NDP – Canada must act now on Sri Lanka

Asoka Weerasinghe Gloucester . Ontario Canada

April 15, 2007

Ms. Alexa McDonough, MP
NDP Foreign Affairs Critic
House of Commons
Ottawa

Dear Ms. McDonough:

*Re: NDP – Canada must act now on Sri Lanka*

I appreciate very much that you have put a lot of thought into your appeal to Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay to take a proactive role in Sri Lanka’s feud as outlined in your party’s press release of April
13 *– Canada must act now on Sri Lanka.*

This is a far cry from what we heard from the NDPiers in 1985/86 when your MPs Ernie Epp, Thunder Bay-Nipigon (December 11, 1985 – Hansard Vol.128, No.196), Dan Heap, Spadina, and Mike Cassidy, Ottawa Centre (February 24, 1986 – Hansard Vo.128, No.229) were crying foul against the Sri Lankan Government and supporting the terrorist Tamil Tigers during Parliament’s Question Period. I, as Chairperson of ‘Project Peace for a United Sri Lanka’, met with Ernie Epp in his office on January 29, 1986, on this subject. It was a valuable exercise of induction on the feud with the map of Sri Lanka spread on his coffee table to walk him over the geography of the war and the Tamil Tiger demands. After the meeting, he admitted that he knew very little of what was going on in Sri Lanka and that he just mouthed off on behalf of his Tamil constituents. At least he was honest.

I met with your then President, Marion Dewar, in May of 1986 in her office at 301 Metcalfe Street, asking her to stop her MPs song and dance to appease their Tamil constituents and to act responsibly on Sri Lanka’s feud during Question period and not to take sides polarizing the two Sri Lankan ethnic groups, Sinhalese and Tamils who had made a life’s choice to adopt Canada as their home. Ms. Dewar was an extremely good listener, and promised to bring this subject at the next caucus meeting.
She very well may have, as the NDP mouthings on this subject stopped for years.

Then came the embarrassing moment when your leader Jack Layton when addressing 10,000 Tamils at Toronto’s Queen’s Park during their Pongu Thamil celebrations on September 25, 2004, compared the ruthless terrorist leader Velupillai Prabhakaran to South Africa’s Nelson Mandela. This was reported in the National Post. He heard from me as well as several others who took him to task. Understandably, 10,000 Tamil votes in the Greater Toronto Area may have been strobing in front of his face mesmerizing his eyes, but we couldn’t let him get away with that foolishness.

Here are my observations and comments on your four pointers to Foreign Minister Peter MacKay.

1. *“Pressure all sides to respect humanitarian law, and to accept
human rights monitors to report and address violations of human
rights violations – whether committed by the government, the LTTE,
or other armed groups.”*

I like your perceptions and understanding of the problems, unlike Amnesty International or Allan Rock who went to Sri Lanka last October as a UN Ambassador and botched his whole exercise trying to go after the Government and the Karuna group, and not the most ruthless terrorist group, the Tamil Tigers. It is quite obvious that you have found out that you just cannot clap with one hand, nor dance a competitive tango alone. You are absolutely right to acknowledge that there are two protagonists in this feud and not just the Sri Lankan government, and Thank You for that honesty.

2. *“Push to re-open land link A9 and work with all sides to
establish an international peacekeeping force (acceptable to both
sides) to maintain the link”.*

You are now skating on thin ice and be careful. Here is why A9 was closed.

Alpha 9, better known as A9, is described in military terms the “main Supply Route” to the troubled Jaffna peninsula. In other words it is the main link and the shortest link between the Sinhala-speaking south Sri Lanka and the northern Jaffna peninsula where the Tamils live. I used the word “Tamil”, not because they were the sole occupants of the peninsula, but because they became the main occupants after a period of ethnic cleansing through killings and terrorizing and kicking out 27,000 Sinhalese between 1971 and 1981 who had lived there for generations.

This road passes through a vast area called Wanni, controlled by the Tamil Tigers (LTTE). It touches the Tamil Tiger political headquarters at Killinochchi. This road has two highly guarded entry/exit points at Omanthai, north of Vavuniya at the southern end, and at Muhamalai, just south of Chavakachcheri at the northern end. It would be worthwhile for you to study this geography on a map of Sri Lanka to better understand what all this is about.

The Tamil Tigers took over this Wanni area after the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) left in 1990 and used it as their refuge when they were pushed out by the army in 1995.

During the battle over the Wanni between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan Armed Forces between 1994 and 2002, the A9 remained closed.
However, with the signing of the Peace Accord in February 2002, the road was opened.

