Comment on NESOHR's 'Massacres of Tamils, 1958-2001'

by A Reader

I browse this site occasionally, and cannot claim to familiarity with the volumes of articles herein, however from what I have read here over the years, this article has got to be the most important (for the political positioning of the Tamil cause) document I have seen.  Now we have something substantial that we can take to our friends, politicians, questioners, as WHY the Tamils are fighting for a separate state, a volume of evidence of the genocide.

Second, the Tamil "problem" is misunderstood outside Sri Lanka (and it is quite differently misunderstood within!).  Very few people know:

(a) about the history of violence against Tamils

(b) that the scale is massive and

(c) that the violence is of genocidal proportions, consistent over 50 years, and

(d) the genocide is state-sponsored.

A car after it and its passengers were set alight, July 1983, photo courtesy blackjuly.info

In this regard, part of the problem is that we have not identified the cause accurately on the world stage: we have to counter the common view of "Tigers" and "rebels" for some vague separatist cause, and instead we have to identify that Sri Lanka is an apartheid state [with the subject article as volume 1 of 2 as substantiation], in which the genocide against Tamils has a long history and is rampant across the many layers of society. 

In my humble view, I suggest we forget the political issues (justification for which is known only to us) and concentrate on an international campaign re the genocide and the human rights issues.  The struggle for equality, militant or not, is a consequence, and the original cause must be publicised and understood, as the cause.