SRI LANKA – AMIDST THE COLOMBO CITY PROTESTS ON POLITICS AND THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

TAMIL MOTHERS OF THE CIVIL WAR DISAPPEARED PROTEST FOR LOVED ONES ON GENOCIDE DAY MAY 18

RANJANIDEVI HOLDS PHOTOS OF HER HUSBAND (MIDDLE) AND HER TWO BROTHERS WHO WENT MISSING DURING THE CIVIL WAR.

UNDER HEAVY MILITARY PRESENCE AND SURVEILLANCE DRONES, 2,000 TAMILS GATHERED IN MULLAITIVU, SRI LANKA ON MAY 18 ON WHAT THEY CALL GENOCIDE DAY, TO REMEMBER THEIR LOVED ONES THAT WERE AMONG THE TENS OF THOUSANDS WHO DISAPPEARED DURING A BRUTAL CIVIL WAR.

“Their struggles are not the same as ours.”

By Pallavi Pundir – JAKARTA, ID – By Kumanan Kanapathippillai

May 25, 2022 MULLAITIVU, Sri Lanka – For years, Sasikumar Ranjanidevi kept secrets from her daughter. Ranjanidevi didn’t tell her about the airstrikes she escaped, or the sandy trenches she dug with her hands during heavy shelling. Or how she walked over a sea of dead bodies and bombed homes, while she was pregnant with her.

When Sri Lanka’s bloody 27-year war ended in 2009, Ranjanidevi, a Tamil ethnic minority in a Sinhala Buddhist-majority country, survived with a baby, a missing husband, two missing brothers, and lasting trauma.

“My daughter grew up never knowing who her father was, or her uncles,” Ranjanidevi told VICE World News.

Ranjanidevi’s daughter is now 13. Until she was 9, Ranjanidevi would tell her that her father was in a military camp. But 44-year-old Ranjanidevi, who lives in the northern Sri Lankan coastal district of Mullaitivu, has no idea where he actually is. Like tens of thousands of Tamil men, her husband disappeared in the war.

“Despite everything I have been through, I want my loved ones back. I will never stop looking for them,” she said.

Over the last two months, tens of thousands of Sri Lankans – crushed by massive shortages of fuel, food and power, dried up foreign reserves, over $50 billion in foreign debt, and the worst economic crisis their country of 22 million has ever seen – have come together to protest. Specifically, protesters blame the powerful and wealthy Rajapaksa family, who’ve mostly ruled the country since the end of the civil war.

The scale of the protest is unprecedented, and its doggedness has managed to shake up the Rajapaksa-led government. But Sri Lanka’s Tamils, the country’s most persecuted community, are visibly absent from the protests.

Even though the country’s 3 million Tamils have every reason to protest. The economic crisis has hit them harder. Many of them largely blame the Rajapaksas for the hundreds of thousands of Tamils who lost their lives or “disappeared” during the country’s civil war, and the continued surveillance, intimidation and racism Tamils face in Sri Lanka.

As protesters in the capital Colombo faced water cannons, tear gas and violence from pro-government factions, VICE World News travelled to Mullaitivu, one of the many districts in north and east Sri Lanka – where Tamils live under heavy military presence and surveillance – to understand why they weren’t joining the mass protests calling for President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to step down.

“Their struggles are not the same as ours,” said Ranjanidevi. “What they want is economic relief, while we want that but also something more valuable: human lives.”

Ranjanidevi isn’t joining the mass anti-government rallies, but she has in fact been protesting for years for her loved ones.

Protesting Tamils like her are rare. Ranjanidevi and more than a thousand other Tamil women – whose sons, husbands, brothers and fathers have gone missing in what they believe to be enforced disappearances – are the brave ones in this region who dare to organise and speak up about their missing loved ones. Their “Mothers of the Disappeared” movement has gained traction globally over the years, even if it is mostly unheard of in Colombo.

In her now decade-long quest to find her family, Ranjanidevi has been subjected to intimidation and threats from the military. Phone calls from military officials and frequent summons to military stations are a constant in this part of Sri Lanka for journalists, families of the disappeared, and even ordinary Tamil citizens. Protesting mothers and wives like her have faced arrests, abuse and attacks too.

Their lives are a sharp contrast to the hundreds of protesters who continue to gather at Colombo’s scenic Galle Face Green where speeches echo from loudspeakers; songs of resistance reverberate; and a crowd holds up banners saying, “Let’s expel the government” and “Power to the people.” Some posters liken Gotabaya to Hitler. Another says, “Gota and his dumbass family, ya’ll should go fuck yourselves.”

Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the current president of Sri Lanka, is the strongman of the country’s most powerful political dynasty. On an island with a history of Sinhalese nationalism, the Rajapaksas have earned a reputation for extreme wealth, corruption and racism, especially towards Tamils.

For nearly a decade, the Sinhala Buddhist majority catapulted members of the Rajapaksa clan into key political positions. Gotabaya was the defence secretary to his elder brother Mahinda, then the president, when the government crushed the Tamil separatist group called Tamil Tigers to end the civil war in 2009, gaining the brothers further popularity. The war made heroes out of the Rajapaksas, but ethnic Tamils call it a genocide.

Many independent reports point out grave human rights violations committed by the Sri Lankan military after the war, but successive governments have avoided investigations into alleged war crimes.

In Colombo, many at the protest told VICE World News that this moment is “unifying” people like never before. “People leave behind their colour, creed and race to be here,” Anu Madhubhashinie, a Sinhalese performance artist, told VICE World News. “I’ve never seen anything like this before, where everybody is trying to put a united front.”

But a Tamil lawyer who provides legal assistance to anti-government protesters felt differently.

“I see some discussions on social media,” Swastika Arulingam told VICE World News. “But on the ground, there’s no discussion on what happened to the Tamils, and why it’s important to include them in the conversations.” She said that protesters are mostly Sinhalese.

“Nobody would deny that this is a historic moment,” Anushani Alagarajah, a Tamil civil rights activist based in the city of Jaffna, told VICE World News. “But Tamil people have been sceptical [about it] from day one, because we haven’t really seen this scale of support when protests were happening here.”

As one drives away from Colombo and towards the north, the bustle of the protest rallies dies down.

In Mullaitivu, home to some 90,000 Tamils, the streets are mostly empty, although the air is tense.

There are no banners criticising the government. No rallies openly calling for the Rajapaksa family to step down. The economic crisis is worse here, with many families able to eat only one meal a day, but they say they’ve been used to hunger for years.

When VICE World News visited the district last week, it was just before the Tamils’ commemoration of Genocide Day on May 18, when they remember the Tamil Tigers, who once ran a parallel state for Tamils in the north and east of the country, and are now designated as a terrorist group banned by countries including the U.S., UK, Australia and India.

This same day is “celebrated” by the Rajapaksa government as Victory Day or National War Heroes Day. While heroes were celebrated in Colombo, a sombre scene unfolded on May 18 in Mullivaikkal town. Although memorial events for the Tamils are generally prohibited, mostly by force and intimidation, even the Sri Lankan military makes a cautioned exception on this date.

UNDER HEAVY MILITARY SURVEILLANCE, TAMILS CRIED AS THEY MOURNED THEIR DISAPPEARED LOVED ONES AT THE GENOCIDE DAY MEMORIAL ON MAY 18.

Rows and rows of Tamil mothers, sisters, fathers and brothers wailed as they lit flames to remember their loved ones on Mullivaikkal beach in a rite of communal mourning. Their loved ones were among the tens of thousands of Tamils who were trapped on this 3-square-kilometre area on May 18, 2009 and killed during the last offensive by the Sri Lankan military against the Tamil Tigers.

The defiant memorial was heartbreaking but short-lived, under the watchful buzz of drones overhead. Dozens of police and military personnel surrounded some 2,000 mourners whose cries mixed with Tamil songs echoing from loudspeakers.

In the past, journalists, local politicians and ordinary people have been targeted for being at the memorial. Last year, a genocide memorial statue in another town was desecrated and destroyed by a government-run university.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/30/imf-sri-lanka-bailout-talks-end-without-a-deal.html

June 30, 2022 – The International Monetary Fund has ended talks with Sri Lanka, failing to conclude a deal for a bailout package for the near-bankrupt nation after 10 days.

Nevertheless, in a statement released around noon Sri Lanka time on Thursday, the IMF promised to keep up the talks, which began on June 20.

Sri Lanka, an island nation of 22 million people, is facing its worst financial crisis since independence in 1948, which has left it struggling to pay for essential imports and forced it to default on some foreign debt.

WUNRN

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7n8jx/tamils-sri-lanka-protest-rajapaksa-crisis

Website shows additional Tamil women in photos