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Your response to my letter to Garth Evans

Asoka Weerasinghe Ottawa . Ontario . Canada

August 9, 2007

Dear “North East Tamil Association NETA”:

I appreciate your response to my letter to Hon. Gareth Evans dated August 1, 2007. I thought that you deserved an honest response from me for your civility and thank you for reading my letter. I googled to find out where your Association is headquartered but failed. Perhaps, you may want to let me know it later.

I promised you “an honest response” and I will keep my word.

You may have just come across one of the very few Sinhalese who have difficulty to accept that Tamils have been ‘discriminated’. Every time that question has been thrown at me, I ask, “What discrimination?” When ever I am told that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are not terrorists but are “freedom fighters”, I always ask “What freedom are they fighting for, when there are over a million Tamils in the south having all the freedom that they want and enjoying life to its optimum among the majority Sinhalese? They have nothing to complain when the majority of these Tamils are raking their riches from their clients who happen to be Sinhalese, Muslims and Burghers. This is the very reason that they have not bought a plane ticket, hopped onto a plane heading west, and landed themselves on foreign soils saying that ‘We are refugees and running away from persecution in Sri Lanka?” It is that simple which the world should be told which you all haven’t.

Once upon a time, I had a very good Tamil friend who hailed from Velvettithurai. We were that close that we were almost brothers, although we were not nourished in the same mother’s womb. What surprised me about him was that after his family arrived in Colombo and lived close to my home, he never wanted to have Tamils as his friends. In fact he didn’t have a single. All his friends were Sinhalese, and he was very keen to date Burgher girls, neither Tamils nor Sinhalese. We planned to come out of the country together and we left for London together and shared a flat in SW London for three years until he had to move out to be closer to his work place in North London. I was a witness at his wedding at South Kensington Registrar’s Office in London when he married a wonderful Nordic girl. We immigrated to Canada at different times but still were close friends. Our friendship began to strain a little bit after the 1983 riots, but yet spoke to each other and our families visited each other. One evening after he saw me on national TV during a newscast expressing my views on the Tamil separatist issue, the telephone rang, and it was him at the other end of the telephone wire.
He immediately accused me saying, “I don’t like what you said about my community when you all discriminated us.” That got my goat. I blasted him and I reminded him that his brother was appointed as the Chief Irrigation Engineer for the whole island at age 39, and whether he would consider that as an act of discrimination? There was a pin drop silence.
He choked. “Cut out that bull-shit”, I told him.

“Sri Lanka government or its supporters cannot continue to fool the world that the Tamil question is a terrorist problem”, you said. Well, I take a different tact on that comment.

I don’t think you Tamils have been honest enough to tell the world the real truth. If the world was told the real truth, the question that the world would ask you lot would be…. “If this is so, why the bloody hell are you fighting for a separate, mono-ethnic, separate racist Tamil state, Eelam.” Here are at least 5 truths out of many that you ought to tell the world, NETA.

1.“When 301 Tamils out of 117,510 Tamils residing in Colombo were removed on June 7, we all complained to the world that the Sri Lankan government was ‘ethnic cleansing’ our people. But, we Tamils too are guilty of the same offense, but our ‘ethnic cleansing’ was much more severe and dastardly.

Between 1971 and 1981, we terrorized and kicked out 27,000 Sinhalese who had been living in the Jaffna peninsula for generations.

0n 13th August 1977, we Tamils, stoned and chased 400 Sinhalese undergraduates and lecturers from the Jaffna University campus. They were brought south in buses escorted by the army and police. Because we were storming the buses with missiles of rocks and stones, all these Sinhalese had to lie prostrate on the floor of the buses. That was ‘ethnic cleansing”, and we are guilty of that human rights violation. But we doff our hats to the Sinhalese in the southern campuses who did not harass nor touch our Tamil students in retaliation.” My nephew was in that batch of undergraduates studying Statistics, and he related the happening to me which is quite vivid in his memory.

“In 1990, we Tamils, terrorized and kicked out 100,000 Muslims from the North within 24 hours. That was a record in inhumanity, which we made Idi Amin of Uganda look like an angel when he gave an ultimatum of several days for the East Indian community to leave Uganda. That is our act of ‘ethnic cleansing’ /par/ /excellance/ which dwarfs the 301 Tamils who were moved to Vavuniya from Colombo that morning which really cannot be categorized as ‘ethnic cleansing’.