The reason why the Tamil Tigers agreed to open A9 was because they were unofficially allowed to collect taxes, road tolls and custom duties from all users of this highway. And they made mountains of money collecting Sri Lankan rupees 200 million to 300 million ($2.8 million) each month.

The Tamil Tigers also used this route to move their military hardware and troop to position themselves to attack the military defense lines in the north and south of Wanni. The closing of A9 saw a squeeze on the Tamil Tiger revenue which was used to replenish their armoury, and their shoes were pinching them by now as well as they were choking with the lack of funds. If the Tamils had lobbied you to have the A9 opened, that was the very reason. They are desperate for those funds. They refused to let the Government of Sri Lanka open an alternate route to link up with the Jaffna peninsula. And now you know why the Tamil Tigers refused this suggestion.

For you to suggest bringing in an *“international peace keeping force”* is a bit dicey. Before this idea is allowed to take hold of your clinical mind, first and foremost, the international community should stop the collection of funds by the Tamil Diaspora in their countries to provide Tamil Tigers financial sustenance to replenish their sophisticated armoury. Canada is guilty of this blooper letting the Tamils collect two million dollars every month to fill the Tamil Tiger war chest during the Liberal’s 13 years governance.

This ought to be a collective effort by all international communities who aspire to do their peace keeping duties along A9 in the Wanni, or else any peace keeping force will be challenged by the Tamil Tigers with their weaponry bought from the millions of dollars allowed to be collected by the international communities. The Tamil Tigers will fight them the way they did with the Indian Peace Keeping Force, the third largest army in the world. India took back 1,500 of their soldiers in body bags who had come to keep peace in the north of Sri Lanka from 1987 to 1990. All these Indian soldiers were killed by the Tamil Tigers, the very protégés trained by Indira Gandhi’s men in military camps all over South India as well as at the foot hills of the Himalayas. And one of them acted as a human-bomb to assassinate her son Rajiv Gandhi. What a way to thank their God-Mother of terrorism!

With the NDP hounding the Conservative government to bring back our troops from Afghanistan just because 53 of our brave soldiers were killed since 2002 by the Talibans, and if apply the same logic your suggestion of an International Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka will not trigger a green light. This proposal should not be on the table even for consideration. The bottom line is that Canada just cannot provide funds for the Tamil Tigers to buy weapons to fight, kill and maim their opponents and innocent bystanders and then to say, “Hey! We are coming to monitor peace in Sri Lanka’s North” defies logic. Ms. McDonough, don’t even go there and take heed of my observations and stop putting your proposed International Peace Keepers in harms way.

3. *Support international efforts to encourage the Sri Lankan
government and the LTTE to immediately resume negotiations,
inclusive of all Sri Lankan parties,* *factions and communities,
in an effort to end the conflict and secure lasting peace*

* *You obviously have more faith in the Tamil Tigers than I and many others do, to believe that the Tamil Tigers would sit for the seventh time in good faith to negotiate when they had walked out at every previous palaver. Every time they met around the world it ended up as an International Gong Show.

The Tamil Tigers want their mono-ethnic, separate, racist Tamil state Eelam and nothing more and nothing less. For them any permutation of federalism is an “F-word”, and they prefer bullets rather than ballots.

It was only on April 12, when Vinyagamurthi Muralitharan, better known as “Karuna”, the former leader of the Tamil Tigers in the East who broke away from the LTTE in 2004, when asked by a reporter – */Tell me about the Peace Talks which you also attended. What happened? /*His response
was:*//*

*/ We went for negotiations but we knew that it would not succeed since as a matter of fact, Prabhakaran (LTTE leader) did not have a will to arrive at a political solution. Before going for talks, according to the discussion he had, asked his men to use this interval to purchase the weapons. So in fact he had no intention of striking a peace deal. /*Ms.
McDonough, now you know how the Tamil Tiger mind set operates regarding ‘peace negotiations’.

What the international community should do is to read the Riot Act to the Tamil Tigers before they sit at the table for any peace negotiations. “You negotiate in good faith or else….” The government of Sri Lanka has been willing to talk to these rascals all along.

4. *Ensure that the Canadian federal government deploys sufficient
resources to make a significant contribution towards these
objectives.*

If you see that “sufficient (Canadian) resources” is indeed the mantra to find Peace in Sri Lanka, then so be it. But be careful not to line the pockets of Sri Lankan ‘ rogue’ peaceniks who would be attracted to the green dollar bills like ants to honey, set up peace shops and achieve nothing. It is time the Canadian government do an audit on such Canadian funded Peace groups to see that the Canadian tax dollars are well spent and not used to bolster the Tamil Tigers. Many INGO and NGOs have been caught with their pants down on this score.

And finally in the preamble of the press release you said, */“We’ve seen the devastating effects of this conflict and we have an opportunity here and now to restore the ceasefire, renew the peace process, and prevent no more years of suffering/*.”

That sentiment sounds politically correct and plausible, but it has many pit falls. Here are my observations:

a. The Peace Accord that was signed in February 2002, is in tatters and in fact dead as a Dodo.
Every international sponsor as well as other international Sri Lanka watchers like Canada who went over to Killinochchi, the Headquarters of the Tamil Tigers to pay their hosannas to the Tamil Tiger leader with a song and dance, came back empty handed. The very moment they turned their backs on the Tamil Tigers to return to Colombo, the Tamil Tigers thumbed their noses at them. This has been embarrassing to let a bunch of terrorists belittle international diplomats.

b. The Peace Accord only provided a hiatus for the Tamil Tigers to fortify themselves with more military hardware as they brought in 11 shiploads of arms, and the Scandinavian Peace Monitors could do nothing about it, and further more they were sneaky collaborators. One of the ships loaded with military hardware was tipped off by the Norwegian leader of the Peace Monitors to get away as the Sri Lankan gun boats were after them. President Chandrika Kumaratunga complained to the Prime Minister of the Norwegian government and he was recalled.

With that backgrounder any effort to renew the peace accord would only provide this terrorist Ali Baba and his forty-hundred thieves few more ship loadsof military hardware to fight their war. So, Ms. McDonough, I suggest you do not touch this proposal even with a barge pole, unless you want to get burnt..

3. No doubt you mean well and your intention is honest and serious. But if you think that Canada can pull off a Lester-Pearsonian Peace deal, just forget it. Within Sri Lanka’s context Canada abdicated that Nobel Peace crown the very moment the Liberal Government decided to look the other way when the Tamil Diaspora collected two-million dollars a month for the Tamil Tiger war chest. For 13-long years, Canada was indeed Sri Lanka’s problem for its separatist war, not even wanting to ban the Tamil Tigers as a terrorist group when other western nations did not hesitate to do so. All this for the want of 100,000 Tamil votes to secure ten of the Greater Toronto Areas ridings for the Liberals.

But, once a upon a time, Canada did have a respectful place as a possible Pearsonian Peace Maker in Sri Lanka’s separatist war. Here is an anecdote that might put a smile on your as well as Marion Dewar’s face, who has won a great deal of admiration from me.

In the summer of 1991 I had a telephone call from Sri Lanka’s President Premadasa, who was assassinated by a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber on May, 1993, requesting me to come up with two names of Canadians, who I thought would be able to help him to negotiate a settlement with the Tamil Tigers. He gave me two days to come up with the two names. He phoned me as agreed in two days.
The two names that I presented were that of the former NDP leader Ed Broadbent and the retired Supreme Court Chief Justice Brian Dickson. He asked me to contact the two gentlemen and find out whether they would be prepared to take on this task but on condition, that no one should know and to keep it under their hats until they were contacted again.

So I did and both promised to keep this request by President Premadasa a secret until further contact. Two days later, Ed Broadbent contacted me to say that after much thought that since the request was going to be a government to government attempt to seek a solution that he was compelled to inform the Canadian Foreign Ministry of this development.
With that decision ended the possible involvement of Canada, and President Premadasa was quite disappointed. You may want to check the veracity of this anecdote with Ed Broadbent. And, of course, the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is no longer with us.

Although a supporter of the Conservatives, if I am asked again today to suggest a couple of Canadians who would be fit for this task, I would still recommend NDP’s Ed Broadbent, and I would be at a loss to name the second Canadian.

Ed Broadbent has indeed won my ultimate respect as a fair, human rights oriented political scientist, competent and a gentleman-politician and a rare human being who understands what is right and what is wrong.

You might now wonder if I think so highly of an NDPier, why am I a Conservative? The only answer that I could provide you with is, ‘One swallow doesn’t a Summer make’.

If it has any value to you, I will certainly be glad to entertain the possibility of meeting with you to discuss the Sri Lankan situation which I have monitored since the unfortunate day of the riots of July 1983, which landed hoards of Tamils as refugees on our shores.

Sincerely,

Asoka Weerasinghe