Fact finding Mission to Sri Lanka

Asoka Weerasinghe Gloucester . Ontario . Canada

November 18, 2006

Ambassador Allan Rock
UNSG
Special Representative on Children and Armed Conflict
New York.

Dear Mr. Rock:

On October 29 I wrote to you before you embarked on the UN assignment in Sri Lanka… “When I take away the past Liberal Party mantle off you, a party that showed a bias in favour of the Tamil Tigers for reasons aligned to domestic politics, I see you as a person of peace that I envied so much in 1970 when you as the University Ottawa’s President of the Student’s Union visited John Lennon and Yoko Ono while they were bedding in Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel suite 1742, for wanting to change the world spreading peace of love. I was a graduate student at Memorial University in Newfoundland then involved in the peace movement myself against the war in Vietnam as well as South Africa’s Apartheid.” That retrospection of you as a student activist was said in all sincerity.

I think you are smart enough to know that you flew into Colombo carrying all the negative baggage you had collected being one of the Liberal parliamentarians who also happened to be the Minister of Justice and Attorney General, who favoured the Tamil Tigers and looked the other way letting the Canadian-Tamil Tiger sympathizers collect two million dollars each month to stuff their war-chest. All that to get their 100,000 votes to elect 10 Liberals in the greater Toronto ridings, and you too depended on their votes in the Etobicoke Centre riding. And along the way you and your Liberals smeared the Canadian hands with Sinhala blood as the massive truck bomb that brought down the Central Bank building on January 31, 1996 killing 114 and maiming for life another 1,400 was packed with high explosives bought from a Ukraine chemical plant with Canadian dollars which your government let them collect, and paid with a seven-and-a-half million dollar cheque cut through a bank in Vancouver.

Which ever way you may wish to slice your defense, you know the facts, I know the facts, the Tamil Tigers know the facts, the RCMP and CSIS knows the facts, and almost all Canadians know the facts. And this was the very reason why the ruthless Tamil Tiger terrorists’ political wing leader S.J. Thamilchelvam gave Canada’s Primer Minister Paul Martin and his Liberal Government the dubious honour in early 2005, that “Canada is our greatest ally”.

I listened to your interviews on ‘As it Happens’ as well as the ‘Current’ on CBC, read many news reports on your conclusions of your10 day fact finding mission as well as the press release from Colombo’s UN office, accusing “elements” of the Sri Lanka’s security forces that “…they rounded up children to be recruited by the Karuna faction” to fight the Tamil Tigers who they were part of since 1976 until 2004.

The critical commentaries on your announcement have flayed you as a disingenuous fact finder who is a biased supporter of Tamil Tigers. The security forces have vehemently denied your allegations, and have said that they were “regrettable” and “misleading”, and some have labeled you as a “Snow Tiger”, for minimizing your focus on Tamil Tiger child recruitment which has gone on for many, many moons, and focusing disingenuously on the Sri Lankan Government forces driven by hearsay. These observations are valid and do I smell a rat here?

These commentaries have put you on the spot to defend yourself on the findings which you have claimed to be from “credible evidence from victimized mothers and eye witnesses”. As you know your statement has aroused controversy in human rights circles, and brought smiles on the faces of the Tamil Tigers and their supporters in Sri Lanka as well as abroad. And you have provided enough fodder for the anti-Sri Lankan- government media to exaggerate your announcement to the point of saying that the Sri Lankan armed forces are recruiting child soldiers. This is not healthy, and unfortunately you are placed in an untenable position of being the catalyst of all this.

Did you ever wonder whether these witnesses were planted paid-actors by the Tamil Tiger propagandists as well as the NGO peacenicks who are raking in a billion rupee industry funded by foreign countries like Norway? Have they done that before? Of course, they have, and gloat on their successes.

I am not certain whether you depended on Tamil translators during your interviews with these affected families and eye-witnesses. If so, did you ever wonder whether the translators would provide you with text-book translations, or hoodwink you by telling their concocted stories to get at the armed forces personnel, and minimize your focus on the Tamil Tiger child abductions for their Baby Brigade? Are they capable of doing it? Of course they are and I was witness to one such a happening in Ottawa.

During late August and early September 1986 when Canada was going through an emotional-divide over the Tamil boat peoples refugee claims and bringing negative publicity on the Tamil refugee claimants who were flooding our shores, the Ottawa Tamils quite cleverly deflected the media attention to Sri Lanka’s High Commissioner General Tissa Weeratunga as a torturer when he was the army commander in Jaffna.

On Monday, September 22, 1986, the Ottawa Tamils had a press conference at Holiday Inn on Kent Street, with Umapathisivan Pararajasegaran (Baby Para), a Tamil refugee who was flown in from Paris to claim that he was tortured by General Weeratunga while in detention in 1979. And AI too got involved in this media story in support of the Tamil refugees who claimed that they were running away from persecution.

What transpired at this press conference was a classic example of the Tamil Tiger sympathizers taking the Canadians down the garden path, knowing that we have been a bunch of suckers and Goody Two-shoes when it came to Tamil refugees.

When a reporter asked Baby Para a two line question in English, when translated into Tamil, Baby Para responded with a three liner in Tamil. Then the Tamil translator translated those three Tamil sentences with about 20 sentences in English. This went on for about 40 minutes and I walked out in disgust, thinking that the Ottawa reporters too were getting sucked into this theatre of the absurd and lies.

I was an employee of DFO (200 Kent Street) then and I was contacted at the office by reporter Dan Leger of the Canadian Press who had been asked by Victor Parsons the Deputy Chief of the Canadian Press Bureau to speak with me, as “Asoka is reliable and he will tell you the truth”. We met for lunch the following day at the Japanese Village on Kent Street. During the conversation I did ask Dan, “Did you find it strange that when you all threw a two sentence question at Pararajasegaran, and he responded in Tamil with a three sentence answer, and the translator translated those three Tamil sentences with 20 English sentences, every time?” Dan’s response was, “Funny you said that Asoka, after yesterday morning press conference, Pararajasegaran had another press conference in Toronto last evening, and we sent our most senior reporter to cover that meeting.

