HOLOCAUST RE-VISITED

The Action Group of Tamils in Colombo (AGOTIC) watched with mounting horror as the Peoples Alliance (PA) Government shifted from "negotiated peace" to "battle for peace" in Sri Lanka. Violence against Tamils has escalated manyfold.

The Holocaust of July 1983 under the United National Party (UNP) Government is being systematically re-enacted with increased ferocity under the PA Government, after 19 April. In May many young Tamils in the South began to disappear and their mutilated corpses surfaced in various lakes and water bodies in and around Colombo.

Meanwhile military operations in the North-East Province (NEP) continue to exact heavy civilian casualties. Aerial bombing and artillery shelling in the Jaffna peninsula have killed many hundreds of Tamil civilians, including women and children. Thousands have been injured and made homeless. Tamil civilians have reportedly been used as human mine-detectors by the Armed Forces in the Batticaloa District of the NEP.

The Government has claimed that the war is necessary because the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) spurned offers to reach a negotiated settlement. However, President Kumaratunga's Devolution Proposals for peace were announced on the 3rd of August, more than three weeks (24 days) AFTER the current military campaign began with Operation Leap Forward on 9 July. Moreover the Proposals are only the President's "basic ideas". The PA Government has neither reached a consensus nor formulated its proposals for conflict resolution. And the Tamil people find the President's Proposals in no way relevant to attaining peace.

The Government has also claimed that the war is only against the LTTE; that it is not a war against the Tamil people. Does the Government believe that the LTTE fell from the skies, that its cadres are alien creatures from another planet? The fact is that the LTTE cadres are the sons and daughters of Tamil fathers and mothers; they are the brothers and sisters of Tamil men and women. A war against the LTTE is a war against the Tamil Nation: thus more than thirty (30) school children were killed in the bombing of a school in the Jaffna peninsula (at Nagarcoil) on 22 September.

Most of the Colombo-based Sri Lankan Tamil Members of Parliament (MPs) and their parties represent no one but themselves. Many of the MPs secured their seats with less than one dozen, repeat one dozen, votes "engineered" at the last elections. All Sri Lankan Tamil MPs and their parties have shamelessly collaborated in fostering the mythical distinction between the LTTE and the Tamil people. Thus representatives of these Tamil parties who met at a five-star hotel in Colombo on 29 September agreed that "it was necessary for the Government to counter the LTTE" with the proviso that "Tamil civilians were not unduly affected by any Government action" (Sunday Observer, 1/10/95, p.1). Presumably they will be quite happy if Tamil civilians are only duly affected.

On the economic front the war against the Tamil Nation takes the form of an economic embargo. Economic activities have been disrupted in the NEP due to the lack of fertiliser and raw material. Supplies of even essential food and medicine are critically low. The Tamil people in the north are facing famine conditions.

The official explanation is that these draconian measures are aimed at weakening the LTTE. But the evident intention is to administer collective punishment to the Tamil Nation as part of the Government's counter insurgency tactic, in the vain hope that the Tamils will turn against the LTTE. In the long run they seek to de-populate Tamils from the northern region. The obvious aims are to undermine the social base of the LTTE and to destroy the territorial basis of Tamil Nationhood.

The attacks upon the Tamil people on the military and economic fronts constitute nothing less than a genocidal campaign of unprecedented proportions. Every dead Tamil - be it a man, woman or child - is a "Tiger". Civilian casualties are virtually unknown in official communiques. Press censorship ensures that the true situation goes unreported in the Sri Lankan press.

AGOTIC recommends that the visiting parliamentarians travel to the Jaffna peninsula to observe the rapidly deteriorating situation at first hand.

Never before in their blood-soaked post-independence history have the Sri Lankan Tamils been subjected to such mind-chilling levels of State terror as they now suffer under the PA Government. It is a tragedy of national proportions that most Sinhalese and Tamil "liberals", "leftists" and "progressives" in the South have spinelessly acquiesced in the slaughter of the Tamil people.

The Sudu Nelum ("White Lotus") Movement, initiated by the Government in August, is attempting to mobilise Sinhala people to "battle for peace". It marks the beginning of a Sinhala-Buddhist Dharma Yuddha (Holy War). The white lotus flower is a potent symbol of Buddhist worship in Sri Lanka. The PA Government has invoked this religious symbol to legitimise the military campaign being conducted by the Armed forces in the NEP. Never during its 17 years of misrule did the previous UNP Government sink to such abysmal depths of Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism. It is no accident that the Operation Thunder Strike now in progress was launched during Navarathiri, a deeply religious festival of Tamil Hindus.

It requires a galactic leap of faith to believe that the present Government would willingly implement a genuine devolution of power which will adequately address the Tamil Question. But many of the Colombo-based Sri Lankan Tamil parties seem to have made just such a gigantic leap of faith. Thus they still continue to support the PA Government in Parliament; at best they merely abstain from voting against the Government or are absent in Parliament during voting time, which political jugglery fools no one.

AGOTIC calls upon the visiting parliamentarians to insist that the Government stops violence against Tamils and that it starts negotiations with the LTTE immediately

AGOTIC demands that the Sri Lankan Tamil political parties represented in Parliament withdraw their overt and covert support for the PA Government as a matter of Tamil national honour.

Dr S Sathananthan Ph D (Cantab)
Secretary
5 October 1995