They are political leaders, intellectuals, soldiers, bankers, artists and entrepreneurs. Just mention some people, like the Argentine president Carlos Menem (of Syrian origin), or Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim (of Lebanese origin), and you'll illustrate the extent of Arab emigration to Latin America. during the first third of the twentieth century. Subsequent generations have kept some of their Arab roots, but "in their own interest, the first emigrants committed a kind of cultural suicide to ease their integration," explains Abdeluahed Akmir, a Moroccan university professor who oversaw the drafting a book on the subject. The first Arabs, derogatorily called "Turks" because they came from the Ottoman Empire, wanted to ensure that their children would not face with the rejection they had themselves suffered. "They gave them Spanish names, they did not teach then their mother tongue, and they converted to Catholicism, registering in religious schools," explains Professor Akmir. The conversion has not been so difficult, because the first waves of emigrants were composed mainly of Maronite Christians and Orthodox.

[. . .]

Many Latin Americans have "discovered" the Arabs, especially in the region of the Triple Border, an area between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, which hosts a large number of new Muslim migrants. Those who were marginalized on ethnic grounds in the early twentieth century are now excluded for religious reasons. The result is a confusion between race and religion among Arabs and Muslim world. And this new form of discrimination has prompted new generation Arab-Latin American, who reject the association between Islam and terrorism, and who again assert their identity, engage with their culture and feel proud to belong to the civilization of their ancestors.

The armed forces are said to have carried out "war games" in which nuclear missiles were fired and troops practised an amphibious landing on the country's coast.

Documents obtained by Wprost, one of Poland's leading news magazines, said the exercise was carried out in conjunction with soldiers from Belarus.

The manoeuvres are thought to have been held in September and involved about 13,000 Russian and Belarusian troops.

Poland, which has strained relations with both countries, was cast as the "potential aggressor".

The documents state the exercises, code-named "West", were officially classified as "defensive" but many of the operations appeared to have an offensive nature.

The Russian air force practised using weapons from its nuclear arsenal, while in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, which neighbours Poland, Red Army forces stormed a "Polish" beach and attacked a gas pipeline.

The operation also involved the simulated suppression of an uprising by a national minority in Belarus – the country has a significant Polish population which has a strained relationship with authoritarian government of Belarus.

Forced to flee fighting between Shiite rebels and the army in the north, Yemen's Jews have found a new home in Sanaa, where they benefit from the special protection of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

"May God keep him alive," repeats Rabbi Yahya Yussef Moussa, the leader of the Jewish community of Al-Salem, every time he refers to the Yemeni president during an interview with AFP.

Al-Salem is close to Saada in northern Yemen, which is the stronghold of the Shiite Zaidi rebels, who are also known as Huthis.

Fighting between the Huthis and the army since 2004 has seen the exodus from the area of an estimated 150,000 people, including the entire Jewish community of Al-Salem.

Counterterrorism officials are investigating a group of youths who allegedly left Canada for East Africa two weeks ago, amid concerns they may have gone to join the Somali militant group Al-Shabab.

Two sources familiar with the case said investigators had been canvassing Toronto's large Somali-Canadian community for information about as many as five men who departed Canada together in early November.

They are believed to have flown to Kenya, the sources said. Kenya borders the region of southern Somalia controlled by Al-Shabab, an Islamist militia aligned with al-Qaeda and sometimes likened to the Taliban.

[. . .]

A handful of Canadians have fought with armed Somali groups in recent years, including Abdullah Ali Afrah, a former Toronto businessman who was killed last year while leading an ambush against Ethiopian troops.

The directors of the Khalid Mosque, one of the most popular places of worship for Somali-Canadians in Toronto, said in a statement to the National Post in September they had no knowledge of any youths who had traveled to Somalia to fight.

"Members of the Khalid mosque congregation have not reported to us any missing children," the directors said in the statement, a response to questions posed by the Post.

