A Brief Preface
Some of my friends were worried that through the previous articles I may have inadvertently ‘’caught the tiger by the (ir) tail’. They have requested me to take care physically (I don’t from whom?). This is besides the 270+ emails flooded into my inbox, and the indicator of 1800+ (if it is true) readers of the article within three days even with some embarrassing evidence of my repeated indiscipline in proof reading. (My apologies)                               

The death of democracy in SL is so deep that it shivers even to present with a mere journalistic commentary on the question of present and future of peace and justice in a land once called paradise, …

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Hon.Te Ururoa Flavell

Hon. Hone Harawira

Hon.Te Ururoa Flavell
Māori Party Whip
Hon. Hone Harawira
Foreign affairs spokesman,
Maori Party

This is written in appreciation of The Maori Party’s decision to block the motion expressing concern about the Sri Lankan “humanitarian situation”; that is, the fighting against LTTE terrorists by the Government forces of Sri Lanka. The reason given by the Maori leaders is very valid: “Because it gives equal weight to the Sri Lankan Government and the Tigers”.

The New Zealand Herald on Wednesday 29 April 2009 reported that: “The Maori Party has been attacked as ‘disgusting’ for blocking a parliamentary motion yesterday… in the name of Progressive [Party] leader Jim Anderton.” It is also reported that …

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It is heartening that the Tamil Tigers have retained a sense of humor under extreme pressure. It is a lesson to us all. The Tigers have declared a unilateral ceasefire and promised not to engage in any offensive military operations. The joke is in two parts. Firstly, they are in no shape to engage in any offensive military operations. In the second place these clowns have pulled this on us and the IPKF on more occasions than I can recall. The first ceasefire in 1985 saw the Tigers under Kittu ringing Sri Lankan army camps in Jaffna with landmines. The IPKF’s stop-go campaign — its rhythm and inconstancy influenced by Tamil Nadu and electoral considerations — enabled Prabhakaran to survive, …

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27 April 2009, Colombo, Sri Lanka: The government is considering a proposal to usher in a new ‘barefoot revolution’ in Sri Lanka as part of its philosophy to revive ancient Sinhala traditions.

This will see the systematic phasing out of footwear use in all government offices, and other places where politicians and officials are present. The practice will be first introduced in Parliament, as well as offices of the President and Prime Minister, and later extended to cover all government offices.

“Wearing shoes and slippers is a recent habit introduced to our people by western colonialists,” says Emeritus Professor Amaradasa Gunasekera, originator of the idea. “The ancient Sinhalese knew that we living in a tropical country do …

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“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” – Edmund Burke, 1795

As I sit on the steps leading down to the garden from the verandah, its night in Pelawatte. Darkness in the tropics descends fast and lies very like a thick blanket. The heat and humidity making it feel more so. The night is still and black.  Intermittent houses and lack of streetlights add to the feeling of absolute darkness. The house lights are low to extenuate the earthy feeling from the dark yellow coloured cement floor, the terracotta tiles on the verandah, antique furniture all add to the stillness of the night. Behind me I hear the murmur of the people …

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[Note from author: I had a piece in the web-magazine Lines that attracted an extremely detailed response from someone who called him/herself John the Baptist. The comments were embedded within the text of my article. I am sending the article with the comments embedded just as it was in red because I think it will interest Groundviews readers and trigger of much more discussion.]

The term ‘post-LTTE’ is a misnomer; there will be no post-LTTE period in a political sense. There will certainly be a ‘post-LTTE as a conventional army’ phase, and there will be a ‘post-Prabaharan’ phase if the government succeeds in catching and killing him as it intends to. I can also discern a ‘post-hope’ or disheartened …

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I recently interviewed Dr. Jehan Perera, Executive Director of the National Peace Council. Jehan is also a columnist for the Daily Mirror and the Lanka Monthly Digest in Colombo. He holds a Doctor of Law degree from Harvard Law School and a BA in economics from Harvard College.