The same thing had happened there too and he called us back and told us to forget this press conference, as he understood that the Tamil translator did not speak or understood a word of Tamil, and he was reciting their scripted story against High Commissioner Weeratunga and the Sri Lankan government to legitimize their refugee claims.” And there you are and I was there to witness all that in a packed conference room with reporters and Tamils. I happened to be one of two Sinhalese at the conference and I was nearly thrown out of the room. My question to you Mr. Rock is, were you subjected to the same ballyhoo and did you fall hook-line-and-sinker to their ploy as all Liberal parliamentarians have, which I suspect reflects in your conclusions of the10 day fact finding mission?

I have difficulty to accept your conclusions too regarding the army and here are my reasons, and you will know where I am coming from.

I have little faith in Liberals and you happen to be one, who are still supporting the ruthless Tamil Tiger terrorist outfit. Some of the culprits are, Jim Karygiannis, Maria Minna, Paul Martin, Bill Graham, Judy Sgro, Albina Guarnieri, Joe Volpe, John McCallum, John McKay, Bryon Wilfert and Roy Cullen, to name a few. You may recognize them as the ones who lobbied in caucus not to ban the Tamil Tigers when you were in charge of the Justice and Attorney General Ministries. And as you recall several of them patronized the fund raising dinner for the Tamil Tigers in the spring of 2000, knowing damn well that the monies were collected for terrorism to haemorrhage Sri Lanka further by killing and miming innocent unarmed civilians. I still haven’t forgiven the Liberals for this crass and heartless act. All for a Tamil vote to get back into parliament.

Why on earth should, Karuna want anyone else to round up the Tamil children in the east, when he has been and still is an excellent terrorist leader who has the wherewithal to abduct children and train them as suicide bombers and front line fighters? He knows the terrain, the urban and village human-geography and the families who have children. He is quite capable of rounding them up. I am stymied with your conclusion.

One of the comments you did make during the radio interview was that you suspected the army collaboration with these abductions to bolster the Karuna para-military army, as the vehicles carrying these children were not investigated at army check points. I am not sure whether the army mandate allows the soldiers to extend beyond checking the identity of the people in vehicles and to see whether the vehicles are transporting lethal weapons. Any activity beyond that would be construed as human rights violations of the person by harassment knowing well that all human rights activists have their hawk eyes directed at the armed forces to pounce at every wrong move. This is just a thought in defense of the army protocol at In and Out check points. One has to be fair on these observations.

I am looking forward to you making public the evidence that you claim to be in your possession, so that President Rajapakse can make a thorough and an intelligent investigation and bring to task the wrong doers. Your allegations are serious and needs immediate attention by the government and your transparency and help will be paramount.

And no doubt this probe will be the litmus test for further fact finding missions by UN organizations such as yours, as any missive by you showing bias towards the Tamil Tigers will fly on your face and in turn the organization that you represented, and the Government of Sri Lanka should not tolerate such intrusions by any international institution anymore.

I am hoping that your conclusions after subjecting yourself to hearsay, like village gossip, should not go unchallenged, as it would readily be used by the international community, some human rights groups, and your colleagues in Canada’s Liberal Party to use it to paint Sri Lanka as a pariah among democratically elected sovereign states. Such conclusions that you felt fit to publicize around the world based on hearsay is the biggest blow that can be dealt to global democracy by harassing small sovereign states, thus helping further under the guise of helping to achieve peace the interests of terrorists outfits like Tamil Tigers.

I hope your final report will be judicious colouring honesty for your mission and will not show even a modicum of bias in favour of the Tamil Tigers thus providing them a cloak of respectability. You have done enough on that score while you were a Liberal parliamentarian. By the way, former Liberal Justice Minister Irwin Cotler did admit to the Editorial Board of the National Post that not banning the Tamil Tigers was a political decision not wanting to antagonize the Tamils as they were seeking their votes in the greater Toronto area. I say pox on the Liberals who have been part of the problem in Sri Lanka’s separatist war.

You saw the devastation on the people and property in the North and East of that beautiful island with your own eyes. All this has been done by the collective effort of major countries like Canada that let Tamil separatist supporters fill one-third of the Tamil Tiger war-chest with Canadian dollars to win 100,000 votes for the governing Liberal party; Indira Gandhi’s India taking the bare-footed Tamil rebels after the 1983 riots, who couldn’t even shoot straight with a pistol to train them for terrorist warfare in her army camps at Kanchiupuram, Salem, Anna Nagar and Uttar Pradesh by the foothills of the Himalayas, and sent them back fitted with infantry-boots, fatigues and cradling AK47s to fight a terrorist war against a legitimately elected democracy.

All this geo-political venom was to seek support from 55 million Tamils in Tamil Nadu for her Congress Party which was running third in the upcoming elections; and Norway that has provided high powered communication systems to the Tamil Tigers using diplomatic channels contravening the Vienna Convention (1961) and the training Tamil Tiger cadres at Rena and Pukut in Thailand, and providing millions of kroner for their sustenance.. All this wanting to strut on the world stage as international peacemakers. Damn you all, I say, for wanting to destroy an elected democracy of this small nation where I was nurtured during my formative years and had many Tamil friends and still do.

I hope that your final report will provide me with the opportunity to respect your response to me on October 29 “…and I approach it with genuine respect for its complexity. I shall do my very best to make a constructive contribution.” And I sincerely hope you will.

Yours sincerely

Asoka Weerasinghe