The Conflict in Sri Lanka: Ground Realities - Ilankai Tamil Sangam

Even in the year 2004, with the LTTE urging all Tamils to vote
for the TNA, only forty-seven percent voted in the Jaffna district
(305,259 out of 644,279 registered voters). This is quite important.
Despite the dominant view amongst all Sri Lankan Tamils that
it is good to have the TNA in the parliament to at least keep the
quislings out of there, and the LTTE urging them to vote, fewer
than half the registered voters in Jaffna took the trouble to vote.
Clearly the claim that the Tamils boycotted the election this year
because of LTTE intimidation is utter nonsense. The decline in
Tamil participation has been a Tamil voters’ own choice, and for
good and valid reasons.
The assertion by the Sinhala opinion hucksters that the ‘Tamil
people wanted to vote’ in this election is not tenable either. These
commentators quite obviously don’t know anything about the
present-day Tamil mindset about their future on the island. This
is not surprising, as they are not in touch with the ordinary Tamil
people.
If they couldn’t talk to the common Tamil person to find out what
this mindset is, they could have at least learned it from those
who did.
Arthur Rhodes, who visited the northeast in mid-November 2005,
wrote in AsiaMedia (UCLA Asia Institute publication), about a
conversation he had with a Tamil vegetable vendor:
“Things are much better since the fighting stopped, and
we are happy for that, but we are all still very poor,”
Kesevarajah says. “The politicians make promises,
but they give us nothing.” She says she does not see a
reason to vote. “Neither candidate will give us what we
need. Eventually both will just bring war.”
He then talked to a young Tamil man.
… Nineteen-year-old P. Selvan proclaims that he does not
care one way or another about the Nov. 17 election. He
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