From de facto State to Barbie Doll Government:
Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam
Prof Sisira Pinnawala
Children when they play create a
world that is make-believe. The parents who know that it is not the real
thing pretend it is real so that the feelings of their children are not
hurt. For the children it is not pretending for they really believe in
it. Their’s is a world of fantasy and can be anything that children want
it to be. In it an old car tyre is a car and a folded paper is a plane.
It has fairies, goblins and monsters. Dolls as playthings are the most
common way children create the real world in the world of make believe.
Countless generations have spent their childhood among dolls and many
more generations to come will continue to do so. In the liberation
politics of Sri Lankan Tamils something similar is taking place.
KP |
Amirthalingam |
Now that the liberation struggle is no more and the de facto state of
Eelam is effectively dead the pro LTTE Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora
leadership is creating a new make-believe in place of their dream that
came down shattering on the banks of Nandikadal lagoon in Eastern Sri
Lanka. This make-believe is the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam
(TGTE). Like the Barbie doll that became a craze and mesmerized teenage
girls around the world the TGTE is taking over the LTTE sympathizers in
the Diaspora. The realists in the Tamil community seem to be behaving
like the parents who do not wish to hurt the feelings of their children
by not commenting on the subject, at least openly and for now. This
essay is a brief critique of the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam
Project and also an attempt to speculate on the future of the TGTE.
The idea that the Diaspora has a crucial role to play in the
liberation struggle of Tamils is as old as the liberation struggle
itself. All Tamil leaders who espoused the idea of separation expected
the Diaspora to be with them but it was Amirthalingam when he became the
leader of the Federal Party who first openly declared that Sri Lankan
Tamil liberation expected active engagement of the Diaspora. With the
Tamil militancy taking roots in Sri Lanka mobilization of Sri Lankan
Tamils living overseas was carried out by sympathizers and activists of
the liberation struggle. However, the first to put forward the idea of
transnational unity of Tamils across the globe was Nadesan Satyendra,
the UK trained lawyer son of the well-known Sri Lankan legal luminary of
Tamil origin and one time Senator S Nadesan, a founder member of the
Federal Party of Sri Lanka. He established the now defunct website
called tamilnation.org the declared aim of which was to create national
consciousness among Tamils across the globe who according to him was a
nation without a state, a transnational nation.
He through his website exhorted the Tamils to rally together around a
pan Tamil identity, under the leadership of Sri Lankan Tamils and
mobilize themselves to end the suffering of Tamils in Sri Lanka. Though
a sympathizer of the militancy and even was a one time member of a
militant Tamil group, he was more for peaceful action. By focusing on
the past glory and intellectual and academic superiority of Tamils he in
his own idiosyncratic and non-violent way was laying the ideological
foundation for what the LTTE sympathizers in the Diaspora are trying to
put in shape today in the form of the Transnational Government of Tamil
Eelam.
Tamil Diaspora’s futile attempt to mislead International
Community. Picture courtesy: Google |
Transnational activities of the Tamil Diaspora were however not
limited to the work of Satyendra. There were many activists on the cyber
space, who were either supporters or sympathizers of the LTTE, and also
web based activities, that mobilized the Diaspora at transnational
level. At the height of transnational mobilization of the Sri Lankan
Tamil Diaspora there were around 200 websites and blogs promoting Tamil
nationalism and supportive of Sri Lankan Tamil militancy. The most
powerful and authoritative website among them may be the tamilnet.com
though there were many equally important Tamil language websites
exclusively catering to the Tamil speaking Diaspora. Yet their
activities were not aimed at any kind of transnational nation building
like Satyendra’s tamilnation.org.
Their concern was mobilizing the Diaspora for achieving Eelam in Sri
Lanka. For them the Tamil nation was not transnational; only the Tamil
community had a transnational characteristic with its presence in many
parts of the world. The LTTE sympathizers who formed the core group of
the Diaspora became interested in transnational nation and State
formation only after the defeat of the LTTE. When they realized that
they cannot achieve their dream of statehood in Sri Lanka they started
to turn their mind and energy to achieve that in the transnational
domain ostensibly as the first step to achieving Eelam in the island of
Sri Lanka. The birth of the idea of Transnational Government of Tamil
Eelam needs to be understood in this context. To be continued
The writer is attached to Sociology Department of Peradeniya
University
[email protected] |