Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site
Forgot your password?
Subscribe

Keywords: Tamil

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Unmasking Australia's boat-stopping deal with the Sri Lankan devil

    • Justin Glyn
    • 25 February 2015
    4 Comments

    Sri Lanka's new Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has claimed Australia's silence on the country's appalling human rights record was the price for its government taking extra measures to prevent people fleeing the country and arriving in Australia on boats seeking asylum. This is a problem on many levels, including our government's seeking to remove human rights issues by reframing them as national security ones.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    High Court fails high seas detainees

    • Frank Brennan
    • 02 February 2015
    20 Comments

    The Abbott Government had a thumping big win in the High Court on Tuesday. All seven High Court judges have made it clear that there is next to nothing that can be done in the courts to question the government's approach. It is lawful, acceptable to government, and hardly a matter of concern to the Australian community, that 157 asylum seekers, including children, can be kept in windowless detention on an Australian vessel for a month on the high seas in the Indian Ocean.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    The masala stone

    • Bernard Appassamy
    • 12 November 2014
    19 Comments

    Families, like mine, that are born from migration are reborn punctually through the scent of their cuisine. It's the 1970s and a grinding rhythm from the garden is audible through my window. Leaning over the ros kari, Jessie, our family cook, is crushing spices for the evening curry. With her two hands, she holds flat a cylindrical stone, the baba, and rolls it with her wrists back and forth, on its large rectangular base.

    READ MORE
  • INTERNATIONAL

    The unjustified secrecy of the Abbott Government

    • Jack Maxwell
    • 11 August 2014
    17 Comments

    Liberal democracies keep secrecy in check. Where secrecy is justified, this justification should itself be public. The Abbott Government has withheld important information from the public on questionable grounds, and it has shielded itself from criticism by stifling debate on whether that secrecy is justified.

    READ MORE
  • CARTOON

    Morrison's refugee rodeo

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 30 July 2014
    1 Comment

    View this week's offering from Eureka Street's award winning political cartoonist.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Why Tamils flee Sri Lanka

    • David Feith
    • 10 July 2014
    23 Comments

    Many Australians regard these asylum seekers as economic refugees. But systematic discrimination against Tamils in Sri Lanka has existed since the country gained independence from Britain in 1948. Tamils are a minority, and are systematically and routinely treated as second-class citizens by the majority Sinhalese community. The extreme Sinhalese nationalist view regards Sri Lanka as an island sacred to Buddhism, in which non-Sinhalese have no place.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Stopping the boats at any cost

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 10 July 2014
    21 Comments

    Like the Dictation Test devised devised to enforce the White Australia Policy, the National Interest Test would allow the Minister to exclude anyone he wanted. People who claim protection can be confident that the Australian Government will not have them or their dogs killed, but they will have no confidence that they will not be placed in dangerous situations or returned to places where they fear for their lives.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Tamils facing new atrocities in Sri Lanka

    • Paul White
    • 04 July 2014
    39 Comments

    On Monday we learned that two boats of Tamil asylum seekers had been intercepted off Christmas Island. Now there are unconfirmed reports that Australia is handing them over to the Sri Lankan navy without assessing their claims for protection. Amnesty warns Tamils face the risk of sexual violence, torture, murder, imprisonment, and enforced disappearance. Since March this year there have been scores of arrests and several deaths.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    'Speak English or die'

    • Jake Dennis
    • 30 June 2014
    5 Comments

    I have to imagine what it would be like to be a refugee, to have fought the sea for safe loam, to starve while salt eats the ship, to thirst for fruit back home, to plea for life and water, to grow sores and wipe blood from our daughter's mouth. But no imagination is needed to witness ice and spit from an ignorant mouth ... I have known and have seen faces contorted like knuckles with hate; feet planted to fight for their version of country.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Time for Labor to disown PNG solution

    • Tony Kevin
    • 28 February 2014
    22 Comments

    Over the past week of Parliament, we have seen the strange and distressing spectacle of Labor timidly criticising the Government's handling of the events on Manus Island. If it were brave enough, Labor could use these events as a trigger for policy change. To call for the Manus centre to close, and for detention and processing centres in Australia to reopen, would be the moral policy for Labor at this point.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Hyphenated migrant's homeland homage

    • Bernard Appassamy
    • 01 November 2013
    7 Comments

    Leaving Mauritius for Australia changed everything and nothing. While I am now liberated from a suffocating horizon, I only need to step outside to sense the presence of a different horizon, one that sits instead as a formidable continent behind me. My understanding of home has also evolved. As a hyphenated migrant, my home does not have a main entry, but a few side doors.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Canada shames Australia on CHOGM boycott

    • Michael Mullins
    • 14 October 2013
    16 Comments

    Tony Abbott has explained Canada's decision to boycott the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting over human rights concerns by saying that 'different countries have different national priorities'. In other words, securing Sri Lanka's cooperation in 'stopping the boats' is more important to Australia than putting an end to human rights abuse in Sri Lanka.

    READ MORE