1:50 am

    to comment 89 navin

    1. the srilankan state is responsible for the people living in the camps. why is that?. because it is the srilankan state and therefore it has to view everyone as srilankan first and tamils next.it is not okay to try to shift the responsibility for what happenned on others like what you are trying to do. the state is ultimately responsible for everything good or bad that happens in the country. MR is trying now to create a srilankan identity but tamils wont trust him because he is not allowing people to leave the camp.
    2. the british did not have a parliament that had 50 percent of seats for 25 per cent minority. GG ponnambalam advocated it for post independence srilanka to stop any bulling of the minorities by the majority. the british refused and bullying commenced with SWRD.
    3. as for partitioning you dont look at area, but the historical aspects. the present north and east is the correct area if partition is the answer. if you are getting the balance, hard luck because that is what you had before colonial rule. however after colonial rule and independence the waters have become a muddied with a fair amount of tamils living outside the north and east. therefore i think a federal solution is the best for the tamils. if something less is offered at a free and fair referendum and tamils say yes then i think the book should be closed as the end and we should move on focusing on development and catching up with the west. one problem with asians is there is too much bickering going on which is hindering progress.

  • 95. Ariya  |  July 15th, 2009 at 3:17 am

    What troubles me is today and tomorrow, and if anyone wants to live in the past, that’s their privilege, and the most who needs that privilege lives abroad, not living and working in Sri Lanka and for Sri Lanka!

    People have to live today for tomorrow, and the children has to be raised.

    The children doesn’t know the past, its our duty to give them a future. Neither Prabakaran, nor the Tamil diaspora thought about that. They, the diaspora didn’t care a tuppence about Tamil children being abducted by Prabakaran and his goons, as far as they could send their children to school, college, etc.

    Even, now they cry a lot, but where is the money coming for the welfare of the IDPs?

    They sit in a foreign country and try to dictate terms to Sri Lanka. Few days ago, we heard about some Canadians, who were in the LTTE ranks, and the parents ‘only’ found out later.

    This is double-speak, so if anyone has any loyalty to Sri Lanka, then get on with some constructive work, and leave the criticism for later. Criticism is the easiest thing to do, as far as one is not criticizing oneself.

    All the overseas ‘Sri Lankans’ learn to work ‘hard’ over there, but when it comes to Sri Lanka, only criticism is there. How many of you criticize the country you live in today? And will you criticize?

  • 96. Nissanka  |  July 15th, 2009 at 5:52 am

    You are a legend Navin 89. That’s all I can say.

    Keep it up.

    God bless you.

  • 97. Haroon  |  July 15th, 2009 at 8:09 am

    #90 Amazed
    Saman #76
    You speak a lot of good sense. But how do we go about carrying out this “quiet revolution”, changing a society’s prejudices, making them drop their beliefs in race and move towards multiculturalism?

    Just a suggestion. Would they drop their belief in ‘race’ if race is proved to be just a social invention? As I posted earlier on another thread (), we were all brought up on a version of history (along with its all its prejudices) which is now disputed by scientific evidence. It would appear that we, the Sinhala ‘race’, predominantly descend from South Indian Dravidian people, contrary to what I was told as a child. I have no doubt that within a few decades our own descendents will accept this as mainstream, while they critically re-assess the political events of the past 60 years – but how far will today’s nationalist-right go to prevent this education from taking place?

    For example, #89 Navin writes from the typical chauvinistic position. It would be interesting to observe how he deals with the knowledge that most of his forefathers (assuming he is from the majority ‘race’ which I think he is) actually came from South India, given that this is not something we can change no matter how much one might want to.

    As the classic question goes, with DNA evidence, supposing it turned out that Hitler’s ancestors were predominantly Jewish?

    To #90 Amazed, my suggestion is eliminate ‘race’ in SL as a concept. Universal understanding that we all the same people might be the place to start. And it can start today. Will you support such a move Navin?

  • 98. Asoka2  |  July 15th, 2009 at 8:14 am

    Navin and other like him:

    From what you have written, I see that you are thinking of SL as two states not one. These IDPs are Sri Lankans and their welfare is a responsibility of the state. There might be some (or a lot) who support the LTTE, but that does not relieve the govt from doing what they are doing right now.

