Celebrating Polarization

"This is totally unacceptable. This is a low point in civilization where a country prevents its people from remembering their dead."
M.A. Sumanthiran, Tamil lawmaker, Colombo, Sri Lanka

LAKRUWAN WANNIARACHCHI / AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Sri Lankan policewomen march during a Victory Day parade in the southern town of Matara on Sunday. The government is holding a military “victory parade” to mark five years since the defeat of Tamil Tiger rebels. Services have been banned to honour Tamil rebels and remember civilians killed in the conflict which claimed at least 100,000 lives.

The Tamil Tigers were a ferocious separatist scourge on the opposition landscape of Sri Lanka, responsible for countless deaths of Sri Lankans, including those of Tamils who opposed their violent tactics trying to bring the government of the country to heel. Tamils fled in their tens of thousands from Sri Lanka, to other parts of the world, to escape the institutionalized oppression of the Tamils living in Sri Lanka.

Canada was a major recipient of the Tamil refugee population, and today has the largest expatriate Tamil community outside of Sri Lanka. The Tamil Tigers succeeded in extorting money from Tamils living outside Sri Lanka to fund their violent activities. Canada and the United States arrested Tamils who were accused and found guilty of supporting the Tigers, considered a terrorist group in both countries, with weapons.

When one agreement to suspend hostilities after another failed, the Colombo government finally launched its last military attack on the Tigers in their geographic stronghold in a civil war that resulted in the final and complete destruction of the Tamil Tigers as a fighting force. In the process the government and the military took no care whatever to protect the lives of Tamil citizens not involved in fighting.

Used by the Tamil Tigers as a living shield to protect themselves from the military onslaught when they were hard pressed to match the full military might of the regime, Tamil civilians became targets for both sides in the civil war. When the rebels were defeated in May 2009, accusations of human rights abuses were levelled against the Sri Lankan government.

More latterly over the past several years the United Nations launched an investigation into human rights violations and concluded guilt on the part of the Colombo government, naming it as a perpetrator of human rights abuses and war crimes. Which the government has denied. Canada, in protest of those violations by Sri Lanka, chose not to attend a 2013 Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Colombo, a boycott eventually joined by India and Mauritius.

Tamils still imperil their lives attempting to escape the oppressive misery of living in Sri Lanka, to be accepted as refugees elsewhere in the world. The government of Sri Lanka has commemorated the fifth anniversary of the civil war that destroyed the militias of the Tamil Tigers, citing it as a great victory. Military personnel paraded in the streets with tanks and artillery guns, with fighter jets passing overhead.

In the ethnic Tamil-majority north and east in Sri Lanka, military troops effectively barricaded political party and newspaper offices to prevent public memorials from taking place in memory of those who died in the civil war. Roads to a fountain sacred to the memory of Tamil Hindus where for generations rituals were performed in honour of the dead, were closed down.

"No wise country celebrates war victory after a civil war", stated the National Peace Council, a local activist group, in condemnation of President Mahinda Rajapakisa's Victory Day ceremony in the southern town of Matara.