“Rajapaksa accuses Britain of hypocrisy over LTTE”

" In this backdrop, while appreciating your decision to ban the LTTE and the apparent interest shown in peace and good governance in Sri Lanka we note with serious and grave concern and deep regrets your continued support for the separatist LTTE terrorists; both within your country and outside when the whole world is up in arms to eliminate terrorism from the surface of this earth. You can’t have good terrorists and bad terrorists. You also can’t have one policy for terrorists within Britain and another for those in other countries. This amounts to double standards and hypocrisy."
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by Dr. Sudath Gunasekara

“UN should work directly with elected governments with a people’s mandated and not NGO’s” – Predident Rajapaksa

(June 28, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The above two quotations are taken from news items that were given world wide publicity on the eve of the Sri Lankan Presidents visit to London last week. Since this is the first time in history a Sri Lankan head of government had the guts to say so and that is also standing on their own land, I think, all patriotic people irrespective of party politics, in this country must hail the President’s bold statement. It is far- far belated. This should have been said by our so-called leaders at least 25 years ago. While I sympathize with them and their inability to do so, I heartily commend and applaud the Presidents courage and bravery on this issue.

While doing so I request the readers to indulge in reading the following note which I addressed to the British Government way back in 2002 or 2003. I must also say that the Sri Lankan President’s statement is very relevant not only to the United Nations as body, but also to all the governments the world over as its individual members.

An open letter to the British Government

Honourable Prime Minister and Members of the British Parliament

As the say goes there is no point in closing the gate after the steed has gone. However, though belated, we appreciate your government’s decision to ban the LTTE operations on British soils even at this last moment; even though this bloodthirsty monster has by now grown out of all proportions thanks to support extended to them by many countries like your own. It is indeed very wise on your part to have decided to ban the LTTE at least now, lest they blast off the Westminster building or the Buckingham Palace. Judging by what the LTTE has done to their one time benefactor and power behind them, Rajeev Gandhi, they will never regard the British Prime Minister or the Queen of England as sacred objects or difficult targets. Therefore I only hope that you are really serious in banning them and moreover I wish your ban will be translated in to concrete action without confining it to a piece of paper.

Although you have ban them now, the British Government cannot escape responsibility for the destruction and vandalism these criminals have already done to our country and its people. Because it was you who have allowed them to station their International Head quarters in London and operates freely carrying out their sinister propaganda against the Sri Lankan state and also collect enormous amounts of funds to buy arms and ships etc and also to bribe international bigwigs to speak against the Sri Lankan government.

In this backdrop, while appreciating your decision to ban the LTTE and the apparent interest shown in peace and good governance in Sri Lanka we note with serious and grave concern and deep regrets your continued support for the separatist LTTE terrorists; both within your country and outside when the whole world is up in arms to eliminate terrorism from the surface of this earth. You can’t have good terrorists and bad terrorists. You also can’t have one policy for terrorists within Britain and another for those in other countries. This amounts to double standards and hypocrisy.

We also take this opportunity on behalf of all peace loving people of Sri Lanka to lodge our strongest protest and disapproval of your governments continued support to the LTTE. This we note as a serious violation of all accepted and civilized diplomatic ethics and also the friendly relationships between our two countries. The present conflict in Sri Lanka is purely an internal issue which no outside country should try to meddle with. It is an armed conflict directed against the democratically elected government of the country by a misguided gang of terrorists. It has its deeper roots in your colonial policies pursued in this country by your ancestors in the 19th century.

It is rather ironical that the final goal of the LTTE is to establish a Sinhala kingdom within this land of the Sinhalese. Because the word ‘EELAM’ itself, means the land of the Sinhalese. There has been no country called EELAM in known history any where in the world as they claim. As such the LTTE’s attempt is nothing but a blatant invasion of the land of the Sinhalese that has been there at least from the 6th century BC. Why don’t the LTTE and those of you who support their cause for an EELAM on Sri Lankan soil, (where only about 500,000 Tamilians live) agitate for it in south India where you have over 6,000,000 Tamils, which also forms the traditional Homeland of the Tamils. Is it simply because you can’t bully India the same way you bully Sri Lanka?

The most Venerable Rambukwelle Wipassi, Mahanayaka Thera of the Malwatta Chapter, the traditional spiritual leader of the Buddhists in Sri Lanka has clearly pointed out the Sinhala Buddhist stand on this issue to the American Ambassador when he called on the prelate few days ago. While we re-affirm and reiterate the views expressed by the venerable prelate we would also like to place the following facts before your government for you to recollect your past and also to point out to you as to why you should not indulge any further in activities detrimental to the Sinhala Buddhists in Sri Lanka. Truth may be bitter. But it has to be said when and where it needs to be revealed.

