Finally, the Tamil National Alliance delegation that had been abroad for quite some time has returned to the country. The delegation visited several diplomats in the European countries during its nearly two-month long tour. The purpose of the visit was ‘to apprise the international community of the plights and the sufferings facing the North-East Tamils at present’.The delegation, led by TNA’s parliamentary committee leader R.Sambanthan, consisted of Mavai Senathiraja, Gajenthirakumar Ponnambalam, Suresh Premachandran and Selvam Adaikalamnathan.
The foreign diplomats that the TNA parliamentarians met with were made aware of the scale of the serious Human Rights violations, abductions, disappearances and detentions taking place in the North East, according to the delegation.
Without doubt, TNA’s international propaganda was intended to discredit the Sri Lankan government. The party has been maintaining that donor countries should stop all the aid pledged to Sri Lanka with immediate effect in order to bring the government back to the negotiation table. One will need to seriously examine the sanity of a person who says that reconstruction and rehabilitation of the war-torn areas in the North-East are possible without foreign aid. However, the government should have known and done better to alleviate the problems of the people in the North-East. And there is also a criticism that the assistance of the foreign countries will be used to strengthen the military.
Let it be true that the government has abdicated its responsibility of looking into the core issues of the North-East population. But what has the TNA which was supposed to have been elected by the North-East population itself done with regard to these issues? Last week, an Eastern district parliamentarian of the TNA admitted in an interview with this newspaper that none of the Eastern MPs of the party had been able to visit their region for over a year. He blamed the government for failing to provide the MPs with adequate security. He, by implication, conceded that the TNA was incapable of functioning on its own for the masses. Shouldn’t the LTTE be also criticized for this crisis?
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