The Daily Terrors
There seems to be something I call the Tamil pingback. It seems that a lot of Tamils give their wife or family a ringcut or a message every hour or so. Any delay is an alert. Prolonged delay is panic. Fellow I know didn’t pingback for a few hours and his wife was freaking out. My friend was making calls to all and sundry trying to find out where he is. After hours found that he’s with the TID (Terrorism Investigation Division). Perhaps his wife can see him on Saturday.
It’s not the unconstitutional arrest so much (that document being suspended). It’s the uncertainty. That space in between phone calls is filled with terror. It’s terrible when someone you love just disappears off the grid.
All that’s left is phone calls and influence. In Sri Lanka, luckily, neighbors and friends love trouble and helping out (even if it doesn’t help). It’s something to do. So his wife (monolingual Tamil) calls my (Sinhala) friend who calls everyone he knows, gets in touch with a Tamil MP, then gets put onto to usual Tamil lost and found.
So this dude is in jail. I know him casually. He’s a web designer. I also understand that there’s a war going on, but I wonder if people understand the very real human cost. Tamil people in Colombo live in fear. Perhaps this is necessary in the short-term (this being my lifetime) but it’s important to remember that this is a bad thing.
Perhaps the arrests have to happen, but the fear and uncertainty doesn’t. At some point rule of law, due process, have to return to this country. At some point the Tamils in the North have to be able to return to their homes and support themselves.
In the midst of arguing about why (which I think we all understand) I also hope we can all understand that these are bad things on a human level. When missing a phone call could mean the end of the world some Sri Lankans are not getting a fair shake. We need to defeat terrorism yes, but we cannot live in fear.
Bring me back old memories. My father had to walk alone numerous times from Hakmana to Walasmulla or Mathara to Kaburupitiya in those old JVP days while there is JVP “curfew” and JVP “members” wanting to kill anyone who brake their law, while Army roll around their buffers looking for “suspects”, mostly capable men. There were no lost and found lists those days. There were no MPs to call. And most of all, there were no phones. If you lost, then you are lost. I guess those were the scariest days for my mom. But I’m glad now the JVP is gone.
ditto,sam.
on another note…
after the war ,it will be tough battle to remove emergency,find jobs for some part of the army and control sinhala supremists.
I think we should attack the Maldives
LOL @ the Maldives comment!
I am a tamil who grew up in the Maldives. I was a kid when the PLOTE idiots attempted to capture the country and then all the tamil young males there who had been there for years were arrested.
NOT such a good idea :)
I know all about the difficulties of being a tamil in Colombo right now. My mother freaks out if I get a liitle bit late to get back from work and I am not allowed to stay out late at night – remember that when scheduling the next open mic will you :)
Seriously though, can’t these open mics be held a little earlier on some public holidays or something?
“on a human level” really isn’t enough to convince professional rent-seekers and their constituents of the strategic and operational costs of detentions. The moment at which you say that such phenomena, “perhaps, have to happen” you concede the strategic and operational questions immediately. Is that the case?
According to what I’ve been reading in the Kottusphere lately, Tamils in Colombo are a prosperous and entrepreneurial mob of John Galts, and have no reason to believe their standard of life, most notably civil liberties enjoyed, is any less than those of their Singhalese countrymen. Sri-Lanka is a different place than in 1983–move on!
What point is there is writing that Tamils in Colombo are afraid? This is a conclusion at which most deductive reasoners eventually arrive and most inductive reasoners can reach after data collection–unless of course they are too busy singing the praises of rent-seekers or grossly overstimating their ability to make positive change.
“The tamil diaspora” is often shouted out, in varying levels of villainous characterization, and there are individual data points which support such characterizations, but there will be pushback from actual members of that group.
i hope it will be courteous and civil in tone but aggressive in rolling back the philosophical models and faulty heuristics which underpin much ‘analysis’ of them by ‘patriots’ of the home country.