"Our message to the Toronto Somali youth regarding the Somalia conflict is: your parents left Somalia to escape the raging war in the homeland and to provide their families a better life. Do not even entertain the idea of returning to Somalia to fight. Somalia has seen more than its share of bloodletting.

"If you want to help yourself, your family and Somalia, hold fast to your faith, focus on and excel in your academic studies and become a productive member of the Somali community in particular and Canadian society in general."

But since about 2006, the fight in Somalia has drawn several foreign youths. Earlier this year, two young men told a news conference they were Americans and had traveled to Africa "to fight alongside our brothers of Al-Shabab" and "to be killed for the sake of God."

Gaola, 22, works on Avenida 9 de Julio in Buenos Aires, the capital’s main thoroughfare. He has been in Argentina for a year and sells trinkets and sunglasses in the street, wearing a white, Lions of Teranga jersey, marking his support for Senegal’s national soccer team. He loves to talk about football, which is what he likes best about Argentina, but is less forthcoming about how he got here and whether he has all the right documents.

With Europe increasingly difficult to enter, growing numbers of African migrants are seeking asylum in Argentina, trying to escape poverty more than outright persecution. In the last two years the number of people with refugee status in Argentina has more than doubled and the majority of applicants are from Senegal, though no accurate figures are available.

According to the Refugees Agency in Buenos Aires prospective African immigrants obtain a visa for Brazil. From there they travel to Argentina. Those who lack the funds to take a plane stow away on freighters for the three-week crossing.

The Catholic Committee for Immigration is demanding stricter controls for new arrivals. It alleges that the authorities reject applications for residence permits but do not deport the Africans, who stay in the country without any proper status, an easy prey for people-trafficking networks.

Once a promised land for migrants, Argentina has been hard hit by unemployment and is in no position to cope with a large influx of illegal immigrants. Nearly half the population operates in the underground economy, with neither welfare nor pensions, and now the Africans are swelling their ranks.

Many Senegalese live in Once, a working class district traditionally home to the Jewish community. It has recently seen the arrival of Asian stores, Paraguayan street vendors and native Americans from the poor northern provinces, who peddle vegetables and spices in the street.

The city probably never featured prominently on lists of where older generations went to escape previous Irish slumps but then, this time around, the traditional recessionary outlets are also down on their luck.

Friends who had visited raved about one of the world’s most exciting cities. First-time visitors from Ireland are often surprised at just how sophisticated the city South Americans consider their continent’s most urbane capital actually is.

The boulevards remind you of Paris or Madrid, while the social life compares easily with London or New York. But the buzz in the air is Latin and the prices are far lower than anywhere near to home, even in these deflationary times.

For recent Irish émigrés planning to spend some time here while waiting for the tide to turn at home, this cut-price cosmopolitanism is a welcome attraction, as they look for somewhere to make savings and severance packages last longer.

Probably not since the 1860s and the arrival of Argentina’s original Irish community has this South American country with a dubious economic reputation been seen as a bolthole for those looking to escape hard times at home. “I love it here. The locals are very friendly, the standard of living is great and the weather is fantastic,” says Slattery.

Another recent arrival is Niamh Haughey, who decided to take a severance package from a failing bank back home. She had visited Argentina in 2004 and always thought about coming back to learn Spanish. “Some time out is good for you. I had a job in the boom and now have decided to do some travelling during the recession,” she says.

While some, such as Slattery and Haughey, are open to the idea of work experience to help make the euro they have brought with them go farther, few are planning a permanent move – perhaps just as well, as Argentina’s chaotic economy and stifling bureaucracy makes finding regular jobs a challenge.

For these children of the great Irish bust, goals such as learning Spanish and seeing some of the continent while the recession at home works its way through the job market are more important than carving out a foreign future like their predecessors did in London and Boston in the 1980s.

