The European Union & the
Listing of LTTE as a Terrorist
Organisation: Some Reflections - Nadesan
Satyendra "The question of
initiating legal proceedings to challenge
the listing of the LTTE as a terrorist
organisation by the United Kingdom and
the European Union has been raised with
me from time to time by concerned Tamils
during the past several months. As 2008
draws to a close, I felt that it may be
helpful to place on record some of my
responses." more
United States & the Tamil Eelam
Struggle for Freedom
U.S. State Department
Undertakes Review of Designation of
LTTE as a Terrorist Organisationtogether with Comment
bytamilnation.org"..the
politics of the ban usually takes a
predictable course. First you threaten
to ban unless the organisation falls in
line with your perceived strategic
interests. Then you ban, to show that
you were serious about that which you
said. But you do not implement the ban
so that you may continue to engage with
the banned organisation and its
supporters. Then you start implementing
the ban but in a calibrated fashion and
negotiate to secure 'appropriate'
responses from the banned organisation on
a piece meal basis. You may then go on to
suggest that the ban may be removed if
the banned organisation plays 'ball' and
drops its political goal. more
Sinhala Buddhist Ethno
Nationalism - Masquerading as
Sri Lankan 'Civic
Nationalism'to include
".. Success is a journey, not a
destination... In the international best
selling book, Jonathan Livingston
Seagull, that sold millions of copies,
its author Richard Bach describes how his
imaginary hero - Jonathan Livingston
Seagull Rajah Viknarasah in
Rising Through The Wheels - The
Tirukkural Way - Ancient Tamil wisdom for
Success
2. Eelam:
British Tamil Forum,
The Unspeakable Truth,
2008"This
book traces the poignant history of
Tamils in Sri Lanka after independence.It
catalogues the Sri Lankan
Tamils� descent from a
once thriving vibrant Nation to one that
is today fighting for its very survival.
This is a story about how a majority
population consumed with religious
chauvinism can corrupt a democratic
process with untold consequences.The book
is organised into three sections covering
the physical harm suffered by the Tamil
community, the destruction of their
cultural heritage and the attempts at
negotiating a settlement which has come
to nothing. The book also strikes a
hopeful note at the end on how lasting
peace can be achieved from the rubble of
destruction." more
Nations
& Nationalism to include
Week Ending:
Saturday 20 December 2008
Tamil Armed Resistance & the
Law
Kilinochchi: The Kiss
Of Death- B. Raman, Additional
Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat,
Govt. of India, New Delhi, and,
presently, Director, Institute For
Topical Studies, Chennai
"'Kilinochchi within kissing distance'.
So said the disinformation warriors of
Lt.Gen.Sarath Fonseka, the Sri Lankan
Army Commander, more than a week ago.
It has been a long kiss of death for
the young hastily-trained Sinhalese
recruits to the Sri Lankan Army who
were rushed to the battle front by the
General in his keenness to keep his
promise of "In Kilinochchi before the
New Year".more
International Relations in the Age of
Empire: the Global Economy
Meaningful Capitalism:
Change We Can Believe In - Alex
Pattakos"The Times They Are A-Changin," sang
Bob Dylan, which is one of his most
famous title tracks for it captured the
spirit of social and political upheaval
that characterized the 1960s... By
integrating and applying the truly "best
practices" of companies and businesses
that have demonstrated how both doing
good and making
a profit can be accomplished, a "New Age"
of Capitalism, whatever it may be called,
is possible...Alright, you probably think
that I'm nothing but a "dreamer," if not
totally out of my mind! Get real, you
say? "Capitalism, in any form, is evil at
best." "There is no such thing as a soul
of a business." "Corporations, by
definition, have no conscience." I hear
you, but I'm still not convinced..."
more
Democracy Continues, Sri Lanka
Style
Sri Lanka President
threatens Supreme Court
judges"In an extraordinary outburst last
week, Sri Lankan President Mahinda
Rajapakse lashed out at the
country�s Supreme Court,
accusing it of undermining his powers,
and issued a barely disguised threat that
the judges could find themselves the
target of violent thugs... the President
ominously reminded the judges of what had
happened in the past.
�Gentlemen of the
judiciary might have forgotten about the
time when the homes of the judicial
officers were stoned and impeachment
motions brought against three Supreme
Court judges,� he
said..."more
Tamil Diaspora - a
Trans State Nationto include
Usha S Sri-Skanda-Rajah
writes from Canada Maampalam Swamy, an
Eelam Patriot Passes
AwayIt
is with a deep sense of loss and
sadness that we mourn the sudden
passing away of a great Eelam patriot
Maampalam Swamy in New Jersey, USA on
14, December 2008. A passionate
advocate of peace, freedom and dignity,
he worked indefatigably to bring to the
forefront the prolonged pain and
suffering of his people in Tamil Eelam
and to draw international attention to
the genocide in Sri Lanka. He was a
committed humanist first and his
compassion extended to all humanity. He
will remain a legendry figure to his
people, the people he had helped to
uplift. more
Velupillai Pirabakaran, Leader of Tamil
Eelamto
include
Velupillai Pirabaharan:Rebel
in the Family - Vinothini Rajendran
sister of LTTE leader speaks to Stewart
Bell, Canadian National Post "... Ms.
