#sarinihar

CHERAN Toronto, Canada Poet, journalist and Professor

“Having survived two air attacks and twenty helicopter gunships I break my ankle, entangling with a small dog”. -May 21, 1986 (The Second Sunrise, Cheran’s Poems. Navayana, 2012)

The emergence of the Tamil militancy  in the north and east of Sri Lanka in the early 1980s paved the way for powerful activism towards social liberation alongside national liberation. Initially, there were compelling media expressions, debates and spaces for alternative and dissenting viewpoints.  New political journals, magazines, forums sprang up, and suddenly literary productions dominated the scene.  All the major Tamil resistance groups - too many to name here - had their own publications and were free to criticize each other’s policies, politics, strategies and tactics. By the end of 1985, this space started to shrink because the dominant idea articulated by the LTTE was that in order to gain our liberation there should be one political and military movement with a perfectly tuned military discipline.

That was the beginning of the consolidation, or what I would call the hegemony of the LTTE:  an imposed command structure that was authoritarian while having significant support of the people. This hegemony was achieved mainly through the elimination of other groups and stifling dissent.

After this anything against the LTTE was not allowed to be published.  The only dissenting materials were those emerging in the diaspora.

The Tigers, however, were not concerned about articles that we have been publishing in English. So I continued my work at the Saturday Review. The only regional English weekly in Sri Lanka, published from Jaffna under the courageous leadership of the late Gamini Navaratne. It stood for freedom of expression, human rights and minority rights.

We were banned by the Government of Sri Lanka twice and bombed by the Sri Lankan Air Force.  On the orders of the government between 1984 and early 1985, we had to post every piece including advertisements to a “competent authority” in Colombo and wait for his approval, which rarely came in time for deadline.

At that time the Saturday Review was the only newspaper in entire Sri Lanka that was under censorship.

In 1985 I was arrested by the Sri Lankan Army and tortured in custody. Gamini Navaratne had to pull some strings in high places to secure my release.

The LTTE banned stories that other Tamil newspapers in Jaffna tried to publish, but we continued our work. In December 1987 Kittu (Sathasivam Krishnakumar), a senior LTTE commander, told me that Pirabhakaran had wanted me silenced for being a kulappalvaathy (a trouble-maker). Kittu said he had advised him against this and asked me to leave Jaffna, saying that he could only protect me while he was still alive.  I left Colombo and fled to the Netherlands sometime after the grenade attack on Kittu in April 1987.

I would return during the thick of the Indian “peace keeping” force’s occupation and war in Jaffna, during which they bombed two Tamil newspapers, Eelamurasu and Murasoli and took control of one with the help of the Tamil group EPRLF [The Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation Front].

In March 1990, some of us who were exiled in Colombo at that time started a Tamil newspaper called Sarinihar, with the help of the Movement for Inter Racial Justice and Equality (MIRJE).

The first issue of Sarinihar came out in April 1990. The LTTE banned it by mid-year. But they would buy 150 copies from our distributor in Vavuniya  for their own internal circulation. The LTTE also kept the channels of communication open between their commanders and some of our journalists.

In 1994 when Chandrika was portrayed as a Peace Dove, we were the only newspaper that was very critical of her and her political platform. The Sinhala Left and several Tamils supported her.

Even the LTTE was at least initially positive about Chandrika and not too happy about our position. But they were still reading our papers and Pirabaharan and several senior leaders knew that what we were writing wasn’t without merit. Still, it was extremely hard for them to digest our criticisms and our investigative reporting, as well as our stories on the expulsion of Muslims by the LTTE.

After an incident in 1994 between the LTTE and the Chandrika regime in which I was involved, but which will continue to remain off the record, the Tigers lifted the ban on the paper and it was available everywhere. The paper ran for 11 years and ended its life in 2001. One of our journalists disappeared in 1991. He was abducted  by the military intelligence and I still believe the EPDP (The Eelam People's Democratic Party) had a role in his abduction and disappearance.