Based on his significant experience as a civil society activist, I asked Jehan whether NGOs in particular had fostered any appreciable difference in the quality of governance in Sri Lanka. Jehan stated that after a quarter century of working in civil society, he was acutely aware how little impact it had in shaping the …

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It is clear, even amongst the most liberal of the western political academic circles that the end of the LTTE is now inevitable. Backed by the widow state of Sonia Gandhi and designed by the US counter terror agencies for the GOSL, the SLA under the command of the wondered and vengeful solder of Mj. Gen. Sarath Fonseka and the non-elitist Rajapakese brothers, have now achieved what all the SL governments for the last 30 years dreamed doing. An annihilating of the LTTE at any (human) cost. Has ambassador Jayathilake echoes, one question that observers of SL politics and conflict studies in general are busy finding answers is how did the fall of the ‘invincible’ LTTE happen …

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For anyone concerned with the plight of innocent civilians, the reports from the North are depressing. The latest ‘avalanche (!?) is yet to be fully screened, searched, scrubbed and bleached for any LTTE connections and corralled into what the Government calls ‘welfare centers’. As to what awaits these men, women and children, thereafter and for how long is not clear at this point in time. But every one agrees that it is going to be a tough and miserable time for them.

As usual, despite knowing that there is going to be a large number of people displaced, in fact demanding such a displacement for a long time, the Government is woefully and recklessly underprepared to receive and take care of …

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For over three decades, we have bombed and shot each other, split our tears and shed them only for ‘our own’, split our joys and celebrated as ‘their’ mothers, wives and children cried. This war will not end when the last shot if fired.
Let us not wait till the last shot is fired. Let us not wait for tomorrow… for the ‘war’ to ‘end’ to realise that we are but branches of the same family tree. Those who would have been our friends, and relatives if only we had not let murderous guns separate us, lie without shelter, unclothed, maimed, bloody and hopeless. They need us now.
So even while those on many shores protest and shout slogans, …

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In the previous essays within this cluster I have dwelt on the dedication to cause displayed by the Tamil Tigers and identified various inspirations or conditioning factors: namely, the Cankam poetry, the warrior tales from Indian history, the embodied practices of self-punishment exercised by religious devotees and the ‘everyday’ acts of surrogate sacrifice that are integral to Saivite Tamil life ways. It was noted that the LTTE leaders marshaled and deployed symbols associated with these practices in the course of their propaganda and indoctrination work. Such processes sacralized the project of Eelam, rendering it “holy.”

But I surmise that in this work of propaganda the Tiger leaders made their choices as true believers. Their selections gained energy (a) from the …

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On 24 April 2005 Dharmaratnam Sivaram, (‘Taraki’) editorial board member of the website Tamilnet, was found shot dead from gunshot wounds to the head several hours after four unidentified persons had abducted him from a restaurant opposite a Police station on Colombo’s Galle Road. His murder, which followed weeks of threats, is as yet “unsolved.”

Four years after his death, it is instructive to revisit his politics and draw lessons from a life lived amidst violence.  Mark Whitaker’s Learning Politics from Sivaram: The Life and Death of a Revolutionary Tamil Journalist (Pluto Press, 2006) is an extended and moving act of mourning and meditation for Sivaram, and arguably the …

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The emergence of the LTTE was an outgrowth from Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism. Tamil nationalism in its turn was an outgrowth from SL Tamil communitarianism in the centuries prior to 1949/50, the moment when an explicit theory of nationality was presented in a sustained manner (Roberts 1999). Note, however, that Tamil nationalism in the period 1949 to the 1970s was a “sectional nationalism” nestling within “Ceylonese nationalism” (Roberts 1979a, 1979b).

Tamil nationalism turned secessionist in the 1970s for reasons that have been widely canvassed in the historical literature and which do not need reiteration here (Wilson 2000; Sabaratnam 2001; De Votta 2004; Wickramasinghe 2006: 171-99, 252-301; Roberts 2007). The LTTE was among those who advocated such a goal, working initially …

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During the halcyon years of the LTTE, besides Māvīrar Nāl on 27 November, the Tigers conducted nine other māvīrar or tiyaki ceremonies every year. These were, on the one hand, subjectively meaningful engagements and, on the other, political propaganda. I have argued that the māvīrar rites — within the context of past grievances and memories, as well as the sufferings of war — contributed substantially to the support for the LTTE project among SL Tamil peoples residing in the territories under their authoritarian sway (Roberts, “Suicidal,” 2009 c, d).

