In the Memories of the Massacred

By: Roy Ratnavel

It has been three years since May 18, 2009. That’s the day Tamil Diaspora’s world stopped spinning. Over time, it has resumed its rotation, sluggishly at first. We are in the early phase of grieving, we have the rawness at our fingertips. Almost primal in our every thought and movement as we attempt to rise each day and put one step in front of another.

Dunes of emotions dominate our psyche somewhere between howling anger and stunned silence. We give up understanding. We find ourselves picking through the wreckage. Not even the lapse of time has numbed how truly horrible it was. Massacre of May 2009 remains a key moment in the shared history of Sri Lankan Tamils.

We don’t think of it as an isolated individual event without connection with rest of the world. There is no such thing in this interconnected world that we live in. Ultimately we understand how people can be prepared by governments and organizations to use horrific violence outside of the realm of civilized behaviour. It’s ironic, in war everybody is killing but there are rules even for killing and should be. Tamils know Sri Lanka never played by the rules.
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