[sacw] sacw dispatch #2 (19 May 00)

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Web - Dispatch #2
19 May 2000
________________________________
#1. Tamil Tiger Rebels 'Ethnically Cleanse' Parts of Sri Lanka
#2. India: Faith dispute over Christian communities
#3. India: Letter from Intellectuals on Victimisation of Aids activists
#4. India: 18th conference of Association for Protection of Democratic Right=
s
________________________________

#1.

Los Angeles Times
=46riday, May 19, 2000

Tamil Tiger Rebels 'Ethnically Cleanse' Parts of Sri Lanka

By DEXTER FILKINS, Times Staff Writer

KALAYANAPURA, Sri Lanka--As Tamil separatists sweep toward victory on
the battlefield, they are beginning to cleanse their land of the people who
were once their neighbors.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who have won a series of
victories against Sri Lankan forces in recent weeks, are stepping up
attacks against ethnic Sinhalese civilians living in the region that the
rebels claim as their homeland.
The Tigers are bombing schools, wrecking Buddhist temples and shooting
civilians in a campaign to force thousands of ethnic Sinhalese from their
homes. The attacks are directed at Sri Lanka's majority Buddhist Sinhalese
living in areas dominated by the mostly Hindu Tamils.
The attacks, overshadowed by the recent military engagements on the
northern tip of this island nation off the coast of India, portend a grim
round of ethnic expulsions as the Tigers inch closer to their goal of a
separate state for the minority Tamils.
"They want us to leave, but we have nowhere to go," said Kadirathage
Ran Keranhamy, a Sinhalese rice farmer whose 21-year-old son was kidnapped
Saturday by Tiger guerrillas. "We are brothers. Why are they doing this to
us?"
Keranhamy lives here in Kalayanapura, one of a cluster of Sinhalese
villages in the sprawling tropical flatlands of northeastern Sri Lanka. The
villages, populated by more than 10,000 Sinhalese, are an island in a sea
of Tamils. Kalayanapura is part of the region earmarked by the Tigers for a
future nation.
As guerrillas have rolled over government forces on the Jaffna
peninsula, the attacks on these Sinhalese villages about 80 miles to the
south have grown in frequency and ferocity. Tiger guerrillas are stepping
up their activities as hundreds of Sri Lankan troops are moving out of this
region to help their besieged comrades.
"We just don't have enough troops to protect the villages," said Maj.
Gen. A.K. Jayawardhana, the provincial governor.
In Kalayanapura, a hamlet of simple brick houses and about 600 people,
the Tigers come at night. They set fire to rice crops and sweep homes with
searchlights and gunfire. Last month, guerrillas blew up a school in a
neighboring village. On occasion, the guerrillas abduct the Sinhalese men
and boys who work the rice paddies; more than 30 have disappeared in the
area since 1995. None have returned, and few bodies have been found. An
additional 15 people have died in shellings and shootings.
More than a dozen villagers have already packed up and left, and
others say they are considering leaving. Those who remain are so terrified
of attack that they carry their straw mats into the jungle at night to
sleep.
"When the sun goes down, our houses are empty," said Indrawathi, a
39-year-old villager who sleeps in the jungle. "We are too afraid."
The Sinhalese villages are the victims of the tangled myths of Sri
Lanka's history and the bloody realities of its civil war. In the 17 years
since the conflict began, more than 60,000 people have been killed. The
Tamils began their struggle after enduring years of discrimination at the
hands of the Sinhalese. The Tamils' fight is being led by the Tigers, a
fanatical guerrilla organization that has killed some moderate Tamil
rivals. The U.S. government has declared the Tigers a terrorist group.
Though the Tamils make up less than 20% of Sri Lanka's population, the
Tigers are claiming as much as a third of the nation's land area--the
northern and eastern rim of the island. The imagined Tiger nation includes
the entire Eastern province, where the village of Kalayanapura sits.
According to estimates, Eastern province is less than half Tamil, but the
Tigers want it all.
Some of the Sinhalese who live in Eastern province were settled as
part of government-sponsored land giveaways--a major grievance of the
