Canadian debate on Sri Lanka

A Special Sri Lankan Guardian Comment

(February 06, Toronto, Sri Lanka Guardian) Sri Lanka Guardian considering the importance of the Emergency Debate on the current Sri Lankan situation that took place in the Canadian Parliament February 4, and the fact that it represented directly the concerns of nearly half a million Tamils, nearly all of them forced to flee Sri Lanka and indirectly the Tamils in Sri Lanka, we are publishing the entire debate part by part.

Most significantly, and indeed ironically, this debate conveys the truism that the voices of the Tamils even in Sri Lanka are being expressed in the forum of one of the most democratic countries in the world which is also a very stable federal state.

This debate is of great significance to Sri Lanka and the Sri Lanka Guardian is of the view that this is the first that the views, aspirations, concerns and sufferings of our Tamil citizens have been heard so effectively in a forum. They have hitherto been ill-represented in Sri Lanka's House of Parliament.

Their genuine leaders, intellectuals, journalists and leaders at the grass roots have been threatened, harassed and even killed and today the community is without good leaders. They have been a highly subjugated community. Even the military commander of the Sri Lankan Forces recently said that the Tamils live in Sri Lanka by the grace of the Sinhalese.

As the Rev Senior said in his poem, Call of Lanka, they have to take a foster mother and providentially Canada has come to our help.

We recommend the Government of Sri Lanka to take a serious note of this debate and acknowledge our gratitude for this gesture to the Government of Canada and the thousands of Tamils who demonstrated peacefully in such large numbers in the streets of Ottawa and Toronto. Their voice is now a universal cry for help and the world will not ignore it anymore.

Canada has been a true friend of our development efforts for years and we need her, more even now than ever.

-Sri Lanka Guardian