    These are human beings. If you had any of your relatives in one of these camps, you are not going take this stand. You cannot claim that the Tamils have not being discriminated against. Only a Tamil person knows what it is like to be a Tamil in SL. Most tamils supported the LTTE because they had no alternative. They picked the lesser of the two evils (according to them).

    If we are to have united SL, we need to understand the plight of all the minorities. We need to be more accomodative and inclusive. We need to start thinking that these people are Sri Lankans!!

  • 99. shankar  |  July 15th, 2009 at 11:51 am

    to comment 65 -rs wickremesinghe

    you quote that overpopulation was the reason for the tamil insurrection. i beg to differ. how do you explain india, a vastly overpopulated land. why was there no insurrection in tamilnadu.that is because the tamils in tamilnadu are a contented lot. now imagine this scenario
    1. india gets independence.
    2. tamilnadu asks for a federal state.
    3. nehru rejects it.
    4.nehru makes hindi the official language of india and makes it a requirement to enter the indian public service.
    5. tamilnadu leaders stage a satyagraha in front of the indian parliament.
    6. nehru laughs as he sees the tamilnadu politicians getting hammered by goons as he passes by.
    7. nehru organises colonisation shemes of indo aryans in dravidian south india sending convicts to colonise and army to ptotect them.
    8. indira ghandhi introduces standardisation. south indian students have to get much higher marks to enter the universities than their northern counterparts.
    9. south india clamours for federal states. in response indira unleashes goons on the south indians living in the north. widespread rape , killing and looting. babies thrown into tar barrels. south indian priests burnt to death.
    10. south indian leaders have a conference and decide to seperate from the north. at the next general election their manifesto is calling for seperation and when elected they claim to have the mandate to seperate.
    11. ghandhi brings law making seperation illegal and south indian politicians cannot enter parliament unless they take oath for unitay state.
    12. south indian leaders boycott parliament.
    13. restless youth in south india are clamouring for armed struggle. leaders are trying to restrain them. sensing trouble ghandhi sends in the army consisting mostly aryans in full force to the south to intmidate and quell any uprising. the police force consisting mostly of aryans burn down the cultural institutions such as libraries in the south. army and police assault, kill and detain many youth.
    14. the first shot fired by south indians when congress party mayor of tamilnadu, a tamil is shot dead by a youth called pirabaharan from tamilnadu.
    15. 34 years later civil war between north and south india ends with pirabaharan shot dead by manmohan singh. 5 million deaths so far with billions of rupees of damage to property.and relations between aryans and dravidians in tatters.

  • 100. banu  |  July 15th, 2009 at 12:12 pm

    #77 Shankar

    well ur right to some extent that is for about 30% of them do realy turn out to be pretty useless but about 70 % of these rural students do equaly well and some times even better than students who come from “better” districts.
    Most of them are like machines which were not well oiled so were of low efficency ,but as soon as they get the best surroundings they do well.

    And another fact is that there is a bit of discrimination(well psoitve discrimination) because students who get high Z scores or merits(merits are considered islandwide for a subject stream not district based) can apply to any university so they most of the time try to get in to the best one.(Colombo medical collage for docs , university of moratuwa for engineers and j’pura for management. )

    So in all fairness i dont see any thing wrong because if what u r saying is right then people of some distrcits are born stupid and can never get in to uni.it is the environment.A good example for this wud be jaffna(i’m not saying people of jaffna are stupid infact they are very bright )in the CFA period jaffna had realy gud results and even produced an island first in maths but in the times when war ravaged results were relativly low.

    And also those other students who do get better z scores but who do not get in to uni do succeed in life because they are bright(Well this is true for most of them), but it is still a problem.

  • 101. Expatriate  |  July 15th, 2009 at 1:26 pm

    #89:

    In US these are called covert operations and here they are called abductions. Its a matter of terminology.

    By simply repeating this thuggish quote by a thuggish, criminal man, you have proved yourself to be unworthy of my interlocutor. Reconciliation is not possible with the likes of you.