Tamils. But many of the province's Sinhalese villages, including
Kalayanapura, have been settled for generations.
Some historians say that the Tigers' secretive leader, Velupillai
Prabhakaran, is trying to revive the old realms of the 13th century Jaffna
kings--and then some. The Tamil nation sketched out in Tiger propaganda
overlaps with the Sinhalese kingdoms that came later. Those kingdoms
stretched northward all the way to Kalayanapura.
"What the Tigers have done is imagine that the Tamil kingdom is much
larger than it ever was," said K.M. DeSilva, former chairman of the history
department at the University of Ceylon and author of several books on the
conflict. "It's a myth, but whether in Kosovo or Sri Lanka, national myths
are extremely powerful."
The Tigers' dreams bear directly on the villagers of Kalayanapura. In
the Tigers' imagined nation, the Sinhalese would be a minority. Or, if the
villagers heeded the recent shootings and kidnappings, they wouldn't be
around at all.
Sitting under the shade of a jackfruit tree, Keranhamy, the rice
farmer, recalled the day last week when the Tiger guerrillas kidnapped his
son. Keranhamy and his son were husking rice they had harvested from their
3-acre paddy when four men appeared just before sundown. Unlike the
villagers, who mainly wear sarongs, the four men wore trousers and carried
guns.
Keranhamy's son, Vimal, ran. Keranhamy, a 50-year-old farmer who looks
older than his years, was too slow. The guerrillas tore a piece of his
sarong to bind his hands. Keranhamy pleaded with the Tigers in his native
Sinhala tongue, but the guerrillas didn't understand.
"I spoke to them nicely, I told them we were brothers, and they hit
me," said Keranhamy, nursing an eye blackened by a rifle butt.
As the guerrillas began to blindfold him, he heard gunfire. Keranhamy
doesn't know who fired the shots, but they gave him the break he needed: He
dashed off into the paddies and dived into the mud.
"I never thought I would escape," he said.
Other Tigers were spotted by villagers that evening. Vimal and three
other villagers are still missing. The body of one resident was found the
next morning in a paddy.
The disappearance of Vimal is not the first time that Sri Lanka's
civil war has brought tragedy to the family. Tiger guerrillas killed
Keranhamy's in-laws in 1990. After that, he took his family away. But they
returned after 10 months because Kalayanapura is their home. After Vimal's
disappearance, the Keranhamys sent their 12-year-old daughter, Sujiva, to
live with relatives in another district.
Four days after the disappearance, Vimal's mother did not have much to
say. In a long drive through the Sri Lankan countryside, Vimalawathi stared
out the car window and silently wept.
The tragedy of the Keranhamy family was relieved slightly by an
unexpected gesture of goodwill. Among those abducted Saturday was Pinhamy
Dissanayake, a Sinhalese villager. The guerrillas also tried to take
Dissanayake's sons, Jayawardana, 15, and Sunil, 13.
R. Rashid, a 33-year-old Muslim laborer, asked the Tigers to spare the
boys. Muslims, a minority community in Sri Lanka, have recently been spared
the mistreatment inflicted on the Sinhalese. The guerrillas told Rashid
that they would keep the boys.
According to several villagers, Rashid faced down the guerrillas,
grabbed the boys by the scruffs of their necks and led them away. Stunned,
the Tiger guerrillas did not shoot.
"Tell the village it will be destroyed by May 25," the guerrillas said
as they walked away with their hostages.
Rashid, a quiet man who earns a few dollars a week harvesting rice,
said the blood drained from his body when he confronted the guerrillas.
Recalling the episode, he tried to explain what gave him the courage to
step forward to save the boys.
"I had pity for the boys," Rashid said. "I have children too."

_______

#2.

Asia Times:
20 May 2000

Faith dispute over Christian communities

By Sujoy Dhar

CALCUTTA - Leaders of India's minority Christians and right-wing Hindu
groups are sparring again, this time over the religious loyalty of the
sizeable indigenous communities in the eastern border state of West Bengal.
Angered by charges of faith conversion, church leaders have rallied the
more than 30,000 Christian tribal people in the state who are traveling in
large numbers from their ancestral homes in distant villages to the big
cities to join protest marches.

