Empowering genocide-victims, particularly women, is nation-building: diaspora writer
A France based Eezham Tamil diaspora writer, Parani Krishnarajani, who has been studying sexual violence unleashed on Tamil women and children in the aftermath of the genocidal war, says rape was not only used as a tool of war or as tool of terror, but as a tool of genocide with multi-pronged effects. The effects are well-recorded but not the intentions and how they were set in motion to achieve the end results that we are witnessing today in the society. The genocidal intent seems to vary from suppressing the memories of valour of Tamil women from the times of Pirapaharan’s LTTE and to the destruction of their familial set-up, nullifying all positive social transformations that had been achieved during the times of the armed struggle. The nation of Eezham Tamils should empower the victimised Tamil women on the ground through evolving familial institutions for them.
Parani Krishnarajani
“The best possible reaction we can offer against the systematic genocide that is going on is to safeguard the structure called family,” Krishnarajani who claims himself as feminist researcher, says.
Some might very well argue that this is backwardness and also argue as going against the very spirit of feminism. But, only those who observe the nuances of genocide could understand how the SL State machinery has been systematically targeting the family structure of Eezham Tamils as part of their well-planned systematic annihilation of the Tamil race, Krishnarajani further argues.
Women form the foundation of a society, not only as forming the basic family units of the society, but also as the main reproductive force of an ethnic formation.
When the Tamil people from Vanni were under its captivity after May 2009, the occupying Sinhala military isolated many of the women, particularly those who were associated with the armed struggle in the past, into separate incarceration programs. The women had to undergo routine ‘interrogations’ at these isolated torture chambers.
This has been documented by independent rights groups such as the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP), led by Jasmin Sooka, who was one of the three UN Secretary-General’s “Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka”.
These rights groups, whether they are prepared to openly admit and categorize the crimes against Eezham Tamils as genocide or not, have established the fact that such torture chambers existed and that the rape was used as a systematic weapon against the Tamil women, Parani Krishnarajani says.
Krishnarajani claims that he has categorised the side-effects of genocidal crimes against women and the survival issues that have cropped up after 2009 into 35 to 40 categories of psychological issues. The members of Tamil diaspora are inflicted with minimum 10 of the same psychological issues, he says.
The diaspora writer is also involved in studying how the LTTE didn’t succumb to the ‘defeatism’, which its adversaries wanted to collectively enact upon it and the Eezham Tamils at Mu’l’livaaykkaal in May 2009.
Pirapaharan’s LTTE faced Mu’l’livaaykkaal without surrendering the struggle and the principles behind it.
The studies being undertaken by writers such as Krishnarajani should serve as eye-openers to Eezham Tamils to shape their political narrative without surrendering the fundamental principles also in the struggles of the present and the future.
The success of these studies would be determined by their ability of defeating the narrative of political counter-insurgency being waged against the Tamil diaspora by the same international Establishments, which were behind the Mu’l’livaaykkaal genocide.
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