BETA

“A servant can have no unfeigned respect for his master”
- Bernard de Mandeville (1670 – 1733)

I am working through a very hectic schedule at the moment, that’s why I could not scribble my ‘thoughts’ these days. The latest transformation of ‘Supreme Commander’ Pillaiyan to a democratically elected Chief Minister of EPC forced me to write now. In history, there had never been an instance that a puppet regime succeeded in crushing the rebellion / insurgency and the will of the oppressed people.
These kind of political comedies are not a new phenomenon to us but this event (EPC swearing in ceremony) should emboldened the Tamil unity further and we should rally behind the Tamil national leadership.

Today I bought a book on ‘Political hypocrisy’ by David Runciman, an academic from the Cambridge University. It seems to be very interesting and helping me to find answers to few of my long standing questions. I am hoping to write about this book and my long standing ‘search’ for the truth.

http://www.poonkothai.blogspot.com/

“Another thing that has changed now is the approach of the army. Earlier, in the eighties, they used to attack Tamil civilians. Now civilians are not attacked”

- SC Chandrahasan

The above comment was made by SC Chandrahasan, the son of SJV Chelvanayagam, when asked about reduced refugee influx to the Tamilnadu state during this latest phase of war. He further said,

“Some of us who believe in the non-violent process know that the struggle will go on until justice is achieved. It will go on much more effectively if the LTTE is not in the picture”

“They (LTTE) have become a problem rather than the solution”

Of course we are witnessing greatest political tragedies at the moment, for example Pillaiyan has become the face of moderate Tamil political leadership and even international agencies are compelled to deal with this low IQ thug. But SC Chandrahasan’s comments are outrageous, unwarranted and hilarious. I presume SC Chandrahasan is far more sensible person than Pillaiyan because of his education and association with the ‘enlighten’ people.

This reminds me about Harilal, the eldest son of Mahatma Gandhi and his open feud with his father. He deliberately embarrassed Gandhi in public and he was being used by the British authorities to undermine the Gandhi and the freedom struggle.

SC Chandrahasan identifies himself with the non violence process of the Tamileelam struggle, he thinks we have forgotten about his association with the TELO and later he was kicked out of the organisation.

He should avoid commenting on Tamileelam affairs and he should concentrate on his daughter’s ‘Tamil nationalistic services’ and the services to the Brahmins of South block. He should be mindful that this kind of traitorous utterances will not be tolerated in future. He will be tried in absentia for treason by the Tamileelam judiciary.

He may be trying to live up to standard of his father’s title ‘Gandhi of Eelam’!!

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

-Philip Larkin (1922 – 1985)

In the past DBS had castigated many Tamil journalists and academics for vilifying Neelan Thiruchelvam in the media even after his death. He argued that in Tamil tradition dead people are treated with great respect even if they are enemies. Its look like, he is preaching to others and fails to practise in his writings. In his latest column he labelled the assassinated parliamentarian Kiddinan Sivanesan as ‘Tiger acolyte’. This clearly depicts his (DBS) pathological mind and animosity towards the current political and military leadership of Tamils on the basis that they are not representing the ‘liberal intelligentsia’ of old Jaffna establishment.

“More importantly when Amirthalingam made a statement or leveled a charge it carried weight and credibility. It was taken seriously at international levels. His complaints could not be dismissed lightly as tiger propaganda. This was not the case with Sivanesan a tiger acolyte whose “propaganda” was limited mainly to pro tiger Tamil media”.

- DBS Jeyaraj

He conveniently forgets the fact that then opposition leader was none other than the Amirthalingam and the mantle of Tamil political leadership was still on the shoulders of his beloved Amir anna. Since the intensification of Tamil national liberation struggle as an armed insurgency there was a convergence of political and military leadership and that culminated in current LTTE – TNA political apparatus.
Unfortunately DBS is not going to stop his abominations towards Tamil nationalists and he wants us to be intoxicated with his Tamil grapevine.

http://www.poonkothai.blogspot.com/

Mr Prabharakan was to make some important comments relating to the ongoing fighting and related matters. He told them that it was his responsibility to cope with the latest campaign in the Wanni by the military. They should not worry about it. However, he asked TNA parliamentarians to highlight to "the outside world" what he called "the suffering undergone by people in the Wanni and the human rights violations that were being committed."

