SANGAM.ORG
Ilankai Tamil Sangam, USA, Inc.
Association of Tamils of Sri Lanka in the USA
By Wakeley Paul, Esq.
The Sri Lankan Government is using every possible weapon to brow beat the Tamil Rehabilitation Organization(TRO), which was praised by the Wall Street Journal as the most efficient dispenser of Tsunami relief anywhere on the island. The government, with the aid of a racist M.D. in New Jersey and foreign public relation firms, is doing its damnedest to try and suggest that the TRO has been anything but devoted to humanitarian aid.
In this regard, the U.S. government must understand two basic facts. The SL government under President Kumaratunge failed miserably to send any fraction of the aid sent from foreign donors from abroad to the NorthEast, where the Tsunami damage was the worst. The U.S. government sent two former Presidents to remedy this situation. Ultimately, an agreement was reached, whereby the LTTE would have the right to distribute the funds allocated for NorthEastern Tsunami relief. President Rajapakse made it his election pledge that this agreement would not be honored. He has not changed that position. The government is now doing all in their power to prevent the most efficient distributors of aid in the NE, the TRO, from receiving the funds so necessary for them to perform their highly commendable humanitarian task. It is the TRO and they alone who have done everything in their power to help victims to try to march briskly out of the ruins.
The Rajapakse government is doing all it can to contain rather than resolve the problem arising from the Tsunami tragedy. They seem determined that the NorthEast should flounder in a cloud of putrid dust.
We Tamils are not a bunch of sheep. We will voice our just discontent whenever it is called for and will never be adoring cowed constituents of corrupt and discriminatory Sinhalese governments. They and the U.S. government had better realize this.
If the TRO is denied its right to perform its functions with the much needed legitimate funds it receives from expatriates, the NorthEastern victims of the Tsunami will end being dispossessed, isolated and abandoned.
The current S.L government is doing all it can, to do as little as they can get away with, and hopes to make this policy permanent with U.S. aid.
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