    The quote is a complete misinterpretation of what the Bush/Cheney regime did; moreover, whenever the details became public, there was an outcry in the media and among the general public. The regime/party change was at least in part due to this. No journalist has been abducted, threatened or killed even during the Bush-Cheney years. To compare the US with what the current SL regime does is thuggish lunacy of the worst kind.

    The rest of your message is garbage because I didn’t say anything about supporting VP/LTTE.

    I note that you have got your knickers in a twist over my mention of ‘Plan B’, thinking I was speaking in conspiratorial terms. But Plan B is what every organization has when their Plan A doesn’t work as planned.

    It has nothing to do with partition or intimidating Sinhalese. I hate to enage with thuggish idiots, but to avoid any conspiratorial suggestions, let me say what I had in mind if the regime doesn’t resettle IDP’s or stop its racist ways… Economic sanctions, boycotts, ratcheting up pressure for war crimes charges, supporting reform movements in the South, potentially causing regime change (if the economy nosedives, the same people who hail the Rajapaksas as heros today will chase them away), etc should be on the list of possible actions.

    This will be my last post in this thread.

  • 102. ron  |  July 15th, 2009 at 2:26 pm

    Britain currently has a system of university entrance especially to Oxbridge where in practice, students from state schools with lower A level grades are accepted over private school students with better grades. The Tamil diaspora seem to have no problem with that!

  • 103. RS Wickramasinghe  |  July 15th, 2009 at 3:23 pm

    to comment 65 -rs wickremesinghe

    you quote that overpopulation was the reason for the tamil insurrection. i beg to differ.

    shankar,

    we have locked horns on the this issue before. The truth is, there is an insurgency that began in India. In the 1960’s the naxalite movement began its own terroristic struggle born out of the growing hunger poverty and overpopulation in India at the time. This has consumed western India into a corridor of insurgency that continues to this day as vexed unresolved problem.

    India is fortunate not to have an enemy who can supply weapons and training to this group in the way they did to Tamil militants in Sri Lanka.

    Let us also not forget that the major communal division in that land was avoided through the creation of Pakistan, which was further divided during that ‘decade of division – the 1970’s – when alot of demographic chickens were coming home to roost.

    Since that time and the emergency that followed India has defined its priorities as modernising agriculture enough to feed its population and maintaining a growth rate sufficient to lift its population out of poverty. Their leaders understood that the overwhelming priority was for for the population to find a stable equilibrium from the disesquilibrium post-independence.

    The point I am making is that when all the dust has settled the real work of building peace will rest on bringing Sri Lanka’s population to a stable equilibrium with its environment. This will be food security, primary health-care and reproductive freedom, education and rule of law. Obviously successful trade and foreign investment has a big role in this.

    To escape Malthusian reality, Sri Lanka must have all of these things and all of these things together at once. If it can do this then its many communal divisions will slowly wither away, and Sri Lanka will meet its tryst with destiny.

    What we cannot do is return to the hysterical nationalisms of modernity that defines your narrative. This is false consciousness. As I have outlined, it is the false consciousness of population pressures from being in disequilibrium with the environment.

    On the note of nationalism I am ashamed at the Rajapakse regimes behaviour and feel an opportunity is slipping away in the rhetoric and triumphalism it has adopted.

  • 104. Erambu Edirisinghe  |  July 15th, 2009 at 3:41 pm

    to #57 Thangachi Pearl who said:

    “Otherwise we are heading for a situation similar to that of the Jews.”

    This is exactly what Tamils want. Tamils think they are the Jews (rises from the desire of Tamils to control the world, which they think Jews do), and like Jews the Tamils think they too will rise to the top after many centuries of roaming the world after being evicted from their homeland – Yaappaneya Kingdom.

    Even politician Navaratnam (VP’s guru) chanelled his brains and translated the book Exodus – so the Tamils can feel the resemblance.

    And Veluppillai Prabakaran, who was meant to be the Tamils’ Ben Gurion unfortunately is no more. So now, KP is the new Ben.

