Inside London’s Mullivaikkal Remembrance Day
Photo by Moahnishan Wignakumar
They moved with grace initially with hands placed in positions that perfectly captured the essence of classical South Indian Bharatanatyam dance. Their movements told stories that couldn’t be portrayed using their facial expressions. They walked in with hope. Then, they dropped down one after another, ending up on their knees and finally curling down onto the ground of Trafalgar Square. They stood for the innocent children who had been murdered and buried.
This was Mullivaikkal Remembrance Day, the 17th anniversary of the end of a war that killed an estimated 40,000 Tamil civilians in its final weeks alone. The performance had been choreographed to a song composed specifically to remember Mullaitivu, the coastal village in northeastern Sri Lanka where the military’s final offensive ended the 26-year civil war in May 2009. The conflict had its roots in decades of systematic discrimination against the Tamil minority by the Sinhalese-majority government following independence from Britain in 1948. The result was an erosion of language rights and political representation. By 1983, it had become a full civil war between the state and the LTTE. It ended at Mullaitivu where many Tamil civilians, trapped in so-called no-fire zones that were shelled regardless, died in the military’s final offensive. No further independent inquiry has been pursued. Seventeen years on, there has been no justice for victims and no consequences for the perpetrators.
My role as a volunteer was simple. I would stand beside a row of exhibition boards detailing the history of the civil war and the endless cycles of violence beginning in 1948 and explain them to whoever stopped to read. Originally, I thought it would be a modest job. What I did not anticipate was how many people would stop and what they would say when they paused.
A man visiting from Canada read through the boards in silence. When he finished, he turned to me and said, “I had no idea. Had I known this was happening, I would have done something to help.” Over the course of the afternoon, I heard variations of that sentence from more people than I could count. From tourists attracted by the commotion to locals who had wandered into Trafalgar Square, all of these people found themselves in the middle of a community’s grief. In an age when some atrocities dominate the news for months, the massacre at Mullivaikkal has never fully entered global consciousness. The Tamil community has been asking for accountability over the past 17 years.
Thiru, the British Tamils Forum’s strategic coordinator, has been asking that question for longer than most. I met him near the exhibitions, composed and precise in the way of someone who has learned to carry great weight without letting it show. His story begins not in 2009 but in 1956 when newly independent Sri Lanka passed legislation making Sinhala the country’s sole official language – the policy that would define the lives of Tamil professionals for generations. Thiru worked in Sri Lanka for seven years. Tamil employees, he explained, were required to pass professional examinations in Sinhalese to qualify for permanent employment, a process officially termed standardisation. He sat the first exam. Then he stopped. “I asked myself why I should have to give up my Tamil identity to keep my job,” he told me. “It felt like an attack on my self-respect.” The consequences were professional and financial. He left anyway. He watched what happened at Mullivaikkal in 2009 from abroad. “None of my immediate family was killed,” he said. “But all of those who died felt like family to me. It felt as if my own family had been killed.” He came to Britain as a refugee and found the BTF in 2018.. He is here because he believes Britain carries a particular responsibility that predates 2009 by decades.
Earlier in the afternoon, British MPs had addressed the crowd, expressing solidarity. Poems were read. There were calls for accountability, for an international tribunal that has still not been convened. The kanji (rice boiled in salt water) was served as a symbol to recall the starvation endured by Tamil civilians trapped in the military’s closing offensive of the no-fire zones. People took the small cups and held them closely. The mood was not one of despair alone. There was a sense of deep mourning as well as a collective refusal to allow silence to become acceptance. I felt it most intensely when the final speaker took the stage. Instead of speaking in everyday Sri Lankan Tamil, she spoke in a more formal, classical form of the language. This dialect was much closer to Tamil’s earliest written origins with rhythms that felt older and more measured. While listening to her, something in me went quiet. Hearing an ancient language carry newly-lived grief created a strange feeling as though hearing those ageless words was itself a representation of Tamil perseverance.
Alojan has been attending BTF events since he was six years old. He began volunteering at 16. He is part of a generation that did not live in Sri Lanka through the war but has still grown up shaped by the stories of parents and grandparents and by the unanswered questions. “The older generation trusts us to carry this forward,” he told me. “But not enough young Tamils know this story. The only way things will change is if we keep spreading it.”
As the vigil drew to a close, the square returned slowly to itself. The exhibition boards were packed away. Tourists continued past Nelson’s Column, photographing the fountains, unaware that an hour earlier, dancers had sunk to this ground to represent the burial of children. The ease with which an entire community’s grief can occupy the heart of London and still go unseen is perhaps the most honest summary of what Mullivaikkal Remembrance Day is really about. The Tamil community does not gather here each May because it believes the world is listening. It gathers because it has learned, across 17 years and across the distances of exile, that the act of remembering is itself a form of resistance.
They were here. They are still here. And they will come back next year.