Anglo-Celtic" has become a glib collective term for non-indigenous Old Australia — a polite way of saying White Australia before the wogs. But it is an insidious distortion of our past and a galling denial of the struggle by an earlier minority group in Australia against oppression and demonisation.

From the First Fleet to the 1960s, Irish Catholics were a discriminated-against underclass, openly barred from employment in much of the private sector and accused of disloyalty for putting Australia before the British Empire. In what we now cosily term "Anglo-Celtic" Australia, a virtual social apartheid existed at times between Catholics and Protestants. But the divisions were not about religion. They derived from England's colonial oppression of Ireland, grievances transplanted to Australia and nurtured with bitterness by both sides.

"This is a Protestant country and it is our pride that we have absolute liberty under the Union Jack,' declared E.K Bowden, minister for defence, in 1922. Four years earlier, in late 1918, an Irish Catholic priest in Sydney, one Dr Patrick Tuomey, was fined £30 for sedition for criticising the British presence in Ireland; he thereby "by word of mouth encouraged disloyalty to the British Empire".

Religion in "Anglo-Celtic" Australia was code for identity: it branded you as part of the Protestant Ascendancy or the Catholic "Bog Irish". To marry across these entrenched divides was nothing short of consorting with the enemy for many — yet one in five did, from the 1890s to the 1960s. Many of these couples were ostracised, sometimes by both sides of the family, to the grave and beyond.

Given the significant decline in the native population as a result of the Spanish Conquista and diseases brought by the European invaders, the Spanish colonialists began importing slaves from Africa in the 16th century.

Historians estimate that between 1580 and 1650, some 250,000 African slaves were brought to Mexico, mainly through the port of Veracruz, to work in the sugarcane fields and on cattle ranches.

"There was a very strong African presence," María Velásquez from the National Institute of Anthropology and History told IPS. "All of those stories that have been handed down in different parts of Mexico (reflecting the influx of Africans) should be made known."

Based on early census data, Mexican anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán estimates that the black population in colonial Mexico numbered around 20,500 in 1570, 35,000 in 1646, and nearly 16,000 in 1742.

In other words, according to U.S. anthropologist Bobby Vaughn, blacks far outnumbered the Spanish in early colonial times, with the black population three times that of the Spanish in 1570 and 2.5 times in 1646.

Vaughn, who specialises in studies on Afro-Mexicans, says that not until 1810 did the Spanish outnumber blacks.

Mexicans of African descent had to wait over two centuries to be free of slavery, although before Roman Catholic priests Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos, two of the country's national heroes, abolished slavery in 1810, slaves had already made several attempts at winning freedom.

• blogTO reports that Church Street restaurant Zelda's has moved away on account of too-expensive rents.


• Excitingly, Centauri Dreams talks about a model of the Europan interior ocean that allows for the possibility of large amounts of oxygen dissolved in that moon's water, creating the possibility for macroscopic life, not just microorganisms.


• Crooked Timber argues that European left-wing political parties have done so badly of late because, well, there isn't much left-wing about them any more.


• Daniel Drezner doesn't think that China's possession of US Treasury bonds makes it all that much a financial power, and likewise doesn't think that Europe's long experience with multinational negotiations via the European Union will help it at the G-20 table.


• English Eclectic's Paul Hall is critical of some criticism of an increasingly queer-friendly British Conservative Party for its anti-gay European Parliament allies.


• Far Outliers quotes a reflection on the frequent contradictions between official and personal histories as illustrated by the history of Thessaloniki.


• Gideon Rachman blogs about the intensification of Latvia's ongoing economic crisis.


• Hunting Monsters says that the problems surrounding the European Constitution's passage and the documents lack of popularity generally reflect wider European ambivalence about an unaccountable Union.</a>
  
• Normblog cites a couple of paragraphs by David Malouf making the point that one of the best things about cities is the way they can detach people from tribes.


• Slap Upside the Head reports on a recent court ruling in Russia establishing the legal non-existence of same-sex marriage in that country.


