[LINK] "Sri Lanka's Tamils watch in silence"

[rfmcdonald]

With the Tamil Tiger leaders dead, Sri Lanka now has a chance to break with its disastrous past. Will it? Ameen Izzadeen's Asia Times article "Sri Lanka's Tamils watch in silence" seems to indicate that pessimism is in order on account of the forced silence and/or extermination of the non-Tiger Tamil leadership.

Why aren't they protesting? Why can't the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), which is the main Tamil party in parliament, mobilize the country's Tamils and take to the streets?

The answer to these questions is simple, says TNA frontliner Suresh Premachandran, a parliamentarian representing the people of the Jaffna district in Sri Lanka's north. For him, the silence of the Tamils in Sri Lanka comes as no surprise.

It is simply state-sponsored terror, he says. "During the peace process, the LTTE was allowed to carry out political activities in government-controlled Tamil areas. But when hostilities broke out, hundreds of Tamil youths who engaged in pro-LTTE political activities were singled out and killed by paramilitary forces. Some disappeared without a trace. Even my party supporters were killed. Three of our MPs were shot dead. So everyone is scared to speak out," said Premachandran, whose party is seen as the mouthpiece of the Tigers.

[. . .]

[S]ome point out that those who complain about the lack of democracy in Sri Lanka see only one side. They say the LTTE does not tolerate dissent either. It killed several top Tamil politicians. One-time opposition leader Appapillai Amirthalingam was gunned down, despite his pro-Eelam credentials. Rival militant leaders such as Uma Maheshwaran and K Padmanaba, who were men with vision, were hunted down though they also fought for a separate state called Eelam.

It was not only rival militant group members that the LTTE eliminated. It also killed well-known Tamil intellectuals who held a view different from the LTTE. Among them was Dr Rajini Thiranagama, a prominent academician and co-author of The Broken Palmyra, which traces the history of Tamil's struggle for self-determination and militancy and documents human rights violations committed by the state, the LTTE and the Indian Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka.

If the Tigers had tolerated dissent and not silenced its critics, people like Thiranagama and D Neelan Thiuchelvam, another Tamil intellectual it killed, would have been there with it to whip up international support for the Tamil cause, observers say.