- Situation Report, Sunday Times, 16/03/2008

M.R. Narayan Swamy, a journalist ‘specialised’ on LTTE affairs, recently made a ‘scoop’ regarding now defunct CFA and the active involvement of then BJP government in the peace process. Apparently Indian government was actively involved in the groundwork for CFA, by liaising with the Sri Lankan and Norwegian governments in drafting the CFA document and the creation of SLMM. The Indian involvement was kept under wraps only few people in the Delhi knew about this.

The Liberation Tigers have been loosing territories since Mavilaru incident in June 2006 and now they have completely lost the Southern region of Tamileelam. The Sri Lankan forces are in a state of high morale with unparalleled resources and now ready to take on Vanni. The hawkish Sri Lankan ambassador Dayan Jayathilaka recently declared year 2008 as the ‘year of victory’. The following excerpts are from his undigested socialist ‘regurgitations’.

“The war can be won. We are at a rare moment in our country's history in which we enjoy a favourable confluence of factors: a President (and Defence Secretary) with political will and determination; an experienced and respected military leadership; massive popular support; high military morale; increased recruitment; high performance on the part of all three armed services….after a quarter century of military conflict, the Sri Lankan people are not about to throw in the towel and bring the boys back home, for the simple reason that the boys are fighting precisely for their home, and therefore a massive 84 % percent of a huge 75% of the island's people, a massive majority of the majority, support the President's war effort. So too does a significant (under the circumstances) segment (20%) of the main Tamil minority. The war is now a People's War”

In the backdrop of a series of battle field reversals, ‘international crack down’ and loss of few high value human resources (etc.Thamilselvan and Charles) for Liberation Tigers, Is Dayan’s assertion going to prevail?

My intention is not to construct any particular school of thought rather I would prefer to ‘discuss’ the current ‘impasse’ in the battle fields of Mannar, Vavuniya, Manalaru and Northern sectors and subsequent low morale of our expatriate ‘Udan pirappukkal’.

The reality of achieving the Tamileelam statehood

The process of making of ‘Tamileelam state’ can be categorised into two major processes.

REMEMBER that in Germany “venereal diseases strike at every fourth person between the ages of 15 and 41”

- Instructions for British servicemen in Germany, Political Warfare Executive, 1944

Saddam Hussein could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes

- Tony Blair

LORD MALLOCH BROWN warned the Tamils in London not to take Kosovo as a precedent in a bid to claim independence. He said Kosovo was a unique case and a number of European and Asian countries are concerned about it……..that the British Government could not push the Commonwealth to impose sanctions against Sri Lanka since the Sri Lankan Government had not committed any offence like Pakistan !

http://www.poonkothai.blogspot.com/

Keen observers of Tamileelam struggle will promptly figure out the content of this blog, thanks to Google that I can confidently verify this fact.
I googled the phrase ‘Tamil grapevine’ and the results showed five out of ten results in the first page of Google results are from Tamil week and Transcurrents websites!!

So called ‘Sri Lanka analyst’ DBS Jeyaraj has been using this phrase very frequently in contemporary Tamil political reporting.

What is grapevine?
According to the Cambridge online dictionary, “To hear news from someone who heard the news from someone else”

Another online dictionary says grapevine telegraph. A person-to-person method of spreading rumours, gossip, information, etc., by informal or unofficial conversation, letter writing, or the like.

From wikipedia

“The term grapevine can be traced to Civil War days when vine like telegraph wires were strung from tree to tree across battlefields and used by Army Intelligence.[4] The messages that came over these lines were often so confusing or inaccurate that soon any rumour was said to come from the grapevine. Usually, grapevines flow around water coolers, down hallways, through lunch rooms, and wherever people get together in groups.[5] The lines of communication seem to be haphazard and easily disrupted as the telegraph wires were, however, they transmit information rapidly and in many cases faster and with a stronger impact than the formal system allows”

In conclusion grapevine means unsubstantiated claims and rumours.