• Window on Eurasia reports that most Ukrainians don't see a military threat from Russia and observes the growing role of Central Asians and Caucasians in Russian Islamic communities.

On a windswept street in a bustling industrial area on the outskirts of town, a stocky man in a white shirt and dark jeans pulls out three Ziploc bags containing red, brown and silver pills.

Take two red and brown pills each day for a week, he tells the woman who says she is nine weeks pregnant, and your baby has an 85 per cent chance of being a boy. Then he demands $750 in cash.

In the Indian state of Punjab, the culture is obsessed with boys. Desperate to avoid giving birth to girls, women for decades have taken extreme measures. They swallow herbs, drink pregnant cow's milk, pray in marathon sessions, and since the widespread use of ultrasound technology, abort female fetuses.

It's a huge topic of debate in India, with an alarmingly skewed birth ratio of boys to girls.

But this scene on an industrial strip was not played out in Punjab, but just west of Toronto, in an area a large number of Punjabis now call home – and where the latest Canadian census figures reveal significantly fewer girls than boys in the South Asian community.

Posing as a pregnant Punjabi woman, a Star reporter met the man after answering an ad in the Ajit Weekly, a Punjabi-language newspaper printed in Mississauga. "A guaranteed and satisfactory medicine for having a son is available," the ad says.

The man turned out to be Kanwar Bains, the newspaper's news editor and the meeting took place outside the paper's office. He said a woman cannot be more than 12 weeks pregnant for the pills to work.

[. . .]

IN 2006, a study published in the British medical journal Lancet found the boy-girl ratio changed markedly after ultrasound technology – that diagnoses fetal abnormalities and illnesses but can also identify sex – became popular in India 20 years ago. The most dramatic decline of female births came between 1991 and 2001, from 945 girls for every 1,000 boys to 927, despite a ban in 1994 on sex-selective abortions.

According to India's 2001 census, the northern state of Punjab has one of the worst gender ratios at 793 girls to 1,000 boys.

Canada does not collect statistics based on ethnicity at birth. But statistics here, now home to more than a million Indo-Canadians, many from Punjab, also show a somewhat skewed gender ratio. According to 2006 census figures, nationally there are 932 girls to 1,000 boys under age 15 in the South Asian community, compared to 953 girls to 1,000 boys in the general population.

The numbers in the South Asian community in the Toronto area become much more skewed: 917 girls to 1,000 boys in the Toronto Central Metropolitan Area. Broken down further, it shows 904 girls to 1,000 boys in Mississauga, and 864 girls to 1,000 boys in Brampton.

"That means the sex-ratio is 50 per cent higher for under-15 South Asians as compared to the general population (in the Toronto CMA)," said David Foot, professor of economics at the University of Toronto and a demographics expert. "I would say that is concerning."

Even without meaning to highlight it, the opening of the cultural program “Catalonian Influences in the Caribbean” evoked the various periods in which Spain too was a country of emigrants.

For reasons of an economic, political or other nature, the richly endowed American possessions of the Spanish crown - or the newly independent republics, depending on the historical moment - once represented the dream of a better life for many Spaniards. Refugees of wars and dictatorships hoped they would find their second homeland in this new world.

With the aim of recovering and strengthening the cultural and emotional bonds between Catalonia and Spanish-speaking Caribbean nations, the program “Catalonian Influences in the Caribbean” was organized by the Casa América Cataluña, considered to be the first institution of its type in the world.

The very origin of that institution was based in nostalgia, because it was started by emigrants who returned to the peninsula after the loss of the former colonies - particularly the last two, Cuba and Puerto Rico. In Barcelona they first founded the Club Americano, in 1911, the predecessor of the Casa América Cataluña.

[. . .]

The Catalans came late, but they took very good advantage of their arrival. Around 1830, “Catalan emigration to Cuba began to convert into an economic, social and even political force of clear importance in national life,” contends writer and journalist Leonardo Padura in his article “La aventura americana” (The American adventure), originally published in the Cuban newspaper “Juventud Rebelde.”

