2015: Protest in Chunnakam, Jaffna against the Uthuru Janani thermal power plant for dumping waste oil and grease deposits in the local well. 

Sri Lanka’s ecology and biodiversity are threatened by the continued repression of Eelam Tamils. To protect the land, international mechanisms are needed “to ensure accountability and help pave the way for egalitarianism and self-determination”.

The legacy of the war

A 16 year old Mullivaikkal survivor, who was just 5 years old at the time of the massacres, shared their experiences of the genocide on the eleventh anniversary of the atrocities.

Pakaloan Vamanan now lives in France.

Kalaiyarasi Kanagalingam, a now 15-year-old survivor of Mullivaikkal, spoke about the last memory of her father and the importance of Tamil genocide recognition at a conference hosted at the Houses of Parliament in October 2019.

May 17th, 2009 was the last time she saw her father.

We have reproduced her full speech to the conference below.

(Photo Credit: trokilinochchi)

Over a decade has passed since the Mullivaikkal massacre but “Tamils remain heavily discriminated against by a state that has yet to reckon with its violent past,” writes Visvajit Sriramrajan for The Diplomat.

Despite the on-going damage to national reconciliation, Gotabaya Rajapaksa is insistent on the normalisation of “military’s influence in the civilian sphere”, warns the Economist. 
 

The normalisation of the military

File photograph

"As sale and exports of fish crash, another huge crisis is staring at Sri Lanka's fisherfolk," writes Meera Srinivasan for The Hindu. 

11 years have gone by since the Tamil diaspora community mobilized and took our voices to the streets. We raised our voices in an effort to raise awareness on the genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka. 

I was 15 at the time, but I remember that day so clearly. It was Mother’s Day, and I was sitting with my family at my grandmother’s house feeling hopeless about what was happening to our people back home. My father and I quickly left to join the thousands of Tamils protesting on University Avenue. After chanting and pleading, we started marching, soon enough we ended up on the Gardiner Expressway. 

The Gardiner protest was pivotal in shaping the political identity of many young Tamils. It inspired a new generation of activists and my own in continuing to demand justice for Tamils on the island while also carrying on the fight for liberation. 

The protest, which occurred on Mothers day, had predominately negative public perception and media coverage, evidenced through their use of language - which often carried racial undertones - and played a role in delegitimizing the protest itself. Rather than centring the story around the genocide and international intervention – the purpose behind the protests, the coverage focused on dominant narratives surrounding the Tamil community as being ‘disruptive’, an ‘inconvenience’ and ‘ungrateful’ and labelling us as ‘others’ and ‘terrorists’ while also removing women from their political agency. 

Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka’s President is “exploiting the novel coronavirus pandemic to undermine the few checks and balances remaining against authoritarianism and sharpening tensions” writes J S Tissainayagam for the International Policy Digest.

“The Sri Lanka president’s rhetoric and actions to contain the pandemic will destabilise Sri Lanka and make him a poster boy in the expanding list of populist-led governments that Western democracies view as a threat.”

Marking 15 years since the assassination of Tamil journalist Dharmeratnam Sivaram, we have reproduced a speech delivered by former Tamil Guardian editor Vino Kanapathipillai at a commemoration for the slain journalist in 2010.

This speech was delivered in London on Aril 29, 2010 at the fifth anniversary of the death of Sivaram.