KAMALIKA PIERIS

Britain was the third country to support the LTTE in the Eelam war. Britain   provided a home for the LTTE   very early on in the Eelam war. Tamil Refugee Action group had got a British National Lottery grant in 1998.    LTTE had continued to openly run its offices from London even after the LTTE became a proscribed organization.

LTTE demonstrations were allowed to take place in London. LTTE supporters chanted the name of Prabhakaran, brandished the Tamil Tiger flag and other regalia in public demonstrations. Such activities are prohibited by UK’s Terrorism Act, however Britain’s law enforcement officials, did not take steps to prosecute,   observed critics. When Mahinda Rajapaksa arrived at Heathrow, the LTTE had provided female demonstrators with small children which made it difficult for police to move them on. This shows that these demonstrations were   directed by an outside agency. They were not spontaneous.

LTTE’s theoretician and chief spokesman, Anton Balasingham    was given UK citizenship and lived in London from 1971. Balasingham had earlier worked as a translator at the British High Commission in Colombo. He was allowed to function as the LTTE’s advisor in spite of proscription of the group.

He enjoyed special status in the UK during the Eelam wars. Britain facilitated a secret meeting between a high level Norwegian delegation and Balasingham, in the UK, to discuss implications of the Kadirgamar assassination in 2005. After Balasingham’s death in 2006, his wife Adele Balasingham, who had encouraged the use of child soldiers and even presented cyanide capsules to terrorists, continues to live in the UK, complained critics.

UK had offered the same training to Lankan police and LTTE, critics reported. 12 LTTE cadres were sent on a three month training programme to Northern Ireland shortly after   the Ceasefire Agreement of 2002.  A six member group of Police were   given a training programme at Scottish Police College then taken to Northern Ireland for two days familiarization. 

Evidence of Britain’s support for the Eelam war emerged in 2009 at the trial of Shanthan in London. Arunachalam Chrishanthakumar known as Shanthan was found guilty in a London court of law, in 2009,   of supplying material to the LTTE. It also convicted him of receiving documents for the purposes of terrorism. Details of the links between the LTTE and Britain were revealed at this trial.

British MP Clare Short, former Secretary for International Development appeared as a defence witness. She stated that the British government gave millions of pounds in humanitarian aid to areas of Sri Lanka held by the LTTE during the four year ceasefire. She said that. LTTE had frequents meetings with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and Shanthan regularly met with Special Branch officers and was contacted by M15.

The ship Vanangaman sailed from Southampton  in  March  2009 carrying cargo designated for the LTTE it was carrying over 2000 metric tons of food an and medical aid for civilians collected by British politicians and celebrities, British Tamil charities and the  UK based  organization  ‘Act Now.’  The ship was to load war material on the way, according to intelligence reports. Vessel was intercepted by the navy and ordered to move to Panadura   then turned back and return to England,Its entry into Sri Lanka waters was illegal.  Christia Goomesta, from Iceland, a former member of the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission had been in charge of the crew.

Tamils who immigrated into London congregated in areas which were known politically as ‘key marginals’. Parliament seats are considered marginal   if the majority is under 10%, usually around      5000 votes. ‘Key marginals’ are the ones that could decide the final outcome of the elections.   Lord Naseby asked, was the arrival of Tamil emigrants into key marginals sheer chance.

Labor government was particularly keen on wooing the Tamils from Sri Lanka as they were concentrated in key marginals, said Naseby.   Gareth Thomas, MP for Harrow,  Simon Hughes MP for Bermondsey, described as aggressively pro LTTE” were two of these MPs who needed the support of the Tamil voters. They had attended Tamil events in London.Simon Hughes had wanted to bring a resolution against Sri Lanka in Geneva in 2008.

David Miliband’s strategy to win the support of expatriate Tamils living in key Labor marginal seats came to light when a US diplomatic cable, quoting one of his own Foreign Office staff, was posted in Wikileaks. William Hague, Shadow Foreign Secretary addressed the Global Tamil Forum and said they all congratulated the GFT on its formation. MPs dependant on Tamil vote had, in 2008, organized two meetings of the House of Commons to discuss the situation in Sri Lanka .This was quite unprecedented said diplomat K Godage.

 An All Party Parliamentary British-Sri Lanka Group was in existence, but around 2007, a rival Sri Lanka Parliamentary Group, which was pro-LTTE , was set up. This was done suddenly in Parliament, by passing the usual procedure, observed Naseby. There was pressure elsewhere too. In August 2013 UK theatres were forced to cancel screening of Shoojit Sircar’s “Madras Cafe” that dealt with the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi by the LTTE.

