An open letter to Mr V Anandasangaree

(October 28, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) Your open letter to the Chief Minister Karunanithy of Tamil Nadu, only reflects one aspect of the problem the Tamil civilians are encountering in Vanni. In your lengthy letter, you have taken the position to singularly harp on the LTTE over its appalling conduct towards the civilian population.

At the time when international attention is sharpening on Sri Lanka, one sided attack on the LTTE alone will not be encouraging.

As a longstanding politician involved in the politics of Sri Lanka for decades, you are well aware that the LTTE is the baby of perverted politics of mother Sri Lanka against its Tamil citizens. Your letter failed to address the root causes of the Tamil sufferings and will be seen as part of the government propaganda against the LTTE.

Unfortunately, to this date, the majority Sinhalese are not willing to empower the Tamils to become honourable citizens of Sri Lanka. The Sinhala politicians will always have their excuses to undermine the Tamil demand by levelling all kinds of charges against them. All these started with G G Ponnambalam demanding 50;50 representation in the parliament for the minorities in the 1940’s. What had happened since then is the successive Sinhala governments are endeavouring to systematically marginalise the Tamils using excuses and the LTTE is its present reason to weaken the Tamils further.

The Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) which you preside, when it was a mass political movement, gave birth to the idea of separate state for the Tamils. When the government violently resisted the democratic agitations of the TULF and proceeded to introduce the racially motivated standardisation scheme in the early 1970’s to curtail the entry of Tamil students to the universities, agitated youths decided to take arms to fight against the government. The successive nationwide pogroms against the Tamils made the violent agitation taking its firm ground thus silencing the real democratic voices of the Tamil people.

The armed struggle got hijacked by the LTTE leading to Tamils progressively encountering untold sufferings. LTTE is the product of the failures of the successive post Sri Lankan governments to prevent Tamils being empowered to be part of Sri Lanka.

Our people have suffered enough in the hands of both the government and the LTTE. Other Tamil militant groups are not angels. They too played their due role to jockey ride on the innocent Tamil people.

The present government’s stance on the Tamil question is worse than the previous ones. The LTTE has become an excuse for it to stampede on the Tamils to extend its well established agenda to broaden its marginalisation process. It is conducting its war behind the iron curtain by debarring the media and the NGO’s to report the true situation prevailing in the war front.

Its well rehearsed presentations about the war that the civilian population is not harmed in the current offensives are comedies dished out to manage the international opinion. Sri Lanka army is no angels. There is sufficient historical evidence to prove their appalling human rights violations. They did not know how to behave even when they were on an international peace keeping mission recently in Haiti.

I am for one will condemn both the government and the LTTE for the predicament facing the Tamil people in the north and east. The government must take larger portion of the responsibility, as it is going on its mission to find a military solution to a largely political problem. LTTE must be seen as a violent irritant for the problems created by the government.

The present government has missed all the opportunities to resolve the conflict politically. Its All Party Representative Committee (APRC) formed to devolve political powes to the region is a shameful mechanism created to dupe the international community. This, time wasting exercise will face its natural death soon due to political stalemates created by the government.

Defeating the LTTE is not a difficult a task. It is the responsibility of the collective Tamil community to say good bye to the LTTE. If the government seriously implements an acceptable political proposal to devolve power short of separation, the Tamil people will walk away from the LTTE fully. I do not have to go into detail about the psyche of our oppressed people. The oppressors will not become their saviours when they present themselves with the bombs and bullets to crush the evil that that they themselves have created.

I regret your stance on the difficulties faced by the innocent civilian population in Vanni is no different to the posture of the extremists JHU, JVP, JNP and the hothead Buddhist monks. These extremist fringes of the government use the bogy stories about the LTTE to deny the rights of the Tamil people to further suppress them.

It is unfortunate to see the present government is presiding over the Tamil opposition to the LTTE in Colombo. It is a tragedy that Douglas Devananda, Karuna and other Tamil leaders have become the slaves of the government and are unable to resist its effort to weaken the Tamils.

It is time for the international community to put Sri Lanka high on the international political agenda. Let us raise our voices loudly to appeal to the United Nations to open the doors of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague to hear charges of war crimes against the government, the LTTE and all other violent groups that are committing war crimes against the civilian population.

India has an important role to play to exert pressure on Sri Lanka to put an end to its campaign against the minority Tamils. Their engagement to find a lasting political solution is vital, without which, we not see the end of the tunnel. We all know LTTE must find its exit and it is not the extremism of the Sinhalese that must guide us, it is will of the Tamil people that must close the chapter for the LTTE.

( R Jayadevan is a political activist in the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora ) - Sri Lanka Guardian