The death of Dr. Thiruchelvam, the genteel soul of the south is receiving much fanfare in the Media. Every who-is-who of the pseudo and neo Sinhala journalists from the wishy-washy Jehan Perera to the ethnic scribbler Nalin de Silva have taken upon themselves to speak on behalf of the Tamils as usual, expressing what the Tamils want and why they are against this terrorist concoction of the North.

In fairness to Dr. Thiruchelvam, one must say that he was working in his own way for a solution to the ethnic problem.

Although detached from reality, he nevertheless attempted to work for the masses of the North and East who unlike him were dirt poor and lived in the areas of the ongoing prosecution.

The fact that Dr. Thiruchelvam has hardly been to any of the areas in the North and East did not deter his conscience from finding a solution to those whom he considered as his own.

Unlike the other Tamil cohorts or the Madarasi Brahmin cartel, Dr. Thiruchelvam was not a white-collar war criminal but an unavoidable and incidental accomplice to the murderous regime of Sri Lanka. His crime perhaps was to give the regime a degree of respectability.

One therefore wonders as to why there has been a lack of condemnation from the Tamil populace at large.

Each and every Tamil from the North and East have had a loved one, a close relative or a beloved friend murdered, mutilated, tortured, raped or brutalized by the Sinhala army. Sympathy is hard to come from the hardened souls of the immediate victims of war.

Each time, I search for sympathy in my soul for Dr. Thiruchelvam’s slaying, the search is marred by the flashback to the scene of the brutal murder of my uncles.

As the Sri Lankan army charged the Jaffna Hospital on information that Tigers have taken refuge in the hospital, my 67-year old uncle visiting a patient in the hospital came out with his hand raised. Needles to say, he was shot point blankly by the Sinhala army.

Like Dr. Thiruchelvam, my uncle was a gentle man and also a highly educated person who rose to the pinnacle of civil service in Sri Lanka despite the many obstacles placed in his path. But, unlike Dr. Thiruchelvam, he was unprotected by any convoy of security personnel.

Like Dr. Thiruchelvam, his body was also lying in a pool of blood on the road, but with no one in the hierarchy to intervene to move the body.

On hearing that his brother’s body was lying orphaned on the road, his 62-year old brother – another of my uncles – set out to claim the body. As he approached the body with his hands raised after speaking to a nearby Sinhala corporal, he too was shot by another Sinhala soldier on the chest.

He fell to the ground bleeding profusely. In a delirious state of mind, he started reciting Sivapuranam. Sivapuranam incidentally is the defense mechanism the TULF generation taught the Tamil populace, and still wants them to use it as a deterrent against Sinhala aggression.

As my uncle’s body twitched and turned with his incoherent recital of Sivapuranam spluttering from his mouth, another Sinhala soldier walked up to him and pumped two more bullets into his head, perhaps in an ironic turn of events ending my uncle’s agony. If this soldier is not a killing machine, then what is, I ask myself.

My second uncle was a gentle man too. A devout Hindu and a dedicated father whose unshakable belief in Ahimsa lead to his disappointment with the Tiger’s call for armed response.

This is also the same uncle who presented me with a copy of the 1100-page Sathiya Sothanai (The Biography of Mahatma Gandhi). Nothing in those pages would make sense in dealing with the Sinhala nation as Mr. Mylvaganam has said in as many words.

My distraught aunt died within a month having hardly spoken a word since her husband’s death.

The recollection of one event often triggers a chain reaction of other recollections. In my case, the death of my cousin’s pregnant wife is next in line. As she took rest in her house from pregnancy related exhaustion, an artillery shell fired by the Sinhala army slammed into the house blowing her into pieces.

The delirious husband on his return from a nearby shop was in a state of shock. He simply sat in the backyard refusing to be moved.

The relatives who scraped the remains off the now remaining walls and floors could hardly tell the sex of the stillborn as he or she was mutilated beyond recognition. As days passed after the cremation of his wife, my cousin simply walked away from his house never to be seen again.

With these experiences - only to mention a few - I dare not imagine the emotional burden being carried by those who lost their parents and siblings directly as a result of the aggression by Chandrika’s army.

Now, Kadirgamar has the audacity to ask the Tamils to come together to condemn the killing of Dr. Thiruchelvam. The reaction from the Tamils, as Kadirgamar himself knows but pretends not to know, would be to the contrary.

In their muted response that is all too characteristic of the Tamils at large, in the coming days one could expect a surge in their goodwill to fill the coffers of the killers whoever they may be. When human laws fail to provide them with justice, the Tamils have come to depend on vigilante justice.