Naavat-kuzhi is a place just 5km east of Jaffna city where the two highways A9 and A32, the only existing land arteries that lead into Jaffna from the south and the western coast meet. First the Sinhala military occupied the junction with camps at both the branching highways. Then a Sinhala colony cropped up in the last two years with permanent concrete houses complete with all facilities at the most potential stretch of land there. Now, foundation is laid for the construction of a Buddhist stupa at this place along the highway to gleefully greet everyone entering into Jaffna city through land. Officers of the genocidal Sinhala military occupying Jaffna attended the foundation-laying ceremony, conducted recently by the Naaka Vihaara Buddhist prelate in Jaffna.
Soon, a Sinhala school, in which the occupying military personnel will be the ‘teachers,’ is also planned at this place. There is already a public request from the colonisers to re-open the Sinhala High School in Jaffna city. As the place is now a camp of the 512 and 512-A divisions of the occupying military, a Tamil school at Kaithadi near Naavat-kuzhi is going to be converted into a Sinhala school, informed sources said.
Earlier the occupying military started teaching Sinhala in the Tamil schools of Vanni. Now that will be ‘experimented’ in the schools of Kaithadi-Naavatkuzhi region in the Jaffna Peninsula too, the sources citing education officials in Jaffna said. The education officials are afraid to reveal detailed information on the military project.
The currently Sinhalicised part of Naavat-kuzhi was resided by landless Tamils earlier. During the 1996 occupation by the Sinhala military their houses were destroyed. They were not allowed to settle back, citing that their housing there had been supported by the LTTE.
Now there are three Sinhala military camps at the locality. Two of them are located at the two branching highways and one is located inside the Sinhala colony itself. Any outsider going to the colony should get permission from the military. Recently journalists who went there were severely grilled by the SL military.
The A-32 highway that adds to the strategic importance of Naavat-kuzhi and adds to the obsession of the occupying military to Sinhalicise the junction was provided with a crucial causeway and bridge built by the British, immediately after the war. But the British never raised a finger at the structural genocide facilitated by their ‘development.’
* * *
Comments from a Tamil activist for alternative politics in Jaffna:
The Naavat-kuzhi Sinhala enclave, built at a state housing scheme stretch for ‘landless people’ in Jaffna, is one of the blatant examples of Israeli model demographic genocide conducted in openly insulting ways with an air of the colonial conquistadors.
The Sinhala colonisers there are not landless or houseless people. They have their properties in the south. Even if they don’t have anything, still there is no need to bring them to Jaffna as though there are no lands in the South.
They are colonised in Jaffna solely for the purpose of demographic genocide: for functioning as a support force for the occupying military, for setting a model to create further enclaves at every Sinhala military installation and for the psychological subjugation of the Eezham Tamils in the very heartland of their country.
According to informed sources further such enclaves are planned in the Valikaamam part of the peninsula too.
On Tuesday, presidential sibling Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, a prime accused in the conduct of the genocidal war, was open in admitting his intention of demographic genocide, when he said that his idea of ‘solution’ was against the existence of ethnic provinces.
Nowadays, many of the Tamils in the island, in Tamil Nadu and in the diaspora do not see the Rajapaksas as the main villains. The Establishments in New Delhi and in Washington are increasingly considered as the ultimate culprits responsible for the genocidal war and for all the structural genocide that takes place now.
Naavat-kuzhi and similar demographic genocidal projects that mushroom in the country of Eezham Tamils are never a subject matter for New Delhi and Washington, who on the contrary shield all kinds of genocide by not recognising them as genocide, and provide all facilitations of space and time for the completion of the genocide.
* * *
During the war, some evil theoreticians of the West wrote that the war should be fought to the end.
“Statistical analysis of the dozens of civil wars between 1945 and 2004 shows that 77 percent ended in a decisive victory by one side, while 23 percent ended in negotiated accords. Four fifths of the decisive victories held; two thirds of the negotiated agreements failed”, wrote former US State Department policy analyst Bennet Ramberg, discussing the Vanni War in International Herald Tribune in February 2009, adding that “ethnic civil wars end more durably when there is a decisive military victory.”
The Bush-time official had told this in advice to Obama, but many Tamils for Obama fail to see that Obama in fact gulped it in practice.
New Delhi and Washington now seem to follow a policy that a ‘lasting’ solution to the crisis in the island is finishing the genocide to the end.
It is exactly this genocidal ideology, which surpasses all kinds of State terrorism that needs to be internationally fought by humanity to the end. If the Tamil civilization has any meaning then the struggle has to be primarily addressed against New Delhi and Washington.
Commentaires