Watch how Tamil protestors turn water cannons attack into opportunity

Key Takeaways:

• On Sunday, Ranil Wickremesinghe visited the area, and Sri Lankan Tamils demonstrated in Jaffna for the 1st time since the president’s election.
• The majority ethnic group in Sri Lanka is the Tamils, who account for nearly 12% of the nation’s 22 million inhabitants.

Sri Lankan Tamils demonstrated in Jaffna for the first time since the president’s election on Sunday as Ranil Wickremesinghe paid a visit to the region. 

In addition to calling for the release of the Sri Lankan Army’s “occupied land” in the Northern Province, the demonstrators demanded justice for the families of Tamils who vanished during the civil war.

To divert the protesters, the administration built barricades in the Nallur locality. However, as the protesters persisted in their demonstration and attempted to scale the barricades, water cannons were used to scatter the crowd.

A protest against President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s lack of action on their demands drew nearly 500 protesters from civil rights organisations and affected families from the Northern Province to the area, which Tamils dominate. To participate in the Pongal celebrations in Nallur, the president travelled to the area on Sunday.

There was a disturbance, but there were no reports of lathi charges as police used water cannons to scatter the protesters. According to police records, one police officer reportedly suffered only minor wounds.

The protesters were seen spraying the police with water laced with cow dung, according to a report in Tamil Guardian, and some even used the water the cannons sprayed on them to shampoo their hair.

Sri Lanka’s Tamils And Their Protests

Tamils are Sri Lanka’s largest ethnic minority, making up nearly 12 per cent of the country’s 22 million people. They are primarily concentrated in the northern and eastern provinces. 

The neighbourhood had endured decades of suffering due to a civil war that raged until 2009 and claimed thousands of lives.

Although the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a Tamil separatist militant group, was defeated, nearly 1 lakh people—mostly Tamils—were allegedly kidnapped by Sri Lankan security forces are still missing. Justice has been demanded by their families ever since.

However, whereas the Tamils have been working to recover, few significant demonstrations have occurred in the northern and eastern provinces. 

This includes last year when the entire country of Sri Lanka was in the streets as the nation battled an unprecedented economic crisis that ultimately forced then-President Gotabaya to flee.

According to a political analyst in Jaffna quoted in a DW report from July 2022, “protesting is a luxury several Sri Lankan Tamils do not appreciate, and scarcities caused by the economic crisis also do not new to them.”

According to Sri Lankan Tamils, who have been protesting the alleged “land grabbing” in the province’s Northern Tamil majority, the government is allegedly trying to evict Tamil families who have owned the property in question for generations.

12 Tamil National Alliance (TNA) lawmakers were seen lining up outside the Secretariat in February 2022, holding signs that read, “Stop the land grabbing of Tamilians beneath the guise of forest conservation.”

A 100-day-long demonstration in the Northern Province demanding a “dignified political solution” ended last month. A protester was quoted in a news story as saying, “We want our land, our right to freedom of movement, and our right to freedom of speech.”