“All economic strata seemed interested in those Spaniards who, from trade with the colony, provided the lungs for the air needed for Catalonia to make the leap to industrialization; at the same time they revived the mercantile life of the island,” noted the journalist.

In this way, Catalans practically directed trade from Cuba around 1850. Not only did they hand down into history famous names - such as Partagás (perhaps the best known Catalan connected to the tobacco industry), Facundo Bacardí (the father of Bacardí rum, whose legend endures even today), and Martí Torrens (whose fortune had a great deal to do with the profitable African slave trade) - but they also left us the legacy of today’s García Lorca Theater.

There were also Catalans recognized for their connection with other important areas of life - individuals like Mariano Cubí Soler, founder of the “Revista Bimestre de Cuba” magazine; and teacher Juan Olivella Salas, co-founder along with Cubí of the Buenavista school.

According to the article by Padura, “The economic surge of this emigration allowed them, by 1840, to even found what would become the first regional association of Spaniards in Cuba: La Sociedad de Beneficencia de Naturales de Cataluña. Its presidency would be passed along to the most noted individuals of this nationality, and the association would physically construct new institutions - first a hospital, where one could die in peace, and later a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Moreneta, where one could cry from their nostalgia.”

A ceremony at Auschwitz Sunday to commemorate the half a million Sinti and Roma killed by the Nazis became a reminder of the threats these people continue to face across Europe.

Evidence of the threats came the following day with the murder of a Sinti woman in her home in Kisleta village in Hungary 230 km east of Budapest. Her 13-year-old daughter was injured in the attack. The police in Budapest say that at least 16 attacks on Sinti and Roma people have taken place in the last 12 months.

The Roma are a people who have migrated to Europe since the 14th century. The Sinti are an offshoot of this group living mostly around Germany and Austria. There are an estimated 12 million Roma and Sinti in Europe.

Sinti and Roma, popularly known as gypsies, are the largest ethnic minority group in Europe, and have endured racism and discrimination for centuries. The Nazis killed some 500,000 of them in concentration camps and in raids.

The Aug. 2 ceremony was held because on that date in 1944 Nazi forces killed 2,800 Sinti and Roma detainees – among them children, women, and the elderly - in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. They were brought in from the concentration camp Birkenau that was constructed to imprison gypsies.

Sinti and Roma delegates spoke at the ceremony of the significance of Auschwitz and Birkenau in the history of European racism against gypsies.

"For us Sinti and Roma, both concentration camps constitute a symbol of the affliction and death of hundreds of thousands of our relatives," said Roman Kwiatkowski, chair of the Polish Union of Sinti and Roma. "We, Sinti and Roma from all Europe, are united by the memories of the crimes committed by the Nazi dictatorship against our people."

[. . .]

The discrimination Roma face was evident at the Aug. 2 ceremony itself. The event was nearly cancelled after the Polish government withdrew a grant of 25,000 euros. It was saved by the Polish Jewish community.

"When I heard that the Polish government had withdrawn its financial support for the Sinti and Roma commemoration, I immediately picked up the telephone," Piotr Kadlcik, chair of Poland's Jewish community told IPS. "We cannot allow a moment such as the commemoration of August 2 to fall into oblivion." He called friends and organisations, and persuaded them to donate money for the ceremony.

Robert McWilliam, president emeritus of the Council of Scottish Clans and Associations, said {Facebook] was the best way of communicating with young people.

However, the special meeting at Holyrood also heard that some clan chiefs do not take their duties seriously and consider the system outdated.

It was held ahead of the world's largest clan gathering and Highland games in Edinburgh on Saturday.

More than 20,000 people with Scottish heritage from around the world, along with the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall, are expected to attend the events.

Thousands of tickets have remained unsold, however, with new figures revealing that a million fewer tourists visited Scotland last year.