The māvīrar ceremonies included the deployment of pictorial imagery, whether as backdrop scenes, pandals, billboards or sculpture. The Tamil cultural heritage has been nourished for centuries by the colourful (sometimes florid) artistic …

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[I wrote this article in response to an "internet-project" initiated by the Sri Lankan journalist, Kusal Perera]
Vasantha Raja
20 April 2009
In countries like Sri Lanka, capitalism did not organically evolve from feudalism. In contrast, European capitalism grew within the womb of feudal society systematically challenging all aspects of feudal consciousness and institutions. Sri Lankan capitalism, on the contrary, was arbitrarily imposed by colonialists on a feudal society. Therefore, it is not surprising at all that its feudal past is still alive. The feudal consciousness continues to persist in various forms. The Sinhala politicians’ pathological failure to politically solve the Tamil Question is partly a result of that.
Sri Lanka’s capitalist economy and its state …

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This set of essays on “LTTE and Tamil People” submitted to Groundviews is a sequel to the four articles on “Suicidal Political Action” reproduced in www.transcurrents.com from 2 April onwards. Both sets of essays are interconnected and involve a measure of repetition because they are set out as separate articles. All of them are a product of a comparative survey that I embarked on about five years ago: namely, reviewing the cultural ingredients which have motivated the projects of the jihadists (holy warriors) and mujahideen (fighters for cause) on the one hand and, on the other, the kamikaze and the karumpuli (Black Tigers) after – and this point has to be stressed — these forces had been generated by specific …

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219 Tamils
were rounded
up in Gampaha
town during
dusk to dawn raids.

They had no
proper id cards
and did not
offer adequate
reason

to be living
in the vicinity.
Their Sri
Lankan
citizenship,

rights to move
about the
multi-ethnic,
multicultural
country do

not hold up
to scrutiny
under Prevention
of Terrorism Act
which allows

for exceptions
to such liberal
silliness
as equality
under law.

For more information, click here.

20 April 2009, Colombo, Sri Lanka: Special security camps, called ‘Government Comfort Centres’ are to be established in order to improve security for Government MPs, according to sources in the Defence sector. Due to fears of LTTE attacks in the coming weeks the Government ordered that all its Members of Parliament will be housed in these centres.

“The Government Comfort Centres are perfectly suited for defensive purposes with no access for outsiders and minimal movement out of these centres for residents” added the defence spokesperson in an exclusive interview with Banyan News Service. According to the plans titled ‘Responsibility to Protect Members of Parliament (R2P MP)’ dated April 2009, the centres will be constructed in three …

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The Writer of Hijab whereforth dost thou commeth? Nazeeya Faarooq, in her article has seemingly probed into a billboard and attempted to develop an intellectual response to an innocent picture. It is good in one-way to develop pondering minds but not so good when it becomes a cynosure, thus steering people away  from much more pressing and important things in life.

I have nothing to disagree with her about the dress of the Ceylonese Muslim women of the past. As I don’t find any contradiction in the dress of the Muslim women of the past in comparison vis a vis the  concept of Hijab in Islam nor do I find any contradiction with the modern version of the so called …

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We Sri Lankans have no excuse whatsoever. We have been forewarned. A piece by PC Vinoj Kumar in the latest issue of Tehelka magazine says that “while the Sri Lankan army claims to be close to wiping out the LTTE, Prabhakaran may already have an able successor in his son”. The article goes onto say that “The techno savvy Anthony is widely tipped to succeed Prabhakaran’s mantle” (sic). And again: “It is expected that Anthony will take over the leadership from his father”. “Many LTTE cadres are said to have entered the thick Mullaitivu jungles, an area where several Indian soldiers died during battles against the LTTE in the 1980s. This is truly the lair of the Tigers…Observers now expect …

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