By Walter Jayawardhana

Some dated allegations have been spread around the world that Tamils are being discriminated by the country despite the charge is a big lie said Douglas Wickramaratne , taking part in a BBC world service interview .ƒÆ’-¡ƒ”š‚ 

“Sri lanka is the only country in the world that has accepted Tamil as an official language . All Tamils in the country get free education in the country,” Wickramaratne , the President of the Sinhala Association of UK, said.

Wickramaratne said the question to describe what is the discrimination to which the Tamils are being subjected to has gone unanswered baffling many.ƒÆ’-¡ƒ”š‚ ƒÆ’-¡ƒ”š‚ 

Answering the question what is the reaction of the Sri Lankan Diaspora to the of ending of a 30 years of a Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka Wickramaratne said it has become a great day for all the peace loving people of Sri Lanka , be it Tamil, Muslim and Sinhalese for ending the separatist war by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)which has been described as the most ruthless terrorist group in the world by the FBI .

During the interview Wickramaratne said the Tamils suffered under the LTTE more than anyone else and all their intellectual moderate leadership like all leaders of the Tamil United Liberation Front like Appapillai Amirthalingam and great statemen like Lakshman kadirgamar , Sri Lanka’s Tamil Foreign Minister have been assassinated.ƒÆ’-¡ƒ”š‚ ƒÆ’-¡ƒ”š‚ 

When the interviewer asked if there is no discrimination why hundreds of thousand of Tamils have come to London or Toronto Wickramaratne said not only the Tamils, under whatever guise they migrate to the West even other Sri Lankans like the Sinhalese migrate. He said for instance, there is a half a million Sinhalese in the Middle East.

Wickramaratne said most of the Tamils who migrated to the West are professionals like doctors, engineers and professors etc. He said most of those migrants received their education without any discrimination, completely free of charge up to the university level without any tuition being charged.

Calling the Tamil struggle as a separatist movement, Douglas Wickramaratne said , in the preamble of the document, which proposed the separatist movement , it said that there are 100 million Tamils all over the world and they lacked a homeland and they proposed part of Sri Lanka for the putative state. He said Tamil Nadu is a state of India with 70 million Tamils and during the 1960’s when a similar fissiparous movement was initiated it was nipped it in the bud.

Wickramaratne said 60% of the Tamil people live in the majority Sinhalese areas and those Tamils live happily without any ethnic conflict. He said the terrorist leadership brainwashed the youth among Tamils and it ended up in the 30 year old war