SO NEAR, YET SO FAR: TAMIL PREDICAMENT IN SRI LANKA

COLOMBO Telegraph, the internet newspaper, dated April 26, 2022, had an absorbing article entitled ‘The New Tamil Refugees from the North-East to Tamil Nadu: New Bonds in Troubled Times’ authored by N Lohathayalan and S Ratnajeevan Hoole. As popular protests mount day by day against the fascist regime, the Tamils, who are the worst sufferers, are naturally trying to come to India as refugees. But the Sri Lankan Navy enters the scene; the escapees are detained in midsea, produced in a court of law, which imposes a fine on them; and then they are allowed to go home.

-  V SURYANARAYAN

If the Sri Lankan Navy believes that it can create a Berlin Wall in the Palk Strait, it is living in a fool’s paradise. Like the famous Berlin Wall which collapsed in 1989, because of the abiding faith of the Germans in truth, freedom and unity, Sri Lankans even at grave risk and danger would come to India, their protector and saviour for nearly four decades.

In his book ‘Culture and Imperialism’, Edward Said has pointed out that it is one of the “unhappiest characteristics of our age to have produced more refugees, migrants, displaced persons and exiles than ever before in history”. The tragic predicament of the Tamils in Sri Lanka reminds me of what Prof. Valentine Daniel had written a few years ago. The refugee, as Daniel had written, “mistrusts and is mistrusted. In a profound sense, one becomes a refugee even before fleeing the society in which one lives.” To apply Daniel’s the Tamil Nadu government, legal and administrative framework, prospects of voluntary repatriation, reintegration and monitoring, problems associated with local integration and what role the UNHCR can play.