All Party Parliamentary Group for Tamils

Asoka Weerasinghe Gloucester . Ontario .Canada

May 16, 2007

Rt. Hon. Keith Vaz, MP
British House of Commons
Westminster
London, UK

Dear Mr. Keith Vaz:

I have learnt through the media that you have spearheaded the creation of an *‘All Party* *Parliamentary Group for Tamils’ *among Members of the House of Commons.

I lament your statement, which accompanied that creation - “*The creation of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Tamils is an important step showing* *the commitment of the British Parliament to a peaceful and just settlement.”* What commitment? It lacked the sense of sincerity and will to achieve the said goal.

The logic in that statement is flawed because the feud is between the fascist Tamil Tiger terrorists (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) aka Tamil Tigers) in the mostly North of the island, and the multi-ethnic democratically elected government of Sri Lanka in the rest of the island. Your ‘*All Party Parliamentary* *Group for Tamils’* partiality is glaring and is clear as the Ding-dong of the Big Ben.
Speaking in favour of the separatist Tamils and for the separatist-Tamils, you won’t be getting anywhere. As the late British ballroom dancing legend, Victor Sylvester Sr., would have told you – “Keith, you need two to tango”. In other words I wouldn’t hesitate to call your intentions “a pretentious Bluff”.

Mr. Vaz, if you think that you and your parliamentarians could walk into your former colony, saying that we now know what conflict resolution is all about as we have ushered peace to Northern Ireland through a power sharing agreement between the Catholics and the Protestants, you are just fooling yourself. What you have to recognize and acknowledge is that both the militant IRA and the Catholic Sinn Fein were no fascists like what the Tamil Tigers have proved to be.

Sure, you all endured bombings in public places, assassinations, ambushes of policemen, and the killing of 3000 people? This is small spuds when you compare to the Tamil Tiger fascist menu. Yes, the IRA snuffed out Lord Mountbatten, but the Tamil Tigers have done better.
They assassinated two heads of States, Rajiv Gandhi of India and President Premadasa of Sri Lanka who were among the 69,000 other deaths.
They also killed 31 politicians among whom were three Mayors of Jaffna (Alfred Duraiappa, Sarojini Yogeswaran & Pon Sivapalan); the Tamil Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadiragama a lawyer with a B.Litt from Oxford and the President of the Oxford Union; Dr. Neelan Thiruchalvam, another Tamil lawyer who also happened to be a Cabinet Minister and held academic postings at Yale and Harvard Universities; Ranjan Wijeratne, a Minister of Defense; and the Oxford University educated lawyer and President of the Oxford Union, Lalith Athulatmudali who was a Cabinet Minister. What a waste, killing the brightest and the best by these Tamil Tiger fascist assassins. You all should count yourself lucky that you did not have to grieve at the assassinations of your Prime Ministers like Harold Wilson, Harold McMillan, Ted Heath, Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair, and curse the IRA for targeting them. That is the difference between the IRA and the fascist Tamil Tigers that you all have embraced. Did I introduce the Tamil Tigers to you as a bunch of fascists?

Mind you, the IRA nor Sinn Fein killed the leaders of your Conservative, Labour or the Liberal parties either, but the Tamil Tigers killed leaders of the Tamil parties who they thought were a threat – Sri Sabaratnam (Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization- TELO), Umma Maheswaram (Peoples Liberation Organization of Tamil Eelam-PLOTE), V. Padmanabha (Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front - EPRLF) and Appapillai Amirathlingam (Tamil United Liberation Front - TULF). I did say these killers were a bunch of ‘Fascist Tamil Tiger terrorists’, didn’t I!

I thought that the British government had a policy not to negotiate with terrorists. Aren’t the Tamil Tigers banned in the UK since they have been identified as terrorists? And now you parliamentarians have adopted them! That is a strange turn around, isn’t it? A double standard of some sort. Are they just standards of convenience and double speak for moments when the British parliamentarians get sudden pangs of superiority and want to interfere in the internal affairs of a former colony?

Sure, the IRA shaved the heads, tarred and feathered women who did not support them or had a liaison with a member of the Sinn Fein, but the Tamil Tigers did some things that were horrific and more worse. They plucked infants from their mother’s arms and bashed their heads against rocks and killed them. You now know why I said that they were bunch of no good “Fascist terrorists’. I sincerely hope that these revelations might help you to decipher the /raison d’etre/ of your adopties, and that their minds are open to accommodate reason.

Wanting to be mouth pieces for the fascist Tamil Tigers is so disingenuous on the part of all you parliamentarians in the Group. Why?
Because you British’s had no time for fascism in Britain and you all despised Sir Oswald Mosley the leader of the British Union of Fascists
(BUF) which he created in 1932, and you all did not give him a chance to preach his brand of politics in England. Not a chance! And now to embrace Tamil Tiger fascism is a riot! Phew! That is a hard sell. I doubt that many Sri Lankans will buy it, even those among the Sri Lankan lawmakers.