Britain supported the Tamil separatists at the UN Human Rights Council, in Geneva.  UK brought a resolution against Sri Lanka in Geneva in 2006. The UNHCR Resolution of 2021 was also led by Britain. The Core Group chaired by the UK tabled a shoddy motion based on a hostile UNHRC Report riddled with factual errors and unproven allegations, none of which qualifies as robust evidence,” said Lord Naseby.

The British embassy in Colombo was also against the Government of Sri Lanka on the Eelam matter. Rajiva Wijesinha said that the Deputy High Commissioner Mark Gooding was very negative about the government. He probably worked for intelligence as well as the Foreign Office, said Rajiva.

British High Commissioner had told Rajiva that they could not contribute to the government initiatives to promote peace since they worked through NGOs, such as Centre for Policy Alternatives and Foundation for Coexistence.

Back in London, Lord Naseby wanted to see the defence dispatches sent from Sri Lanka by Anton Gash, military attaché, between January 1 to May 19, 2009. Lord Naseby got the   data after two years of persistence.

 The Defence Department said that this was a matter for the Foreign Office.  Lord Naseby made his request to Foreign office. Foreign office refused. Naseby then appealed to the Information Commissioner. The Information Commissioner supported the request and Foreign and Commonwealth Office made available 39 pages of heavily redacted dispatches from Gash. Naseby’s book Sri Lanka paradise lost paradise regained”, gives the Gash reports in the appendix   indicating the extent of the redactions.

British Foreign office refused to release the Gash dispatches in full. Naseby then went before the First-tier Tribunal, which is part of the law courts of the UK, asking for the non redacted text. But the Tribunal upheld the position of UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office   who said that the material that was redacted was sensitive in terms of UK relationship with friendly countries.  

However, UK had provided the Gash Dispatches in their unredacted form to the UN Human Rights Commission. ” During the inquiry into the matter, Naseby had, by mistake, received the full 39 pages of the dispatched, unredacted.  He had handed them back without looking.

In 2019, Lord Naseby tabled a question to UK’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office in the House of Lords seeking full disclosure of British diplomatic dispatches from Colombo hitherto withheld from the public as confidential documents. .”

The Foreign Office informed Naseby that dispatches written by Lieutenant Colonel Gash were based on isolated information from a number of different sources, without any independent verification of the information. As such, they cannot be considered an evidenced-based assessment”.

Why were the reports so heavily censored if both the Defence Ministry and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office believed the reports were useless, asked Naseby.UK never questioned the legitimacy of  these documents during the conflict, said Naseby. Why wait till over a decade after the end of the war.  

It is increasingly clear to me that these refusals may well hide data that may exonerate Sri Lanka or they will expose some actions that the UK took to undermine Sri Lanka, said Lord Naseby.

The Foreign Office  on the other hand,  decided to get rid of its documents. The Foreign Office  has shredded nearly twice as many files on the Eelam war than it previously admitted, a freedom of information request by the Morning Star has found, it said in 2019. Morning Star is a left-wing British daily newspaper with a focus on social, political and trade union issues.

 The Morning Star has found that the Sri Lanka recordsdating from the mid-1980s   were destroyed in 2014, and the process is continuing. Foreign Office admitted to destroying nearly 400 diplomatic files from the start of a Tamil uprising in Sri Lanka. Only lists of file names survive, many of them relating to arms sales. 

.Dr Rachel Seoighe, a Sri Lanka expert at Kent University, told Morning Star that the destruction of files is happening on an even larger scale than initially thought.”So far, diplomats have rejected her freedom of information requests to declassify the surviving files, forcing her to appeal to the Information Commissioner. She is  trying to rescue the remaining files.

She told the Star, the British government’s role in the conflict, particularly in arming and training the Sri Lankan forces, is not yet fully understood. That’s why its eagerness to destroy files from that period is suspect and concerning.

Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT)  also condemned the destruction, saying the Foreign Office cannot be allowed to erase its complicity in Sri Lanka’s war crimes. These files contain details about political asylum applications, training of Sri Lankan forces in Britain and nine volumes on arms sales, CAAT said.

Analysts observed that Britain  has its own difficulties. There is Brexit. Compulsory competitive tendering was introduced to the government sector some time back. Carillion, the government’s second largest supplier collapsed in 2018, taking with it around 420 contracts, including contracts for serving school dinners, building railways and cleaning prisons. A BBC documentary of 2013 indicated that UK army had carried out targeted assassinations on suspected IRA operatives. ( continued)