Tribal groups walked through the streets of the state capital Calcutta late
last month. They carried banners saying the church was being wrongly
accused of luring poor tribal people into changing their faith. A big
protest meeting of Christian tribals was due in Calcutta Thursday. Similar
gatherings have been held in Calcutta and other parts of West Bengal in
recent months. The controversy was kicked off by media reports and claims
by Hindu groups that Christian tribals have begun returning to the Hindu
fold. Television channels in recent weeks showed such ''re-conversion''
ceremonies in the rural pockets. But Christian leaders have disputed this
claim by a prominent Hindu right-wing group affiliated to India's main
ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

According to Herod Mullick, general secretary of the Bangiya Christiya
Parishad, an umbrella body of Christians in east and northeast India, ''the
truth is that not a single true church-going Christian has changed his
religion.'' The Christian leaders are pitted against the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad, better known by the initials VHP, which translates as the World
Hindu Council. A well-known international Hindu organization that is close
to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's BJP, the VHP's local leaders claim
to have reconverted 300 Christian tribals back to the Hindu faith. The
state's most widely read daily newspaper, Ananda Bazar Patrika, had
reported a few months ago that 250 tribals, most of them Christians, had
reconverted to Hinduism secretly in Bhatina village of Birbhum district in
south Bengal.

Asit Bhattacharyya of the VHP claims this is true. ''Of the 250 tribals,
245 were converted Christians while five were tribals who followed
indigenous religion,'' he said. ''We are helping them to return to their
original religion after being misled into other religions.'' But Christian
leader Mullick denied this. ''We went to the village and found that not a
single member of the 13 Christian families there had reconverted,'' he
asserted. ''We have extensively toured rural Bengal and found all such
claims of reconversion as fake. May be one or two Christians who were yet
to be baptised had returned to their old religion.'' Mullick also denied
the VHP's accusation that Christian missionaries were offering inducements
to poor tribals to change their faith.

The bulk of the Christian tribals in West Bengal work on the farms of
better-off land owners. Surveys by non-governmental groups have reported
high levels of malnutrition among the tribals. Their original religion was
nature and animal worship. ''If we had been so eager about converting
people, the total percentage of Christians in India would not have been
just 2.5 percent of the country's 1 billion population,'' Mullick said.
According to the Christian leader, the media reports were ''false
propaganda to demoralize the tribal Christians living elsewhere and create
an anti-Christian feeling.''

The media reports do not seem to have worried the state's Left
government-ruling West Bengal for nearly a quarter century. State Chief
Minister Jyoti Basu said the government was not aware of this. ''We can try
to ensure that there are no forced conversions,'' Basu was quoted as saying
in media reports. However, Basu's Communist Party of India (Marxist) and
India's main opposition Congress party have hit out at the BJP's radical
Hindu partners for trying to fan religious violence in the state. Although
local police officials too said they were not aware of reconversion
ceremonies, media reports spoke of unease among the tribal communities.

Media commentators warned of violence and likely attacks against
Christians. They referred to the ghastly torching of an Australian
Christian missionary and his two small sons, allegedly by Hindu fanatics
early last year, and the murder of another Christian priest later in the
year. Both incidents took place in the neighboring eastern coastal state of
Orissa. Over the past year, Christian leaders in India have appealed to the
Indian government for protection from the ''terror campaign'' that has seen
violent attacks against community members across north India. India's Home
Minister Lal Krishna Advani has admitted that there were more incidents of
communal violence against Christians in 1998 and 1999 than in the half
century of the country's independence from British colonial rule.

Those familiar with tribal lifestyles cautioned that the re-conversion
controversy could rupture the traditional harmony within the tribal
community. ''I have so far not heard of any re-conversion by force. But if
re-conversion exercises by deceit continue, it would lead to a fight among
the tribals who so far have lived in harmony,'' said tribal rights activist
Mahasweta Devi. According to Devi, winner of the Ramon Magsaysay award
(Asia's version of the Nobel Prize) and famous Indian writer, the tribal
communities in West Bengal have traditionally taken part in all religious
festivals. ''These people are neither Hindu, nor Christian nor Muslim,''
she pointed out. (Inter Press Service)
_______

#3.

