With over 56, 000 members across US, Canada, Europe and Australia, our walk began on May 26, 2009. We were inspired by the mounting reports on the ethnicity based massacre of Tamils in the Tamileelam region of Sri Lanka.  

Just as we were planning on this mission more than 30,000 innocent Tamils were being massacred (in May 2009 alone). Children are abducted every night. Young women are made victims to the ongoing campaign of rape, which is being utilized as a weapon of genocide against the Tamils.  According to reports, majority of the girls being raped are between the ages of 13- 15 years of age.  People are starved to death. A generation of Tamil children have been made amputees with both arms and legs missing, while medicine is denied. Currently, over 300, 000 people are trapped in ‘internment camps’, which are very similar to those of the Nazi Germany ‘concentration camps’.  Reports indicate that over 1, 400 people are being killed each week in these camps.  

These incidents triggered us to embark on a journey to convey this message to the American leaders and to ask for their help.
Not only in Sri Lanka, but in any part of the world, we cannot allow an entire community to be massacred merely because they belong to a particular ethnic category. Following each one of these types of incidents we said “never again”. The gruesome reality is we allowed it to repeat, only with different names. We called it the Holocaust in Germany, ethnic conflict in Rwanda, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and genocide in Darfur. We said “No more” and established conventions and protocols to prevent them. However, it silently happened again. We called it ‘bloodbath’ in Tamil Eelam and stood by.

We felt the international community was wasting time playing word games over the lives of innocent Tamils who were being slaughtered by the hundreds and thousands on a daily basis. We decided to shift the focus of this crisis away from words, numbers and politics into concrete actions. We hope to influence the American leaders to come up with concrete initiatives towards bringing a long-lasting peace and stability to the people of that island. Team Break the Silence USA (BTS USA) wants to bring awareness to the continuous suffering of the people in the Tamil Eelam region of Sri Lanka. We want to stir the pulse of hope.

Our walk will take about 90 days to complete. It was inaugurated at the Richard J. Daley Center in Chicago, IL and will cover a distance of over 1,000 miles by the time it reaches Washington, D.C. During this journey we will be interacting with many members of the public, politicians and major media outlets in the United States. During this process we will trek through Chicago IL, Joliet IL, Pontiac IL, Bloomington IL, Springfield IL, Decatur IL, Champaign IL, Covington IN, Crawfordsville IN, Indianapolis IN, Cincinnati OH, Dayton OH, Springfield OH, Columbus OH, Zanesville OH, Cambridge OH, Wheeling WV, Pittsburgh PA, Rockville PA and finally reaching Washington D.C. during the first week of September 2009.