    Rise, oh Tamils of Wanni! Walk from the IDP camps (when the army is sleeping) and retake the land that is turly yours (this is the land which is a bit west of Puttumattalan. Once you take it, inform the Diasporials, and they will come, holding hands, as the Jews did in Schindler’s List.

  • 105. Navin  |  July 15th, 2009 at 5:12 pm

    # 97. Haroon:

    Could you please let me know what is chauvinistic about my post in #89? I’m very confused about your notion of chauvinism. To call a spade a spade or a thief a thief is not chauvinism. Pardon me but I won’t accept that Sri Lanka is an apartheid state. Please don’t get lost in fashionable eloquent expositions that carry no substance. One doesn’t have to blame the government to be concerned about IDP s. Further to not blame the government for all the ills of the country today does not mean one is white washing the MR regime.

  • 106. Navin  |  July 15th, 2009 at 6:03 pm

    #94. shankar:

    1. the srilankan state is responsible for the people living in the camps. why is that?. because it is the srilankan state and therefore it has to view everyone as srilankan first and tamils next.it is not okay to try to shift the responsibility for what happenned on others like what you are trying to do. the state is ultimately responsible for everything good or bad that happens in the country. MR is trying now to create a srilankan identity but tamils wont trust him because he is not allowing people to leave the camp.

    It is possible that the government is delaying the resettlement of these people but that is not without reason. The governments concern is about the weapons that are buried in that area and what would happen if they were to get into the wrong hands. It is also concerned about possible LTTE moles that may be hiding among these people waiting to start terrorist activities again. Please tell me, how you propose that the government let these people out immediately and also address at least the above two issues? Keeping IDPs in camps is more expensive for the government both in monetary terms and political terms locally and internationally than having them go back to where they lived before the war. So there must be damn good reason why the government is sacrificing its political capital and keeping these people in the camps. Its my strong belief that it has nothing to do with ethnicity of these people or lack of interest but unresolvable constraints like the ones I cited.

    2. the british did not have a parliament that had 50 percent of seats for 25 per cent minority. GG ponnambalam advocated it for post independence srilanka to stop any bulling of the minorities by the majority. the british refused and bullying commenced with SWRD.

    Do you think a 50:50 parliament is a fare deal? How do you divide the 50 seats reserved for the different minorities? 25 for Tamils and 25 for Muslims? Oops! I’m sure GG wouldn’t have been too happy about my suggestion there. Wait, but then what about those who do not fall into any one of those 3 types? To me it looks like a none starter to begin with.

    3. as for partitioning you dont look at area, but the historical aspects. the present north and east is the correct area if partition is the answer. if you are getting the balance, hard luck because that is what you had before colonial rule. however after colonial rule and independence the waters have become a muddied with a fair amount of tamils living outside the north and east. therefore i think a federal solution is the best for the tamils. if something less is offered at a free and fair referendum and tamils say yes then i think the book should be closed as the end and we should move on focusing on development and catching up with the west. one problem with asians is there is too much bickering going on which is hindering progress.

    Tamils didn’t rule over entire region of what we call north and east today before colonial times. Yes, there was a kingdom in Jaffna but its borders were not static. Good part of what is Wanni today, came under Kandyian kingdom. When Jaffna was powerful, they shifted south and when the Kandiyan kingdom was powerful they shifted north. So where do we draw the line? Besides, what justifies us from not looking at times when there was no Tamil kingdom in Jaffna but the whole of the country was controlled by king in Anuradhapura? Even the tanks that have Tamil names today were likely built during those times. If you take this path of partitioning we are descending into a bottomless pit. Hence its better to keep away from that. What is federalism and con-federalism? Again, you are asking the same thing in different terms. Of course if we have a referendum and ask Tamils whether they want self rule in the north they will say yes but do they have the right to claim those lands as their exclusive property? That is the problem. You say yes and I say No.

  • 107. Pearl Thevanayagam  |  July 15th, 2009 at 10:41 pm

    104, You ain’t a novice. Tamils have suffered at the expense of Sinhala hegemony. Tamil diaspora are not living a luxury in the West.

    But they want dignity an they will regain what isrigthfully theirs.

