{"id":117726,"date":"2021-09-01T16:26:44","date_gmt":"2021-09-01T23:26:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=117726"},"modified":"2021-09-01T16:26:44","modified_gmt":"2021-09-01T23:26:44","slug":"erasing-the-eelam-victory-part-23-da","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2021\/09\/01\/erasing-the-eelam-victory-part-23-da\/","title":{"rendered":"ERASING THE EELAM VICTORY Part 23 Da"},"content":{"rendered":"

KAMALIKA PIERIS<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n

Britain was the\nthird country to support the LTTE in the Eelam war. Britain   provided a home for the LTTE   very early on in the Eelam war. Tamil\nRefugee Action group had got a British National Lottery grant in 1998.    LTTE had continued to openly run its\noffices from London even after the LTTE became a proscribed organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LTTE\ndemonstrations were allowed to take place in London. LTTE supporters chanted\nthe name of Prabhakaran, brandished the Tamil Tiger flag and other regalia in\npublic demonstrations. Such activities are prohibited by UK\u2019s Terrorism Act,\nhowever Britain\u2019s law enforcement officials, did not take steps to\nprosecute,   observed critics. When\nMahinda Rajapaksa arrived at Heathrow, the LTTE had provided female\ndemonstrators with small children which made it difficult for police to move\nthem on. This shows that these\ndemonstrations were   directed by an outside\nagency. They were not spontaneous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LTTE’s theoretician and chief spokesman, Anton Balasingham    was given UK citizenship and lived in\nLondon from 1971. Balasingham had earlier worked as a translator at the British\nHigh Commission in Colombo. He was allowed to function as the LTTE\u2019s advisor in\nspite of proscription of the group. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He enjoyed special status in the UK during the Eelam wars. Britain\nfacilitated a secret meeting between a high level Norwegian delegation and\nBalasingham, in the UK, to discuss implications of the Kadirgamar assassination\nin 2005. After Balasingham\u2019s death in 2006, his wife Adele Balasingham, who had\nencouraged the use of child soldiers and even presented cyanide capsules to\nterrorists, continues to live in the UK, complained critics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

UK had\noffered the same training to Lankan police and LTTE, critics reported. 12 LTTE\ncadres were sent on a three month training programme to Northern Ireland\nshortly after   the Ceasefire Agreement\nof 2002.  A six member group of Police\nwere   given a training programme at\nScottish Police College then taken to Northern Ireland for two days\nfamiliarization.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Evidence of Britain\u2019s support for the Eelam\nwar emerged in 2009 at the trial of Shanthan in London. Arunachalam\nChrishanthakumar known as Shanthan was found guilty in a London court of law,\nin 2009,   of supplying material to the\nLTTE. It also convicted him of receiving documents for the purposes of\nterrorism. Details of the links between the LTTE and Britain were revealed at\nthis trial. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

British MP Clare Short, former Secretary for\nInternational Development appeared as a defence witness. She stated that the\nBritish government gave millions of pounds in humanitarian aid to areas of Sri\nLanka held by the LTTE during the four year ceasefire. She said that. LTTE had\nfrequents meetings with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and Shanthan\nregularly met with Special Branch officers and was contacted by M15.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ship Vanangaman sailed from\nSouthampton  in  March \n2009 carrying cargo designated for the LTTE it was carrying over 2000\nmetric tons of food an and medical aid for civilians collected by British\npoliticians and celebrities, British Tamil charities and the  UK based \norganization  \u2018Act Now.\u2019  The ship was to load war material on the way,\naccording to intelligence reports. Vessel was intercepted by the navy and\nordered to move to Panadura   then turned back and return to England,Its\nentry into Sri Lanka waters was illegal. \nChristia Goomesta, from Iceland, a former member of the Sri Lanka\nMonitoring Mission had been in charge of the crew. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tamils who immigrated\ninto London congregated in areas which were known politically as \u2018key\nmarginals\u2019. Parliament seats are considered marginal   if the majority is under 10%, usually\naround      5000 votes. \u2018Key marginals\u2019\nare the ones that could decide the final outcome of the elections.   Lord Naseby asked, was the arrival of Tamil\nemigrants into key marginals sheer chance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Labor\ngovernment was particularly keen on wooing the Tamils from Sri Lanka as they\nwere concentrated in key marginals, said Naseby.   Gareth Thomas, MP for Harrow,  Simon Hughes MP for Bermondsey, described as\naggressively pro LTTE\u201d were two of\nthese MPs who needed the support of the Tamil voters. They had attended Tamil\nevents in London.Simon Hughes had\nwanted to bring a resolution against Sri Lanka in Geneva in 2008. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

David\nMiliband\u2019s strategy to win the support of expatriate Tamils living in key Labor\nmarginal seats came to light when a US diplomatic cable, quoting one of his own\nForeign Office staff, was posted in Wikileaks. William Hague, Shadow Foreign Secretary\naddressed the Global Tamil Forum and said they all congratulated the GFT on its\nformation. MPs dependant on Tamil vote had, in 2008, organized two meetings of\nthe House of Commons to discuss the situation in Sri Lanka .This was quite\nunprecedented said diplomat K Godage. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

