{"id":116252,"date":"2013-12-05T05:08:39","date_gmt":"2013-12-04T23:38:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=116252"},"modified":"2013-12-08T01:26:39","modified_gmt":"2013-12-07T19:56:39","slug":"sri-lanka-tamil-struggle-continues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/sri-lanka-tamil-struggle-continues\/","title":{"rendered":"Sri Lanka: Tamil Struggle Continues"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just over two months ago, the Tamils went to the\u00a0polls for Sri Lanka\u2019s Northern Provincial Council elections\u00a0with defiance, yet with a cautious\u00a0sense of festivity. Military harassment of voters and party candidates had been thorough and\u00a0brutally innovative throughout the campaigning; in addition to the typical battering of election monitors, cash-for-votes and widespread intimidation, government supporters had even printed a fake newspaper.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/RTX15EQN-386x257.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-116253\" alt=\"RTX15EQN-386x257\" src=\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/RTX15EQN-386x257-300x199.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/RTX15EQN-386x257-300x199.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/RTX15EQN-386x257.jpg 386w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a>The night of Election Day, one retired man from Jaffna would not dare predict the polling results. If the Tamil National Alliance won, there might be retribution, he said; destroyed cars, people beaten up and houses set on fire. Yet, if they lost, the military violence already in place might never end. For now, the elections themselves \u2013 the first in 25 years \u2013 were reason enough to celebrate, he said cheerfully, showing a small bottle of arrack \u2013 local coconut spirit \u2013 in his pocket.<\/p>\n<p>Then, against all the odds, the\u00a0TNA won a landslide victory, with 30 out of 38 seats on an unexpectedly high voter turnout.<\/p>\n<p>The dream of an independent Tamil Eelam may be dead, but for many northern Tamils the provincial elections in the northeast had opened another narrow window of opportunity to claim the equal rights they have struggled to win for so long. Though primarily a symbolic defeat for the central government,\u00a0the TNA\u2019s success had also reignited hope that now \u2013 finally \u2013 the Tamils might have a chance at\u00a0the reconciliation that, four years after the end of the Eelam IV war, has failed to materialize.<\/p>\n<p>Read more in <a href=\"http:\/\/thediplomat.com\/2013\/12\/sri-lanka-tamil-struggle-continues\/\">the Diplomat<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p> [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":116253,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,3402],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-colombotelegraph","category-editors-choice"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Sri Lanka: Tamil Struggle Continues - 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