Asoka Weerasinghe Kings Grove Crescent . Gloucester . Ontario Canada

Monday, 11 May 2009

Albina Guarnieri
Liberal MP for Mississauga East-Cooksville House of Commons, Ottawa

Dear Albina:

When you got up in the House today to do your little pious preaching on behalf of your Tamil constituents, I said to myself, “Oh No, not her again!” But I expected you to wear a habit made out of a red Tamil Tiger terrorist flag. That would have been colourful as well as given you the stamp of a real Snow Tigress fighting for the Tamil Tiger separatist cause.

Then you started reading your script like a psalm from the Tamil Tiger Bible and lo behold, it sounded the same Albina Guarnieri that I listened to during the Emergency Debate on Sri Lanka on February 4th evening. You hadn’t changed.

While you were blasting the Sri Lankan Government for bombing the ƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ”¹…”No Fire Zone’ and killing a thousand Tamil civilians over the weekend, showing your contempt that the 180,000 Tamil civilians who were liberated from the Tamil Tiger human shield by the government armed forces being camped within barbed wired compounds, and that the Tamil women had been raped by the Sri Lankan soldiers, the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon got the weekend happenings right to the button when he blasted the LTTE for their disrespect for the safety of the thousands of civilians trapped in the no-fire zone in the Northeast Sri Lanka and said that the LTTE must immediately allow the remaining civilians in the conflict zone to leave. Two extremes, eh! One from a Canadian Tamil Tiger supporter, and the other from an International man who wants to understand the crisis with a neutral eye. It was that transparent.

Did you know that you did not mention the Tamil Tigers even once during your spiel on the events in Sri Lanka over the weekend? Was it deliberate? Was it that you wanted to paint the Tamil Tigers as a bunch of babes-in-the-woods, or a bunch of paragons of virtue, or as ƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ”¹…”Doves of Peace’ that you Liberals christened them during the vigil for S.P.Thamil Chelvam on November 6, 2007 at Markham Recreation Ground.

Let me be blunt with you Albina. You stood up in parliament as if you were standing up at a church pulpit and recited your damning script like a squeaky voiced nun, and charged the Sri Lankan soldiers raping Tamil women in the IDP camps. These unsubstantiated rape stories that were spread around the world were part of the anti-Sri Lanka Tamil Tiger propaganda. And the British journalists who were the genesis of this story were arrested and kicked out of Sri Lanka. But you still had to repeat it in Canada’s parliament to make your point that you detest the Sri Lankan Government and that you are having a love-in with the Tamil Tigers.

Then to be fair on you I tried to reconstruct this rape story to see whether it could have happened. And this is how I went about it.

The Stage Set was: Internally Displaced Persons Camps in the Northeast of Sri Lanka. According to you they were open spaces and enclosed with barbed wire.

Props: Tents and shacks scattered in the open, and very close together and a few shrubs here and there on a sandy terrain. The place was sun-hot and the sky was wide open without a canopy of leaves for the lack of tall trees.

Acoustics: would have been good even though it was an open space with crows cawing and any scream would have been heard and the direction of the scream could have been easily detected.

Players : on the stage were thousands of displaced Tamil civilians walking around, gathering, kids playing, and government officials around and so would have been some of INGOs like the ICRC going about with their business.

The actors: Sri Lankan 30-year old soldier, Silva, and a pretty, lithe 20 year old Tamil woman, Rani, in a peasant skirt and blouse and bare-footed.

Act 1: Silva wants to rape Rani… “Ummmm, but where the hell can I do it as it is so open, and there are hundreds of people every where”, he says to himself, “no, this is impossible, I can’t do it as I will get caught”. He convinces himself and abandons the idea of raping Rani. It was absolutely impossible in these over populated surroundings.

Act 2: Silva approaches Rani and notices a shrub between two tents, and tells himself, “I don’t care if anyone sees us, so he smacks his lips and approaches Rani and tries to drag her to the shrub, and she shouts. Her father, brother, uncle and neighbours ran towards her and circled soldier Silva and he is beaten to pulp and Rani is saved from being raped by soldier Silva. Again the surroundings were not congenial to rape a woman in an IDP camp.

So where is the rape, Albina?

Albina, since Act 1 and Act 2 scenarios will not convince anyone that a Tamil woman could be raped by a soldier in an IDP camp, do you have an Act 3 that could convince us that soldiers were able to rape Tamil women in IDP camps? If you do, let me know as I am curious.

That is how stupid, sick, ugly and disingenuous you were this afternoon with that charge. And you had the gall and temerity to go after the Sri Lankan soldiers who have acted like an army of Angels-in-Khaki, saving 180,000 Tamil civilians from the Tamil Tiger human shields, carrying the old grandfathers and grandmothers in their arms like babies to safety dodging bullets screeching around them shot by your friends, the Tamil Tigers.

You had difficulty to mention the words “Tamil Tiger” during your sermon this afternoon, but there are definitely terrorists called Tamil Tigers and they are vicious, they kill innocent people and they assassinate moderate Tamils as well as Sinhalese politicians, and they successfully blew their 382nd suicide bomber killing hundreds of innocent civilians around them. Did you know that over half of those suicide bombers were women? They are bad dudes Albina, just be careful dealing with them.

So Albina, my request to you is just cut out this dishonesty and lies. Sri Lanka will get through this difficult phase, and there will be no ƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ”¹…”ceasefires’ for the Tamil Tigers to rearm and regroup to fight another day for the want of their Eelam. You might as well accept it, and live with it, and may be find a patch of land closer to Mississauga or Scarborough and gift it to the demonstrating Tamils so that they can call it Eelam and live there happily ever after.

Sincerely,

Asoka Weerasinghe