In a letter to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the DMK party president, M Karunanidhi, urged action against the Sri Lankan government's "intensive and systematic programme of erasing the Tamil language, culture, religion and diluting the concentration of Tamils in areas where they had historically been predominant."
Describing the ongoing Sinhalisation of the Tamil North-East, the letter listed the names 89 Tamil villages that had been renamed with Sinhala names, the destruction of 367 Hindu temples and noted the alteration of village borders to change demographics.
Karunanidhi went on to exemplify the intense militarisation and oppression of Tamil livelihood in the North-East, stating that there were 161 army camps in the war-ravaged Mullativu district alone.
The letter also shed light on lacking reconciliation and the grip the Sinhala army have over the local economy, stating that there was a "non-allocation of funds to resettle and rehabilitate internally displaced Tamil families, schools, hospitals and other infrastructure and promoting of Sinhala settlements on Tamil land and Sinhala takeover of the economic life Tamil areas, which impoverishes the Tamil"
The letter ended by calling on India, "the world's largest democracy", to fulfil its moral obligation and "stop this atrocity immediately."
See here for full letter.
