Australian Tamils Fast for Action reports on an incident (see video below) in Melbourne where a large group of (Sri Lankan) Sinhala chauvinists attacked a Tamil protest cavalcade.
For those not familiar with the Tamil struggle for human rights and national recognition, this incident may appear exotic and simply an example of ethnic sectarianism.
But my experience has been similar here in Brisbane.Sinhala chauvinists have actively tried to get us expelled from local markets because we had the gall to display a placard which proclaimed 'Stop the genocide in Sri Lanka.' In an extraordinary incident, Sinhala chauvinists lodged complaints of racism against us because we supported Tamil rights. The negotiated consequence was that we are now no longer allowed to display any material on the Tamil struggle.
This overbearing assertion by members of the Sinhala majority, hoodwinked by the Sri lankan government spin in regard to the Tamil minority on the island, is processed through many sources as a justified response to what is misrepresented crudely as a military struggle between the government and the LTTE -- Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam . This is exactly how the Palestinian struggle for self determination is handled -- as a struggle between the Israel state and Hamas with the Palestinian population simply caught up in the middle-- by the Zionist supporters of the racist Israel state.
If only the LTTE would stop fighting and the Sri Lankan government stop killing then everything would supposedly be resolved in a climate of peace to the advantage of all. This is how left blog sites like Politics in the Zeroes has reported on the conflict.In effect pandering to Sinhala chauvinism and ignoring that the armed dynamic grew initially out of pogroms against Tamils back in 1983.
While a cease fire should be put in place immediately, the complication is that the Sri Lankan government's approach to the issue has verged more and more towards a genocidal solution. This is total war, not a policing exercise. The core problem is not so much the LTTE's tactical mistakes , dedicated militarism or their deployment of indiscriminant violence on the civilian population which has served only to alienate the Sinhala majority , but the determination of the Sri Lankan government to solve the problem of secession and Tamil inequality by terrorizing and reducing the Tamil minority to a smaller more manageable and cowed minority.This is a calculated genocide on par with the Indonesian subjugation of East Timor. This fact is incontestible but like the situation in Palestine the cynical spin is engineered to obscure the core aims of the ongoing war against the Tamil minority.
Arguing for the rights of Palestinians and Indigenous Australian is no different from the situation of Tamils in Sri Lanka. Racism is racism. Those who seek to misrepresent the situation as a civil war between two self seeking military factions -- are merely pandering to the institutional racism being engineered in Sri Lanka and broadcast around the world under guise of the War on Terrorism.
Already in Australia this spin has ben deployed to fit up local members of the Sri Lankan Tamil community.
This reflects the ongoing cancer that has infected Sri Lankan politics and the main political parties, including those on the left bar one -- have signed on with the chauvinist agenda and like the ideology of Apartheid or that of Zionism, the attitude to the Tamils rights has consolidated such that this war is packaged as a patriotic cleansing operation.
For those not familiar with the Tamil struggle for human rights and national recognition, this incident may appear exotic and simply an example of ethnic sectarianism.
But my experience has been similar here in Brisbane.Sinhala chauvinists have actively tried to get us expelled from local markets because we had the gall to display a placard which proclaimed 'Stop the genocide in Sri Lanka.' In an extraordinary incident, Sinhala chauvinists lodged complaints of racism against us because we supported Tamil rights. The negotiated consequence was that we are now no longer allowed to display any material on the Tamil struggle.
This overbearing assertion by members of the Sinhala majority, hoodwinked by the Sri lankan government spin in regard to the Tamil minority on the island, is processed through many sources as a justified response to what is misrepresented crudely as a military struggle between the government and the LTTE -- Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam . This is exactly how the Palestinian struggle for self determination is handled -- as a struggle between the Israel state and Hamas with the Palestinian population simply caught up in the middle-- by the Zionist supporters of the racist Israel state.
If only the LTTE would stop fighting and the Sri Lankan government stop killing then everything would supposedly be resolved in a climate of peace to the advantage of all. This is how left blog sites like Politics in the Zeroes has reported on the conflict.In effect pandering to Sinhala chauvinism and ignoring that the armed dynamic grew initially out of pogroms against Tamils back in 1983.
While a cease fire should be put in place immediately, the complication is that the Sri Lankan government's approach to the issue has verged more and more towards a genocidal solution. This is total war, not a policing exercise. The core problem is not so much the LTTE's tactical mistakes , dedicated militarism or their deployment of indiscriminant violence on the civilian population which has served only to alienate the Sinhala majority , but the determination of the Sri Lankan government to solve the problem of secession and Tamil inequality by terrorizing and reducing the Tamil minority to a smaller more manageable and cowed minority.This is a calculated genocide on par with the Indonesian subjugation of East Timor. This fact is incontestible but like the situation in Palestine the cynical spin is engineered to obscure the core aims of the ongoing war against the Tamil minority.
Arguing for the rights of Palestinians and Indigenous Australian is no different from the situation of Tamils in Sri Lanka. Racism is racism. Those who seek to misrepresent the situation as a civil war between two self seeking military factions -- are merely pandering to the institutional racism being engineered in Sri Lanka and broadcast around the world under guise of the War on Terrorism.
Already in Australia this spin has ben deployed to fit up local members of the Sri Lankan Tamil community.
This reflects the ongoing cancer that has infected Sri Lankan politics and the main political parties, including those on the left bar one -- have signed on with the chauvinist agenda and like the ideology of Apartheid or that of Zionism, the attitude to the Tamils rights has consolidated such that this war is packaged as a patriotic cleansing operation.
- Australian Tamils Fast Unto Action
- see also: SA member, Dr Brian Senewiratne, deported from Malaysia
- SA Tamil solidarity resources
- SA policy position regarding the conflict
- Sri Lanka: Genocide of the Tamil minority
- Sri Lanka: Behind the genocidal war against the Tamils
- The Tamil question in Sri Lanka
On 4 April 2009, a group of 50 Sinhala expatriates attacked a car-rally organised by Australian Tamils in Melbourne. The car rally was to protest the genocide of Tamils in the island of Sri Lanka and demand immediate end to the war waged by the Sri Lankan government. A few Tamil Australians were injured and their cars were damaged in the attack.