Mr McWilliam, from the US, told the other chiefs that he had a message from American Scots that they need to use modern forms of communication.

[. . .]

Donald MacLaren, chief of Clan MacLaren, said: "A minority of chiefs think this is not for them. It's a great disappointment for those who look upon them as the head of their family."

He said some thought the clan system moribund since the mid-18th Century, but he disagreed and insisted it still had a future. North America alone has a clan membership exceeding 100,000.

"I was brought up in Suffolk, have quite a plummy accent and while I consider myself a Scot, I see myself as a bit of a hybrid. Aren't we all?

"The chieftainship and clan society were passed to me by my father when he died 20 years ago and all I had to do was carry on what he'd started. We have people from all over the world in the clan society, but mainly from America, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. They join, I guess, for a feeling of kinsmanship, to find out where they came from.

"My role is to be the figurehead and keep it all together. It's a hobby. If I had a full-time job – I would describe myself as a country lady – I probably wouldn't do it. Both the Gathering and the Clan Convention look quite interesting. I'm not sure that being a clan chief is that important, but it's a wonderful thing to do, and quite an honour."

Last year, Western countries put pressure on Beijing to hold a dialogue with representatives of the Dalai Lama, with French President Nicolas Sarkozy even threatening to boycott the Beijing Olympics if China refused. Beijing's protestations that Tibet was an internal Chinese affair were disregarded.

This time, however, the Western response is muted. The United States has adopted a mild tone, with President Barack Obama merely calling on all parties in Xinjiang “to exercise restraint.” The European Union has gone even further, taking the position that violence in Xinjiang “is a Chinese issue, not a European issue.” Serge Abou, the Eu's ambassador to China, said Europe also had its problems with minorities and “we would not like other governments to tell us what is to be done.”

While there are similarities between events last year in Tibet and those in Xinjiang this month, the world has changed: China is now seen as an indispensable partner of the United States and Europe, both of which are facing a financial crisis. Beijing's diplomatic assistance in resolving the Iranian and North Korean nuclear issues is also seen as too important to put in jeopardy.

What reaction there has been came mainly from Muslim countries. The Saudi-based Organization of the Islamic Conference, which represents 57 Muslim governments, condemned what it called the excessive use of force against Uyghur civilians. At least 184 people, both Uyghurs and Han Chinese, have been killed.

The OIC statement declared: “The Islamic world is expecting from China, a major and responsible power in the world arena with historical friendly relations with the Muslim world, to deal with the problem of Muslim minority in China in broader perspective that tackles the root causes of the problem.”

The country that has taken the strongest position is Turkey, whose people share linguistic, religious and cultural links with the Uyghurs. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan actually went so far as to characterize what has happened as “a kind of genocide” and said his country would bring the matter up in the United Nations Security Council.

Thousands of Turks and Uyghur expatriates took to the streets across Turkey after Friday prayers, protesting the violence in Xinjiang and burning Chinese flags and products, AFP photographers and media reports said.

The biggest of the demonstrations was at Istanbul's Fatih Mosque, where an estimated 5,000 people gathered and said prayers for members of the Uyghur community who lost their lives in the ethnic unrest in Xinjiang, the NTV news channel said.

"No to ethnic cleansing!" chanted the crowd, waving the Uyghur flag depicting a white crescent on a blue background, as some protestors set fire to Chinese flags and goods produced in China.

Some 200 people attended similar prayers at Istanbul's Beyazit mosque at the call of a Turkey-based Uyghur association and Turkish nationalist groups, after which they held a brief demonstration, shouting "Murderer China", an AFP photgrapher said.

Black peoples’ presence and contribution to national culture have been systematically denied by official historiography. There is also a widespread perception that there are no people of African descent in Argentina, where 97 percent of the population describe themselves as white.