 A<\/em>n All Party\nParliamentary British-Sri Lanka Group was in existence, but around 2007, a\nrival Sri Lanka Parliamentary Group, which was pro-LTTE , was set up. This was done suddenly in Parliament, by\npassing the usual procedure, observed Naseby. There was pressure elsewhere too.\nIn August 2013 UK theatres were forced to cancel screening of Shoojit Sircar\u2019s “Madras\nCafe” that dealt with the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi by the LTTE. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Britain\nsupported the Tamil separatists at the UN Human Rights Council, in Geneva.  UK brought a resolution against Sri Lanka in\nGeneva in 2006. The UNHCR Resolution of 2021 was also led by Britain. The Core\nGroup chaired by the UK tabled a shoddy motion based on a hostile UNHRC Report\nriddled with factual errors and unproven allegations, none of which qualifies\nas robust evidence,\u201d said Lord Naseby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The British\nembassy in Colombo was also against the Government of Sri Lanka on the Eelam\nmatter. Rajiva Wijesinha said that the Deputy High Commissioner Mark Gooding\nwas very negative about the government. He probably worked for intelligence as\nwell as the Foreign Office, said Rajiva. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

British High\nCommissioner had told Rajiva that they could not contribute to the government\ninitiatives to promote peace since they worked through NGOs, such as Centre for\nPolicy Alternatives and Foundation for Coexistence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back in London,\nLord Naseby wanted to see the defence dispatches sent from Sri Lanka by Anton\nGash, military attach\u00e9, between January 1 to May 19, 2009. Lord Naseby got\nthe   data after two years of\npersistence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 The Defence Department said that this was a\nmatter for the Foreign Office.  Lord\nNaseby made his request to Foreign office. Foreign office refused. Naseby then\nappealed to the Information Commissioner. The Information Commissioner\nsupported the request and Foreign and Commonwealth Office made available 39\npages of heavily redacted dispatches from Gash. Naseby\u2019s book Sri Lanka\nparadise lost paradise regained\u201d, gives the Gash reports in the appendix   indicating the extent of the redactions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

British Foreign\noffice refused to release the Gash dispatches in full. Naseby then\nwent before the First-tier Tribunal, which is part of the law courts of the UK,\nasking for the non redacted text. But the Tribunal upheld the position of UK\nForeign and Commonwealth Office   who\nsaid that the material that was redacted was sensitive in terms of UK\nrelationship with friendly countries.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, UK had provided the Gash Dispatches in their unredacted\nform to the UN Human Rights Commission. ” During the inquiry into the\nmatter, Naseby had, by mistake, received the full 39 pages of the dispatched,\nunredacted.  He had handed them back\nwithout looking. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2019, Lord Naseby tabled a question to UK\u2019s Foreign &\nCommonwealth Office in the House of Lords seeking full disclosure of\nBritish diplomatic dispatches from Colombo hitherto withheld from the public as\nconfidential documents. .”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Foreign Office\ninformed Naseby that dispatches written by Lieutenant Colonel Gash were based\non isolated information from a number of different sources, without any\nindependent verification of the information. As such, they cannot be considered\nan evidenced-based assessment\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why were the\nreports so heavily censored if both the Defence Ministry and the Foreign and\nCommonwealth Office believed the reports were useless, asked Naseby.UK never questioned the legitimacy of  these documents during the conflict, said\nNaseby. Why wait till over a decade\nafter the end of the war.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is\nincreasingly clear to me that these refusals may well hide data that may\nexonerate Sri Lanka or they will expose some actions that the UK took to\nundermine Sri Lanka, said Lord Naseby. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Foreign\nOffice  on the other hand,  decided to get rid of its documents. The Foreign\nOffice  has shredded nearly twice as many\nfiles on the Eelam war than it previously admitted, a freedom of information\nrequest by the Morning Star has found, it said in 2019. Morning Star<\/em>\nis a left-wing British daily newspaper<\/em> with a focus on social, political and trade\nunion issues. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

 The Morning Star has found that the Sri Lanka\nrecordsdating from the mid-1980s   were destroyed in 2014, and the process is\ncontinuing. Foreign Office admitted to destroying nearly 400 diplomatic files\nfrom the start of a Tamil uprising in Sri Lanka. Only lists of file names\nsurvive, many of them relating to arms sales. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

.Dr Rachel Seoighe,\na Sri Lanka expert at Kent University, told Morning Star that the destruction\nof files is happening on an even larger scale than initially thought.\u201dSo far,\ndiplomats have rejected her freedom of information requests to declassify the\nsurviving files, forcing her to appeal to the Information Commissioner. She\nis  trying to rescue the remaining files.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She told the\nStar, the British government\u2019s role in the conflict, particularly in arming and\ntraining the Sri Lankan forces, is not yet fully understood. That\u2019s why its\neagerness to destroy files from that period is suspect and concerning. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Campaign\nAgainst Arms Trade (CAAT)  also condemned\nthe destruction, saying the Foreign Office cannot be allowed to erase its\ncomplicity in Sri Lanka\u2019s war crimes. These files contain details about\npolitical asylum applications, training of Sri Lankan forces in Britain and\nnine volumes on arms sales, CAAT said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analysts\nobserved that Britain  has its own\ndifficulties. There is Brexit. Compulsory competitive tendering was introduced\nto the government sector some time back. Carillion, the government\u2019s second\nlargest supplier collapsed in 2018, taking with it around 420 contracts,\nincluding contracts for serving school dinners, building railways and cleaning\nprisons. A BBC documentary of 2013 indicated that UK army had carried out\ntargeted assassinations on suspected IRA operatives. ( continued)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kamalika-pieris"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117726\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}