To his surprise, Graham Williamson of Act Now, UK, realised that Tamils and Sinhalese biologically stem from a common genetic process originating since prehistoric times, when he read the book Peopling of Sri Lanka by Subramaniyam Visahan. The study may help to overcome genocidal conflict. Yet the reality of genetic similarity between the two peoples does not suggest that the two should be treated as one as Sinhala nationalism seeks the extinction of Tamils as a cultural identity, if not a people. The many differences of language, religion and culture suggests a political separation in the same way that the peoples of Europe jealously guard their national identities yet manage, today at least, to cooperate in harmony, he reviewed. Meanwhile, Chennai-based website The Weekend Leader on Saturday documented the extent of cultural genocide committed in the land of Tamils in the island.
“Travelling through the Tamil areas in North Sri Lanka, one is shocked to see the changing demography of the land. A land that was once inhabited by Tamils and a land that had a distinct flavor of Tamil culture and heritage is now in the grip of Sinhalese hegemony, seen in the form of Buddhist statues, viharas and stupas dotting the landscape that is also lined by broken Tamil homes and newly built shanties of Tamil refugees,” said an article “Erasing the cultural leftover of Tamils to convert Sri Lanka into Sinhala country,” appeared in The Weekend Leader, based in Tamil Nadu.
“Throughout our travel into the Tamil hinterland, we could sense an air of Sinhalese triumphalism,” Military camps and Sinhala soldiers are a common sight in Tamil areas. The occupying SL defense forces alone inhabit 7,000 sq. km of total 18,880 sq. km of Tamil land in the island, the correspondent who wrote the feature said.
While around 2500 temples and 400 churches have been destroyed in the war, nearly 2500 Buddhist stupas and statues have come up in the last couple of years in the Tamil areas, where the only Buddhists are the occupying soldiers, the article said, documenting some of them at major Tamil towns.
The article also documented Sinhala colonization, economic exploitation and the extent of Sinhalicisation from signboards and road names to schools and administration, in the country of Tamils in the island.
The Weekend Leader correspondent raises the question “Where will this all lead to? Only time will tell.”
Graham Williamson, reviewing Visahan’s book sketching DNA commonality of Tamils and Sinhalese says, “I find it an irony then that Sinhala nationalists, who propagate these ‘racial’ differences, so oppose the separation of the two peoples? I guess that the only meaningful separation for them would involve either the extinction of Sri Lankan Tamils as a cultural entity if not a people, or for them to be kept repressed and downtrodden if not.”
That’s why he argues for a solution based on political separation time-tested in Europe.
But even after seeing clear intention of genocide in the killing of 200,000 Tamils in a war of three decades and in the structural developments of the aftermath, which are worse than the war, the USA, India and the leadership in the West are not prepared to pronounce genocide and come out with solutions logical to it, because they are ideologically bankrupt in conceiving innovative and creative ideas to realize their ambitions in the island without genocide, commented a Tamil academic in the island.
The Indian foreign minister this week saw the crisis in the island as caused by three decades of ‘terrorism’.
The Stalinists in India ideologically concerned of only India’s imperial unity and thinking of integrating the island as a whole, try to save their face by suggesting ‘federal solution’ to the genocidal context of the island.
At the height of the war when thousands and thousands of Tamil civilians were massacred with genocidal tendencies, the UK envoy in the UN said that the Tigers were long blighting state in Sri Lanka.
The US that had set the whole stage for the genocidal war has not acknowledged what they contributed to the island was genocide.
Here is where the political separation of Eezham Tamils to independence gains universal importance to the polity of humanity and to the interpretation of human civilization to its progress, the academic further said.
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