However, the latest scientific research has shown that more than half of the population has at least one Amerindian ancestor, and that the average genetic structure of the Argentine population contains a European contribution of around 78 percent, an indigenous contribution of between 16 and 19 percent, and an African contribution of between 2.5 and four percent.

In 1810, when the territory that is now Argentina ceased to be a colony of Spain, black people made up 30 percent of the population of Buenos Aires, and in some provinces they were the majority, as in Córdoba in the centre, Catamarca in the west and Tucumán in the north.

This very significant population, descended from Africans brought over as slaves in colonial times, was decimated when black soldiers served as cannon fodder in the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870), in which Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay virtually devastated Paraguay, which lost one million of its then 1.3 million people.

The yellow fever epidemic that killed off about eight percent of the population of Buenos Aires, apparently introduced by soldiers returning from the war, caused ravages particularly among Afro-descendants, who lived in overcrowded conditions without any sanitation.

‘Little Jaffna’ in Paris is a cluster of streets branching off from the rue du Faubourg Saint Denis in the capital’s 10th district. It stretches all the way from the Gare du Nord railway station to the metro station Chapelle on the northern fringes of Paris, in what is generally referred to as the “immigrant neighbourhood.” The area is usually tight with people, alive with commercial activity and the hum of business. It is packed with “cash and carry” stores, sari “palaces”, sweet meat vendors, restaurants, video and music shops, butchers selling goat meat, tailors, barbers, travel agents, and fresh fish-wallas.

For the last week, however, this hub of commerce has come to an eerie standstill. Peeling posters bearing the face of LTTE leader Velupillai Prahakaran’s are spattered across the walls. Not a stray cat seems to walk the byways and black drapes and flags cover closed shop fronts. The Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in Paris, estimated to number between 60,000 and 75,000, is in mourning. There was shock and disbelief when news arrived that the LTTE supremo had been killed.

“No one believes he is dead,” Shalini, a 20-year-old medical student who came to Paris at the age of 10, told The Hindu the day Sri Lankan television announced Prabakaran’s death. “I am certain he has already left the country and will soon give us a message on how the struggle should go on. He is the only true leader of the Tamil people. We revere him, we worship him, and I am sure later today he will give us a sign that he is still alive.” Now that the LTTE has formally acknowledged his death she seems rudderless, adrift.

[N]ot everyone has kind words for the LTTE. “I feel terrible when I see those innocent civilians killed. What have they done to deserve this, herded into camps like cattle? Prabakaran did not know when to negotiate. He became too fond of the gun and made his people here into Mafiosi,” says Shanthamma, a Pondicherry Tamil whose parents once owned a shop in Little Jaffna. She said agents of the Tigers forced them out of their original premises in what has now become Little Jaffna. “First they came with a ridiculous offer to buy our shop. Then there were threats on the phone and through the post. Finally, we found our windows were being broken, our merchandise tampered with. We preferred to quit. How else do you think did they manage to lay their hands on this entire street [Faubourg Saint Denis] and all the streets around it? It was done with threats and coercion. We do not care for the Tigers. They did terrible things in the name of self-determination. What had the members of the Pondicherry Tamil Community done to them? Yet they forced us out in order to put up their own shops so that they could collect their so called Freedom Tax.”

Angélina Etiemble, a sociologist and researcher who has carried out extensive studies on the Sri Lankan Tamil population in Paris, told The Hindu: “The LTTE was so well organised that every individual Sri Lankan Tamil was more or less forced to pay between 536 and 839 euros per year — the rate was 2.32 euros per day, deemed to be a ‘decent’ living wage for those engaged in the cause or deprived of their livelihood by the war. Shop owners had to pay up more, between 1,678 and 2,287 euros per establishment.” Ms. Etiemble says she is not surprised by the level of loyalty to the LTTE or the almost total indoctrination of the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. “They used their media network to the full — newspapers like the Poobalam Weekly, controlled directly by the all-powerful Tamil Coordination Committee.