Box 55292, 300 Borough
Drive, Toronto, Ontario M1W 3L9 Canada
Website: www.sluna.org ; E-mail: sluna@idirect.com
By-E-mail September 20, 2005
Ms. Virginia Judge
Member of Parliament for Strathfield
New South Wales, Australia
Dear Ms. Judge,
RE: Statement made in the New South Wales Parliament on September 15, 2005
Your recent visit to Sri Lanka at the urging of 3000 members of the Tamil community resident in your electorate explains the reasons for your obvious bias and inaccuracies contained in your statement. As a member of parliament, we would expect you to do your homework and have some background knowledge of the country that you are perhaps visiting for the first time, without uttering a whole lot of gibberish presented to you by one party to the conflict engaged in every form of violence and terrorism to advance their cause of carving out a mono-ethnic Tamil separate state in the north and east of Sri Lanka.
In order to educate you on some of the aspects of the contents of your statement, let us firstly point out to you that Sri Lanka has a recorded history of over 2500 years, and is the motherland of the Sinhala people who number around 78.8 percent of the island’s present population of nearly 19 million people. The Tamils whose homeland is Tamilnadu in South India, initially arrived as invaders and subsequently came as settlers towards the 11th century. The name of the separate state that the Tamils have pursued by an armed insurrection is called “Eelam”, which according to Professor Krishnaswamy Aiyengar, an authority on Tamil Language at the University of Madras in South India, as given in his foreword to the book titled ‘History of Jaffna’ in 1925, the word “Eelam” always meant the land of the Sinhalese, and he further goes on to show the derivation of this word from the ancient Pali word “Sihala” which was tamilised as Sihalam and later shortened to “Ilam” or “Eelam”.
Sri Lanka today is the common
homeland of all her people made up of the Sinhalese, Sri Lankan Tamils who
have lived in the island for almost a millennium, the Moors or Muslims, Indian
Tamils brought in as indentured labour by the Dutch and British colonial
administrations for work on the plantations in the 18th and
19th centuries, the Malays and the Burghers who are descendants of
European colonial stock.
According to the census taken in 1981, the Sinhalese numbered 75
percent, whilst the Sri Lankan Tamils made up 12.8 percent, the Moors around
6.1 percent, the Indian Tamils numbering 5.2 percent with the balance coming
from the Malay, Burgher and other minor communities. Contd./2)
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A partial census was
carried out in the year 2001 with estimations for populations
resident in certain parts of the northern and eastern provinces resulting from
the non-cooperation of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which has
been designated as an international terrorist organization by the UN Security
Council, which group illegally controls parts of the Vanni region which you
visited recently.
The estimated numbers shows the Sinhalese at 78.8 percent, the Sri Lankan Tamils dropping from 12.8 to around 8.0 percent following the large scale migration of this community to Canada, UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, the Moors at 7.2 percent, the Indian Tamils at 5.6 percent and the balance made up of Malays, Burghers and others.
At the time Sri Lanka regained her independence in 1948, you will be surprised to learn that the then 11.0 percent Sri Lankan Tamils held 60-65 percent of the civil service jobs, 50 percent of all professional positions and also owned and controlled almost 45 percent of the private business sector. This situation arose consequent to the divide and rule policy of the British colonial administration which held sway for 133 years, during which time the Tamils were provided with greater access to English medium education that they introduced and favoured treatment meted out to this minority as opposed to the majority Sinhalese community.
Eight years after independence, the majority Sinhalese who were virtually second class citizens in their country sought the switch from English spoken by about five percent of the people to Sinhala spoken by 78 percent as the official language of the country. This demand was given effect in 1958 making Sinhala the official language and at the same time providing for the reasonable use of Tamil, along with the right to education in the Tamil medium from the kindergarten to the university free of fees under the Free Education System. As the minority Tamils felt discriminated by language, the status of Tamil was progressively elevated and made a National Language and language of administration in the north and east after the short space of 20 years by the Second Republican Constitution of 1978. Recently, Tamil has been made an official language and brought on a par with Sinhala. In Canada, although English and French are official languages at the federal level, in actuality French language services are provided only where it is economically feasible in the provinces outside Quebec, and English treated likewise within Quebec as a matter of cabinet policy, whereas Tamil linguistic rights are enshrined in Sri Lanka’s constitution.
