Problems of reintegration for those displaced by the conflict persisted, and women in particular faced unique hardships upon return. Despite the end of the conflict, the human rights environment continued to deteriorate in a climate of impunity. These areas remain heavily militarized; in addition to checkpoints blotting the region, the military also ran businesses, farming and development projects, and controlled civil society activity in these areas.
While there have been some improvements for the Tamil minority since , many areas in the north and east are still dominated by the military presence, with continued barriers for justice for the victims of conflict-related violence and their families, as well as lack of accountability and continued abuses and impunity by security forces. These problems persist to this day, with continuing militarization, displacement and Sinhalization in minority areas, reflected in the construction of Buddhist shrines and victory monuments that affirm Sinhalese control.
Rights violations include the taking over of land for Buddhist religious sites, the emergence of Buddhist symbols and places of worship in minority areas — in some cases where no Buddhists resided — and the denial of Tamils access to Hindu places of worship and cultural sites.
Protecting Tamil culture in the north and east, as well as reducing the pressures posed by militarization and rapid in-migration, will therefore be an essential element in ensuring peace and reconciliation in the country.
Despite this worrying global situation, we reaffirm our commitment to safeguarding the rights of minority and indigenous communities and implementing indivisible human rights for all. Sign up to Minority rights Group International's newsletter to stay up to date with the latest news and publications. Since August, MRG has been assisting Afghan minority activists and staff from our partner organizations as their lives and their work came under threat with the return of the Taliban.
We need your help. For the last three years, we at MRG have run projects promoting freedom of religion and belief across Asia. In Afghanistan we have fostered strong partnerships with amazing local organizations representing ethnic and religious minorities. They were doing outstanding work, educating minority community members about their rights, collecting evidence of discrimination and human rights abuses, and carrying out advocacy.
Not all have been able to flee. Many had no option but to go into hiding. Some did not have a valid passport. Activists can no longer carry out the work they had embarked on. They can no longer draw a salary, which means they cannot feed their families. With a season of failed crops and a cold winter ahead, the future is bleak for too many. We refuse to leave Afghanistan behind. We are asking you today to stand by us as we stand by them.
We will also use your donations to support our Afghan partners to pay their staff until they can regroup and make new plans, to use their networks to gather and send out information when it is safe to do so, and to seek passports and travel options for those who are most vulnerable and who have no option but to flee to safety.
Azadeh worked for a global organization offering family planning services. Standing for everything the Taliban systematically reject, Azadeh had no option but to flee to Pakistan. MRG is working with our partners in Pakistan to support many brave Afghans who have escaped Afghanistan because of their humanitarian or human rights work or their faith.
They are now in various secure locations established by our local partners on the ground in Pakistan. Although they are safer in Pakistan than Afghanistan, Hazara Shia and other religious minorities are also persecuted there.
We need your help, to support those who put their lives on the line for basic human rights principles we all believe in: equality, mutual respect, and freedom of belief and expression. The situation on the ground changes daily as more people arrive and some leave. Aluminium mining in Baphlimali, India, has caused environment devastation and has wrecked the lifestyle of thousands of Adivasis. For centuries, Adivasi communities like the Paraja, Jhodia, Penga and Kondh have been living amidst the Baphlimali foothills.
For generations they have lived in harmony with nature. They lived through rain fed subsistence agriculture of millet, cereals, pulses, rice and collection of non-timber forest produce, e. With widespread mining activities and linked deforestation, they have lost access to forest products and to the much needed pasture land in the vicinity of their villages. Your help will mean that MRG can support communities like these to help decision makers listen better to get priorities right for local people and help them to protect their environment and restore what has been damaged.
The above picture is of a tribal woman forcibly displaced from her home and land by District Forest Officers in the district of Ganjam, Odisha. Her cashew plantation burned in the name of protection of forests. Please note that the picture is to illustrate the story and is not from Baphlimali. Esther is a member of the indigenous Ogiek community living in the Mau Forest in Kenya. Her family lives in one of the most isolated and inaccessible parts of the forest, with no roads, no health facilities and no government social infrastructure.
The Ogiek were evicted from some forest areas, which have since been logged. The Ogiek consider it essential to preserve their forest home; others are content to use it to make money in the short term. Esther has a year-old daughter living with a physical disability who has never attended basic school, as it is over 12 kilometres away. Young children living in these areas face challenges such as long distances to school, fears of assault by wild animals and dangers from people they may encounter on the journey.
Because the Ogiek have no legally recognised land rights, despite hundreds of years of residence in this forest, the government is refusing to provide social services or public facilities in the area. Ensuring that the Ogiek can access health services and education is essential and will mean that they can continue living on their land, protecting and conserving the environment there.
We are also advocating for equity in access to education and health by supporting OPDP to ensure that budgets for services are allocated fairly and are used well. The consequence of this wealth is that successive governments — colonial and post-colonial — have seen greater value in the land than the people. This has led to extensive open cast mining which is doubly damaging to the climate, despite the opposition of the Khadia tribe.
Archana is a rare example of an indigenous activist who is involved in UN debates; we need to support many more indigenous peoples and acknowledge their expertise. Minority Rights Group acts as a bridge between excluded communities and decision makers, telling indigenous peoples about opportunities to contribute and reminding decision makers that they need to listen to and involve all, particularly those with proven strategies of living in harmony with nature.
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See where Sri Lanka ranks. Tackling COVID together Despite this worrying global situation, we reaffirm our commitment to safeguarding the rights of minority and indigenous communities and implementing indivisible human rights for all. We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking 'Accept', you consent to the use of all the cookies. Manage consent. Close Privacy overview This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website.