When my elderly aunt and uncle were detained for being aged diabetic and bipolar Tamils with pictures of 50′s era hunting expeditions on the mantelpiece, there was no one left in SL to call ‘friends’ in gov’t to secure their release. It was done 100% by diaspora relatives, 100s of calls to this or that machan/batchmate/oldchum, all for the release of 2 senior citizens. And after 24 hours, it finally worked. For that i’m greatful–not to the understanding superintendent–but to my diaspora relatives for accumulating enough human capital to save a family member.
Articles like this make me doubt whether this is a short term thing.
“One university lecturer, who agreed only to speak on the telephone, said: “The police are always asking us what we are doing here. Why we are in Colombo. We are scared. In public places we have to speak Sinhalese. If you speak Tamil in a bus or market, people will stare.”
This, of course, does not equate to support for the rebels’ violent tactics. But on a walk through Bambalapitiya, replete with Hindu temples and flower sellers, practically everyone who agreed to speak voiced some degree of sympathy for the LTTE.”
I’m all for the diaspora participating. I think they’re important.
They just really need to put the LTTE flag down. That’s my only beef with them.
Actually, a few months ago, Rajivmw was suggesting we should invade Australia. Their army’s much smaller than ours, and hasn’t had too much experience in combat, except for the SASR, and they’re all in Afghanistan. I was thinking that if we landed somewhere close to Darwin, no one would notice for a few years.
not a bad idea.Parakramabahu the great invaded Burma and brought Burmese king back.Why not bring John Howard ?(Leave Paul Rudd alone).Mahinda the greatand Gotaimbara yodaya can do it alone I guess.
At least the majority of the Sinhalese people are reassured to know that the govt.’s not going to stop at anything to protect them..
Excellent post. It is something that would have made it to mainstream media, had the press been relatively free. The fact that it did’nt tells you a lot.
The same story retold is in the Sunday Leader today.
I never carried that flag nor did any of that actual diaspora members that I actually know.
assuming your case is proven while proceeding to other points is very Derbyshire and disappointing. I had hoped you possessed some sort of dataset to substantiate your stated claim about how the entire diaspora is carrying the flag.
thinking logically (while we still all have that capacity), does the flag-waving population of the protests we’ve all seen pictorialized over the years really constitute the entire diaspora population? a tenth? .0001%? We’ll never really know but there will still be individuals curiously confident enough in this lack of data to repeatedly trumpet the apparently unchanging character of every single diaspora member as “tiger flag bearing.”
arriving without money or family to lean on, most of us were too busy supporting families, paying off school loans and generally making it in the west. That you think everyone has such a bloody large amount of leisure time to devote to flag waving is puzzling unless you never had to do that yourself. When you don’t even have bootstraps by which to pull yourself up, your perspective and priorities can never match this ludicrous straw man characterization of the diaspora that you and so many others here inthe kottusphere seem to joyfully share in disseminating.
I am in my 30′s and lived in Colombo most of my life. As far as I can remember growing up in Colombo, I was constantly making attempts to hide my identity as a Tamil so that I wouldn’t be ‘noticed’ and hence receive unwanted attention. Involves not speaking in Tamil in public, not wearing any religious items that would give me away as a Hindu. Pretty much all of my friends were doing it too. Several of my relatives from north east have got arrested purely because they couldn’t speak Sinhalese and the cop/army doesn’t ask them questions in Tamil. With Mahinda’s govt, the signs are that the fear of the Colombo Tamils isn’t going away anytime soon.
One should not speak of invading a small and friendly neighbor like the Maldives, even in jest. Especially because the Maldives has already been invaded once by Sri Lankan mercenaries (the PLOTE).
But actually, there is an excellent option for the troops after the war (if there is a real after): peace keeping operations. This is good business, as evidenced by the rebellion of the Bangladesh Border Force who were not eligible to go. Of course, it is essential that the peace keepers should not rape the local women (we had a couple of incidents already).
The troops will be used after the war to govern.
[...] Criticizing the ban of foreign journalists and aid workers, renowned journalist John Pilger wrote that the sufferings of the Tamils are being unnoticed by the world and distant Tamil voices are not being heard. In recent times we have seen that the pro Tamil voices have become feeble due to intimidation and fear. [...]