Tamils - a Trans State Nation..

"To us all towns are one, all men our kin.
Life's good comes not from others' gift, nor ill
Man's pains and pains' relief are from within.
Thus have we seen in visions of the wise !."
- Tamil Poem in Purananuru, circa 500 B.C 

International Federation of Tamils (IFT)

Memorandum submitted to the Human Rights Council

at  7^th session, 10 March 2008 - Full Text in PDF

IFT submits a memorandum to the member states and the participants of the  7th session of the human rights council.   The purpose of this memorandum is to present an overview of the sixty-year period since the so-called independence from colonialism in the year 1948. The overview exposes the indisputable prevalence of planned, systematic and widespread grave crimes and persecution by the state of Sri Lanka directed against the Tamils as a people, from that very year of de-colonisation up to the present day. For the Tamils, then, it has not been a period of independence, but on the contrary, one of oppression. Nor has it been a liberating passage from colonialism, but only a transfer of colonialism from the British to a new colonial ruler, namely, the Sinhala-Buddhist majoritarian State.  In this context, the memorandum also traces the development of the Tamil people’s shift from striving after co-existence within a united Sri Lanka on the basis of equality, to restoring independent existence as the inevitable option.

The memorandum  concludes ... The only option now left for the Tamil nation, a nation that once enjoyed sovereignty but is now made a subject people against their will, a nation whose existence on this island spans over three millennia, a nation whose peaceful efforts to secure its dignity and equality within a united Sri Lanka has been met with exclusion, persecution and the threat of genocide perpetrated by the Sri Lankan State, is to pursue what it resolutely declared thirty years ago:

“The restoration….of the free, sovereign State of Tamil Eelam, based on the right of self-determination.”