Re: Rock accused of consorting
with Tamil terrorists
Asoka Weerasinghe
Kings Grove Crescent . Gloucester . Ontario . K1J 6G1
January 26, 2007
The Editor (Letters)
THE OTTAWA CITIZEN
Sir:
Re: Rock accused
of consorting with Tamil terrorists
Apparently former Liberal Justice Minister and Attorney General Allan
Rock is the target of an apparent smear campaign as he prepares to
address the UN Security Council panel on child abductions and soldiers
in Sri Lanka.
Allan Rock was an unfortunate choice to begin with for this ten day
assignment in Sri Lanka knowing his bias towards the Tamil Tigers
as a former Liberal parliamentarian. He hit the skids the very moment
he accepted this assignment from Radhika Coomaraswamy, the UN envoy
for Children and Armed conflict, an ethnic Tamil herself.
His inquiry procedure fell far short of accepted norms and standards
pertaining to conduct of such inquiries or investigations. Much of
his allegations against the Sri Lankan Armed Forces which he alleges
complicity helping the Karuna Group to abduct children are based according
to him on “credible evidence” of hearsay and gossip which
he still has difficulty to explain. To add further to his woes, he
was accompanied for five days by Arthur Tveiten, the Scandinavian
Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission’s Batticaloa chief. Tveiten has
gone on record making prejudicial comments about the Security Forces
many times, and had to apologize for such indiscretions later. There
is every possibility that Tveitan could have manipulated evidence
and distorted the ground situation for Allan Rock who was there sweeping
Ampara, Batticaloa, Kilinochchi and Jaffna in the eastern province
for five days of the ten, searching for evidence. To bribe Tamils
with thousands of rupees to manipulate evidence in Sri Lanka is a
common practice, as this war has become a billion rupee business and
the Tamil Tigers are over flowing with it being funded by the Norwegian
government and the Tamil Diaspora. The Tamil politicians in India’s
Tamil Nadu are in the Tamil Tiger pay role to lobby for them too.
That is the ground reality.
What was amiss and suspect in Allan Rock’s report is that he
made little shrift of the Tamil Tiger abductions, who are the real
culprits as recorded by UNICEF. They recorded 5956 child abductions
and forced recruitment by the Tamil Tigers for their army between
January 2002 and December 2006. This is where Allan Rock has lost
grounds on his report. Suspect, the critics say.
Thus his allegations against the Sri Lankan Armed forces have become
suspect and become the genesis for the alleged “smear campaign”
against him. Too bad. There certainly won’t be smoke where there
is no fire! Allan Rock has no choice but to defend himself to extricate
himself from these predictable woes.
To start with, Allan Rock should have never accepted this assignment
being a former Liberal parliamentarian, who refused to ban the ruthless
terrorist group, the Tamils Tigers, and letting their Canadian supporters
collect two million dollars a month for 13 long years to top their
war-chest. Allan Rock should have been smart enough to know that he
was walking into a wall of fire.
Asoka Weerasinghe
613-747-2272.