DBS and Tamil grapevine

The New York based young writer of Sri Lankan origin, Vasugi V. Ganeshananthan’s first novel Love Marriage is going to be published in April 2008. Following passage is from her website, http://www.vasugi.com/index.html

In this globe-scattered Sri Lankan family, we speak only of two kinds of marriage. The first is the Arranged Marriage. The second is the Love Marriage. In reality, there is a whole spectrum in between, but most of us spend years running away from the first towards the second. [p. 3]

She seems to be attracted to back Home and Tamil identity, also a member of the Facebook group ‘Ariyalai’, a suburban of Jaffna!
It is heartening to see a young Eelam Tamil writer with western literary background writing about Eelam struggle and Tamil expatriate life. I am eagerly waiting to see how she has portrayed this Sri Lankan conflict in her book, which is going to be read by many non Tamil English readers.

http://www.poonkothai.blogspot.com/

This piece of blog is not going to deal with the arrest of Karuna by the UK authorities and possible prosecution against him for the crimes he committed in Tamileelam. There is an overwhelming desire from Tamils all over the world to see Karuna being prosecuted by the UK government for his crimes. According to well informed Tamil sources in UK, a legal advice had been sought from eminent barristers and they have opined that there is a possibility this prosecution trial can bring unwanted bad publicity to the Tamileelam struggle. The Human rights watch and Amnesty international are pressing hard to prosecute him and eventually prosecution can become real, so we have to wait and see the unfolding events.

Back to my topic, I have special interest in the topics of Counterinsurgency (CI), psychological operations (PSYOPS) and Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). When I was doing a background reading on these topics I came across a comment of veteran journalist Taraki Sivaram on the state of counter insurgency strategy by the successive Sri Lankan governments. He mentioned about his experience in US with an expert on counter insurgency; that officer said that he could not understand why the Sri Lankan government is having trouble in floating an anti LTTE paramilitary organisation in its fight against LTTE and Sivaram replied to him that Sri Lankan situation is very unique in this nature. He further elaborated that in Sri Lankan situation, who ever being propped by the authorities will face a credibility problem because those puppets won’t be able to convince the Tamil people that there is an alternative solution to this ethnic problem; he succinctly said ‘the unitary constitution of Sri Lanka leaves no room for any kind of alternative solution to this ethnic question’ also he mentioned that Eelam Tamils are ‘different kettle of fish’ and difficult to out manoeuvre!!
Strangely he made this comment before the infamous Karuna rebellion.

Personally I don’t read PARAPARAPU paper regularly but once in month I have the chance to read this paper when I go to a saloon run by a Tamil guy in London. In that saloon they used to keep most of the south Indian Tamil magazines, few free Tamil newspapers published in expatriate countries and PARAPARAPU paper. Basically I don’t want to waste my money on PARAPARAPU paper and most importantly I can’t waste my time on this paper because nothing I can gain from this paper. While I was waiting in the saloon for my turn to get the hair cut done I used to read this paper and I felt sorry for the average Tamil readers of this paper.

The latest PARAPARAPU paper has claimed that they have rightly predicted the Anuradhapura SLAF base attack by the Liberation Tigers nearly two weeks ago. In reality not only the ‘analyst’ of PARAPARAPU paper, almost every ‘analyst’ in Tamil media are predicting various types of Tiger responses to the Mahinda regime. This has been going on since last year. Apparently they have predicted the exact number of TAF aircrafts is going to involve in this operation!! If it is the case then Sri Lankan government doesn’t have to worry about recent loss of surveillance capacity of SLAF, simply they (government) have to supply PARAPARPU paper to military planners and they can read the paper and find out the future Tiger plans!! It will be very cheap and pain free way of gathering information.

My comments are based on its contents and I don’t know any of the journalists behind this paper and nothing personal. What is bothering me is the way this paper publishes some of its contents and misleading the ignorant Tamil readers. Sadly it is a reminiscent of Ramesh’s THINAMURASU (before his death).

http://www.poonkothai.blogspot.com/

The island of Sri Lanka was unique among other third world countries in many ways, the high level of literacy and remarkably decent health care system put Sri Lanka in an unique position.
Whether you like it or not, the Sri Lankan health indices on maternal mortality rate and infant mortality rate were comparable with affluent western countries. There are many factors contributing to this kind of paradoxical indices.

 Existence of a strong educational system and the tradition of academia left behind by the British helped to maintain a high level of literacy rate.

 Naturally very resilient people on both sides (Tamils and Sinhalese) of the divide.

 Many of the institutions and disciplines are still aggressively following the British system and accreditation of British standards. This is very much obvious in Sri Lankan medical establishment’s performance.

So why am I writing about maternal mortality rate?

Since the eruption of Tamileelam liberation struggle nearly three decades ago, Sri Lanka (Tamils and Sinhalese) had gone through numerous challenges in every aspect of life. Still Tamils are trying to live as normal as possible even if they are in an IDP refugee camp. This does not under estimate their hardships and sufferings, I would like to highlight the resilience of the people. On the other hand Sinhalese people also feeling the burden of this protracted conflict, even though they are in a far better living condition than Tamils. The successive Sinhala governments also tried to contain the war into the Northeast region and tried keep the Sinhala mass in the state of surrealism of ‘Jaya Sikkurui’ / victory assured.