    Their rights and ownership of property have been plundered by the Sinhalese and govt. propagated nationalism has mobilised run of the mill Sinhalese into believing Sri Lanka is rightfully their prerogative.

    Forget the LTTE. The systematic deprivation of Tamil rights and the regular ostracisation of Tamils are not being overlooked by the Tamil diaspora.

    Mother Lanka belongs to Tamils who are the rightful heirs as much as the Sinhalese.

    Our rights are just waiting to be regained.

    We ain’t going nowhere. We are not tolerating thuggery of the Rajapakse regime. The IC is behind us.

    The day of reckoning is not far off and when the govt faces (which no doubt it will) international war tribunal and accords what is rightfully ours then your euphoria will end.

    Pearl Thevanayagam

  • 108. Sriyan Chaminda Pasqual  |  July 16th, 2009 at 7:01 am

    # 107,
    What rights are you talking about.
    Can a Tamil buy a property in Colombo.
    Can a Sinhalese buy a property in north and east.
    What is the national language in Japan, America or any other country.
    My dear, have you ever seen a American $. What is written there.
    We should have equal rights.
    But you cant take your rights at the expense of Sinhalese people’s rights.

  • 109. Sriyan Chaminda Pasqual  |  July 16th, 2009 at 7:03 am

    This gentleman talks about “Sinhalese peasants”
    These are the people who took all Tamil friends for a ride.

  • 110. shankar  |  July 16th, 2009 at 7:44 am

    to navin-comment 106

    1. regarding your quote”The governments concern is about the weapons that are buried in that area and what would happen if they were to get into the wrong hands. It is also concerned about possible LTTE moles that may be hiding among these people waiting to start terrorist activities again”
    ——————————————
    the government has not mentioned these reasons you quote for imprisoning 280000 of its citizens. it says it is due to demining. tamils are not buying this because it is not allowing even people to go to colombo, jaffna and easttern province to stay with relatives.
    as for worrying about ltte moles, is a 70 year old woman a ltte mole.
    sarath fonseka is having 150000 army idling. they can surely search for the hidden weapons while the resettlement is going on. he is going to double it to 300000 and then to 500000 like north korea. while everyone is drinking soup made out of grass there are plenty of troops to search every nook and cranny for hidden weapons.

    2. i agree with you that GG ponnnambalams 50-50 proposal was a flawed one right from the start. the tamils are blaming him for letting them down. he was no jinnah and DS Senanayake sweettalked him and he let down the tamils and joined the cabinet. he should have told the british what is being given to tamilnadu tamils has to be given to ceylon tamils. nothing more , nothing less and wont budge an inch just like jinnah. if that was done today srilanka would be the envy of our neighbours. the difference between his request and jinnahs would be that jinnah asked for partition and GG would have asked for federalism. partition is not a economically viable opton for srilanka because unlike pakistan which is 800000 sq kms , srilanka is only 65000 sq. kms.both the tamils and sinhalese will lose wheareas federalism would have been a win win situation for both.

    3. regarding your quote” Tamils didn’t rule over entire region of what we call north and east today before colonial times. Yes, there was a kingdom in Jaffna but its borders were not static. Besides, what justifies us from not looking at times when there was no Tamil kingdom in Jaffna but the whole of the country was controlled by king in Anuradhapura? ”
    ————————————————————
    if an international court was looking into the case it would be looking at the most recent significant development that altered the status quo. that would have been colonial rule. you are right about the borders. it is not all black and white, but that is why courts are there for to look into complex matters and give a verdict.

    4. regarding your quote”What is federalism and con-federalism? Again, you are asking the same thing in different terms”
    ——————————————————————–
    federalism is a system of government in which power is divided between a central authority and constituent political units.
    examples of small countries which are federal are switzerland, austria, croatia.
    if switzerland is divided into 2 countries like what happened to india and pakistan then that is partition. as you can see it is one country. so i cant understand what you are saying that i am asking for the same thing in different terms, because in a federal system secession is ruled out.

