In the second version of this blog that began in June 2008 after I deleted all the previous entries, I worried about a few global hotspots as I observed them from my corner of the world. I listed in that August 2008 post the following countries/regions in addition to Iraq and Iran:
- Pakistan
- Afghanistan
- Georgia
- Zimbabwe
- Sudan/Darfur
- Israel/Palestine
- Lebanon
- Sri Lanka
- Burma
- Tibet
Only Georgia has really gotten off that list, right?
About Sri Lanka, this is what I wrote in that post in 2008:
This AFP report says it all: Strife-torn Sri Lanka is bracing for intense and bloody battles as security forces close in on the political capital of the Tamil Tiger rebels, according to military analysts.
That was in the summer of 2008. The 25-year old civil war that began on "Black July" in 1983 was entering yet another bloody--yes, literally bloody--stretch.
Here in the US, it was the summer of the presidential election season, with a young and untested but charismatic Barack Obama even going to Berlin and addressing the crowds that were all eager for a change from the Bush-Cheney era.
The US couldn't care about the violence in Sri Lanka.
Later that December, I was in India, and observed people and the press expressing worries over the increased military assaults on Tamil areas in order to wipe out the Tamil Tigers. So, I did what I could. I wrote a newspaper commentary after returning home.
The Sri Lankan government didn't ease up. It was a scorched earth approach to wiping out the Tamil terrorists, and civilian deaths and displacement didn't matter one bit to the government. The leadership of the Tamil Tigers were killed. An uneasy peace settled on the island.
All these in an island with which Arab merchants fell in love on first sight, which is why they called it serendip, which morphed into the English word "serendipity" to mean something absolutely awesome that just appeared or happened when least expected.
I was reminded of all that, of the roommates in my first year of graduate school, and more, when we watched Funny Boy.
The best #Tamil movie that I have watched in decades ... is a Canadian movie about #SriLanka ...#FunnyBoy involves two complex issues at once: #CivilWar and #Homosexuality https://t.co/Vfpi6unq65
— Am Dr Khe (@congoboy) February 2, 2021
If you read until here, well, you might be interested in a French/Sri Lankan movie we watched a couple of years ago. Dheepan is a movie that is about three Sri Lankan Tamils who are in France after fleeing the civil war.
All I can do is read about peoples and countries, watch movies, and wish for peace. That itself is a start, right?
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