Sri Lankan Yellow Journalism And Its Slander Of Tamil Women
By Janani Paramsothy
15 November, 2011
Countercurrents.org
Smear campaigns. It has long been the tactic of those who know that they are losing the battle. Employed by the vicious, the most desperate and the least honourable, it only highlights the ignorance of the debater and the futility of their argument. Like the fox who blames the grapes for being sour just because he cannot reach them and the Republican who asks President Obama to produce his birth certificate, because he can find no other way to diminish him, the Sri Lankan attacks the personality of a Tamil, in absence of anything else they can viably attack. Why engage in debate when you know you’ve already lost the argument? Instead bomb the opposition into silence. Failing that, just smear them.
This is what Mr. Rajasingham has effectively done in his vitriol-filled article which you may have the pleasure of reading here.
It can be seen clearly, that the article neither engages with the accusations made against the government nor in no way refutes them effectively. It is instead a ‘character assassination’ of a brave and inspirational woman just because she dared to speak out publicly about what happened to her. Sri Lankans rule by and through fear. The fear is usually based upon the ever hanging threat of physical violation- death, beatings, torture and rape. This is why Diaspora Tamils are such a big source of contention for them; there is no way to intimidate the Tamil who does not live under your sphere of control and will never live under it.
Unless you can scare them in some other way. When you can’t attack the cause, attack the people behind it.
If you manage to do this, then there is no need to provide any credible evidence that the ‘baseless allegations’ that Meena Krishnamoorthy has levied against the Sri Lankan government are indeed baseless. You can cavalierly dismiss, the war crimes that Sri Lanka has committed- verified by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, independent media sources and the governments of many western nations amongst others. Indeed, you need to do this, because you have no evidence to prove the opposite, no argument and no leg to stand on.
Knowing this, you start venomous attacks. And when the person on the other side is a woman, the attacks increase in venom and rabidity.
The charges against Ms Krishnamoorthy, as stated in the article, involve only the concoction of an elaborate story based on the writer’s own prejudices and strongly entrenched Sri Lankan views about what a woman should be. Especially what a Tamil woman should be, which to a Sri Lankan, is their sex slave.
This involves no autonomy- not even over their body, let alone their mind-, no courage, no spirit and certainly no voice.
How dare then, Meena, a Tamil woman be strong and independent? How can she venture to stand against the Sri Lankan government and their lies? There is no need to address the substance of her argument when you can just attack her for being a woman making those arguments in the first place. This helps to hide the inability to deal with the argument in the first place as well as allowing Sri Lankan men to do one of their favourite things: demolish Tamil women, whether that be physically, mentally, or sexually.
Attacking what she wears, when her pregnancy date was and even the very essence of her motherhood is as useless as it is disgusting. What use is her personal life to the argument? Does the fact that she wore jeans, or a skirt, or a saree change what the Sri Lankan armed forces did to the Tamils during those months in 2009? Does it diminish your crime just because the victim is not a submissive, helpless being? Why do we insist victims to have to fit the mould- the pre-conceived, foolish notion of what they should be like?
When they cheerfully attack her for attempting to cover her real identity, when proving via the article itself, what the need was to protect her identity initially, do they not sense the hypocrisy? This woman, as strong as she is, is a human being. Her husband is missing; she has lost her baby and her peace. She has seen her nation being dismantled and her people being destroyed. The last thing she needs or wants, is rubbish like this being thrown at her.
Sri Lankans need to get used to the fact that Tamil women are strong. Whatever they may do to us as a group, whatever they may do to us as individuals, we have a collective spirit that cannot be broken. Eelam Tamil women, whether Sri Lankans like it or not, are not just helpless victims. They are inheritors of the Tigers emancipatory legacy, a legacy that lends all Tamil women across the globe confidence and power.
This attempt to shout down Tamil women by attacking their sexuality first and foremost, needs to be thwarted. There were many instances of this during the global protests against Sri Lanka in 2009, especially over the internet. Women with a higher public profile face even more brutal attacks.
Damilvany Gnanakumar had to when she came back to Britain and spoke out about her time during the last phases of the war and in the camps. Isaipriya faced it post-mortem, for having been the face of sexual violence and horror against Tamil women, in the Channel 4 video, something she didn’t even have any control over.
It is high time that Sri Lanka, its politicians and the yellow journalists at the service of a racist state face the music. They should be made to stop harassing Tamil women for being Tamil and for being women. If you have something to say about their argument, or their cause, (unlikely as that may be) then state that. This strategy of trying to dismiss our claims by dismissing as us persons is not working. We will not allow it to.
On a final note, it is interesting that none of the self-proclaimed ‘Sri Lankan Tamil feminists’ have spoken out against this behaviour. You cannot be selective in your feminism, constantly criticising the Tigers for ‘intolerance’ (when the Tigers’ ‘intolerance’ to patriarchy they more to empower Eelam Tamil women than the sophisticated discourses of any of these feminists) and then remain silent about this Sri Lankan tactic. This only shows on which side you are on.
Janani Paramsothy is a Law Student at University College London
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