    5. regarding your quote”Of course if we have a referendum and ask Tamils whether they want self rule in the north they will say yes ”
    ————————————————————-
    self rule is rule without only defense and foreign policy powers. i mentioned that referendum is for something less than that for example the 13th amendment. we can never really say how their mind works or for that matter how any human mind works.

  • 111. Erambu Edirisinghe  |  July 16th, 2009 at 6:46 pm

    #107: Thangachi Pearl

    “our rights are just waiting to be regained” – oh, sure, because the Tamils have the entire world in their pockets. See how the world has reacted so far? IC has better things to do than support a minority that even India doesn’t care about.

    “The day of reckoning is not far off and when the govt faces (which no doubt it will) international war tribunal”

    in which dhevalokam are you living in? Did the IC come to your aid when your property, life and limb were plundered by the SL Govt sponsored goons in 1977 and 1983? Do you not know that even the UN had agreed hardly a month ago that there need not be a tribunal for the SL Govt after the war? The IC and India ganged up on the tigers whose tails the Tamils were holding steadfastly until the day Sooryadevan was killed. And now the Tamils live in la-la land wishing all sorts of bad things on the SL Govt, simply because they can’t take the loss they deserved due to the utter stupidity of the tigers.

    “Tamil diaspora are not living a luxury in the West”

    of course they are living in luxury – just look at the sons and daughters of the Diasporials. These Meenporial (fish fry) eating diasporials are bursting at the seems – they will soon start rolling along the road instead of walking. Well fed and well clothed (albeit in gangsta-wear), these people are living in luxury and yet, they want more – a separate country for their holiday destination so that they can come back to the West and say “how relaxing life is there, no? Not like this west where we don’t have time to breathe”.

    And now all gone! Poof! Just watch the SL Army run the show. I predict that all Tamils will be Sinhalese in another 50-100 years. Of course, then they will be proud that it is their land! This is survival now – learn to speak, write, sing, walk and dream in Sinhalese, and you know what led to this situation? You guessed it – VP and his Tigers. If not for those morons, Tamils might have got at least a reasonable solution under Ranil W, but now, nothing.

    Thamizhanendru sollada, thalai kunindhu nillada…

  • 112. Navin  |  July 17th, 2009 at 9:39 am

    “Over 300 Claymores found in Mullaitivu”

    Please read DM Fri 17. Since LTTE attack on Kebithigolava bus killed over 60 and this attack used just 2 claymores, if we assume 1 claymore can kill 30 this is just 9000 lives saved. Just imagine the kind of mayhem this would have caused over the next couple of years if these weapons got into the hands of the LTTE moles! Not only they would not hesitate to use them against SLA and Sinhalese civilians in the south they would start selling them to whoever pays the hight price. Its a threat to entire region. Everyone who is blaming the government left and right for not releasing the IDPs back to Wanni should think what consequences their actions would entail unless we handle this situation with utmost care.

    110. shankar: I think the government is doing exactly what you said. They are clearing the area sector by sector and will resettle people as soon as they are done with one part of the land. Its not difficult to figure that out and they under lot of pressure of India to sort this matter out as soon as possible. From what I have heard people older than 60 have already been allowed out to live with their relatives.

    If you read my previous postings you would see that I have take the position that neither Sinhalese nor the Tamils can claim exclusive rights over land in the north and east. I buy you argument over courts but just think whether your reasoning has any moral justification? That land also belongs to the Sinhalese just as must for their ancestors thrived on that land not so long ago before Tamils established their dominance. In fact, there still exists enough relics in that country to prove it. So international courts is a dead end.

  • 113. Belle  |  July 17th, 2009 at 12:25 pm

    Erambu Edirisinghe#111

    “And now all gone! Poof! Just watch the SL Army run the show. I predict that all Tamils will be Sinhalese in another 50-100 years. Of course, then they will be proud that it is their land! This is survival now – learn to speak, write, sing, walk and dream in Sinhalese, and you know what led to this situation? You guessed it – VP and his Tigers.”

    Do you have no shame? Are you celebrating the possibility that your community could wipe out an entire culture?

