Resolve education chaos or face armed insurrection, says TNA

August 20, 2012

by Zacki Jabbar

The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) yesterday warned that unless the chaos in the country’s education system was resolved expeditiously, it could lead to another armed insurrection.

The Tamil uprising had actually begun in London in the 1970’, long before LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran entered the scene; Tamil students who were affected by the standardisation policy had been forced to go to England to pursue higher studies after their parents sold whatever assets they had, TNA MP M. A. Sumanthiran told a news conference in Colombo.

He said that the youth were bitter about what had happened to them in their motherland and it became one of the primary reasons for the ethnic conflict that had been dragging on for decades.

EPRLF leader, Suresh Premachandran, was a living example of a Tamil who had abandoned his studies in London and gone to Palestine for military training, Sumanthiran said, adding that the pioneering General Union of Eelam Students and Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students comprised many like minded persons.

A countrywide protest would be launched before the next budget to ensure that sufficient funds were allocated to provide ample educational opportunities up to university level, the MP said.

Sumanthiran said that the current budgetary allocation for education was a joke when compared to the monies being wasted by the Rajapaksa government on propaganda activities.

The seeds of conflict had been sown once again with the Z-Score crisis and other related problems. History could repeat itself unless urgent remedial measures were implemented, Sumanthiran noted.

The UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe was also of the view that one of the main reasons for terrorism in Sri Lanka was the mistakes that had been committed in the education sector.

When avenues for academic progress were closed, the youth got frustrated and violent. The government should immediately constitute a Parliamentary Select Committee to do a thorough analysis of the drawbacks in the educational system before it was too late, he said.