The Age of Discovery was committed during times when there were no international laws. Those who eventually wrote the international laws were the perpetrators & violators of territories & committed insidious crimes that under their own terminologies constituted crimes against humanity, war crimes & genocide. None of these crimes that took place across the world have been taken up in any Court of law. Many of the conflicts that prevail find their roots to the policies of colonial rule. One such policy is the “Colonial Settler colonization” policy applied in Sri Lanka that brought in natives from another country & intentionally usurped and pushed away the ethnic group originally living there & intentionally changed the demography while showering undue perks & privileges which created in them the mentality of superiority warranting them to pursue demands pre-independence & post-independence for a separate State including aiming to achieve it via an armed conflict & terrorism. Modern politics cannot disassociate from colonialism because the issues currently faced by nations are a result of colonial policies & legacies. Colonization involved not only seizing of land & displacement of people & implanting foreign settlers but also the most damaging aspect being colonization of people’s minds.

The Western colonial powers who landed & occupied nations have committed immeasurable damage & crimes. Not only are they guilty of annihilating natives they transported natives of other nations & planted them in lands all round the world & treated them as superior to the original natives. They destroyed or attempted to destroy the political, physical, cultural, spiritual, intellectual & even space of the indigenous populations through these settlers.

Before giving into unfair demands of the Settler occupiers shouldn’t the world emphasis be on the people who were usurped to enable settler colonialism?

Who is going to be voicing or defending the people who were annihilated or pushed away from areas that they lived in to occupy settler colonizers?

People have the right to resist annihilation.

British colonial evidence suffices to prove this intentional annihilation of the Sinhalese by colonial administrative policy.

The rights of the Sinhalese & the discriminations they were subject to during colonial rule cannot be silenced, erased or forgotten.

Benjamin Horsburgh who was Governor of Northern Province, declared in 1916: “that the Sinhalese occupied the Northern portion of the mainland, ……., there is ample evidence carved in stone all over the Mannar and Mullaitivu Districts.” (Horsburgh. p 54)

Should the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples who “have suffered from historic injustices as a result of inter alia, their colonization & dispossession of their lands, territories & resources” be applicable more to the Sinhalese if historical facts as per colonial records is used as evidence & not the string of myths & fabricated yarns being woven?

The British denied water to areas where Sinhalese lived thus killing them or forcing them to move elsewhere. In 1833 the Kantale tank that was populated by Sinhalese had no Sinhalese by 1855. GA Trincomalee C. M. Lushington was concerned about the fate of the Sinhala villages due to lack of water under him & admired the ancient Sinhala civilization. His appeals in 1898 to restore the tanks were ignored. The Sinhalese in the East declined due to the intentional step motherly treatment of colonial British.

Settler rights cannot supersede the rights of those who were living on the lands & were chased out. The Sinhalese are the aggrieved party & their grievances should be addressed first.

Settler logic & settler supremacy cannot override the rights of the indigenous people.

Only the Sinhalese have evolved in Sri Lanka – they created their own language, their own customs & cultural heritage revolving around Buddhism, their own man-made hydraulic engineering system that is not second to none & they were nation builders, creating a civilization & treating the land & resources with love & defended it with their blood from invaders, not simply to lay claim to it as a possession & not defending it against invaders. It was the Sinhalese who came forward to defend the nation against South Indian invaders & the 3 colonial invaders. Only those who defend the land can lay claim to it.

Today, the colonial settlers are being given virtually the same preferential treatment that the colonials gave them when they settled them in lands that colonials forcibly occupied. They have made fake histories, fake claims, they use global kittys to promote fake propaganda & purchase foreign politicians vulnerable to vote bank politics.

Is it not strange that of the South Indians taken to all corners of the world by the colonial British & intentionally placed to change the demographics of nations are laying claim to an exclusive area only in Sri Lanka! None of the settler colonialists taken to the Caribbean, South Africa, Malaysia, Singapore, Fiji are claiming a separate homeland. Why is it only in Sri Lanka?

Cognitive imperialism “denies people their language and cultural integrity by maintaining the legitimacy of only one language, one culture and one frame of reference (Battiste) The Sinhalese were victims of targeted discrimination.

There are some hard questions that need to be asked & answered or at least suffice to think about.

Can any group of people who were brought in from a foreign land either as mercenaries, labor & settled in areas after intentionally displacing those that lived in those areas, with time have moral or legal right to claim the areas they were forcibly settled in as “theirs” & claim this area to be a “separate homeland” exclusively for only themselves?

This is a question that colonial British must answer mainly, as well as colonial Dutch who codified Malabar to make it a “customary law” applicable to only Malabars from South India.

Only the Sinhalese can showcase that it evolved as a separate ethnic group, it created its own language, own culture & legal system that revolved around Buddhism, its owned distinguished chaithyas, irrigation systems and so forth. No other community can claim its own distinguished facets as the Sinhalese have. The colonial records suffice to show that the Sinhalese were very much living in the North & that the colonial policies intentionally displaced them to be replaced by the settler colonization scheme.

No politician or political party can be bargaining against the truth & facts for political power or political careers.

This island nation was defended by the Hela people to remain as one entity. Settlers under colonial colonization schemes cannot split the Nation & separate it by claiming a “homeland”. All of their demands over the years have stemmed from a superior complex mentality injected to them by the colonials as a result of the perks, privileges & favoritism given to them during colonial rule & beyond independence simply to keep newly independent states destabilized & eternally suffering some form of conflict which finds its legacy back to colonial rule.

The colonials must be asked to solve the problem they created not to palm off their problem on post-independence governments forcing them to give citizenship to foreigners that the colonials intentionally dumped on other nations to change demography & cause conflicts thereafter.

What readers need to ask themselves is a simple question – can people forcibly brought in by colonials from foreign states or during foreign invasions, and settled in the island displacing the Sinhalese who were living in these areas have any right to claim a separate homeland? Even those who have come by choice & settled cannot & should not be allowed to claim & separate any part of Sri Lanka. Everyone must learn to live in harmony & peaceful coexistence.

Shenali D Waduge