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The Tamil Homeland
26 February 2007
[see also
Boundaries of Tamil Eelam]
The indisputable fact is
that the East has been a Tamil region for several hundred years. The area
remains part of the Tamil homeland despite the colonization efforts by Sinhalese
leaders, efforts designed to alter this hardcore reality and annex the region by
government decree.
Sinhalese Academics like Justice Raja Wannasundera and President�s Counsel H.L.
de Silva contest the fact that the erstwhile Eastern Province is, in fact, part
of 'THE TRADITIONAL TAMIL HOMELAND.'
H.L. de Silva supports his contention that the East is not part of the Tamil
homeland by virtue of the fact that this phrase was rejected, and the phrase
�AREAS OF HISTORICAL HABITATION OF THE TAMIL SPEAKING PEOPLE� substituted for
it, in the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord of 1987. What de Silva conveniently ignores is
how this change came about.
What was the status of the Eastern Province in the seventeenth century? None of
the local Kings, namely the kings of Kandy, the kings of Kotte or the kings of
Jaffna, effectively exercised control of this region when the British arrived in
1786. This was a region largely unoccupied until the Tamils started to settle
here before the British arrived. The Muslims followed, mainly as traders, and
later settled down permanently. The Muslims spoke Tamil because that was the
primary language spoken in the region by the majority Tamil community. The
Sinhalese were a miniscule minority who spoke both Tamil and Sinhalese in order
to function in this dominantly Tamil region.
J.R. Jayawardena, one of the island's most anti-Tamil leaders, was determined to
contest the Tamils' right to this region. He persuaded the much less experienced
Rajiv Gandhi, who initially dropped food supplies to help the Tamils, to join
him in an effort to oppose the Tamil movement for separation. It was Jayawardena
who persuaded Gandhi to avoid classifying the NorthEast as the TAMIL HOMELAND,
despite the fact that the TULF had won the preceding election on a platform of
separating the NorthEast from southern Sinhalese domination with an overwhelming
majority of the Tamil vote.
To combat this powerful trend toward the assertion of Tamil rights, Jayawardena
passed the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which was used to brutalize and terrify
the Tamils in the NorthEast who stood for separation.
The indisputable fact is that the East has been a Tamil region for several
hundred years. The area remains part of the Tamil homeland despite the
colonization efforts by Sinhalese leaders, efforts designed to alter this
hardcore reality and annex the region by government decree. Driving out the
Tamil population at the point of a gun, military occupation, state-financed
colonization and electoral gerrymandering cannot alter this reality in one or
two generations.
Enforced occupation by government decree does not alter the prescriptive rights
previously acquired by the Tamils and those who followed them, the
Tamil-speaking Muslims. A homeland does not only become a homeland by thousands
of years of occupation. Like the Law of Prescription, an area becomes one's
homeland by traditional occupation over a much shorter period of time. Tamil
habitation as the overwhelming majority of the population since before the
seventeenth century fulfills that requirement.
The claims by the Sinhalese colonists to be natives of this region are at best
an oddly fragile claim. The Wannasunderas and Silvas refuse to admit that their
arguments to the contrary are totally unproductive. They cannot make their
misfortune respectable by repetition.
The image that the Sinhalese have sought to make of themselves as the
'super-stars' of the East through colonization has turned them into nothing more
than a side-show freak in this region and that is how their status shall remain,
despite every effort to change the East's demography and occupy this territory
with armed immigrants.
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