Today was the third day of our fast. It is supposedly the hardest day of a fast because your body stops relying on whatever leftover food you had from your meals before the fast and it begins to realize no more is coming in. We are expected to start feeling much more sluggish from now on as our body fiercely tries to conserve what it can, whatever remains.
I find it ironic that this demanding day coincides with Sri Lanka’s Independence Day. Sri Lankans are celebrating while Tamils around the world remember it as the day that began a prolonged genocide. A little bit of history might help in realizing how this all began.
Sri Lanka originally was home to 3 kingdoms: 2 Sinhalese and 1 Tamil. When the Dutch and the Portuguese ruled the island, they ruled the kingdoms separately. When the British ruled, they ruled everyone jointly (as they are known to erase and create boundaries with reckless abandon) and when they left, they received false reports regarding demographic distribution and released control purely to the Sinhalese.
Independence Day, indeed.
What followed for the Tamils is somewhat analogous to the situation I described regarding the third day of our fast. At the very beginning, Tamils were able to rely on our reserves, like our deep-rooted cultural commitment to education, to help us begin to fight back, even with the loss of representation and the lack of a Bill of Rights in the 1948 Constitution. But as government policies quickly and systematically began to weed Tamils out of citizenship, higher education, jobs and life, we began our fierce struggle to conserve our identity. And today, over 60 years after “independence”, that’s where we still are, just trying to conserve our identity. Or at least, whatever remains.
Tags: history, independence day, third day
February 8th, 2009 at 9:38 am
The British were not fooled by the false demographic report in 1948. The Tamil leaders of that time protested to the British for they feared that they would be denied the equal treatment received under the British administration. However, the first Prime Minister, D.S.Senanayake promised the British that his government would treat the Tamils on par with the Singhalese. The gullible British believed him and granted independence. Within months of independence, D.S.S. systematically began to discriminate the Tamils. Singhalese colonisation of Tamil areas began and is still being done to dilute the Tamil population. D.S.S. began this more for political reasosn and less for the revival of chauvinism. S.W.R.D.Banadarnayake completed the process in 1956 for both political and chavinistic reasons. Now the Rajapakses have descended further into the pit with a planned genocide of the Tamils. Can anyone blame the Tamils for the armed struggle against the Singhalese?
February 9th, 2009 at 4:01 am
I was a victim of the government motivated communal riot in 1983. I was minutes away from being killed by the sihalese thugs. I was taken to the refugee camp in Sarawathy hall in Bambalapitiya amongst 16,000 others. What did I do to deserve that other than born as a Tamil. Why the capital city of Colombo could not bring law and order to stop the riot? I learnt later the then president J.R.Jayawardena refused to sign the paper for the Commander to stop the riot.
Talking to the victims and the injured the act cannot be described by words. The whole thing was planned by the government where thugs were brought in train loads and the train stopped at every road where tamils lived. The houses were very well identified to be attacked means there was enough support from the government to give the information to the thugs. Why should the tamils face this. That one experience traumatised me for life . Can’t imagine this riot was the 5th or 6th since the independance. Why blame LTTE for taking weapons when the whole thing is fuelled by these government induced riots? We are living in harmony in where ever we are, but in our own homeland where we were brought up for generartions as long as the island lived the Tamils have to be hunted and massacred. Where is justice in this world?It is no longer internal problem and is now an international problem where we urge justice from civilised nations. All the best for your efforts.