Tribute To Soori; Eelam Tamil Community Lost a Great Humanitarian
Sooriyakumar Sivanathan (Soori), a key founder of the SJC87 Initiative, has passed away on December 21st, 2021. He lived his life for others and helped many war-affected families & children in Tamil Eelam after the genocidal war. Throughout the last 12 years, Soori worked tirelessly towards providing education to the children to uplift the Eelam Tamil community. Losing a passionate, like-minded soul is a great loss for our community, and we hope to commemorate his great selfless acts by putting others before himself.
2009 was a devastating year worldwide for Tamils. Many felt hopeless after the Tamil Eelam government was destroyed and thousands of Tamil civilians were killed. Over 300 thousand Tamils were caged in concentration camps, hundreds of them being young orphans, while the UN ignored the Tamil community’s plea for help. During that desperate time, Soori took the initiative to rescue many young orphans, provide them with safer shelter, and educate them with valuable knowledge. The initiative is continuously expanding to this day and is constantly helping those in need. To allow this to happen, Soori had to sacrifice many crucial aspects of his life. This includes spending time away from family, living off of partial wage. As part of the Tamil diaspora, we appreciate and are grateful for his tireless work, and encourage friends in the diaspora to support his family by donating to this fundraiser. https://www.gofundme.com/f/nathan-sooriyakumar-funeral-expenses-and-family.
Helping Tamil young orphans while in the midst of continuous genocide against Tamils was not an easy initiative to perform. There were several challenges to his efforts that his team had to overcome. One of the challenges was the nature of the end of the war, where the extrajudicial killings continued and evidence of genocide was carefully being removed. There was an intent by the government to keep the Tamils in camps long-term in order to make demographic changes to the Tamil homeland. Tamil Rehabilitation Organisation (TRO), which did most of the humanitarian work for Tamils in Tamil Eelam, was banned in 2007 by the USA department of treasury as it was a part of the Tamil Eelam defacto government. Tamil diaspora financial support was soon after branded purposefully with the label as terrorist sympathizers.
Initiating humanitarian charity was a risky move because of viewed perspectives, thus requiring lots of courage and knowledge of politics. Soori was a humble, caring, visionary, and talented person who was able to persuade many people in the diaspora to quickly gather support for the initiative.
Previously, when the Tamil Eelam government existed, there were no beggars, even though in the midst of heavy war. This was due to the humanitarian support TRO provided, and financial support Tamil diaspora provided via TRO as it was a trusted entity. The Tamil Eelam government was able to prevent orphans from becoming homeless as they managed safe shelters for the children. They had two main centers, one for males called “Kantharooban Arivucholai” and another for females called “Sencholai”. The genocidal war in 2009 became a leading factor to a rapid increase in young orphans, as many lose their parents throughout the war. By the end of the war, the two main orphanage centers were destroyed. This, in turn, lead to many of the orphans becoming helpless and begging for basic human rights while held captive in concentration camps.
Defying all the odds, Soori traveled from Sydney to North America and then to the UK to visit his classmates, well-wishers to solicit support in order to rebuild and develop education in war-affected areas. Soori’s vision made SJC87 the first charity to set foot in many parts of the war-affected areas.
In 2011, two years after the charity started, the SJC87 initiative was falsely defamed and had to do the rebuttal that reads the following.
“From our assessment of this ‘research note’ we cannot help but conclude that it is nothing but a slanderous report written with dubious motives and malice. Further, the conclusions drawn by the author evidences neither journalistic merit nor academic rigor. He may have, for whatever reason, sought to ruin our charity organization’s reputation and compromised the safety of our members and put the future of the war-affected children in trouble. We insist that the editors of the Groundviews to refrain from publishing unfounded defamatory writings as exposé. We want to thank our well-wishers and donors for their support and know that the SJC87 Initiative will continue its charity work to help the children affected by the war.” https://groundviews.org/2011/11/28/separating-fact-from-fantasy-on-the-%E2%80%98research-note%E2%80%99-by-%E2%80%98the-principal-researcher%E2%80%99-mr-muttukrishna-sarvananthan/
The above example shows the challenges faced to running a humanitarian initiative in the Tamil homeland. It displays what it takes for the Tamil diaspora to do mid-level humanitarian efforts in the midst of genocide. None of these challenges stopped Soori from his humanitarian work. In fact, the challenges made him stronger and allowed him to expand his work. Later years, the SJC87 expanded to several schools in the Vanni region and added special tutorial classes for exam preparations, English language classes, and computer classes for hundreds of students. In 2018, Soori started the Education for Everyone initiative with his Google Educator certification on IT for children and university-level students. Soori went on multiple trips to Sri Lanka to conduct IT workshops in various parts of Sri Lanka.
Soori is a visionary leader and missing him is a great loss for the Tamil community. His service to the needing community through his expertise will be remembered for a long time.