Rajendran says her brother is in no
danger. 'They won't be able to catch him'
she says... A poster of the Hindu hero
Arjuna hangs on the wall. The Tamil
script below tells a story from the
Bhagavad Gita about a conversation
between Lord Krishna and Arjuna, who is
reluctant to go to war. 'Arjuna says, how
can I fight my relatives?' ... Then
Krishna says, it is your duty. 'I am the
God and I am telling you, you do it'.
Then he (Arujna) decides to fight. It was
one of Prabhakaran's favourite childhood
stories... 'Once he accepts something, he
always finishes it... Father was like
that' says Ms.Rajendran. "more
Tamil Nation Library
Full
Text of Article by Deirdre McConnell in
Cambridge Review of International
Affairs, Volume 21 Issue 1 2008
on'The
Tamil people's right to
self-determination'Notebytamilnation.org
-Deirdre
McConnell's 17 page article is a
closely argued and scholarly examination
ofEelam
Tamils' right to
self-determination.
It is a significant and influential
addition to the literature on the Tamil
Eelam struggle for freedom. more
Arundhati Roy on
Mumbai: The monster in the
mirror"...Homeland Security has cost the
US government billions of dollars. Few
countries, certainly not India, can
afford that sort of price tag. But even
if we could, the fact is that this vast
homeland of ours cannot be secured or
policed in the way the United States has
been. It's not that kind of homeland. ..
What kind of Homeland Security can secure
India?.... The only way to contain (it
would be na�ve to say
end) terrorism is to look at the monster
in the mirror. We're standing at a fork
in the road. One sign says Justice, the
other Civil War. There's no third sign
and there's no going back.
Choose."more
"... We are all
leaders, even without that formal title.
We are in communities, governments,
corporations, schools, universities,
churches, non-profits, NGOs, healthcare.
We are very diverse, yet our values unite
us: We rely on human goodness. We depend
on diversity. We trust in life's
capacity to self-organize in sustainable,
generous, and inter-dependent ways.
We live in many different cultures and
nations, and we express
these values in wonderfully
diverse ways. Yet we each
serve the vision of a world where people
can experience themselves as whole,
healthy, sacred, and free. In
all our different activities, we want to
liberate the creativity and caring that
are common to all people..." Margaret
Wheatley, The Berkana Institute
quotedBeyond Nations &
Nationalism: One
World
"...A true
transnationalism will not come by the
suppression of one nation by another. A
true trans nationalism will come from
nationalisms that have flowered and
matured: from peoples who have grown
from dependence to independence to
inter-dependence. It is only the
independent who may be inter-dependent
- and to work for the flowering of the
Tamil nation is to
bring forward the emergence of a
true trans nationalism. Meanwhile,
Tamils have no cause, to be apologetic
about their togetherness as a people.
As a people, they too have much to
contribute to the rich fabric of the
many nations of the world - and to
world civilisation. At the same time,
it is true to say that the Tamils have
gained, and continue to gain, by their
interaction with other peoples and
other cultures - particularly those of
the Indian sub continent. No people are
an island unto themselves. The Tamil
people do not take an exaggerated view
of nationalism. They are not
chauvinists. .." more
Week Ending:
Saturday 13 December 2008
Reflection
"Great masters of theory are
only very rarely great organizers also.
And this is because the greatness of the
theorist and founder of a system consists
in being able to discover and lay down
those laws that are right in the
abstract, whereas the organizer must
first of all be a man of psychological
insight... to be a leader means to be
able to move the masses. The gift of
formulating ideas has nothing whatsoever
to do with the capacity for leadership.
It would be entirely futile to discuss
the question as to which is the more
important: the faculty of conceiving
ideals and human aims or that of being
able to have them put into practice.
Here, as so often happens in life, the
one would be entirely meaningless without
the other..." Adolf Hitler in Chapter XI,
Mein Kampf: My
Country
"... All propaganda
must be popular and its intellectual
level must be adjusted to the most
limited intelligence among those it is
addressed to. Consequently, the
greater the mass it is intended to reach,
the lower its purely intellectual level
will have to be...It is a mistake to
make propaganda many-sided, like
scientific instruction, for instance.
The receptivity of the great masses is
very limited, their intelligence is
small, but their power of forgetting is
enormous. In consequence of these
facts, all effective propaganda must be
limited to a very few points and must
harp on these in slogans until the last
member of the public understands what you
want him to understand by your slogan..."
more
Human Rights
& the Tamil Eelam Struggle for
Freedom
International
Federation of Tamils on 60th Anniversary
of Universal Declaration of Human
Rights"It
was sixty years ago on 10 December 1948
that the United Nations General Assembly
adopted the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights. It was also sixty years
ago, on 4 February 1948, that the British
ended their colonial rule of the island
of Ceylon (Sri Lanka as it is now known)
and handed over power to a permanent
Sinhala majority within the confines of a
single unitary state. And for the people
of Tamil Eelam in the island of Ceylon,
it was also sixty years ago that British
colonialism was replaced by Sinhala
colonialism.... For the people of Tamil Eelam, the
60th Anniversary of Universal Declaration
of Human Rights is a painful reminder of
the gap between the words and deeds of
the member states of the United Nations -
a gap made all too visible by their
responses to Sinhala Sri
Lanka�s 60 year record
of tyranny and oppression
� a tyranny and
oppression that led the people of Tamil
Eelam to have recourse, as a last resort
to rebellion and armed resistance, with
all the suffering that that resistance
entailed, and continues to entail...
Aspirations for freedom and liberty are
not easily quelled. This is the lesson of
history. And it is this lesson of history
that the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights set out to teach sixty years ago
after the �untold
sorrow� of two world
wars - the lesson that
�recognition of the
inherent dignity and of the equal and
inalienable rights of all members of the
human family is the foundation of
freedom, justice and peace in the
world� and the lesson
that �if man is not to
be compelled to have recourse, as a last
resort, to rebellion against tyranny and
oppression, that human rights should be
protected by the rule of
law�. The last 60 years
show that there is a pressing need to
continue to teach that lesson to the
member states of the United
Nations."more
New
Delhi won't listen to the political
jokers in Tamil Nadu says Sri Lankan Army
Chief Fonseka"...If the LTTE is wiped out, those
political jokers like Nedumaran, Vaiko
and whoever who sympathizes with the LTTE
will most probably lose their income from
the LTTE.. If you consider the overall
thing, the LTTE's separate state ideology
is a threat to India, because this
ideology will spread in Tamil Nadu too.
It is now proved by Tamil Nadu by staging
protests against the Indian government
and seeking help to take the side of the
LTTE..." more
International Relations in the Age of
Empire - 60th Anniversary of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December
1948... Human Rights? What Human
Rights?
1. Andre Vltchek -
Wouldn't it be nice to live in an ideal
world with no violence and
brutality - "Wouldn't it be
nice to live in an ideal world with no
violence and brutality, where every
individual is free and responsible,
where every nation can choose its fate
and alliances?... This is not the world
that I know. Almost all the
countries on earth do everything they
can to crush independence movements,
preventing ethnic groups and occupied
territories from gaining
self-governance... Just over ten
years ago I witnessed the aftermath of
mass rape by Indonesian military (TNI)
in a small mountainous town of Ermera,
in East Timor. Almost all men were
arrested and the military moved in,
raping everybody from little girls to
grandmothers. Eventually I got arrested
for being in the area. When I finally
managed to reach safe shores, I
contacted several major newspapers and
television channels in the US,
Australia and Europe. There was no
interest in my story or in the plight
of tiny occupied nation. Occupation,
after all, occurred, with the blessing
of the United States and Australia, and
Indonesia proved to be a good ally
after killing almost all Communists as
well as hundreds of thousands of ethnic
Chinese.." more
2. John Pilger - Kafka
Has A Rival: The British Foreign Office
Lectures Us On Human Rights -
"..Today, a surreal event will take
place in the centre of London. The
Foreign Office is holding an open day
"to highlight the importance of Human
Rights in our work as part of the 60th
anniversary of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights". There
will be various "stalls" and "panel
discussions" ... Is this a spoof? No.
The Foreign Office wants to raise our
"human rights awareness". Kafka and
Heller have many counterfeits.... There
will be no stall for the victims of a
systemic British policy of exporting
arms and military equipment to ten out
of 14 of Africa's most war-bloodied and
impoverished countries....There will
be no stall for history, for our
memory. Stored in the great British
libraries and record offices,
unclassified official files tell the
truth about British policy and human
rights, from officially condoned
atrocities in the concentration camps
of colonial Kenya and the arming of the
genocidal General Suharto in Indonesia,
to the supply of and biological weapons
to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s..."
more
Week Ending:
Saturday 6 December 2008
Reflection
Without Comment
"... We can
expect in the next years and decades,
young terrorists of Tamil origin to
descend upon us, machine guns blazing in
all directions. How to guard against
this? We must avoid the worst case
scenario, in which Tamil terrorism of
external origin reinforces and links up
with Sri Lankan based Tamil
terrorism....there are 80 million
Tamils and only 18 million Sinhalese.
Therefore the
Sinhalese need the support of the
anti-Tiger Tamils. They also need to
increase the numbers of anti-Tiger,
anti-terrorist Tamils..." Sri Lanka
Ambassador, Dayan Jayatilleke in �Nothwithstanding
the Dividing
Sea�Mahaveera, Mumbai
& the Madrasi Mad Max mode", 2
December 2008
3.
Hindu Obituary, 1957
"Krishnan the
comedian was twin-brother to Krishnan
the moralist and motley was only a
disguise this fine artist threw over
his self-chosen mission as propagandist
for a better order..."
".. Success is a journey, not a
destination... In the international best
selling book, Jonathan Livingston
Seagull, that sold millions of copies,
its author Richard Bach describes how his
imaginary hero - Jonathan Livingston
Seagull
" 