As most of you are aware, Sri Lanka has remained one country and one nation through out history beginning in 543 BC until the arrival of the Portuguese in 1505. This Island, through out history, was known as Sinhale meaning the land of the Sinhalese and its people were known as Sinhalayo. Although there have been intermittent attempts by South Indian invaders to capture it, they have failed. All historians agree that there is no clear evidence of any permanent Tamil settlements on this Island until the 13th century. The 13th century Kalingamaga invaders who succeeded in chasing out the Sinhalese from the northern lowlands to the hills and the south west were also subsequently defeated and those who survived were later absorbed in to the main stream of the Sinhala Buddhist society.

The present day Tamils in the north and the east are the descendants of those south Indian labourers who were brought in to the Island firstly by the Dutch and settled in the Jaffna peninsular to work on their tobacco farms and secondly by the British as labourers to work on public works and railways etc. When your own ancestors defined ‘Thesavalamei’ (the law applicable to Jaffna Tamils) as the law applicable to the Malabar inhabitants of the peninsula of Jaffna, I am sure you knew from where they came? and what their history was.

Those who are on the central hills are the descendants of south Indian indentured labour, again brought by the British to work on their coffee and tea plantations. Plantations were opened up on land forcibly taken over from the Sinhalese by the British under various draconian laws. These estate labourers never had a permanent domicile in Sri Lanka until 1948.

The country that was ceded to the British in 1815 was Sinhale, meaning the land of the Sinhalese. The Kandyan Convention was signed between the Governor of the British settlements and territories in the Island of Ceylon (the maritime provinces captured from the Dutch) on behalf of the King of Briton on the one hand and the Adigars and Disawas and the people on behalf of the people of this country’ It was an honourable agreement between two independent sovereign parties. The British by this Convention agreed to protect the native interests and rule the country according to native customs and traditions. But subsequent history of colonial administration in this Island has been one of blatant violations of all accepted diplomatic values and principles. It was full of deceptions, betrayals, intrigues, suppressions and betrayals.

The appointment of a Muslim man to a high government post in Uva in contravention to the provisions of the Kandyan Convention was done by the colonial administration in 1817. This incident supported by other suppressive activities on the part of the colonial administration triggered off the first independent struggle by the Sinhalese (which was called the 1818 rebellion by the British). Martial law was declared by Brownrigg and the uprise was mercilessly and brutally suppressed. One has only to read the writings of Major John Davy, who was himself a British, to know what atrocities and cruelties your ancestors have inflicted upon the innocent people of this country. Commenting on the aftermath of the 1818 rebellion this is what Davy has said. “the history of British rule in Sri Lanka after the 1818 rebellion cannot be related without shame. None of the members of the leading families in the Kandyan country have survived. Small-pox and privations have destroyed those spared by the gun and the sword” It is also to be noted that all males over 18 years were butchered and women and children were driven in to the jungle. Animals were slaughtered, all trees were cut, irrigation canals and tanks were destroyed beyond recovery” That was how your ancestors honoured the Kandyan Convention and kept their promises embodied in that sacred document.

The 1815 Kandyan Convention was unilaterally abrogated in 1818 by the British government. It was replaced by the Proclamation of 21st Nov. 1818. Therefore the 1818 Proclamation was illegal and unconstitutional. Thereafter all the affairs of the Island were carried out according to that Proclamation and the Kandyan Convention of 1815 died its natural death. Therefore none of the governments and the constitutions enacted thereafter in this country can claim any legitimacy. The Nov 21st Proclamation, as such, constitutes one of the most prominent black marks in the entire British colonial history.

In 1833, for the first time in the history of this country, the Colebrook Cameron reforms introduced communal politics to this country by proposing communal representation to the Legislative Council. This diabolical step installed a superiority complex in the minds of the minority Tamils who constituted less than 10 % of the total population as against the Sinhalese who constitutes nearly 90 % of the population of the country at hat time. The same year the colonial government paved the way for the disintegration of the political map of Sri Lanka on ethnic grounds by carving out the northern and eastern provinces on an ethnic basis. At the same time the colonial government initiated a policy of promoting the Tamil minority and undercutting the Sinhala people by providing the Tamils with special privileges like better educational facilities. For example by 1845 out of a total of 103 schools in the Island, the district of Jaffna alone was provided with 36 first class English schools run by the missionaries while the Sinhala areas were provided with less than 5 % of such facilities. In the mid-19th century they brought indentured south Indian labours in large numbers to work on coffee and tea plantations opened up by them with the sinister intention of implanting a permanent anti Sinhala Tamil population hostile to them, right at the centre of the country. This was a well calculated plan by the British to destabilize the future political map of the colony.

