From de facto State to Barbie Doll Government:

Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam

by Prof Sisira Pinnawala

(July 21, Kandy, Sri Lanka Guardian) Children when they play create a world that is make-believe. The parents who know that it is not the real thing pretend it is real so that the feelings of their children are not hurt. For the children it is not pretending for they really believe in it. Their’s is a world of fantasy and can be anything that children want it to be. In it an old car tyre is a car and a folded paper is a plane. It has fairies, goblins and monsters. Dolls as playthings are the most common way children create the real world in the world of make believe. Countless generations have spent their childhood among dolls and many more generations to come will continue to do so. In the liberation politics of Sri Lankan Tamils something similar is taking place.

Now that the liberation struggle is no more and the de facto state of Eelam is effectively dead the pro LTTE Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora leadership is creating a new make-believe in place of their dream that came down shattering on the banks of Nandikadal lagoon in Eastern Sri Lanka. This make-believe is the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam (TGTE). Like the Barbie doll that became a craze and mesmerized teenage girls around the world the TGTE is taking over the LTTE sympathizers in the Diaspora. The realists in the Tamil community seem to be behaving like the parents who do not wish to hurt the feelings of their children by not commenting on the subject, at least openly and for now. This essay is a brief critique of the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam Project and also an attempt to speculate on the future of the TGTE.

The idea that the Diaspora has a crucial role to play in the liberation struggle of Tamils is as old as the liberation struggle itself. All Tamil leaders who espoused the idea of separation expected the Diaspora to be with them but it was Amirthalingam when he became the leader of the Federal Party who first openly declared that Sri Lankan Tamil liberation expected active engagement of the Diaspora. With the Tamil militancy taking roots in Sri Lanka mobilization of Sri Lankan Tamils living overseas was carried out by sympathizers and activists of the liberation struggle. However, the first to put forward the idea of transnational unity of Tamils across the globe was Nadesan Satyendra, the UK trained lawyer son of the well-known Sri Lankan legal luminary of Tamil origin and one time Senator S Nadesan, a founder member of the Federal Party of Sri Lanka. He established the now defunct website called tamilnation.org the declared aim of which was to create national consciousness among Tamils across the globe who according to him was a nation without a state, a transnational nation.

He through his website exhorted the Tamils to rally together around a pan Tamil identity, under the leadership of Sri Lankan Tamils and mobilize themselves to end the suffering of Tamils in Sri Lanka. Though a sympathizer of the militancy and even was a one time member of a militant Tamil group, he was more for peaceful action. By focusing on the past glory and intellectual and academic superiority of Tamils he in his own idiosyncratic and non-violent way was laying the ideological foundation for what the LTTE sympathizers in the Diaspora are trying to put in shape today in the form of the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam.

Transnational activities of the Tamil Diaspora were however not limited to the work of Satyendra. There were many activists on the cyber space, who were either supporters or sympathizers of the LTTE, and also web based activities, that mobilized the Diaspora at transnational level. At the height of transnational mobilization of the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora there were around 200 websites and blogs promoting Tamil nationalism and supportive of Sri Lankan Tamil militancy. The most powerful and authoritative website among them may be the tamilnet.com though there were many equally important Tamil language websites exclusively catering to the Tamil speaking Diaspora. Yet their activities were not aimed at any kind of transnational nation building like Satyendra’s tamilnation.org.

Their concern was mobilizing the Diaspora for achieving Eelam in Sri Lanka. For them the Tamil nation was not transnational; only the Tamil community had a transnational characteristic with its presence in many parts of the world. The LTTE sympathizers who formed the core group of the Diaspora became interested in transnational nation and State formation only after the defeat of the LTTE. When they realized that they cannot achieve their dream of statehood in Sri Lanka they started to turn their mind and energy to achieve that in the transnational domain ostensibly as the first step to achieving Eelam in the island of Sri Lanka. The birth of the idea of Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam needs to be understood in this context. To be continued

The writer is attached to Sociology Department of Peradeniya University. He can be reached at sisirap@pdn.ac.lk