Women and Genocide – An assessment involving psychology, sex, violence, family and culture.

 

The United Nations has declared May 15 as International Day of Families.

The United Nations, supposedly a world forum, unfortunately was hand-in-glove in the destruction of Eezham Tamils. The UN also went overboard by supporting the efforts of the demonic Sinhala establishment who were hell bent in destroying the familial set-up of Eezham Tamils.

The world body that celebrates International Day of Families on May 15th went ahead and supported a regime that indulged in destroying the familial set up in the very middle of the same month. What an irony indeed!

The Sinhala establishment at Colombo continues its structural genocide in innovative ways and methods in Tamil Eezham. These methods are camouflaged tactically that none can recognize them as being part of intention to commit genocide. We found about 27 different versions of these camouflaged tactics.

The notion of destroying the familial set up was the central theme in all these 27 different tactics. By committing such horrendous acts, the Sinhala establishment has poised itself to give a final push to their only agenda of annihilating the Tamils from the island.

This establishment has opened possibilities of waging a war on ourselves.

You and me, we are the criminals in this set up. The criminal Sinhala establishment by opening the possibility of our men harming themselves neatly watches the proceedings with much fanfare.

The side-effects of the horrendous crimes of genocide committed and being committed continuously, and the basic survival issues that crops up after the war, gives rise to nearly 35 to 40 psychological issues among the victim race. The magnitude of horror faced by the victims is so wide.

Each of us, though live as Diaspora, are inflicted with a minimum of 10 psychological issues. Various external and internal conditions might influence the degree of the infliction of these psychological issues. But it is rather not possible to nod that there were no issues at all.

No amount of words can capture the magnitude of the horrendous genocide-ridden crime faced by the population of Vanni. It may also be wrong to begin such an exercise without knowing its full magnitude.

Should those down and out souls who believe that normalcy has returned to them get to read this amplified report, they may get into another psychological dilemma. The repercussions it might cause would be severe. That is exactly what is happening in Vanni right now.

The complications of life faced by every Eezham Tamil are no more private. After May 18, the complications are indeed something more of a common issue.

There is no open atmosphere to talk about the psychological issues. Yet there needs to be mechanism to address those issues. It is indeed frustrating to know the magnitude of the complexities though we understand the issues.

Women form the foundation of a society not just in a family but also in a race. This is the exact reason why genocidal regimes target women.

When we begin to react to the criminal intentions of the regime, the theories and solutions we put forward turned as ideologies that were backward and contrary to principles of women emancipation. When we observed this we did feel a sense of shock.

When our women started crossing Mullivaikkal on May 18th, they literally began carrying the sins of this race. The cruel irony is, they are the target, of both, our adversaries and we.

When we were fighting for our rights, our women were more than equals in the battle field. But now we have entered a phase of treating them as “Women” of tradition. This war has made us blind and ruthless.

Mullivaikkal has opened new challenges for our women. Their rights have to be protected and at the same time, they are the beacon of hope for our race that struggles for mere existence. Everything is now on a knife-edge. We cannot afford to lose the challenge as it might bring multiple yet unknown issues to the front.

I did some research on the works of Simone de Beauvoir, a well-known feminist and activist, Amilcar Cabral, a rationalist and independence leader of Guinea-Bissau and the rational movements of EV Ramasamy of Tamil Nadu to postulate a theory against genocide.

I postulated and came up with this theory after putting it through the prisms of human relationship after genocide, spectacular failures of all the ‘isms” after a genocide, and women, their rights and feminism in the background of genocide.

I cannot vouch that the theory is the best – it can at best be called as being precautionary and temporary in nature. Nothing more!

The theory takes into account our women whose current status as widows and half-widows, and as physically challenged. It also takes into account gender bias they face in the wake of a systematic genocide.

A war of tradition has already erupted in the guise of divorces and obstacles to marriage after May 18. Hence it is imminent that we are not a robust society. Our fertility rate has almost dropped to zero. The rate at which we can have new offspring has dropped so significantly that we are facing a near extinction as a race.

Given this backdrop, it hence becomes imperative that education on sex and gender sensitivity is given top priority in the theory. Many innocent women being brandished as being whores and getting relegated as modern untouchables are terrible stories one gets to hear.

People like me who are able to make out the different dimensions of the issue, at times commit practical mistakes. May be it is time to acknowledge that we are victims of genocide too. It is imperative for men to change their attitude. And women should zealously safeguard themselves in this treacherous time. The issue too needs redress in different dimensions.

A redefinition of women rights is essential given the changed scenarios. It is because women are in the forefront of being subjected to systematic genocide. So safeguarding women takes precedence given the treacherous time we live in. Many definitions can be attributed to the word “safeguarding” in this context.

The best possible reaction we can offer against the systematic genocide that is going on is to safeguard the structure called “family”. Some might very well argue that this smacks of backwardness in thinking and goes against the very spirit of feminism as well.

But unfortunately our sustenance and identity breeds here. Only those who observe the nuances of genocide can very well understand how the government machinery has been overhauled to target the very structure of a family. This targeting is part of their well-planned systematic annihilation of the Tamil race.

After the direct assault on our race in 2009, a systematic targeting of family structure is followed currently. This was after they came targeting our widows and half-widows, the divorces they orchestrated, the obstacles they created for marriages and the unspoken misery they caused to families that had women as their heads.

This paves way to unhealthy economic conditions, psychological disasters and gender biases among our women. This in turn breeds immense social divide and a sense of disharmony in our race. This displays the whole world that we are not a healthy race by any means. Our fertility rate has almost dropped to zero and we are staring a near total annihilation.

The militants who lead our liberation struggle and the people who supported the mass movement are ironically unable to deal with their internal familial pressures. The perpetrators help those pressures grow to the point that the children of the family are made orphans and the members are left isolated.

Beyond the destructive plans of the sinister Government, our men and women, our soldiers, have all succumbed to failures and have been pushed to a future that looks bleak. That is the psychological injury the perpetrators have inflicted and the resulting failure is what has reflected in our society.

The outcome is their failure to forget mistakes and ignoring the noble virtue of being magnanimous among their family members. The disagreements have caused disastrous splits in their family and they have settled to live a desolate life characterised by a lack of vision for the future.

The bare truth is the fact that this status quo not only affects them individually but it pushes back every effort of the Tamils as a race to come out of the destructions faced in the aftermath of a systematic genocide unleashed against us.

I am not sure if the concerned people are aware or not aware of this status quo. So it is obligatory to not succumb to the pressure of disconnecting the familial chord come what may. A strong psychological wellbeing is the need of the hour.

Some of you might be surprised beyond a point. Let us ignore the general population in the statistics. Let us take the data among the militants who surrendered after May 18. Many families of the ex-militants got tangled in this emotional quagmire only to be pushed into familial disputes. The resulting lack of confidence has separated the members apart and destroyed the family set up. The data of families of ex-militants destroyed in this internal squabbling will be shocking.

This paves way to further isolate our women and hinder the proliferation of our generation. This is exactly why I express my opinion that some kind of psychological counselling mechanism has to be organized for the war affected. But many view this as something seriously wrong and this attitude needs to be addressed.

If we decide to react positively and firmly against the genocide unleashed on us, we need to cross the obstacles placed on marriages and we need to make our marriages work. Let us no more have widows and half-widows. Let us grow within us a quality to forgive mistakes among us and develop the noble virtue of being magnanimous to each other. Let us create families and let us make babies.

To put it in a different way, let us do away with the system of having a women-headed family. This will blow a death knell to the cruel efforts of the Sinhala establishment to annihilate our race.