There are at least 160,000 Sinhala military personnel occupying the North. The uprooted people have been waging protests from Keappaa-pulavu in Karai-thu'raip-pattu in Mullaiththeevu district along the eastern coast to Mu'l'lik-ku'lam in Musali in Mannaar district along the western coast of the Northern Province.
All the people waging continuous protests have been questioning the integrity of the SL President Maithiripala Sirisena, particularly the trajectory of his earlier announcements that lands would be released in a step-by-step manner.
“Now, we know that there are 2 years between each step,” commented the protesters in Keappaa-pulavu in Mullaiththeevu, who also met ‘report writing’ Pablo de Greiff, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence, who is on an official visit to the island.
The emboldened position and resolve by the occupying Sinhala military stems from the external backing, the activists said.
The US was behind the ‘consensus’ resolution with the SL State in Geneva. The same Establishment was behind extending 2 more years of monitoring the progress as none of the promises were delivered by the Agent State in Colombo.
The US-UK Establishment has also been pampering elitist sections of Tamil diaspora, especially academics and youth groups among them, not to spoil the ‘consensus’ politics. They have been encouraged to ‘monitor’ the progress and file ‘reports’ in areas where there are ‘complaints’. A section of youth activists are led to believe that they have to convince the Establishment through documenting that the SL State is not capable of institutionally ‘reforming‘ itself.
“You don't need to collaborate and document it. There are already more than enough evidences to document that the SL State cannot reform itself without a drastic re-configuration of the entire apparatus. How many years do you want to keep counting the trees instead of proving the existence of the forest, which is our problem?” commented a student activist from Jaffna University.
By manipulating the ‘liberal’ sections of the Tamil diaspora, the Establishments think they could keep the mainstream Tamil activism into containment, the student activist said.
“Awarding scholarships and NGO funding to the report writing discourse cannot derail the sentiments or the resolve of the grassroots activists from taking forward a democratic struggle-centric discourse,” the activist further said.