Some of you parliamentarians may be old enough to remember how the British police blocked the marches organized by Mosley’s BUF, and yet they continued to organize marches policed by their Blackshirts in Nazi boots. The British government was sufficiently concerned to pass the Public Order Act 1936 that came into effect on 1 January 1937 which, among other things, banned political uniforms and quasi-military style organizations. And mind you, all this when Mosley’s organization hadn’t killed a single Britisher. But then, the fascist Tamil Tigers that you all have adopted and opted to be their spokespersons have killed thousands of innocent, unarmed civilians, among them infants, children and pregnant mothers. Crawling in the indigo nights they shot and hacked the Sinhalese farmers and fisher-folk to death while they were fast asleep. Those were the bunch of lowly cowards that you all have adopted.
With this catalogue of heinous acts of horror by the fascist Tamil Tiger terrorists, fascist Oswald Mosley looks like an angel in his black uniform compared to fascist Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tamil Tiger leader in army fatigues and jack-boots, who is a downright murderer and an assassin that Interpol is after. Ha! An *‘All Party Parliamentary Group for Tamils’*, my foot, I say.

Mr. Vaz, you were just a two-year old toddler when I witnessed how the British police, disrupted and batten charged Oswald Mosley’s BUF meeting near Victoria Station in London in 1958. They were chased along Victoria Street and Wilton Street. It so happened that I was walking down Wilton Street to my flat at 10 Chichester Street in Pimlico that afternoon.
That is how much you British despised fascism. And to create an “*All Party Parliamentary Group for* *Tamils’*, rather than an “*All Party Parliamentary Group for Sri Lankans*”, is perverse, and I believe you and your parliamentary colleagues have a hidden agenda. What is it? Or do you want me to speculate – that having had the audacity to create this Tamil separatist problem with the colonial ‘divide and rule’ policy during the rule of that colony for 131 years, you are now prepared to help your Tamil minions to carve out their separate, mono-ethnic, racist Tamil state Eelam.

I sincerely hope that my exposing you and your parliamentary colleagues to the resume of the fascist Tamil Tigers that you all have adopted, will make you take a step back, and think twice before you all become the architects of a territorially divided Sri Lanka.

If the Tamils have whined into your ears seeking sympathy for their cause wanting their Eelam, by saying that they had faced discrimination by the Sinhalese majority ever since the British left the island in February 1948, well, take a deep breath and ….think.

Any intervention by your Group should take the ground realities during the early years of Ceylon’s (Sri Lanka) independence into the equation.

Sure, when the British left Ceylon the Tamils began to lose their privileges, which they seem confused saying that they have lost their rights. Not so. The Sinhalese on the other hand viewed the change as a natural and inevitable adjustment which bestowed on them their due share, and rightfully so. Two different perceptions of the same phenomena emerged. The Tamils began to feel they were discriminated against, and the Sinhalese felt that recent changes simply reversed the discrimination that they had been subjected to during the colonial era.
The British imperial policy of ‘divide and rule;’ had created a ‘privileged minority’ (Tamils) and a’ wronged majority’ Sinhalese among Ceylon’s communities for 131 years.

With that backdrop, you all should not arrive at a conclusion on the Sri Lanka’s separatist feud by hearing one side of the story, as my knife cuts both ways, and I hope yours too. Be impartial. However, the need of the moment is to implement fully, as required by the United Nations Convention on the Suppression of Financing of Terrorism of 2001, to ensure that funds are not collected in Britain and remitted to bloat the Tamil Tiger war-chest. Snip the fascist Tamil Tiger umbilical cord that is attached to their survival as internationally designated terrorists.
Choke their sterling-pounds and they will see the beacon light of reasoning, willingness to compromise, and sacrifice their ideological concepts, and you bet, we will be on the road to a lasting peace.

If you and your parliamentary colleagues have any intention of an intervention, then you owe Sri Lanka and her peoples of all ethnic groups, as well as to the world which is fighting to eradicate terrorism, the suppression of British funds for this fascist Tamil Tiger terrorists.

But let us not forget the mantra that was used in the Northern Ireland peace deal … Your government insisted that IRA renounce terrorism and decommission its weapons supervised by international observers bringing about a complete cessation of hostilities before bargaining began. And your government refused any compromise.

Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa told the visiting US Assistant Secretary of State, the other day that his Government was willing to stop its military campaign against these fascist Tamil Tiger terrorists if they were willing to stop theirs. That sounded genuine. But as the leader of his sovereign nation, he sure wouldn’t succumb to intimidation by a bunch of fascist terrorists or bullying by a foreign nation. Your Tony Blair would have expressed the same sentiment and would refuse to compromise for reasons of the security of his people and his country.

And your government stopping aid to Sri Lanka was an interesting tact to apply pressure on the Sri Lankan government. I suppose you are now aware how President Rajapaksa has responded. “If we are offered genuine aid we will take it, if not we will forget about aid and do our job. We will not be dependent on aid,” he said. Wow! If you all had expected a knee jerk reaction from the President, you certainly didn’t. I hope you took note that he stood tall upholding the dignity of his people and not to be bullied? I hope that the *“All Party Parliamentary Group for Tamils’* noted that too. It certainly reminded me of Frank Sinatra’s song ---

*/Regrets, I’ve had few;
But then again, too few to mention.
I did what I had to do
And saw it through without exemption./*

*/ I planned each charted course;
Each careful step along the by way,
But more, much more than this,
I did it my way./*

Yours truly,
Asoka Weerasinghe
e-mail:weerasin@magma.ca

cc: Hon. Dr. Kim Howells, MP
Hon. Simon Hughes, MP