We are ashamed to have leveled this removal of 301 Tamils as ‘ethnic cleansing’ when there have been worse incidents in the world that had been ignored and whit-washed. Like when the Canadian federal cabinet during World War II passed an Order-in-Council on February 24, 1942, to uproot 22,000 Japanese-Canadians from the coast of British Columbia
(B.C.) and sent them to decaying mining towns like Greenwood, Slocan and New Denver, in the interior of B.C.”

2. You Tamils have complained to the world that you have been discriminated in education by the Sri Lankan Government. But what you should have told to the world is this –

“We know, we lied to you to get your sympathy, but actually we were NOT discriminated at all as these statistics would tell you so.

Schools in the Jaffna Educational District were well supported and qualitatively superior in comparison with the situation elsewhere in the island. Even in 1981, two years prior to the riots, the Jaffna Educational District had 555 Government schools for a student population of 207,524, where as the capital Colombo had only 251 such schools for 231,690 students. In 1981, the Sri Lankan Tamil enjoyed a literacy rate of 88.3% compared to 86.5% for the majority Sinhalese.

The privileged position of the Jaffna Educational District schools was evident from school facilities and amenities such as approved science laboratories. They were available in 41% of Jaffna schools compared to the all island average of 19.6%.”

You know what NETA, if these facts were laid out to people like Gareth Evans, I could well imagine him puffing under his breath saying, “You Tamils have taken me for a ride one more time and made me look a bloody fool. What the heck are you Tamils doing being a bunch of cry babies when you all are swimming in an ocean of extraordinary comfort, and wanting us to support your separate state, Eelam?” Now you know, why I keep asking the question when I am told that Tamils are being discriminated – “What discrimination?”

3. You Tamils make such a big fuss about “standardization of marks” saying you all were discriminated. Here is my side of the story which I tell the western Sri Lanka watchers who the Tamils keep lying to solicit their sympathy.

“Ceylon Tamils who constituted only 12% of the island’s population, held 40% of the public sector employment. There was a feeling among the majority Sinhalese (74%) community that the minority Tamil community had a disproportionate hold on public service appointments. When you look into it, it is not just “a feeling”, it was indeed a fact.

The affirmative actions by the Government (it happens even in Canada), such as “standardization” of marks in schools through out the country to give an opportunity to all the students to correct the unhealthy discrepancy, made the Tamils feel that they were discriminated against.
These are the fairy tales that the Tamils keep spinning for you western Sri Lanka watchers!

The disparity in the quality of education was put in place by the British in their policy of ‘divide and rule’. The colonial masters feared that some day it would be the majority community (Sinhalese) that would rise against them. Therefore they planned to weaken the majority community by creating rifts among them and by helping the minority community (Tamils) to develop and rise above the Sinhalese majority.

They, for this purpose provided superior educational facilities with the help of Christian Missionary Societies, in places like Jaffna where there were a large concentration of the minority Tamils.

The missionaries who started to arrive from 1812 were able to increase their schools, particularly in the North within a very short time. The Baptists had 165 schools, Wesleyans 81, the Church Mission 36, the American Mission 96, and the Roman Catholic had 61 through out Ceylon.
But, the majority of these schools were opened in Jaffna.

The Sri Lanka Universities Commission Report of 1959 (p.303) states:
“The proportion of Tamil students receiving University Education compared to their population is 1:320. This is as good as the educational facilities provided in the United Kingdom. But the proportion of the Sinhalese receiving University Education in comparison with the population is 1:3212. This is being second-class with an immense disadvantage”.

This Report also provides some revealing statistics.

Contrary to what the Tamils would tell you about being discriminated against education, I expect you to be a dispassionate reader of these statistics and be judge and jury. I believe that you will soon come to the conclusion that it were the Sinhalese that were the ‘wronged majority’ and the Tamils were the ‘privileged minority’, who had it so good right along What you all keep hearing from the Tamils are a bunch of hocus-pocus.”

So NETA, I hope you are not going to call me a “racist” like most Tamils do as I have the gumption to come out with these facts that you all could hardly challenge, for the eyes and ears of the Western politicians that you all keep bamboozling. I told you that I would be “honest”, and this is what my honesty is all about. And now you understand why I question “What discrimination?” when the Tamils say that they have been discriminated. I say that’s a crock of cods-wallop.

4. “Ethnic discrimination” in University admissions is a constant complaint of you Tamils, when you solicit support from the west for your separate, racist Tamil state, Eelam. And this is what I would tell the world.

“The above complaint by the Tamils could be based on the following logic. In 1969 Sri Lankan-Tamils constituted 12.6% of the island’s population and occupied 40.8% of the places in the universities. Tamils certainly did not complain nor sympathize then about any unfair balance in the university population, nor did any of the other communities protest about being discriminated against, despite the startling figures.

