Eelam Tamils, Together In Joy And Sorrow From Jaffna To London

During the 1983-2009 war and in the past 12 years, the Eelam Tamil diaspora (many of whom are war refugees) has been instrumental in the struggle to resist the Sinhalese ethnocratic violence of the Sri Lankan state. Written in the wake of the ousting of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, this text by Abinaya Nathan describes her growing up in the vibrant Eelam Tamil diaspora of North-West London, from the remote support to the Liberation Tigers to the last decade’s demonstrations.

As a diaspora, Eelam Tamils are said to be over a million strong globally. It is currently impossible to glean exact numbers since countries do not record Eelam Tamil as an ethnicity. Even in the United Kingdom, where our numbers are substantial (conservatively, 300,000 over 10 years ago, in 2011) there is no one reliable statistic since on ethnicity forms, we are “Asian Other,” the forgotten stepsiblings of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The only other estimate to go by is Sri Lanka as a country of birth, which would both include the far less numerous Sinhalese and other ethnicities from the island, as well as exclude second-generation Eelam Tamils born in the U.K. or in the European Union.

The U.K. was once seen as a final destination for only the most privileged Eelam Tamils who had the financial and social capital, i.e. through caste and class networks, to reach it. Hence it was also known as one of the biggest locations from which cash flowed to the liberation struggle at home. However, a steady stream of arrivals, particularly of asylum seekers throughout the war and post-war years, as well as a massive wave of Tamil migration from E.U. countries in the early 2000s, has rendered it one of the largest of Tamil hubs, representing a spectrum of socio-economic backgrounds. The spaces we have built here are as diverse as they are numerous: Tamil schools, old students associations, village associations, temples, churches, restaurants, university Tamil societies, sports leagues and teams, women’s groups, elders groups, advocacy and campaigning organizations, and too many charities to keep track of.

Yet, living in a North-West London suburb with one of the highest concentrations of Tamils outside of Asia, one thing I have never had to experience was the immigrant “identity crisis,” the beloved trope by popular Western media. Instead, my out-of-school hours were spent in these imperfect spaces where Tamilness was always affirmed and where the homeland never seemed too far away.

As someone whose entry into adulthood collided almost exactly with the end of the war, I have no personal recollection of the controversies or academic conspiracies about the Eelam Tamil diaspora during the armed struggle. My lifeworld coalesced entirely around the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as a central organizing force, from my local temple to my netball team. Garlanded photographs of fallen relatives in their tiger stripes, a framed picture of LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, the tiger flag hoisted at sporting events, quarterly magazines and videos with images and footage of battle, poetry anthologies by cadres, and CDs of music recorded in the de-facto state of Tamil Eelam, these were all ubiquitous in our homes and communal spaces.

Although the Tamil nation was straining to be heard both under the censorship and repression on the island, and over the brutal determination of global powers to help wipe out the liberation struggle, there remained one powerful machine at its disposal, and that was the unbreakable bond between the homeland and the diaspora. While the Tamil diaspora’s funding of the armed struggle remains the most discussed and studied phenomenon of the war years, even today, the relationship was far more expansive and important than many analysts care to admit.

Personal remittances from relatives in the diaspora, although not a widespread solution for the hardships of war, kept thousands of families in Tamil Eelam afloat during economic blockades and internal displacements. Tamil diaspora-based charities and humanitarian organizations meanwhile worked with the LTTE to disperse support on a larger scale. The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 illustrated how vital this relationship was, when the North-East, despite being most heavily impacted by the disaster, was cut off from international aid entrusted to the Sri Lankan government, and the LTTE stepped up in its stead with backing from the diaspora.

Aside from financial support, the diaspora was key in fighting the asymmetric narrative battle. Regular rallies and demonstrations gave some space for Tamils to be seen and heard against the tide of mainstream media coverage which was invariably skewed in favor of the Sri Lankan state. Foreign media correspondents would be stationed in Colombo, far away from the fighting, and would often parrot government press releases. The establishment of English-language news website TamilNet and newspaper the Tamil Guardian, made space for the first time for news directly from the other side of the battlefield, publishing for example accurate reports of civilian casualties, abductions and massacres. This new era of reporting proved such a threat to the Sri Lankan state, it was moved to assassinate one of TamilNet’s founding writers, Taraki Sivaram.

In the spring of 2009, British Tamils spent months in Westminster’s Parliament Square, as parallel protests took place across the globe, begging the world to intervene as the Sri Lankan state pursued its final military solution to put an end to our liberation struggle, massacring thousands of Tamils in the process. But the protests although representing an epochal moment for our community, did not succeed in preventing genocide. The terrible events of 2009 and the Rajapaksas’ reign of terror did have the effect of making many Tamils lose hope, both in the diaspora and in the homeland. Crowds at demonstrations have not quite returned to the levels seen at the height of the armed struggle—some marches in London exceeded 100,000. The overton window seems to have shifted to an extent where the imagery of the Tamil liberation struggle, once adorned brazenly in our homes, businesses and community spaces, has for a while been hidden away. But this devastation and grief by no means resulted in the subduing of the Tamil nation, neither in the homeland nor in the diaspora.

Following the brutal end of the war in May 2009, when recently-ousted president Gotabaya Rajapaksa was Defense Secretary and his brother Mahinda Rajapaksa (until recently Prime Minister) was President, the United Nations Human Rights Council held a special session in which it rejected calls for accountability for the atrocities committed, and congratulated Sri Lanka for its handling of the war and its defeat of the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam (LTTE). Three years later, in 2012, the same council passed its first resolution calling for accountability in Sri Lanka, and its latest in 2021, very tamely suggested the UN’s high commissioner for human rights could be empowered to collect and preserve evidence for future accountability processes. Although the resolution still fell far short of what Tamils had been calling for in terms of justice, it was the first explicit suggestion of international involvement in accountability, a cornerstone of Tamil demands.