The evolution of international society

“The starting point is human beings organized into geographically separate political communities and the horizontal relations of conflict and cooperation that ensue from their joint political existences. International society can be understood as a distinctive institutional response to accommodate this dimension of political coexistence. It has assumed different forms from ancient times to the present era but it also discloses common features the most important being a relationship of both independence and interconnectedness between political communities, usually conceived as states”.
- From ‘The globalization of politics’

The following list will give some idea about the evolution of ‘international society’.

500 – 100 BC Ancient Greek or Helenic
1300- 1500 Renaissance Italy
1500 – 1650 Early modern European
1650 – 1950 Eiropean-cum-Western
1950 - Global

The Treaties of West – Phalia
The medieval European states operated on the idea of ‘Respublica Christina’, the Christianity was unifying factor and played the crucial role in relationship with other states. The protestant reformation propelled the European society in the path of modern secular sovereign states. The ‘Thirty Years War’ (1618 – 1648) and the treaties of west-phalia formally recognised the existence of separate sovereignties in one international society. Religion was no longer a legal ground for intervention or war among European states.
The treaties of west-phalia brought a new dimension to the international relations, where more emphasis was made to stop further war among European states as a result wars between European states would now on tend to be fought in the global south in the competition for colonial influence.

The foreign borrowing of US$ 500 million by the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa (for the infra structure development) is going to be carried out by the help of HSBC bank. This controversial borrowing by the Sri Lankan government was severely criticised by the opposition UNP and its leader Ranil even asked the people to surround the HSBC banks to protest against the rising cost of living. The UNP is well known for its well disciplined fiscal control and revenue management and always regarded as competent to manage the economy. The Transparency International Sri Lanka (TISL) had issued a position paper on this borrowing and questioned various aspects of this dealing and demanded openness in the whole borrowing process. I don’t want to go into the details complex repayment scheme and the implications to the Sri Lankan economy due to this borrowing; one of the risks listed by the TISL position paper was following;

“There are no guarantees whether the funds raised would be utilised for infrastructure
Projects as presently indicated. There is a possibility that it may even go towards funding Consumption or to fund the war related costs or financing the budget deficit”

We the expatriate Tamils should expose the shady dealings of HSBC bank with one of the world’s worst perpetrator of human rights violations against its own people and conducting a genocidal war against Tamils. The expatriate Tamils should specifically target the HSBC bank to drop its secretive deal with Mahinda regime by executing a well planned public awareness campaign and series of protests out side HSBC branches throughout the world (especially in Western Europe, North America and Australasia).

Please wait!! Just before rushing to stand in front of the HSBC bank with a placard written at last minute; please do the protest in a planned and professional manner where you can make a real difference!

During eighties in Jaffna as a general rule for all Jaffnites my father was a regular listener of Indian radio programmes. Some times I was also attracted to some of those programmes; when I look back those programmes most of them were boasting about Indian ‘power’ and praising the glory of socialist India’s fight against imperialism.

The controversial 123 agreement (civilian nuclear project) between US and India has stirred up the already muddled Indian political establishment. The proposed agreement will allow India to gain access to US technology and skills to produce nuclear power (civilian project). This is in violation of nuclear non proliferation treaty (NPT) of 1954 and will allow the IAEA to inspect all fourteen nuclear sites in India annually; this is clearly a disgraceful end to Indian ambition to become a global super power. India –US relations started to warm up in early nineties with economic liberalisation by then congress led government of PV Narasimha Rao and later right wing BJP led NDA government initiated more closer defence and strategic relationship. The current ‘strategic partnership’ was started with the10-year India-U.S. defence framework agreement signed in 2005. The 123 agreement was aggressively pushed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his advisers with the blessings of Sonia Gandhi despite the strong opposition from left parties and dissent from some constituents of UPA. Even a lay person will notice the change in Indian foreign policy during last decade and now it is more ‘congruent’ with US strategic interests. This is a very shameful end to traditional Indian foreign policy and her anti imperialist stand in the past. The US government dictates the Indian foreign policy and even demands certain issues to be done specifically in order to suit the American needs. The following excerpts from the Frontline magazine will give some idea about the extent of this new phenomenon.