On 12 November 2005, Vaithiyanathan Loganathan, aged fifty-five and resident in Neuss, Germany, was brutally attacked by three to four men. Mr. Loganathan, known in the Tamil community as Loganathan Master, was a teacher at Central College in Jaffna in the early 1980s and has since been resident in Germany for the last two decades. He was a founding member of the 'illakiya chandippu' (Tamil literary gatherings) and editor of the Tamil magazine 'Aruwai' in the late 1980s. On 5 November 2005, Mr. Loganathan organized a memorial meeting in Neuss that condemned the assassinations of two Jaffna principals, Nadarajah Sivakadatcham and Kanakapathy Rajadurai, in mid-October. (See SLDF statement of 4 November 2005 on educational freedom) During the days leading up to the memorial meeting, Loganathan and his family received numerous threats from supporters of the LTTE. The police were informed of these threats and the meeting was held with police protection.
The memorial meeting drew close to a hundred activists, former teachers, intellectuals and poets from many European countries. The poems read at the meeting, were under the general title, "Can a bullet close the eyes of education?" The meeting was broadcast live by the Tamil Broadcasting Corporation to listeners in Europe and Sri Lanka. Like other such meetings held in recent months, this memorial meeting is a challenge to the LTTE's hegemony over the Tamil diaspora and the LTTE's undemocratic claim of sole-representation.
A week later at about 11 pm on Saturday, 12 November 2005, Mr. Loganathan was attacked while closing his store in Essen, Germany. He was attacked from behind and his attackers smashed his head with beer bottles and broke his leg with an iron rod. While Mr. Loganathan was viciously beaten facedown, he heard one of the attackers shout in Tamil, "Do you dare hold a meeting?" Mr. Loganathan's assailants fled when neighbouring shop owners came to his rescue. He was taken to the hospital, where the deep wounds to his head required twelve stitches and medical care was given for his fractured leg.
SLDF calls on the German police and authorities to bring those responsible to justice and to investigate whether the LTTE and its front organizations were responsible or complicit in this crime. Indeed, in recent months the threats against dissenting Tamil activists have been escalating throughout the Tamil diaspora. Political columnist Selliah Nagarajah in Australia received death threats from the LTTE death squad Ellalan Force last month, and a number of activists in Canada have been targeted by LTTE website Nitharsanam. However, this attack on Mr. Loganathan signals the LTTE's willingness to resume physical attacks against diaspora activists, which was characteristic of its actions in the 1990s. The LTTE has always recognized the gravity of Tamil dissent in the diaspora. Such challenges threaten its hegemony over the Tamil community as a whole as well as its war efforts in Sri Lanka, which would be crippled without its political and financial base in the West. In 1994, dissenting Tamil activist Sabaratnam Sabalingam was murdered by the LTTE in broad daylight in Paris. Neither Sabalingam's killers nor those who sanctioned the crime were brought to justice. Similarly in 1993, D.B.S. Jeyaraj suffered head injuries and a broken leg, when he was brutally beaten by LTTE thugs armed with baseball bats for his dissenting writings in Toronto. The LTTE should not be allowed to extend its culture of intimidation and violence to the West, particularly since these Tamils arrived in the West seeking refuge from such violence.
In the past, authorities in Western countries have not taken the rights of their Tamil residents and citizens seriously, and have often chosen to look the other way in the face of violence within the community. However, in its statement on 26 September 2005 issuing a travel ban against the LTTE, the European Union stated the agreement among Member States to take "additional national measures to check and curb illegal or undesirable activities (including issues of funding or propaganda) of the LTTE, its related organizations and known individual supporters." The European authorities' commitment to human rights and democracy will be reflected in how they choose to address attacks against their own citizens and residents who, like Mr. Loganathan, seek to promote pluralism and democracy within the diaspora. If the EU is unwilling or unable to effectively respond to the LTTE, and instead allows basic rights and freedoms to be violated with impunity within its own territory, it is unlikely to contribute to a peace with human rights and democracy in Sri Lanka. [SLDF]