A decade is by no means an insignificant amount of time, not least for those who live with the scars of genocide. But to secure such a drastic change in narrative and perception, and from the position of a people, which not only had no state resources, but which had the entire machinery of a tyrannical nation-state turned against it, is itself a remarkable feat. The years following the end of the armed conflict far from bringing about the anticipated peace, since the LTTE were portrayed as an arbitrary aggressor in an otherwise potentially democratic nation-state, were marked by human rights abuses, extra-judicial killings, enforced disappearances and an ever-increasing authoritarianism and intolerance for dissent which even began to impact the majority Sinhalese.

For Tamils on the island, those years were filled with a terror sometimes not even felt during the war years, since the existence of the LTTE represented a bulwark against the state and its defeat left the population utterly defenseless. It was a time remembered for surveillance on a dystopian scale, the multiplying of armed forces in their localities, and the arbitrary seizing of land and homes by the state and military, with absolutely no recourse for those impacted. Protests were stamped out with brutal efficiency, journalists beaten in broad daylight, and in the place of memorials to the Tamil liberation struggle sprang Sri Lankan victory monuments, gargantuan warnings to any potential attempts to revive the liberation struggle.

The diaspora’s involvement in homeland politics has always been met with hostility by the Sri Lankan state and its Sinhalese majority, but especially so in the post-war years when we were accused of stirring up tensions and inciting separatist sentiment, and essentially raining on the Sinhala nationalist triumphalist parade. In fact, surveillance of and attempted infiltrations of the Tamil diaspora remain expressly part of the duties of Sri Lankan embassies in key capitals, and several Tamil individuals and organizations remain proscribed by Sri Lanka.

With continued (if not worse) censorship and surveillance, and a new lease of life to the Sri Lanka state, riding high on development money, and revived tourist numbers, the bond with the diaspora was one of the few outlets Tamils in Eelam had at their disposal. With relentless campaigning and advocacy from Eelam Tamils thousands of miles away, in London, Paris, Toronto, Berlin, Washington DC, Sydney, Geneva slowly the tide was turning. The realities of the post-war situation—the abuse, rape and torture of Tamils in detention, the continued extra-judicial killings and abductions, the military crackdowns—started to gain more salience globally. Furthermore, evidence of the atrocities of the final stages of the war, the summary executions and sexual violence, the targeted massacre of civilians, and the murder of 169,796 Eelam Tamils, slowly seeped its way into the mainstream of both policymaking and media narratives.

We are by no means more important or more vocal than those in the homeland in our commitment to liberation. But when the Sri Lankan constitution forces Tamils into self-censorship by making it illegal to advocate for secession and to establish a separate state on the island, we do as we have always done, which is amplify and support those voices on the ground for whom it may be too dangerous to speak.

Since the vast majority of Sri Lankans have brought into our demonization and the criminalization of our struggle, and continue to pour scorn upon our demonstrations and campaigns, the events that have unfolded in Sri Lanka starting March 2022 have been watched by many in the Eelam Tamil diaspora with a sense of bemusement.

After months of protest demanding he “go home,” Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the President of Sri Lanka and key perpetrator in the genocide fled the island in July 2022. Far from his war crimes catching up to him, he was ousted after his government’s mismanagement and corruption led to the one of the worst economic crises in modern times, with people all over the island left without fuel nor power and with inflation at over 50%, many unable to afford basic staples. It was a twist few would have forecast in 2019, when Rajapaksa swept to power with a huge mandate entirely on the back of the Sinhala majority.

The fact that the Rajapaksa brand had become so toxic that no liberal power was willing to offer any semblance of a helping hand cannot be attributed to the Sinhalese protests alone, after all, how many world leaders are actually ostracized for financial incompetence? A man who seemed invincible, who sits on immense personal wealth, and who was thought to have the backing of the Sinhalese armed forces, was helpless to flee the country, with failed appeals to the U.S. government for an emergency visa, and the Indian government refusing to allow entry via military aircraft. Even Singapore, where he finally landed via the Maldives, and where Tamil is an official language thanks to its sizable minority of Tamils, including of Eelam Tamil descent, had to announce that the embattled President had not been granted asylum, but was in the country on a brief “personal” visit.

While the Sri Lankan protests with their massive numbers and stunts of occupying the president’s residence and making use of its luxuries have been ideal for media coverage and meme content, with virtual onlookers reveling in vicarious revolutionary fervor, the work of creating the conditions of Gotabaya’s humiliation on the world stage has been a slow, unglamorous slog, carried out in large part by the Eelam Tamil diaspora. Now that Gotabaya has fled, and his most vocal supporters may do so too, the diaspora will be waiting with the few tools at our disposal—universal jurisdiction, civil claims, mass demonstrations—to advance justice and accountability for their crimes against Eelam Tamils.

As I write, Sri Lanka is undergoing a presidential selection, and the main Tamil nationalist party has already stated its intention to abstain, since no candidate is willing to address the Tamil national question. The Eelam Tamil diaspora, taking its cues as always from the homeland, will continue to provide support when and where it is necessary, and not according to the dictates of the Sri Lankan state and those invested in upholding it.

From the temple priests calling for a moment of silence for those lost in the genocide at the end of every festival day, to the Instagram influencer wearing the national flower of Tamil Eelam woven in gold thread on her wedding saree. Both in these soft expressions of nationhood in struggle, and in our more visible projections of collective power, such as fundraising for those in the homeland and annual remembrance days to the fallen LTTE fighters, we reassert our unshakeable conviction of our right to be, to exist and to live as Eelam Tamils. ■