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New Democratic Party Statement on Sri LankaMahinda GunasekeraBy E-mail
Agincourt, Ontario M1W 3L9
October 3, 2008
Hon. Bob Rae, M.P., P.C. O.C., OOnt., Q.C. Member for Toronto Centre and Liberal Party Foreign Affairs Critic, Toronto, Ontario
Dear Mr. Rae,
Your statement dated September 30, 2008 on The Situation in Sri Lanka I find your statement on the Sri Lankan situation as the Liberal Party’s Foreign Affairs Critic just two weeks prior to Canada’s General Election to be political posturing with the obvious intention of trying to retain the 100,000 odd votes of the Canadian Tamil community spread across the Greater Toronto Area. With the dwindling support for the Liberals, your attempt to woo this group by discussing Sri Lankan issues during your political campaign shows that you are uncertain even if the Tamil voters would back your party. Except for extremist Tamil elements within the diaspora that has and continues to extend financial support to the banned Tamil Tigers with the blessings of the Liberal leaders who participated in fund raising events organized by the Tiger fronts such as FACT, WTM, TESOC, TRO, etc., the rest of the Tamil community have expressed their appreciation of the Conservative Party led government’s ban on the Tigers, which put a dent on the extortion and open intimidation of members of the community.
Tamil Grievances: You have stated that the LTTE emerged in the 1970’s against a backdrop of mounting grievances in the north and east over declining access to language and political rights. The Second Republican Constitution of 1978 elevated Tamil spoken by 12.6 percent Sri Lankan Tamils and 5.2 percent Indian Tamils as a National Language and language of administration of the north and east. Declining employment prospects affected not only Tamils but all communities due to a stagnant economy following the sudden upsurge in oil prices and manufactured goods, whilst prices for Sri Lanka’s agricultural exports remained static. According to a Marga Institute study carried out in the 1970’s, unemployment amongst Sinhalese youth was as high as 60 percent whereas unemployment in the ranks of the Tamil youth was around 11 percent, which is one factor for the first revolt by the Sinhala youth led by the JVP in 1971. As regards political rights, there was no difference between the ethnic groups, except that the cry for separation and division of the country by the Tamil United Liberation Front was the forerunner to the introduction of an Oath of Allegiance to Sri Lanka, which fell far short of India’s 16th Amendment of 1963 which made separatist claims unlawful.
Listing the LTTE as a Terrorist Organization: Designation of the LTTE as a terrorist organization by western governments is not enough, if the front organizations are allowed to raise funds for their terrorist activities as permitted under Liberal governments. Even the former NDP government of Ontario led by you extended grants of over $600,000 to the LTTE’s front organization to construct a central office in Scarborough. Also, Norwegian peace facilitators and Nordic Monitors of the ceasefire of 2001 and the Sri Lanka Peace Process proved to be ineffectual due to their partiality, and overt and covert assistance given to the Tamil Tigers including funding in contravention of the UN Convention on the Suppression of Financing of Terrorism of September 2001. Telephone conversations between the Norwegian Ambassador, Jon Westborg, and Nordic Monitoring Mission officials with representatives of the LTTE are available on tape which could be accessed in the Norwegians Against Terrorism website amongst others, which shows the duplicity of professed western peace makers with secret agendas to promote the break up of the tiny island via a two state solution in Sri Lanka.
Opposition to a Federal System: Your participation as the Canadian nominee to the Sri Lanka Peace Process was of little value as you had the preconceived notion that a federal structure was the best answer to resolving Sri Lanka’s national question, notwithstanding the outright rejection of federalism by an overwhelming majority. The Tamil militants led by the LTTE were not interested in peace but only interested in carving out territory to establish a separate state called “Eelam” through armed force. The Sinhalese people making up around 78 percent of the island’s population as per the 2001 census were agreeable to granting some degree of devolution to the periphery at the district level, but were totally opposed to a federal constitution as it would create a stepping stone to separation by subsequent adoption of the Quebec option.
