Trevor Grant Stood With The Tamil People Until The End
By Usha S Sri-Skanda Rajah –March 13, 2017
Usha S Sri-Skanda-Rajah
A tribute to Trevor Grant: “the fine ethical journo” and “a true friend of Eelam Tamils”.
Trevor Grant stood with the Tamil people until the end. He stood with them in their hour of need when their governments failed them and world governments had forsaken them.
Sadly, Trevor Grant succumbed to cancer on 5th March, his death deeply affecting the Tamil world – victims, refugees and activists alike – who owed him a deep debt of gratitude for his relentless campaign for justice on their behalf.
As such, although he first became famous as a great sports writer, and broadcaster, his prolific writings, speeches and interviews, educating the world and the international community on the genocide perpetrated against the Tamil people living in the NorthEast of the island of Sri Lanka and the injustice caused to them after they had to flee their land, will go into the annals of history of the Tamil people and their struggle for freedom – as true evidence of their story as persecuted people in their own homeland and as forgotten and ill treated refugees in various parts of the world and in his own Australia.
Here was a man who was not reticent about calling the 2009 Mullivaikkaal massacre exactly what it was, a genocide and put the issue front and center without fear or favour. Listen to him here making the case for the Tamil genocide:
Through his book, ‘Sri Lanka’s secrets: How Rajapaksa Regime Gets Away with Murder‘, he revealed the exact intentions of the “corrupt and brutal Rajapaksa regime” and that of the Australian government which he said was complicit.
As ‘convener’ of, and spokesperson for, the Tamil Refugee Council, he was a fearless and vocal defender of the rights of the Tamil people and an outspoken critic of both the Rajapaksa and the Sirisena governments until the very last.
Trevor Grant
Even as a lover of sports he advocated for the boycott of the Sri Lankan Cricket Team on a matter of principle. Hear him explain how Rajapaksa, “a brutal dictator interfered with and used cricket to launder his own image”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz-HE5IFgOw&t=157s He wrote about how Mike Atherton, former captain of the England cricket team, was horrified by what he saw in the documentary ‘Sri Lanka: Killing Fields’ – to make his point.
If one checks his twitter handle his tweets were all about Tamil issues. His last retweet on 24th February 2016 a year ago under this handle, was a tweet from the journalist, academic and activist, Wendy Bacon who called him, “the fine ethical journo.”
Constantly exposing the Australian Government’s complicity he tweeted about, “how Australia had become an enabler for accused war criminals. In that tweet he shared his article in which he wrote, “he was not surprised,” by the Sri Lankan Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremaeinghe’s revelation, made to the ‘Australian’ newspaper, “that the Australian Government had kept silent on the human rights abuses of the brutal regime of Mahinda Rajapaksa in order to get his co-operation to stop asylum-seekers fleeing to Australia.”
Not once hesitating to expose even the Sirisena government, Trevor Grant wrote Sirisena was an “offshoot” of Mahinda Rajapaksa. His assessment of Sirisena written in January of 2016 can’t be further from the truth, a little more than a year on today as the 34th sessions of the UN Human Rights Council is taking place right at this moment:
