SRI LANKA UNITED NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF CANADA
Box 55292, 300 Borough Drive, Toronto, Ontario M1P 4Z7 Canada

Website: www.sluna.org E-mail: sluna@idirect.com
Transmitted by E-mail January 12, 2007
(Printed copy sent by Regular Mail)

His Excellency, Mr. Ban Ki-moon
Secretary General
United Nations Organization
First Avenue at 46th Street
New York, NY 10017
Your Excellency,

Open Letter on Sri Lanka, UN Agencies and UN Officials

We would firstly like to congratulate you on your successful bid to become the eighth Secretary General of the United Nations Organization, and wish you boundless energy and wisdom in achieving much needed peace and sustainable development within the community of nations which has placed immense trust in you. We also wish to state that we are extremely pleased that the task of charting new approaches and courses of action to achieve the common goals of the people of the world has been entrusted to a fellow Asian who has been nurtured in the ancient philosophies that have contributed to the peaceful evolution of material advancement based on harmonious values within an all embracing spiritual framework that has withstood the test of time.

We are a community association of Canadians of Sri Lankan origin, who are particularly concerned about the wellbeing of the people of our motherland of Sri Lanka. This land which is the National Homeland of the Hela people, later known as the Sinhala or Sinhalese, have a recorded history of over 2500 years and a rich pre-history which is coming into focus as seen from recent archaeological studies which are yet in its preliminary stages. The Hela Nation or the Sinhala people have allowed others who came peacefully to settle down in their land, including Tamils from South India who arrived about the 12th century AD, whose National Homeland is the State of Tamilnadu where over 55 million Tamils live. Yet other Tamils arrived later as indentured labour brought in by the Dutch and British colonial powers from about the 18th to the 20th centuries, for work on plantations established on lands confiscated from the indigenous Sinhala people without any payment of compensation. Yet others of Arabic descent, Indonesian and Malaysian origin, and the descendants of the European colonial powers made Sri Lanka their home.

Today, Sri Lanka is a multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation, made up of Sinhalese numbering around 77.5 percent, the Sri Lankan Tamils who immigrated earlier accounting for about 8.5 percent having diminished their numbers from 12.8 percent following large scale emigration to the western countries, Indian Tamils who arrived as indentured labour more recently numbering around 5.5 percent, Moors (Muslims) making up 8.0 percent and all others representing about 0.5 percent of the total population estimated at close to 19 million people. Sri Lanka has given a great deal of recognition to her minorities making Tamil an official language and bringing it on a par with Sinhala spoken by the majority, and further declared national holidays to mark special religious and cultural events celebrated by the minority communities. The National Constitution has by its Fundamental Rights Chapter bestowed equal status to all her citizens including the grant of all civic and human rights, the freedom of worship, and all other rights as available to citizens of any other country.

As you may perhaps be aware, the minority Tamil community numbering approximately 11 percent of the population in the late 1940’s, benefited from the better educational facilities and other privileges provided to them during the British colonial era lasting 133 years till 1948, came to play a dominant role in every field of activity in colonial Sri Lanka (Ceylon). They sought a special arrangement of power sharing from the colonial administration after the departure of the British, but even the British rejected their demands and instead the Soulbury Commission recommended the grant of voting rights to all persons over 21 years of age at the time of granting independence, which naturally transferred a greater share of power to the majority Sinhala community in the newly established parliamentary democracy. This change diminished the hitherto dominant role played by the Tamil minority giving rise to Tamil separatist movements that are even today engaged in an armed insurgency extending over 25 years, seeking recognition of their community as a second Tamil Nation (in addition to the Tamil Nation which controls the territory of the State of Tamilnadu in Southern India) thereby attempting to forcibly grab territory belonging to Sri Lanka in the north and east of the island to establish a racist separate state, comprising 30 percent of the land and 66 percent of the coastline and adjacent territorial waters for Tamils numbering less than 4.0 percent of the island’s population resident in the region.

We find that the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora with the support of other Tamil groups are carrying on a campaign internationally to win support for their territorial ambitions, based on a recently invented history that speaks of traditional homelands of Tamils within Sri Lanka’s terrain, and vicious propaganda carrying false statements aimed at hostility towards the Sinhalese people and the Sri Lankan state. We are aware that such propaganda campaigns are being actively carried on both openly and in a subtle manner by the pro-Tamil lobby even within the United Nations Organization. We have been struck by clearly biased decisions being taken by United Nations officials handling the Sri Lanka file, who have apparently been influenced by the ongoing propaganda of the

Tamil separatist movement seeking the division of this country.