    It wasn’t VP and the Tigers that led to this situation. It was the chauvinism of a majority community that has no respect for any other culture than their own. Well, actually, that shouldn’t surprise me. After all, this community has no respect even for its own culture–a Buddhist tradition that it has spat on for half a century. In fact, it does not respect culture itself. That is how it elected goondas and thieves into Parliament.

    In 50-100 years, you folks will be speaking, singing and dreaming in Mandarin, so please don’t worry your head about Tamils having to learn Sinhalese.

  • 114. Tamilmaran  |  July 17th, 2009 at 7:21 pm

    DBS,

    Why are you Publishing these kinds of materials?

  • 115. Tamilmaran  |  July 17th, 2009 at 10:51 pm

    All Tamil people like me support President Mahinda fully. We want him crown as emperor

  • 116. Tamilmaran  |  July 18th, 2009 at 6:45 am

    Cool here you go DBS. You are the best.

  • 117. peace  |  July 18th, 2009 at 1:20 pm

    It’s sad and regrettable a lot of lives were lost in SL over the ethnic issue on both sides.It’s time to put this behind and move forward.With a goal of just and fairness in all work walks of life in SL.Reconciliation has to take place but not retribution.
    Please read this article http://www.island.lk/2009/07/12/features9.html

  • 118. Sriyan Chaminda Pasqual  |  July 20th, 2009 at 7:20 am

    # 113 Belle

    So, what do you suggest.

    It’s this attitude that creates all these problems.
    Be realistic.

  • 119. paths  |  August 19th, 2009 at 4:47 am

    carry on Jeyaraj; we need opinions; ur continued contributions are most welcome. What we need is a united SL with Meaningful Devolution of Power for a merged N-E with powers to raise development cash amply available with the diaspora incl the Ltte cash; we can develop N -E thro local NGOs but the govt is blocking the NGOs from functioning. Rajapakse s MAHINDA CHINTHANAYA speaks of an unattainable SINHALA SL by chasing the Tamils into S India.

    The President does not realise, the 3 nations of SL can together bring about a rich cultured SL; so much he is soaked in his ‘chinthanaya’ the countrys finances r in poor state, no development , no foreign investment ,indebted to ADB, WB etc. while his brothers r plundering for continued luxury life in USA; the laws in USA will catch them soon – Bruce Feign will see to that.

    GG’s 50/50 was distorted; what he meant was balanced representation meaning – a f’irst past the post system of elected lower house & a Senate of 50% singalese & 50% tamils & Muslims to block legislation that will injure the minorities. such legislation going for referenum.
    The economic woes will finally see the birth of a federal or confederal setup for SL; the respected VITHARNE proposals
    r with the President with 2-3 forms of govt ; i prefer confederal setup with joint rule at the centre.
    Lets wait for the end of the year; this problem cant go on endlesly. Thank You.

  • 120. UGK  |  August 24th, 2009 at 3:55 pm

    113) Belle
    In 50-100 years, you folks will be speaking, singing and dreaming in Mandarin, so please don’t worry your head about Tamils having to learn Sinhalese.
    ——————————-
    hahahahahahahhahaha
    This might actually happen.
    Chinese might be given free passport to turn Sri Lanka into their official southern penetration point to destabilize India

  • 121. UGK  |  August 24th, 2009 at 4:00 pm

    I see some Mahavamsa motivated comments here.
    Please remember that Sri Lanka was originally a Hindu country.
    Buddhism arrived and spread. And you had large numbers of Tamil Hindus, tamil buddhists and other Indian Buddhists all living in SL.
    There was no such thing as ‘Sinhalese’ in those days.
    Sinhalese was created much later by using elements of Pali, Sanskrit and tamil.
    And even then, using false history to create genocide in the 20th and 21st century is not acceptable

