Southwark Councillor Eliza Mann

Libdem councillor and former Mayor of Southwark, Eliza Mann discussed some of the issues facing activists working to improve the rights of Tamil women. Cllr Mann, a former-nurse, has worked with the UN through various NGOs including Amnesty International and the World Peace Organisation.

Discuss the background of the conflict.

The British Empire put the three kingdoms together when they captured Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), each kingdom had their own rulers. At first, they kept it all separate but in 1833 the Empire grew so they found it harder to manage while they ruled.

At the time of Independence, they installed a first-past-the-post system, population-wise there are more Sinhalese people so we ended up with a low no. of seats for Tamils. Entrenched laws cannot be changed, this requires a referendum or a 2/3rd majority. To get a 2/3rd majority, nationalists joined two Tamil constituencies into one, to bring the number of Tamil seats down. The Indian Tamil plantation workers were stripped of citizenship, Tamils lost 13MPs because of that. In this way, the nationalists got a 2/3rd majority and Buddhism and Sinhala became the official religion and language and Sri Lanka

then became a Republic that didn’t have to answer to the Privy Council. Under the name of development, grants were given to develop water reservoirs in Tamil areas, Sinhala people were put in these lands, Tamil land became smaller, the number of Tamil representatives became smaller and the world stood and watched all of this happening. We became a minority,

that’s why Tamils live all over the world, peaceful resistance resulted in arrest so eventually an armed conflict began.

What inspires you to campaign for Tamil rights?

I was on holiday in Sri Lanka in 1987 in chavakachcheri, I was in the market, buying fish and everyone had their notes out for one fish that was chopped into pieces. Suddenly everyone disappeared, except me and my note, even the fishmonger disappeared and then I heard bombing. The plane doesn’t make noise until it drops bombs, people could sense it and they ran to save their lives. When I came home at 7pm, I realised the enormity of the incident, I could’ve died, people here don’t realise what it is like to live in that scenario. I’ve seen people alive and happy in the morning and by night, they were dead. You don’t see all of this in the international media, when I returned to England I knew something had to be done.

In what ways have you worked with people in the UK to raise awareness of the struggles of Tamils in Northern Sri Lanka?

From 1987-2010 I have worked with various groups including, Tamil Refugee Action, Tamil Refugee Housing and Tamil Refugee Training and Employment. I try and get young people from here to take up Social Studies, International Development and International Relations for example and not just stick to the two or three professions that their parents want them to go into like medicine or accounting.

I was part of a group that helped install a solar-panel computer centre in a school in Mullaitivu, small children in war-affected areas have only seen planes, bombings and guns and we wanted to teach them about the outside world.

I helped organise a group of students to help out after the tsunami, they started at 8 am and finished at 9pm. People there thought students who were born and brought up here wouldn’t integrate with them but they loved it and became part of society there. There are many projects I have been involved with over the years to raise awareness of the plight of Tamils.

Talk about the process of getting through to Cameron before he went to the 2010 Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting (GHOGM) in Sri Lanka.

I was involved in setting up the All Party Group for Tamils. We used the voting power of Tamils to get MPs to bring up the issue in parliament and Simon Hughes led the way for that to happen. We tried to get Cameron not to go but we understood that he had to so we made sure he raised the issue of human rights and visited the North. Slowly we got the foreign office to pay attention, we took hard facts and evidence supported by local media and worked in groups with different organisations looking after Tamil refugees. A lot of people were afraid to speak up because they have relatives in Sri Lanka and the Sri Lankan foreign office would always push the idea of countering terrorism so it was a really difficult process.

What are some of the stand-out moments of your time as an activist?

I had to speak about how violence impacts Tamil women at a UN fringe meeting. 3 Buddhist monks attended this meeting and challenged the Chair of the meeting who didn’t want any trouble. The women speaking about three other countries had finished and when I started speaking, they got up and started shouting- I don't know if these people were really monks. They asked questions like ‘What do you think about suicide bombers?’ I simply said this is a meeting about violence against women and continued to give my speech. After that meeting a Korean expert passed a resolution to help tackle violence against women in the four countries, he asked me if he should include a clause specific to Tamil women and I said no, the resolution should have just applied to all women.

What are you most proud of?

At the UN Convention on Human Rights in Geneva it was passed unanimously that rape in an internal conflict is also a war crime, country leaders and foreign ministers had to pass that a few years ago. It is now a war crime, it was a war crime between two countries at war, but as Sri Lanka experienced a civil war, the mechanism for justice was different.

Also, getting the foreign office to stop writing ‘terrorist’ every time there was an issue regarding Tamil rights. We said if you want to talk about the LTTE, they have a spokesperson and can represent themselves. We separated ourselves from the LTTE and stopped people calling us a front organisation for a terrorist group, they’d always mix the two.

What are cultural barriers Tamil women face?

We did have the caste problem and dowries, these are abolished now but some similar practises are resurfacing. When we get to the third generation of Tamils here, hopefully these will go away. Our children are much more westernised, I worry more about the girls in Sri Lanka. Here we are protected by the law, in the council even, we have different departments to help protect women and children.

Because of my experience, I managed to get the council to keep families together and give support to parents and we had a family-education system at one point but this was stopped because of funding. I put a policy in place saying all children in care should have tuition and leave school with 5 GCSE’S. We have prize-giving for example, we put systems in place to find carers for children who need it, all of this involves all communities but a lot of Tamil children are in care, in Lewisham there are also quite a lot. I’ve done a lot because of the experiences I’ve had but I regret not being able to do more for Tamil people because there are so many limits on what we can do.

What difficulties do Tamil women face when they move abroad from Sri Lanka?

Language is a problem, they find it hard to express the violations that have happened against them and they’re afraid to discuss it. The lifestyle and system here is different, I went to visit a family 3 months ago and the children’s eyes were rolling because the mother gave them squash without adding water. Small things like that show how different life is here, the information is in English and people who move because of war don’t know English well because they lived in Sri Lanka when the official language was Sinhala. We started TRTECH, an English language course for free in Southwark but the government stopped the grant. In Sri Lanka a network of people are available for people to care for children, here people have to do everything alone, post-natal depression is quite common, there are many problems women face when they move here.

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