We are aware of certain recommendations made by UN Agencies such as the UNHCR in the case of re-settlement of internally displaced persons, where priority and special treatment was extended to members of the Tamil community ignoring the affected people from the Sinhala and Muslim communities – with the least concern towards the Sinhalese, who have been driven out of their homesteads on account of ethnic cleansing massacres and attacks carried out by the internationally designated terrorist group known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Part of the reason could be the disproportionate number of Tamils hired by the various UN Agencies operating in Sri Lanka. The UNICEF is yet another agency that depends on an official, one Penney Bourne, who has lived in the un-cleared areas illegally held by the Tamil Tiger Terrorists for the past ten years even though her contract allows her to serve only three years at one station, where she is known to soften the blame in connection with the abduction of children to be enlisted as child soldiers, or the forced military training given to the captive civilian population in areas controlled by the LTTE.

We have been shocked to hear UN officials, I-NGOs, NGOs and even members of the Nordic Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) uttering excuses to shield the offending Tamil Tiger Terrorists and even making a case for their need to forcibly enlist child soldiers to replenish their depleting fighting units, without strongly condemning such acts which are deemed war crimes as per UN Conventions covering the use of children in armed conflict. Their statements makes one wonder as to whether their sympathies were with the child abductors and not the innocent children who have been torn away from their parents or guardians whom they are required to protect.

The recent visit of Ambassador Allan Rock who was assigned the task of visiting Sri Lanka by the United Nations Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, Madam Radhika Coomaraswamy, herself an ethnic Tamil, to report on the use of child soldiers and the violence occurring as a result of the Tamil Tiger Terrorist insurgency in that country, was heard to make absurd and unfounded statements alleging complicity by Sri Lanka’s Security Forces in the abduction of some 135 children by the Karuna faction which had broken off from the LTTE terrorist movement in 2004, on his short ten day visit based on village gossip or stories planted by the LTTE. What is alarming is that he gave scant attention in his public statements to the continued abduction of children by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which according to UNICEF had abducted in excess of 5200 children since the signing of the ceasefire agreement of February 2002. It is disappointing to say the least that the special emissary failed to recommend any measures or sanctions against the LTTE which had earlier given a pledge to the UN Special Representative, Olara Otunnu, to release the thousands of child recruits in their fighting ranks, and openly scorned the UN as an ineffective body entrusted with the task of protecting the rights of innocent children. The LTTE had even taken funds from UNICEF to establish half-way homes to rehabilitate the released child soldiers, the larger portion of which funds they had misappropriated, thereby acting with utter contempt, ignoring their undertaking to Mr. Otunnu.

Ambassador Allan Rock seemed to naively accept a fresh position announced by the LTTE to the effect that under new policies adopted by them, they were arranging to release all of their child soldiers by January 2007. This is all he reported in his public interviews with regard to the involvement of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the crimes they continued to commit against innocent children and their families, as though he was confident that the LTTE would honour their pledge this time around. We are left to conclude that Ambassador Rock was either instructed to or naively on his own as a former Cabinet Minister of the Liberal Party Government in Canada, which shielded the LTTE’s Canadian fronts ignoring the advice of Canada’s intelligence services, as the party benefited from the votes of the Tamil Diaspora in the Greater Toronto Area, decided to invent a case against the Sri Lankan Government’s Security Forces to draw attention away from the main offender, i.e. the LTTE.

We would like to remind you that Sri Lanka has been a member of the United Nations Organization since its inception. Despite its size and limited economy, Sri Lanka has contributed greatly to develop consensus and agreement on a variety of vital issues such as World Trade, Law of the Seas, WIPO, Nuclear Non-Proliferation, Prevention of Financing of Terrorism, etc. Sri Lanka is a free, independent and sovereign country and not a UN administered territory. It has been our perception that a large number of the UN Officials and Agencies serving in developing countries tend to act with the old colonial mentality and attempt to dictate solutions as they see fit, as though they were specialists in all fields and had answers to every problem even before they grasped the specific issues in the respective countries to which they were assigned to serve the member country concerned. We look upon such officials with utter disdain, and consider that they do a great disservice and harm to the effectiveness of the United Nations Organization.

We finally wish to state that Sri Lanka has already made six attempts in the last two decades to deal directly or negotiate with the help of international mediators and facilitators with the intransigent and ruthless terrorist group known as the Liberation Tigers of Eelam (LTTE), who seek nothing short of dismembering Sri Lanka on ethnic lines which would result in greater chaos and violence. Sri Lanka needs to reign in the misguided terror group and quickly bring an end to the terrorist menace, to usher in a stable and lasting peace that her citizens of all communities seek.

We would like to once again wish you well, and trust that you would achieve much success in building a climate of peace and a safer environment for all living beings during your term of holding the high office of Secretary General. We wish to extend our highest assurance that our cooperation can be counted upon in your efforts to reach these goals.

Yours very truly,

Mahinda Gunasekera
Honorary President