The word 'Diaspora' was coined following the fleeing of Jews from Palestine to other countries as defined in the dictionary as follows
di·as·po·ra
1. (Usually initial capital letter) the scattering of the Jews to countries outside of Palestine after the Babylonian captivity.
2. (Often initial capital letter) the body of Jews living in countries outside Israel.
3. (Often initial capital letter) such countries collectively: thereturn of the Jews from the Diaspora.
Does the Tamil community living in the Western countries belong to the similar category of people described in the dictionary? A vast majority of the Sri Lankan Tamils living in Western countries have migrated to those countries as asylum seekers purely due to the economic reasons with bogus claims that they were being persecuted by the "racist Sinhalese governments" and its armed forces. So they can best be described as economic refugees. And also the background of the vast majority of them who entered to those countries illegally and other means in last two decades or so is connected to terrorism and other fraudulent activities as highlighted in one of my posts.
Using the term diaspora to a group of economic refugees is a great injustice caused to the genuine diaspora communities in the world. On the top of all these Tamil economic refugees are directly connected to the terrorism as they sustained the terrorism of LTTE by funding LTTE for its terrorist activities. And they continue to do so though the armed terrorism in Sri Lanka was comprehensively defeated. The stepping stone for resurrecting the armed terrorism in Sri Lanka was laid with the US-India resolution against Sri Lanka passed in the 19th session of UNHRC in Geneva in the last March. It's these economic refugees' lobbying, the false propaganda and the money that played a major role in passing this US-India resolution.
The need of stop using the word diaspora to a group of economic refugees came at a Public Lecture titled 'Sri Lanka after Geneva in the Shadow of Seeming Giants' held in Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka on 10th April by Mr. H. L. D. Mahindapala, a highly acclaimed veteran journalist in the English media and now domiciled in Australia. So It is our collective responsibility to popularize this idea and stop injustice caused to the genuine diaspora communities who are neither economic refugees nor are the supporters of terrorism.