Meanwhile the lands belonging to Buddhist temples were forcibly taken over in 1853 by special laws and may other repressive laws were enacted and implemented to keep the Sinhala people at low ebb. Ever since 1815 the British adopted an anti-Sinhala anti-Buddhist policy. Right from the inception they followed a divide and rule policy, heavily discriminated against the Sinhalese Buddhists. In addition to setting Tamils and Muslims against the Sinhalese they also created divisions and disunity among the Sinhalese themselves by driving a wedge between the low Landers and the high Landers by calling them Low country Sinhalese and Kandyans respectively. They also promoted an English educated social class alienated from local values who would ultimately take over the reigns of government after the colonial masters leave the shores of this Island. In fact up to this day it is these comprador, with the exception of a very few, elite who hold the reigns of the destinies of this country. The present socio-political, economic and cultural ‘hotch-potch’ is the direct legacy we have inherited from this ugly colonial policy of the past.

The British left the shore in 1948 leaving behind all these ugly colonial legacies including nearly 1 million stateless South Indian Tamil labourers right at the centre of the Island, that was plundered from the natives, which has been their home from the inception of history The Crown Lands Encroachment Ordinance of 1840, the Temple Lands Ordinance of 1853 and the Waste Lands Ordinance of 1897 were the main instruments under which the colonial rulers confiscated these lands. The native Sinhalese, in millions who were driven out of their ancestral lands today live as landless paupers in the valley bottoms on their own motherland, gazing at the plantations thriving on the hill tops inhabited by a non-national hostile population. Colonial rulers also destroyed the local culture and the value system firstly by discarding them as uncultured and backward and secondly by introducing their own habits like arrack and beef eating to our society that were unknown to our people.

Enactment of new laws like the sec 29 of the Soulbury constitution and conversion of Buddhists to your religion also has brought in new divisions among our people. Even to day your government continues to pursue the same policies. For example you have allowed the LTTE to freely function on your land and collect funds to purchase arms etc to fight against the democratically elected government of this country. You have allowed them to have their Head quarters in London and to carry out sinister propaganda against the Sri Lankan government and the Sinhala Buddhists; allowed Anton Balasingham, the no 1 criminal who is supposed to be the theoretician of Prabhakaran the Murderer, the most dangerous terrorist leader in the world, to carry out all activities against the Lankan government? You also continue to act as a spoke man for the LTTE and support other LTTE friends like Norway to interfere in our internal matters.

A closer scrutiny of all these events makes us to believe that all this constitute a part of a big international conspiracy to destroy the Sinhala Buddhist civilization in this country. We categorically and firmly stand united to defeat all such conspiracies from whatever corner they may come from. We are committed and dedicated to go back to the political status-quo that existed in1815and begin afresh to struggle to win our lost rights and fight to the bitter end as sons of the soil who are the undisputed architects of the great civilization that is Sri Lankan.

Finally on behalf of all peace loving Sri Lankans we demand that

a) Your government will refrain from all activities that help the anti-Sinhala anti-Buddhist elements both within your country and Sri Lanka and thereby respect and honour our independence and sovereignty as a free nation

b) Your government will take immediate and effective steps to ban all LTTE activities within UK and deport all EELAMISTS led by Balasingham so that the Sri Lankan government could take appropriate action against these criminals. In the event of your failure to respond positively to this just and democratic request, we do not consider you any further as a friendly nation of our country.

This I think is the only way by which you can rectify the wrongs your ancestors have committed against our people. The content of this letter however may be not interpreted by any means as a rejection of your positive contributions. But they certainly outnumber the intractable problems your forefathers have left behind on our soil.

Should we be left alone without undue interference by outside forces, we are more than confident that we can defeat not only the LTTE but also even a bigger enemy as we have always done for the past 2500 years.

In this background I only wish and hope that the President will also tell India as well, what she should do and she should not do in the context our internal affairs.
That will make him the Statesman par-excellence of the era.
- Sri Lanka Guardian