  • 122. UGK  |  August 24th, 2009 at 4:11 pm

    Navin,
    Dont talk like a smart alec.
    I know straight away reading into your attitude that you are a Mahavamsa believer.
    Tamils were never given treated as equals.
    And they had every right to demand Eelam based on the oppression.
    In an ideal Sri Lanka there would be no reason to demand Eelam. But Sri Lanka is not ideal and the string of racists that came to power kept on demonstrating that over and over again.
    It is not a favour or a gift to ask for freedom when you are subjected to murder, humiliation on a regular basis.
    And this was long before LTTE came into the scene.
    There was a robbery case my family suffered in the 1960s. There was no LTTE then. A sinhalese thug approached my Grandfather and said: ‘You tamils be careful, when you go into court hearing, you better not identify those responsible for the robbery of your house. Because we will have to deal with you later. You tamils realise where you stand in Sri Lanka’
    My grandfather got scared and refused to testify in court.
    Whatever LTTE did wrong much later, this cannot be used to dismiss the systematic oppression of tamils since the British left.
    Only racists who are brainwashed by the Mahavamsa will continue supporting this.

  • 123. UGK  |  August 24th, 2009 at 4:21 pm

    Wickremasinghe,
    From dress to food to values, even in their violence the two communities are a mirror image of each other.
    —————————————
    Absolute rubbish!
    Right throughout recent history there have been countless riots by the sinhalese against Tamil Hindus and on occasions against the muslims.
    Members of the tamil community never went on riots.
    The LTTE is a different issue. They are an armed rebel group that organised themselves into a war unit.
    But with Sinhalese, the public were always ready to run down the street with swords and sticks looking for ‘Paara Dhemala’
    One example was in the 1930s when Ponnamballam publicly challenged the demonisation of tamils (through Mahavamsa) as being fabricated history.
    It instantly resulted in mobs of Sinhalese going on the rampage from Colombo to Maskeliya. The British rulers managed to silence it.

  • 124. UGK  |  August 24th, 2009 at 4:44 pm

    It is correct that arrogant upper caste tamils of Jaffna looked down upon other tamils. This is an unfortunate problem. Tamils creating problems for other tamils in a land where a sinhalese who want to eliminate the whole lot? A double blow really
    I have spoken about this with another tamil and he said that attitude is rapidly changing with the Genocide in recent times. He says it is fast making tamils put aside petty differences and unite.
    In some ways, Rajapakse with his careless approach to Genocide has given alot of opportunity and evidence to get Sri Lanka exposed as genocidal racist nation.
    In the past it was very hard to expose oppression because it happened on a more subtle scale and killing were fewer in number.
    But the reincarnation of Dutugemunu (as our Mahavamsa friends call him) decided to use heavy artillery and phosphorous chemicals. And then lock the rest in starvation camps.
    So the world suddenly saw it!

  • 125. dayan jayatilleka  |  December 27th, 2009 at 10:00 am

    Sorry for coming in so late, but i just discovered this. I do wish that Siva had sourced his punchline. It was originally from a letter written by James Baldwin to Angela Davis: ” If they come for you in the morning, sister, they will come for me at night.”

  • 126. krishna  |  February 26th, 2010 at 6:24 pm

    it is time for sri lankans both tamils and sinhalese to understand the philosophy of history. history can be very nasty when leaders make terrible errors. the tamils made a terrible mistake by not seeking a separate state as happened in india in 1947. may be they thought a separate tamil eelam would not be viable. but realising the success of the israelis,leaders like navaratnam must have been influenced enough to translate EXODUS.

    so actually, the tamils shud accept their rerrible historical mistake in not seeking a separate independent nation based on the treaties signed with the portuguese in 1598.

    a separate tamil eelam and a separate sinhala nation would have eliminated the reason for racial politics. it would have turned the politics of the 2 states to be based on ideology.

    whatever happened after 1948 in sri lanka would be described as details by historians however bad the tragedy is.

    the tamils can take comfort that it is not only tamils suffered . many other nations have suffered oo such as the jews.

    the defeat of the LTTE doesnt mean the beginning of a new sri lanka. i doubt the issues can be resolved unless sinhalese sri lankans realise that economic development and social justice is more important than racial politics. we will have to wait and see for further developments.

    in any case best wishes to sri lanka. may your nation be able to heal and prosper.

  • 127. Dinesh G  |  February 28th, 2010 at 6:50 am

    Very illuminating and thought-provoking

  • 128. jayalal perera  |  July 7th, 2010 at 2:06 am

    It is good to have a balanced view.

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