Internecine Racism in Sri Lanka: the LTTE's attacks on Tamils - 25th September 2007

Mr Chairman,

The Sri Lankan government is as concerned as the representative of Interfaith International about the paucity of minority representation in the armed forces of Sri Lanka as well as in senior official positions. Unlike the representative of Interfaith International however, we should look into the reasons for this.

The fact is that this deficiency is not due to any racist policy, but rather the systematic elimination by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam of Tamils who wish to serve their country. Delegates here may not be aware of the assassination two years ago of the Tamil Foreign Minister of Sri Lanka, the distinguished lawyer Lakshman Kadirgamar. My deputy is a senior Tamil diplomat who was our ambassador in Vienna amongst other places, but he is a brave man. His predecessor as Deputy Secretary General of the Peace Secretariat, the scholar Kethesh Loganathan, was assassinated after websites supportive of the Tigers described him as a collaborator.

In the armed forces there are senior Tamil officers, but enlistment has been forcibly discouraged amongst the young. Recently there were several minority applications for the police, but hardly any Tamils came for the interview. This is understandable in a context in which so many brave servicemen of Tamil or Muslim origin have been killed. Shortly after the Ceasefire Agreement, following the publicization of those working with the army, several were killed including two brilliant intelligence officers.

This decimation of Tamils opposed to the LTTE extended also to politicians who were committed to the democratic process. Recently the People's Liberation Organization for Tamil Eelam (PLOTE) reported that the LTTE used the CRFA to kill over one thousand civilians - 'Apart from the killings of civilians, the outfit has also targeted a large number of cadres of rival political parties. Around hundred PLOTE cadres have been killed by the LTTE in the past four years'. Douglas Devananda, the senior Tamil Minister now in the cabinet has survived several assassination attempts.

Certainly Mr Chairman there have been flaws in the Sri Lankan polity, and the excesses of the government of 1983 must be remembered and atoned for. But such practices have not occurred since. The current government is committed, as indeed its predecessors for the last twenty years or more have been, to policies of pluralism. Tamil was made an official language in 1987 by constitutional amendment, to remedy a situation that should never have arisen, but at least through that, through the assertion of the need for at least bilingualism amongst officials, we have done our best to uphold better values.

We deplore therefore the attempt to denigrate the Sri Lankan state, when in fact the chief proponents of racism, directed against fellow Tamils who believe in democracy and others, are the Tigers. Recently, when a former Australian Foreign Minister who sadly does not do his homework, was challenged about a speech he made in which he insinuated that Sri Lanka was responsible for genocide and ethnic cleansing, he passed the buck to his assistant who seemed to have written the speech, and who claimed that ethnic cleansing had indeed taken place in Sri Lanka, in 1990, when the Tigers had driven Muslims out of the northern province that they claim as their traditional homeland. To give the Tigers their due, they have not practised such ethnic cleansing since. But it is disingenuous of the representative of Interfaith International to bandy similar charges when they apply most conspicuously to the organization he seems to adulate.