Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Friends, Sinhalese, Countrymen, Lend Me Your Ears

By Anandaraj L. Ponnambalam -July 24, 2013

Anandaraj L. Ponnambalam

With due respects to William Shakespeare, and to be read in conjunction with:

“Vanni 2002 – 2006; What I Owe the People of the Vanni” – CT of Feb 7, 2013
“A Plea to the Pundits: Seek Truth, Accountability, and Justice” – CT of April 26, 2013

Friends, Sinhalese, countrymen, lend me you ears;

I come to bury the Nation of the Tamils and the People of the Vanni, not to praise them.

The evil that men do lives after them,

The good is oft interred with their bones;

So let it be with the Nation of the Tamils and the People of the Vanni. The noble Sri Lankan government and the noble Sri Lankan military

Hath told you the Nation of the Tamils and the People of the Vanni were ambitious, separatists and terrorists;

If it were so, these were grievous faults,

And grievously hath the Nation of the Tamils and the People of the Vanni answered it.

Here, under leave of the Sri Lankan government and the rest,–

For the Sri Lankan government and the Sri Lankan military are honorable men;–

So they all, all honorable men,–

Come I to speak in the funeral of the Nation of the Tamils and the People of the Vanni.

July 24, 2013 |

“Dr. K. Vigneswaran, a member of the APRC Experts Committee, told us that Tamils do not believe that devolving powers to the district level will meet their aspirations. The concept of the merged Northeast Province speaks to their need for security and for proper representation, he said. Tamils fear that the Districts, whose heads are to be appointed by the President, will be subject to manipulation by the central government. Tamils believe that “colonization” of their traditional areas by Sinhalese would accelerate. Further, Vigneswaran argued, the SLFP proposal removes the powers of police, land and irrigation from the provinces, but replaces them with nothing. He asserted that reserving the security, land and water portfolios to the central government leaves it unclear what is left to be devolved to the districts.” the US Embassy Colombo informed Washington.

Dr. K. Vigneswaran

The Colombo Telegraph found the related leaked cable from the WikiLeaks database. The ‘Confidential’ cable discusses the governing SLFP’s devolution proposals. The cable was written on May 04, 2007 by the US embassy Charge d’Affaires James R. Moore.

Moor wrote; “A senior UNP Member of Parliament we contacted said he had spoken by phone on April 3 to party leader Ranil Wickremesinghe. The MP believed that the newspaper had taken Choksy’s comments out of context. What Choksy meant, he said, was that only the UNP and SLFP, working together, could put forward a viable proposal that could command the necessary majority in the South and in Parliament. However, he noted that the UNP had for months insisted that the 2000 proposal by then-President Chandrika Kumaratunga was the minimum benchmark to meet. The SLFP proposals represented a step back even from the status quo under the 13th Amendment and were therefore ‘a waste of time’. He and three UNP working committee members we saw separately all expressed deep skepticism that the SLFP proposals were serious. It appeared to them that the President was simply trying to play the ball back to the UNP. They saw this as an attempt to shift the onus to the UNP for advocating concessions to the LTTE. They made it clear that the UNP was disinclined to fall into this trap.” Read More