Historical Evidence of the Sinhalese Claims to Sri Lanka: The Sinhalese who are a global minority of about 15 million have no other homeland other than their ancient land of Sri Lanka, and they cannot be expected to resolve the homeland issue of later settlers of the Tamil community who arrived after the 11th century with the bulk of them landing in Sri Lanka as indentured labour brought in by the Dutch and British colonial powers for work on tobacco, cocoa, coffee and tea plantations established on lands confiscated from the indigenous Sinhalese without a penny in compensation. The Tamils on the other hand claim to number 80 million spread out over many countries of whom 61 million live in the State of Tamilnadu in South India. Tamil homeland issues have therefore got to be raised in India, and cannot be advanced by forcibly robbing territory from the founding people of Sri Lanka who are the Sinhalese whose recorded history contained in the Mahavamsa, Deepavamsa and Chulavamsa dates back to over 2600 years. Over 3000 rock inscriptions found across the length and breadth of Sri Lanka (a photo record of which are available at the Cambridge University in UK) which exceeds even the number discovered in China, the written history, and other archaeological remains clearly go to establish the Sinhalese and Buddhist origins of the island. The Tamils and other ethnic minorities in Sri Lanka are guaranteed equal rights by the Fundamental Rights Chapter of the National Constitution and are fellow citizens of the modern state of Sri Lanka. The Tamils have no evidence other than an erroneous note made by one Hugh Cleghorn, a British civil servant, in the year 1799 referred to as the ‘Cleghorn Minute’, which merely described the people residing in the island, whilst at the same time ignorantly stating that the Sinhalese were descendants of the Siamese people. Cleghorn’s reference to Jaffna is very interesting:- "The inhabitants of Jaffna consist of a collection of various races. The greatest number are of Moorish extraction and are divided into several tribes known by the names of Lubbhas, Mopleys, Chittys and Choliars. They are distinguished by wearing little round caps on their close shaven heads. There are also a race of Malabars found here somewhat different from those of the continent." It is clear from this that there were few Tamils in 1799 even in Jaffna referred to as Malabars at that time and earlier in all official documents of the Dutch and the early British period. Therefore, if Cleghorn’s minute is to be accepted, it was the Muslims who were the majority in Jaffna, which necessarily means that even Jaffna cannot be claimed as part of the so called ‘traditional homeland’ of the Tamil people. Tamils should therefore refrain from making bogus claims to exclusive Tamil areas as being part of their homeland dating back to the dawn of history, which is divisive and the major cause of the long drawn out conflict that has cost nearly 70000 lives. Justice Sansoni who inquired into the violent events following the adoption of the infamous ‘Vadukkodai Resolution’ of 1976 by the TULF to support their claim for a separate state for Tamils in their so called traditional homelands, attributed the unsubstantiated separatist cry as the main cause for the upheaval. Professor S. Krishnaswamy Aiyengar of the Madras University, an authority on Tamil Language and History has in his foreword to the book titled ‘Ancient Jaffna’ written by Mudliyar C. Rasanayagam in 1925, stated that the word "Eelam" used by Sri Lankan Tamils for the island of Sri Lanka always meant the land of the Sinhalese to the Tamils of South India. He has even gone on to give the derivation of the word "Eelam" as coming from the Pali word "SIHALA" (meaning Sinhala) being Tamilised as "SIHALAM", and same being shortened to "ILAM" or "EELAM". Furthermore, British Historians, namely, B.Horsburg and J.P. Lewis after exhaustive research, too were able to prove to the satisfaction of the then leading Tamil Historians, namely S.W. Coomaraswamy and Father Gnanaprakasar that the place names within the Jaffna Peninsula and its environs had been Tamilised from their original Sinhalese names.
Attempts to Reach a Negotiated Peace: You are no doubt aware that Sri Lanka has made five separate attempts to reach a negotiated peace with the Tamil minority using international mediators as well as direct talks during the past two decades. A deal could not be reached as the LTTE were not interested in peace, but only sought a separate state comprising 1/3rd of the land and 2/3rd of the coastal belt and adjacent ocean in the north and east for the exclusive domain of the Tamils who today number around 8 percent with less than half that number residing in the region sought for their separate state. The LTTE reneged on the 1987 accord mediated by India’s Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, whom they went on to assassinate using a suicide bomber on Indian soil. The LTTE have sought peace talks whenever they were militarily weak, and unilaterally abandoned such talks to recommence hostilities.
In the last round of negotiations following the ceasefire of February 2002, the Nordic Monitors ruled that the LTTE violated the agreement on 3830 occasions in the first five years counting over 400 murders including the killing of Hon. Lakshman Kadirgamar, Sri Lanka’s distinguished Minister of Foreign Affairs, on top of the forcible recruitment of some 5800 odd underage children into their fighting forces, as against 351 minor violations on the part of the government’s security forces during the same period. The LTTE resumed large scale hostile actions as of December 2005 launching their final war of liberation to militarily create their separate state, only to falter following government retaliatory strikes which has resulted in their ejection from the east and loss of substantial territory in the northern districts of Mannar, Killinochchi and Mulativu. The government forces are currently in the process of eliminating the LTTE terrorists and freeing the Tamil civilians who have lived under the iron grip of terror cadres wearing cyanide necklaces.
