Friday, 11th July 2014
By Dinoo Kelleghan
IT is a crying shame that a country that has dragged itself up by the bootstraps from twin ruthless Marxist and ethnic insurgencies that devastated its economy and killed almost 200,000 people during the past 45 years should become a pawn in the game to bash the Australian government over its anti people-smuggling strategy.
Those who demonise Sri Lanka are acting on misinformation fed to them by a manipulative pro-Tamil Tiger terrorist lobby that makes political gain by painting the country as a sinkhole for rule of law and human rights, specifically for the Tamil minority.
The country is by no means perfect: there is corruption, political thuggery, a parliament unhealthily weighted because the main opposition party, once mighty, has shrivelled to a peanut, splintered and unelectable.
But it’s not Nazi Germany.
And the Tamil minority has the same rights as anyone else.
The street signs are in English, Sinhalese and Tamil. There are Tamil television stations, and government documents mostly come in Sinhalese and Tamil. Tamil children study in Tamil, there are Hindu temples celebrating extravagantly colourful festivals wherever there is a sizeable Tamil community in the Sinhalese-dominated south as well as the Tamil-dominated north. The armed forces, once wild and acting with scant regard for human life, have been transformed into a tightly disciplined force whose members receive regular human rights training overseas and routinely act in UN peacekeeping efforts around the world.
Nazis?
Those who fling the allegation around should be held to account. Malcolm Fraser will look in vain for Tamils scrubbing pavements with toothbrushes if he ever has a first-hand look at Sri Lanka — the country, he tweeted to the world, that treated its Tamils the way the Third Reich treated its doomed Jews.
Mr Fraser won’t see death camps or a fascist state. He’ll see Tamils and Sinhalese rejoicing in being able to work together without being bombed or blown up.
Genocide? The population of the capital, Colombo, was 30 per cent Tamil in 2001 at the height of the civil war, and now Tamils and Muslims outnumber Sinhalese. Many of those Tamils fled the fighting in the north but choose to stay in the Sinhala-dominated south even though the war is over.
Of course, the jobs are in the south, but would that keep them there if they feared persecution?
Will Mr Fraser look for rule of law? He’ll find it, faulty though it is with corruption and inadequate resources.
Is there anything in The Australian’s reporting of the humdrum court process of the returned boatload of 41 asylum-seekers and people-smugglers to suggest evil?
Presidential, parliamentary and provincial and local council elections have been held all over the country since the end of the civil war in 2009. Tamils have exercised their right to vote freely, choosing the Tamil Nationalist Alliance for representing their interests in the north but leaving intact the thumping majority of President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s United People’s Freedom Alliance for national government.
The TNA, which reflects the agenda of the Tamil Tigers, travels freely overseas to lobby foreign governments to impose sanctions against Sri Lanka and successfully lobbied the EU to handicap exports on “human rights” grounds.
There is no decree sequestering Tamil property: two of the six richest Sri Lankans listed by Forbes magazine last year are Tamils, Hari and Mano Selvanathan.
Kristallnacht? Muslim-owned shops, not Tamil, are being targeted in scattered attacks by radical Sinhala monks whose Buddhist Theravada brothers in Myanmar have been slaughtering Muslims with an impunity not tolerated in Sri Lanka.
Perhaps the telling rejoinder to Fraser’s assertion of a Gestapo state in Sri Lanka comes from the Tamil heartland in Jaffna, where the Chief Minister is a Tamil former Supreme Court justice, the TNA’s CV Wigneswaran.
Two media reports illustrate why the asylum-seeker lobby here should keep its heart warm but take with a grain of salt the information fed by Tiger lobbyists.
Last month, Mr Wigneswaran told India’s The Hindu newspaper he lived with “an occupying military force which systematically seeks to subjugate the populace, change the demography, destabilise the economy, impose an alien culture and stultify legitimate democratic aspirations”. Hot stuff, and at odds with his assertion the previous month that he had summarily rejected the army’s application to buy 20 blocks of land in Jaffna. “People no longer fear the army,” he added in The Hindu article. He praised the “self-confidence that has dawned on our people ... we have still been able to usher in a sense of purpose and confidence among our people.”
Persecution? Genocide? Let the buyer of propaganda beware.
Dinoo Kelleghan is a Sri Lankan-born Australian with part-Tamil ancestry who was foreign news editor of this paper when Sri Lanka’s civil war broke out in 1983. She was a member of the Refugee Review Tribunal for seven years and was assisted by DFAT to make a fact-finding visit to Sri Lanka to aid refugee determination. She lived in Sri Lanka for much of last year and visited Jaffna interviewing students, academics and returned asylum-seekers who all but one acknowledged having left for economic gain. She found Sri Lanka to be safe and thriving.