Another canard voiced by you is that Tamils and other minorities have to score higher marks than the Sinhalese to gain admission to the universities. The real position is that a decision was taken to allow students from rural schools to be considered for admission to universities with lower averages,as they were lacking qualified teachers, science laboratories, teaching materials and equipment when compared with the well established schools located in the cities that had comparatively superior. (Contd./3)
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This scheme to standardise marks was to be a temporary measure pending the improvement of facilities in the rural schools, but it is probably being continued even at the present stage as it is a major financial and administrative issue involving the training of teachers, etc. which the country has not been able to meet due to the terrorist war and economic conditions. The children in the city schools in predominantly Tamil areas as well as the Sinhala areas have therefore had to score higher marks than children from rural schools to gain admission to universities.
There has not been any erosion in the rights of the Tamils or the other minorities, as the Fundamental Rights Chapter of the Second Republican Constitution recognises the rights of the individual irrespective of ethnicity, religion or other background factor. However, due to the situation prevailing in the country where an armed terrorist group is illegally controlling parts of the country, it has not been possible to apply the writ of the state nor uphold the constitution in all parts of the country in a uniform manner.
You speak of the Tamils being systematically cut out of the opportunities afforded to the majority. When did you make a study of the ownership and share holdings of the Tamils in business and enterprise in Sri Lanka? You will be surprised to find that the Tamil and Moor minority communities dominate this sector.
You also cite lists produced by Catholic priests relating to nearly 300 churches damaged by aerial bombing and shelling, but apparently you never saw a single of these damaged churches yourself. During the height of the hostilities, the Sri Lankan Security Forces would ask the ordinary Tamil civilians to take shelter in churches and Hindu kovils, and it is quite a revelation to find that these same churches had been targeted by the forces according to the holy men that you met. Perhaps you are not aware of the deliberate destruction of Buddhist places of worship in the north and east by the Tamil Tiger Terrorists to erase the historical evidence supporting the heritage of the Sinhala people who founded this nation of Sinhale, later named Ceilao by the Portuguese, Ceylon by the British and Sri Lanka in more recent times.
You speak of visiting
“Tamil Eelam” on your visit to Sri Lanka. Where on earth is this place called
“Tamil Eelam”? You had also
visited a Children’s Home run by the TRO to look after orphans, but you may
not have known that some are being brain washed to become Suicide Bombers
referred to as Black Tigers. The
TRO has been de-listed by the British Charity Commissioner. You do not make mention of the Child
Soldiers, abducted from the care of their parents and forcibly recruited,
numbering in excess of 3500 according to UNICEF in the three years following
the signing of the ceasefire in 2002.
You do not mention the 3000 violations of the Ceasefire Agreement by
the Tamil Tiger Terrorists as reported by the Scandinavian Monitors including
over 400 killings, assaults, intimidation and extortion of the ordinary people
living under the LTTE’s fascist regime that you speak highly of.
(Contd./4)
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Unfortunately, there is no end in sight, as the LTTE has made a mockery of the ceasefire, not participated in peace talks after April 2003, and continue to build their
war machine to seek the same goal of a mono-ethnic Tamil separate state by force of arms. The LTTE has even denied that they made a commitment to explore a solution based on a federal system as announced after the Oslo round of talks. They did come up with proposals for an Interim Self-Governing Authority, which was nothing but a blueprint for a separate state.
You are probably the second Australian woman to try and boost the flagging fortunes of this brutal terrorist group known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) who have carried out over 240 suicide bombings against mainly civilian targets, assassinated two heads of state in India and Sri Lanka, killed several Sinhalese and Tamil leaders who stood for a negotiated solution within a democratic framework, and have continued to kill all political opponents mainly from the Tamil community, and even operate torture chambers where an estimated 5000 persons are being held in the Vanni according to a Tamil torture victim who managed to recently escape from this hell hole in the glorious land of “Tamil Eelam”. The other Australian woman is Adele Balasingham who is married to the LTTE theoretician residing in UK, who is responsible for the death of nearly 700 police officers who surrendered to the LTTE during direct talks being held in Colombo with the LTTE by Sri Lanka’s President Premadasa, on the undertaking given by Anton Balasingham that the policemen would be released at a pre-determined location, only to be gunned down by machine gun fire. This other Australian takes credit for training the women fighters of this terrorist outfit, and has posed with her AK47 and army fatigues to display her utter stupidity, whose trainees have later exhibited their depraved minds by killing 64 families including women and infants in the rural hamlet of Gonagala using machetes in the middle of the night.
Good luck to you in gaining the respect of the Tamil Tiger Terrorists and hopefully the votes of the 3000 Tamils in your electorate. May you be spared of the nightmares of the horrendous crimes committed by this group of terrorists whom your admire, or attempt to admire for the sake of a some votes which are tied to your supporting their cause which has already cost over 65000 lives.
Yours very truly,
Mahinda Gunasekera
Honorary President