"..The Tamil people have paid a
high price
for their
dreams of freedom. The social fabric built on family and
kin, music and dance, and an ethic of hard work has been torn to
shreds as families have been separated by death and
forced
migration. Their homeland is dotted with orphanages and a whole
generation has missed out on basic education. Why don�t I leave my
war where I came from? I am burdened by the knowledge that it is a
random twist of fate that has me fighting with the pen and not a
rifle."
I am not a terrorist.
I am not a terrorist.
I am not a terrorist.
The Colombo government has been able to
use the language of terror to criminalise the Tamil population in
Sri Lanka and in the Diaspora. Today the words Tamil and
tiger go
together as easily as Islamic and fundamentalist; as easily as
Vietnam and war; as krispy and kreme.
It is a reflection of the times that I
feel the need to say upfront that what I seek is
peace with justice.
However, I hope this article will help
form a more nuanced picture on what is being currently played out in
the Diaspora.
They need to be understood in the context
of a foreign struggle. A struggle that the Western media seek to
interpret through the lens of terror.
I do not claim to speak for the entire
Tamil community, like any community there are a range of views and
voices.
My ideas about the conflict have been
shaped in two phases � the �angry brown man� phase and the
�intellectual brother� phase.
The �angry brown man� phase lasted from
my teens through to my second year of university. Feelings of
teenage social exclusion and �otherness� were fused with stories
passed down through parents and grandparents. As a young man � mine
is a gendered experience � I turned to the hip hop of Public Enemy
and the romanticised resistance of the Tamil freedom struggle.
However, I could not relate to the fiery
passion of the older men; my liberal arts education made me question
violence. I feared the label �radical� or �extremist�.
Then I did some post-graduate study on
the conflict � what I like to call the �intellectual brother� phase.
Here I gained a deeper understanding of the roots of the conflict
and was able to form an almost dispassionate position on
the struggle. In 2002 I visited Sri Lanka for the first time in
eighteen years.
For many the history of the conflict
begins in 1983 with the ambush of 13 Sri Lankan soldiers, for others
it is the anti-Tamil race riots in the wake of that ambush. This may
have been the start of the war, but the
freedom struggle and
the
oppression it resists pre-dates this iconic moment.
Today, the Sri Lankan government refers
to `Tamil separatism� and dare I say it
- �Tamil terrorism�. But these
are but responses to the root cause of the problem -
a racist
ideology.
In 1956, the government
passed the
Sinhala Only Act declaring that �the Sinhala Language shall be the
one and only official language of Sri Lanka�.
In many Western countries, students of
Asian origin are significantly over-represented in tertiary
education. We do well because our parents see it as the only way for
minority ethnians to get ahead in the white man�s
world. Imagine if fifty years from now the white man feels
discriminated against and ethnians have to get higher marks
to get into university.
Amid heightening tension and increasing
militarism anti-Tamil violence erupted when 13 Sri Lankan soldiers
were killed in an ambush by Tamil militants in
July 1983. More than
3,000 Tamils were killed.
These events have left a deep scar on the
Tamil psyche. While the violence was not on the scale of the
Holocaust � its effect on the Tamil people has been similar.
As Tamils became vulnerable to �state
terror�, more and more took to arms.
Why don�t I leave my war where I came
from? I am burdened by the knowledge that it is a random twist of
fate that has me fighting with the pen and not a rifle. The angry
brown man phase would surely have taken me there.
We are not terrorists.
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