Defence Spending: You have drawn attention to the escalating defence expenditures n Sri Lanka to deal with the threat of Tamil Tiger terrorism. Sri Lanka has succeeded in obtaining funds from her long time friends in the Asian region to replace the piddling amount of foreign aid given by the western governments which are channelled through NGOs with questionable agendas. Defence related expenses have continued to grow with the growing threat of terrorism over the past 33 years, but remains a fraction of that expended by Canada which has enjoyed considerable peace during the last 60 years. The higher defence budget of Sri Lanka has brought favourable results which will soon see the end of large scale terror activity, and open the space for all of the constituent ethnic communities to reach an acceptable constitutional arrangement that guarantees a safer and better future for all of her citizens.
Security and Safety of Persons: In a climate where terrorist cadres are able to move into population centres and target civilians by planting bombs in public transit, shopping centres and also unleash suicide bombers to attack ordinary citizens, political and military leaders in the capital city and other places, the government needs to take adequate precautionary measures to safeguard the right to life of all her citizens from all communities. The violence on the part of the LTTE is not restricted to attacks against government personnel and assets, or the majority Sinhalese community which is seen as supportive of the government, but members of every community including the Muslims and even Tamils considered dissidents who refuse to submit to the dictates of the Tamil Tigers. Furthermore, with the split in the ranks of the LTTE in 2004 following the departure of the Karuna group which comprised of cadres mainly from the eastern province, the violence escalated due to the LTTE wanting to liquidate the Karuna faction as they had previously done to other Tamil militant groups, Sri Lanka saw a series of tit for tat killings, disappearances, etc. of the rival cadres including their journalists who backed the two opposing sides.
INGOs, NGOs and Aid Agencies: You have also stated that Sri Lanka is the world’s most dangerous place for aid workers. It is a fact that some 17 local persons attached to aid agencies had met with their death during the ongoing conflict, whilst not a single foreigner has been harmed at any time. Sixteen of this number were killed in August 2006 in Muttur during the height of a battle where the government’s security forces were attempting to dislodge the LTTE fighters that had forced their way contravening the existing ceasefire, to avert any threat to the major naval base of Trincomalee. The 16 aid workers belonging to Action Against Hunger (ACF) had been killed in their office premises around August 4, 2006 whilst the LTTE was in effective control of Muttur. These workers had remained at this location and refused to be ferried back to their regional office in Trincomalee by the Navy prior to the escalation of military action, nor did they move to the churches or temples where the local residents sought refuge as suggested by the religious dignitaries. An official inquiry is currently being conducted by a Presidential Commission, but unfortunately, their employer ACF has abandoned their responsibility towards the former employees and left the country without participating in the proceedings.
It is for reasons of safety and security of aid workers that the Sri Lankan government asked the aid agency personnel to move out of the LTTE’s centre of Killinochchi to a safer location in the Vavuniya district, just 30 to 40 kilometres south of the Killinochchi town to conduct their programs, as the government troops are closing in on Killinochchi to retake it from terrorist control. I am sure the aid agencies are thankful to the government, and have paid heed to the warning that their safety can no longer be guaranteed if they decide to remain within the theatre of war.
The bona fides of some of these aid agencies too are questionable, as it has now been found that Norwegian People’s Aid has recently claimed that 40 of their vehicles including heavy earth moving equipment had been commandeered by the LTTE, apparently using same to dig trenches, build defensive walls, bunkers, and other obstructions to hamper the advancing government troops. Another representative of the Dutch NGO known as ZOA holding an Italian Passport has remained behind in Killinochchi to fight alongside of the LTTE. Many items such as high protein biscuits and numerous other material taken by the aid agencies supposedly for distribution to the civilian population in the Vanni region under the control of the LTTE have been found in LTTE military camps overrun by the government forces. Furthermore, it has also been revealed that little or no development work has been done in the Vanni by the aid agencies supposedly engaged in community development programs, nor by the LTTE which claimed to operate a de-facto state, except for well laid out cemeteries built to bury the brainwashed and misled cadres and acres of minefields and explosives laden booby traps in the areas so far liberated by the security forces. Added to which, the following quote from the recent letter written by one Selva Gnanam a Tamil residentof Melbourne makes one wonder about the real motives of these bleeding hearts rushing in to resolve conflicts in distant lands such as Sri Lanka? “I read of young girls (who had escaped from the Vanni) being raped by senior LTTE cadres and later offered to foreigners as 'entertainment' (these girls would later volunteer as suicide bombers because they were not 'pure' any more). Then I realized why so many Westerners came to the Vanni for 'direct negotiations' with the LTTE, and why they were backing the LTTE in Sri Lanka, while fiercely opposing terrorism in their countries. It was an 'erotic escapade' in an exotic island, far away from wife/husband and family.” Having seen some of the photos that leaked from NGO sources, I could not agree more with Mr. Selva Gnanam about the real motives of several of these do gooders who rush to places like Sri Lanka to engage in ‘conflict resolution’ and community development, because of the good remuneration and other perks bestowed to them by the Tigers in the Vanni.
Yours very truly,
Mahinda Gunasekera |
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