May 16,2000
LETTER TO EDITOR

Dear sir,
We are extremely concerned about the way the issue of a booklet on the risk
of AIDS in Uttarakhand has been handled. It raises three important issues:-
1) The invoking of draconian legal instruments including the National
Security Act against the persons directly involved with production of the
booklet is completely unwarranted. These instruments are meant for very
limited use and their misuse is condemnable. We appeal to the government to
review the case immediately and revoke the charges under NSA.
2) The booklet is an example of poor research and poorer report writing
about a culturally sensitive subject. The people=EDs protest against it is
understandable. But it needs to be viewed with greater political
sensitivity from all sides, neither allowing cultural insensitivity nor
falling prey to cultural chauvinism and authoritarianism. We urge the
people of Uttarakhand, who have themselves been victims of state
repression, not to press for such action against the NGO activists.
3) The booklet is not an isolated task of a single NGO. It is a mere
reflection of the uni-dimensional perspective of the international AIDS
control programme that is being enforced on regions with varying
socio-economic and cultural features and resulting in misrepresentation of
communities. The fact that the Indian government has uncritically accepted
this programme is the moot point. The present incident highlights the
alienated nature of policies being adopted not only in AIDS control but
also in other spheres of social development, whether it is health,
education, forestry, or water management. It is this policy trend, of
isolated interventions without considering their impact on overall social
processes, which is of serious import for people=EDs wellbeing.
The government, which has recently formalised the second phase of the
National AIDS Control Project funded by a loan of 544 million US dollars
from the World Bank, needs to review its own policies to find out what went
wrong in Uttarakhand. It cannot make a well intentioned, but misguided,
doctor and his team the scapegoats. A large number of NGOs are today,
knowingly or unknowingly, only bringing to fruition the uncritical
application of perspectives being promoted by international agencies and
therefore, can they alone be held responsible? By using the National
Security Act against such an organization the government is not only
missing its own chance for introspection but also reducing available spaces
for social action.

D.L. Sheth, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS)
Ashis Nandy, CSDS
D.Banerji, Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, (CSMCH) JNU
Imrana Qadeer, CSMCH, JNU
Ghanshyam Shah, CSMCH, JNU
Shiv Visvanathan, CSDS
K.R.Nayar, CSMCH, JNU
Mohan Rao, CSMCH, JNU
Rama Baru, CSMCH, JNU
Prabhash Joshi, Jansatta
Rajeev Dhawan, Supreme Court
Swami Agnivesh, Bandhua Mukti Morcha
Arun Kumar, Paani Chetna Samiti
Dunu Roy, Hazard Centre
Vijay Pratap, Lokayan
Yogendra Yadav, CSDS
Madhulika Banerji, Delhi University
Alpana Sagar, CSMCH, JNU
Ritu Priya, CSMCH, JNU & Swasthya Panchayat

_______

#4.

18 May 2000

The 18th conference of the Association for Protection of Democratic
Rights (APDR) was held at Farakka on 13-14 May 2000. Established in 1972
and banned during the Emergency (1975-77), the APDR has been campaigning
consistently for in defence of human rights. The conference was attended by
382 delegates from all over West Bengal. In the inaugural session, S.
Seshaiah from Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee (APCLC) and writer
Jaya Mitra addressed the delegates. A written address by writer Mahasweta
Devi was read out. The conference expressed serious concern over the
increasing supprssion of democratic rights by the state. It decided to
launch an all-out movement against the proposed Prevention of Terrorism
Act (POTA), a new incarnation of the infamous Terrorist and Disruptive
Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA). The All-India Coordination Committee
of Civil Liberties, Democratic Rights and Human Rights Organisations, of
which APDR is a constituent, has called a meeting against this proposed
draconian Act at New Delhi on 25 June. The recent attacks on APDR
activists in different parts of West Bengal, including Siliguri,
Hariharpara and Diamond Harbour were condemned. Concern was expressed over
the frequent incidents of mob lynching and political clashes which were
becoming sources of grave human rights violations. A resolution was
adopted against the dangerous plans to set up a nuclear power plant in
West Bengal. A public rally held at the conclusion of the conference was
addressed by APDR and APCLC leaders and Jaya Mitra. Sachidananda
Bandyopadhyay and Tapas Chakrabarty were re-elected as president and
general secretary of APDR respectively.=20

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