Out of these, the cookies that are categorised as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyse and understand how you use this website. But you guys did not accept. I must develop my country, no? How can we do that? Well, since then, China has managed many deals in Sri Lanka, such as the latest coup of wresting a crucial port project in Colombo from the contracted India-Japan coalition.
Loganathan, a native of Rameswaram, who has been helping me with reporting on Sri Lanka since when the first Tamil refugee boats landed there from the strife-torn north Lanka. Rameswaram has been famous for its Ramanathaswamy temple, where according to Hindu mythology, Lord Ram had worshipped Shiv to atone for the sin of killing a Brahmin, Ravan, to rescue Sita, who was kept a prisoner by him in his kingdom Lanka. Closer to present day, the temple town has been frequently in the news for the attacks on its fishermen by the Sri Lankan Navy while out at sea.
Apart from this thorny issue, there is also the old cry of politicians and social activists in Tamil Nadu, asking Delhi to retrieve the Katchatheevu island gifted away over a cup of tea by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi while hosting her Lankan counterpart Sirimavo Bandaranaike in Delhi in Quad is the collective of the Indian Ocean countries of India, Japan, the US and Australia, that has been undertaking joint naval exercises to demonstrate clout in the IOR and also pledging big-time dollars to wean away the smaller nations from the liberal yuan doles from Beijing.
For its part, the Dragon has been breathing fire upon these pygmies to scare them away from the Quad. I must mention here his most recent phone conversation from Colombo, because he has always had his fingers on the pulse of the island polity. From to , in all but one case, Protestant Christians of both language groups "represented the interests" of the largely Buddhist, coastal Sinhalese in the Legislative Council.
Although poverty was widespread in all the island's ethnic communities, some Muslims, Christians and Hindu Tamils had visible, highly placed economic and political positions in society. Periodic clashes between Buddhists and these other religious groups did occur.
Several factors fueled this revival. The Sinhalese glorified their roots, claiming distinct descendance from a superior Aryan race. They also emphasized their belief of Buddhism's special place on this supposedly sacred island, and exaggerated images of invading Tamil kingdoms from India many centuries in the past. With tens of millions of Indian Tamils just across the narrow straits separating the island from India, this last image has been particularly troublesome to the regionally small Sinhalese population.
From independence on, with political power resting solidly with the majority Sinhalese, nationalism for the newly politically powerful majority became defined by "a return to Sinhala. Two rather distinct Tamil communities, which together make up around 20 percent, of the total population, exist in Sri Lanka today. The smaller grouping of "plantation" Tamils were brought over the Palk Straits from India by the British in the last century to work on estates.
An initial act of the independent Ceylonese government was to disfranchise these Tamils and then deny them citizenship rights. This boosted the voting power of Sinhalese in rural districts. Language became another initial indicator to Sri Lankan Tamils that their rights as a minority were in jeopardy after independence. In , after pledges that both the Tamil and Sinhala languages would have equal status, Sinhala was declared the only official language.
Then the Sinhalese-dominated government whittled down one of the very pillars of Tamil self-worth by beginning to hold Tamils back on university admissions and government jobs. Although many Tamils had successfully integrated into regions outside of their traditional "homelands" in the north and east, government programs to settle Sinhalese into Tamil areas were also perceived by many Tamils as a deliberate effort to weaken them.
Up until , predominant Tamil political parties pressed for a federal political system to solve these problems, which would grant much greater powers to regional governments. But as the violence against Tamils escalated, their leaders began calling for a separate Tamil nation, or Eelam.
On the island that would encompass northern and eastern coastal areas. Nonviolent Tamil protests against discrimination and consistently broken promises by Sinhalese politicians met with increasingly violent reactions from certain Sinhalese sectors. From to , Sinhalese mobs instigated at least five major outbursts of communal violence directed at innocent Tamils.
The attacks proved to be a crucial turning point for many Tamils. Government officials were implicated in riots that took hundreds of lives, rendered thousands more homeless and destroyed millions of dollars' worth of property. In addition to this mob violence, organizations like Amnesty International began documenting widespread human rights violations against Tamils by official Sri Lankan security forces supported by particularly harsh emergency regulations.
The current president of Sri Lanka, Junius Jayewardene, was elected in with the support of many Tamils. Like previous Sinhalese politicians, however, he has found it difficult to implement changes that he promised would address basic Tamil concerns. In fact, he barred from Parliament the main Tamil political party, then the country's largest opposition party, due to their stand on Eelam. That the party's pursuit of Eelam was to be nonviolent was of little consequence to most Sinhalese.
Tamil youth, growing increasingly disenchanted with their political elders, began an armed struggle for Tamil Eelam. Out of their ranks materialized a half dozen different militant organizations, all professing to follow some form of Marxism. The emergence of these groups reinforced the worst fears of the Sinhalese majority - that Tamils would try to destroy Sri Lanka and bring millions of their Tamil cousins from India along with them in this struggle.
If the riots jolted the conscience of Tamils, then the comparable event for the Sinhalese was the militant Tamil raid on the sacred Buddhist city of Anuradapura in May Up until then, Tamil raids were usually directed at the Sri Lankan security forces, which were composed nearly entirely of Sinhalese.
In Anuradapura, Sinhalese civilians were left dead in the raid's wake. After this massacre, a hit-and-run war between Tamil and Sinhalese forces erupted in Sri Lanka's eastern provinces. Unfortunately, the Tamil-speaking Muslim community there has been drawn into the conflict. Up until India's intervention in the summer of , the militant Tamil and official Sinhalese forces were battling for supremacy in the east, with the militants apparently controlling the northern, Tamil-populated Jaffna peninsula.
In this decade as many as 15, Tamils, mostly civilians, may have died in the conflict; many Sinhalese lives have been lost as well.
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