By 1974, the proportion of Tamil university students had dropped to be more in line with their proportion of their total island population – 16.3% of the university places for the 12.6% Sri Lankan-Tamil population. This readjustment to a more just balance has been termed “discrimination” by Tamil political parties and has been seized by extremists as justification for maiming, ‘necklacing’, and massacring thousands of innocent Sinhalese and Muslim men, women and children and also their own Tamil moderate politicians and citizens who oppose their violent methods or their separatist cause.

Sri Lanka’s old university admissions policy simply tried to redress old wrongs out of simple desire for fairness to its entire people and to all its social classes. The search for justice for a social underclass should, not be unfamiliar even to Canadians : as the affirmative action programmes in Canada that help women, ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples, and the physically disadvantaged are an exact parallel to what Sri Lanka tried in the 1970s. To call that policy racialist, as Tamils do, is a grotesque distortion of reality.”

5. “However, it is their historical land that the Tamils seek to regain….” you said.

Well, now, now, NETA, you are now dream-walking into the realm of mythical fantasy. What historical land? That is a bunch of baloney.

This is what I would tell the world contrary to what you had just said.

“History does not allow the Tamils the luxury to claim North and East of Sri Lanka as their ‘historical land’. And they got a nerve to do so when they were indeed invaders from their Motherland Tamil Nadu, in southern India where 61 million Tamils live, which is separated by 18 miles of water from north Sri Lanka.

If the Tamils claim that prior to the arrival of the British, the northern regions of Sri Lanka were not integrated with the south, these facts would negate their claim.

In the writings of recent times, the Portuguese historian /de Queyroz/ described the Jaffna kingdom as a tributary to the King of Cotta (Kotte) in the south.
/Baldaeus/, the Dutch historian, describes King Rajasinghe’s titles as including ‘King of Jaffna’. Indeed /Baldaeus/ also tells us that King Senerat of Kandy in the centre of the island shortly before his death, summoned all his subordinate rulers to a Council to select his successor, and that among the subordinates who attended was the King of Jaffna. Thus even the existence of a King in Jaffna during some periods did not necessarily mean that this was an independent historical kingdom.

/ / Any archaeological thesis would prove that the north and east were no historical kingdom of the Tamils and they wouldn’t have a foot to stand on.”

You say, “What is happening in the East since the so called liberation and celebration. Systematic antogonisation, genocide continues.” That I find is a strange, an unfair and a sensational comment.

If kicking ass of the Tamil Tigers in the East and shooting to kill these marauding terrorists who are still active in pockets in the East planting claymore mines and killing soldiers and innocent civilians is categorized as ‘genocide”, then so be it. But it does seem strange for you all not to acknowledge and applaud the Sri Lankan armed forces that liberated thousands of Tamils, your own people, who were under the grip of the Tamil Tigers for two decades in places like Vellaveli, Pattipalai, and Vakarai.

Without doubt, the government has a Herculean task to resettle 48,000 IDPs who have been living in camps in Batticaloa, and perhaps there are other thousands elsewhere. But that is no ‘genocide’. Just cut out that sensationalism. But, according to the Daily Mirror, the government has already settled 95.000 IDPs. And that is not ‘genocide’ either.

For your information, the Government is involved in a crash programme to develop the east that they took away from the Tamil Tiger terrorists, especially in the Batticaloa district. In this crash programme they will be building 7,000 houses and give preference to build permanent houses in Vavunathievu, Vellavelai, Pattipalai and Vakarai for the IDPs. That is not ‘genocide'.

The Government has also decided to give Rs.250,000 per family to build permanent houses. And that is not ‘genocide’ either. From where did NETA get that notion or are you all being mischievous to discredit the Government?

That is a reality check for you NETA and stop spreading those vicious, rumours.

This is my honest response and why I question “What discrimination?” and “What freedom are the Tamil Tigers fighting for?” No doubt there will be Tamils who will call me names like, “He is a racist”, or that “He is a Sinhalese chauvinist”. To them, I say, “ Boo! Don’t be that damn stupid just because you cannot accept the truth. Go, get a life!”.

NETA, you didn’t sign your e-mail letter to me but I will mine as that happens to be my style. I normally have a habit not to respond to phantom letters where the writer has no spine to reveal his or her identity, but your civility was the reason that I responded this time around.

I will be releasing this response to Hon. Gareth Evans and a few others who are yearning to know the ‘facts’ of this issue, rather than the ‘truths’ that the Tamils normally spit out.

Asoka Weerasinghe

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