I grew up under the influence of the Tamil Tiger Cult. Not as much as my parents, but nevertheless clouded in my judgement about Sri Lanka and its history.
Through most of my life, the providers of my perspective on the history of Sri Lanka were my parents. Both regarded the Tamil Tigers as "freedom fighters" rather than terrorists. My publicly father argued that the Tigers were the "military arm" of the Tamil people, and that they were the only thing standing between the Tamil People and the "genocidal" Sri Lankan armed forces. This is, of course, propaganda straight from the Tiger's mouth(piece).
Since the defeat of the military wing of the Tamil Tigers and the propaganda and political arms of the Tamil Tigers have undergone yet another transformation. Already globalised, the propaganda machine expanded on its spurious accusations of "genocide" by what they called the GoSL - Government of Sri Lanka, which they continued to claim was a "Sinhalese" government that did not represent the "legitimate needs" of the Tamil people in what they continued to call the "Tamil North and East". The political leadership created what they called the "Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam" headed by the American Tamil lawyer Visvanathan Rudrakumaran. Rudrakumaran insisted on calling himself "Prime Minister" of the TGTE, much to the amusement of anyone who knew he was a legal adviser to Anton Balasingham whose Australian-born wife Adele handed out cyanide capsules to young Tamil girls.
I have discussed all this with my mother but not my father. Today I tried again. I rang my parents' home in Mt Gravatt. My mother answered the phone. After saying hello, I asked if she had heard of the Sri Lankan poltician I had watched on You Tube last night. His name is Professor Rajiva Wijesinha and I had been very impressed by what I had seen and read about him and by him.
Professor Wijesinha is a Sri Lankan and British-educated academic who headed one of the universities in southern Sri Lanka before abandoning academia for politics. He has done an amazing job in his role as head of the government's reconciliation efforts. I urge readers to stop reading this after the next paragraph and watch the You Tube videos of Rajiva Wijesinha. His is fluently bilingual in Sinhalese and English. I do not know how much Tamil he understands, but I'm sure it is more than that possessed by me or my father. Maybe more than my mother, too, though she regards herself as "Tamil". She used to call herself a "Ceylon Tamil" but reluctantly took to identifying herself as a "Sri Lankan Tamil" after the change in the country's name in 1972. That was when Sri Lanka took the first steps to becoming "democratic" and "socialist" - The Democratic, Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka.
When I was a child in England my older sister and I were told that, unlike the "English" children, we "came from Ceylon" and were of "mixed race". These two races were, I was later told, the "Singhalese" and the "Tamils". The Singhalese and Tamils were of fundamentally different races and, I learnt, were "Aryan" and "Dravidian" respectively. The Aryans came from North India and the Dravidians from South India. This was the view of history, simplified, that is presented in the book A Concise History of Ceylon, which I have borrowed from my mother's library. Reading this book, which was published by the Ceylon University Press (Colombo) in 1961 has given me a new perspective on the mind-set of the Tamil Tiger cult.
I'll explain what I have discovered in my next blog....
Through most of my life, the providers of my perspective on the history of Sri Lanka were my parents. Both regarded the Tamil Tigers as "freedom fighters" rather than terrorists. My publicly father argued that the Tigers were the "military arm" of the Tamil people, and that they were the only thing standing between the Tamil People and the "genocidal" Sri Lankan armed forces. This is, of course, propaganda straight from the Tiger's mouth(piece).
Since the defeat of the military wing of the Tamil Tigers and the propaganda and political arms of the Tamil Tigers have undergone yet another transformation. Already globalised, the propaganda machine expanded on its spurious accusations of "genocide" by what they called the GoSL - Government of Sri Lanka, which they continued to claim was a "Sinhalese" government that did not represent the "legitimate needs" of the Tamil people in what they continued to call the "Tamil North and East". The political leadership created what they called the "Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam" headed by the American Tamil lawyer Visvanathan Rudrakumaran. Rudrakumaran insisted on calling himself "Prime Minister" of the TGTE, much to the amusement of anyone who knew he was a legal adviser to Anton Balasingham whose Australian-born wife Adele handed out cyanide capsules to young Tamil girls.
I have discussed all this with my mother but not my father. Today I tried again. I rang my parents' home in Mt Gravatt. My mother answered the phone. After saying hello, I asked if she had heard of the Sri Lankan poltician I had watched on You Tube last night. His name is Professor Rajiva Wijesinha and I had been very impressed by what I had seen and read about him and by him.
Professor Wijesinha is a Sri Lankan and British-educated academic who headed one of the universities in southern Sri Lanka before abandoning academia for politics. He has done an amazing job in his role as head of the government's reconciliation efforts. I urge readers to stop reading this after the next paragraph and watch the You Tube videos of Rajiva Wijesinha. His is fluently bilingual in Sinhalese and English. I do not know how much Tamil he understands, but I'm sure it is more than that possessed by me or my father. Maybe more than my mother, too, though she regards herself as "Tamil". She used to call herself a "Ceylon Tamil" but reluctantly took to identifying herself as a "Sri Lankan Tamil" after the change in the country's name in 1972. That was when Sri Lanka took the first steps to becoming "democratic" and "socialist" - The Democratic, Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka.
When I was a child in England my older sister and I were told that, unlike the "English" children, we "came from Ceylon" and were of "mixed race". These two races were, I was later told, the "Singhalese" and the "Tamils". The Singhalese and Tamils were of fundamentally different races and, I learnt, were "Aryan" and "Dravidian" respectively. The Aryans came from North India and the Dravidians from South India. This was the view of history, simplified, that is presented in the book A Concise History of Ceylon, which I have borrowed from my mother's library. Reading this book, which was published by the Ceylon University Press (Colombo) in 1961 has given me a new perspective on the mind-set of the Tamil Tiger cult.
I'll explain what I have discovered in my next blog....
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