I thank the Chairman and committee members for giving me this opportunity to speak. I am a Sinhaleseby origin, and my parents do not speak a word of Tamil, but I started learning Tamil by ear in July 1983, after seeing so many Tamils being massacred and burned alive by the supporters of the Sri Lankan Government of the day. According to official statistics, 3,000 people were killed and 500,000 people were displaced all within one week in 1983. My ethical response to this was to learn the language of the other, so I am bilingual today.
Over the last 25 years, I and like minded colleagues have been working on a cross-community basis. As the ceasefire collapsed, many of us had to leave the country. I speak in front of the committee today because I want to go back home and work for my country.
We would like to make four appeals to the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs. The first appeal is a call to halt the Sri Lankan Government's military onslaught in Vanni. The conflict in Sri Lanka has often been depicted as a conflict between two parties where innocent civilians are trapped. This depiction undermines the political reality and the dynamic of the conflict. According to the one of the prominent Ministers of the Sri Lankan Government, all those who are trapped in the Vanni region are relatives of the Tamil Tigers, and are therefore legitimate targets of the war against that group. The defence secretary of the Sri Lankan Government clearly stated last week that Tamil Tigers have bombed ten times the area of the Government controlled areas, and that the Sri Lankan Government has retaliated 10,000 times with aerial bombardment.
It is clear that it is a war against the Tamils in Sri Lanka, and their struggle for freedom which had been ongoing for 60 years. The first phase of the struggle was based on Gandhi-style protests which were crushed brutally. The second phase was the armed phase. We appeal to the Irish Government to call on the Sri Lankan Government to halt its military onslaught on Vanni.
The second appeal is a call to allow immediate humanitarian aid to save the people from death. A group of my friends from Colombo visited the border area of Vavuniya yesterday. I was in contact with them over Skype, as most telephones are tapped by the Sri Lankan intelligence services. They told me that people are dying of starvation. The Mullaitivu district health officer has recorded 13 deaths due to starvation. Children have begun to eat poisonous wild herbs and have been hospitalised. Therefore, we appeal to the Irish Government to call on the Sri Lankan Government to allow immediate humanitarian aid as fast as possible.
The third appeal relates to the fact that the Tigers have often been condemned for not allowing civilians to leave the war zone. A question asked less often is why should the people concerned leave the area. It is their land, property, school and church. They have been living there for ages; therefore, why should they leave? Those who were forced to leave are being detained in internment camps by the Sri Lankan military in government controlled areas. The group of friends who are representatives of various NGOs communicated to me yesterday that males had been separated from females and that some males were disappearing, while others were being interrogated. The Sri Lankan Government has appealed to the international community to assist it to evacuate people from the region to government controlled areas. That is a measure that would promote the use of internment camps. We would like the Irish Government to call on the Sri Lankan Government to halt work on internment camps and halt the forced evacuation of the people.
The fourth appeal is to call on the Sri Lankan Government to re-establish parity of esteem and promote a negotiated settlement. Parity of esteem was the basis of the 2002 ceasefire agreement. People like me and my colleagues who are working on a cross-community basis found the democratic base of the ceasefire agreement to be a golden opportunity to build understanding between the two communities. In fact, the ceasefire agreement did not include concrete mechanisms to sort out the political crisis but it recognised in principle the need for confidence building measures such as demilitarisation, resettlement and rehabilitation. That means the Sri Lankan army should leave the civilian areas they have been occupying for 15 years in Tamil areas, allow civilians to resettle and a rehabilitation process to be carried out.
Six rounds of talks were held between the two parties in major cities in Europe and Asia and three concrete sub-committees were formed to implement the confidence building measures. Unfortunately, due to four or five major factors the sub-committees became defunct. One of the biggest blows to the ceasefire agreement was in 2005 when a new political formation began in Sri Lanka. Two political parties which do not recognise that the Tamils have an historical, political set of grievances formed a coalition with the party of the current President with the aim of upholding the unitary character of the state, against which the Tamils had been agitating for 60 years, non-violently and with arms. The second principle of the coalition was to abrogate the ceasefire agreement and remove the Norwegian facilitators from the conflict. The third promise given to the Sinhala constituency was to carry out a military operation.
After the victory of the government it was only a matter of who would fire the first shot, the political landmines were already set. Unfortunately, the EU ban on the LTTE indirectly encouraged the Sri Lankan Government's military options and since then, as Ms Loughnane clearly said, most of us have had to leave the country. Two of my personal friends, who were human rights activists working with Amnesty International, were killed. One was a journalist. A total of 45 Sinhala journalists have fled the country, five of whom are my closest friends. Since then 7,000 Tamils have been killed and 800,000 displaced. Our appeal, taking on board the principles of the Irish peace process, one of which is parity of esteem, is to remove the ban on the Tigers and establish parity of esteem in recognition that the conflict cannot be resolved militarily. The only means of arriving at a solution is through dialogue and political negotiations.
Until last December many NGOs and foreign governments, including the co-chairs, accepted that a military solution was not possible, that the only way was through political negotiations. We can see from the statements of the European Union and the central government of India that there is a call to the LTTE to surrender arms. That indirectly promotes or encourages the Sri Lankan Government's military option. There is much pressure on one side to give up arms and less pressure on the Sri Lankan Government to stop the military onslaught and abide by the rules and principles of the 2002 ceasefire agreement. It was the Sri Lankan Government which withdrew from the ceasefire agreement unilaterally in February 2008.
I thank committee members for listening to this brief account. We would welcome comments and questions in order that something concrete can emerge from the meeting.
