GEORGE TOWN: An academic has hailed Hindraf Makkal Sakti’s decision to revive its suit against the British government, saying it will serve to draw domestic and international attention to the plight of Malaysian Indians.
“The success of the suit is not relevant; it is the intended message that matters,” said Azmi Sharom, who teaches law at Universiti Malaya.
The class action suit demands US$4 trillion in compensation for Malaysians descended from Indians whom the British brought to Malaysia as indentured labour. Hindraf claims that the British government, when it granted independence to Malaya, left the Indians without representation and at the mercy of Malay extremists.
Hindraf’s London-based chairman, P Waythamoorthy, originally filed the suit on Aug 31, 2007, but it stalled following a Malaysian clampdown on Hindraf that included the arrest of several lawyers under the Internal Security Act.
Waythamoorthy announced recently that he would file the suit again.
Hindraf’s lawyers in London told FMT that they needed more documents on the colonial period in Malaysia, kept by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). The movement’s chief legal counsel in London, Imran Khan, will head a three-man delegation to Malaysia next month on a fact-finding mission.
Azmi met Waythamoorthy in Bangkok last year during an international conference and they discussed the suit.
He told FMT he was aware that Waythamoorthy and his small team of researchers were working hard to obtain and study thousands of relevant documents in Britain’s archives.
“From my personal point of view, Hindraf has every right to file the case on behalf of all Malaysian Indians,” he said.
“It’s an incredible effort by an ordinary person to push the issues pertaining to a community’s plight into the international and domestic limelight.”
He dismissed suggestions by certain quarters, notably in Umno, that the suit would threaten Malay interests.
“The extremist, nationalist and right wing Malay elements have their right to talk about the so-called Malay supremacy,” he said.
“But we have our right to ignore them.”
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Nirupama Menon Rao’s Ultimate Criminality towards the Eelam Tamils
Most of us, when we are leaving the country for a prolonged period of
time, would prefer to spend the last few days at home with our
families. Not so with India’s Foreign Secretary Nirupama Menon Rao;
she hurriedly left for Colombo on Friday night 29 August, to spend her
last three days with the genocidal Sri Lankan President Rajapaksa. She
was the Indian High Commission in Colombo during the critical period
from 2004 to 2006, when the Mullivaaikkal genocide was hatched.
According to sources, Rao had been given a personal invitation to
visit Colombo before the end of her term by President Mahinda
Rajapaksa when she was part of the troika of top Indian officials to
the island nation in June. “A few days ago, the President wrote a
letter to Rao inviting her to Sri Lanka,” said a senior MEA official.
After reaching Colombo on Friday night, Rao was hosted to a farewell
breakfast meeting on Saturday morning by President Rajapakse, with
whom she shared a close rapport.
“There is no official mission or objective to this visit,” said the
official. Rao will return on Sunday, which will be the last day of her
two-year term. She will shortly be going to Washington to take charge
as India’s Ambassador to the United States. The Brahminic newspaper,
Hindu, saying that the meeting was a result of spontaneous invitation
from Rajapaksa, cited officials describing the meeting as a “farewell”
Rajapaksa had wanted to accord her because of the special relationship
she shared with the country. But political observers said Nirupama’s
fascination with Colombo on the eve of her retirement is connected to
her new assignment as India’s ambassador to the US.
This is not a farewell but the beginning of a new line-up in the
crime-filled war partnership in Colombo and in the National
Security-Foreign Service junta in New Delhi. Their original planning
was sabotaged by WikiLeak and Channel 4 revelations and Colombo and
Delhi are now standing exposed in front of the world community. They
are now forging a shield to evade international justice and to impose
a silencing political model in the island, a political analyst in
Colombo said.
Evidence of this is already available as soon as she departed from
Colombo. The president’s powerful brother, Gotabaya Rajapaksa admitted
for the first time that there were civilian casualties at the end of
the war, but he downplayed it as collateral unavoidable causality and
not a deliberate attempt to kill to kill the Tamils.
“The Sri Lankan
government is finally admitting that its forces caused civilians
losses during the conflict’s final months, but unconvincingly claims
no responsibility,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights
Watch. “This is just the latest and glossiest effort to whitewash
mounting evidence of government atrocities during the fighting.”
“The use of unmanned aerial drones by Sri Lankan commanders to gain a
clear picture of the battlefield raises concerns that artillery
attacks on hospitals and other civilian areas were deliberate, and not
mere mistakes resulting from the ‘fog of war,’” Adams said.
“The Sri Lankan Defense Ministry report is yet another feeble attempt
to convince the world, despite growing evidence to the contrary, that
government forces committed no crimes in the conflict with the Tamil
Tigers,” Adams said. “Concerned governments should use this factually
challenged report to jump-start international accountability efforts
as the UN Panel of Experts recommended.”
Nirupama Menon Rao has a close working relationship with Shiv Shankar
Menon, the current National Security Advisor of India, who previously
as Foreign Secretary was one of the key persons handled India’s role
in the genocidal war in the island of Sri Lanka. The other prominent
Keralite mafia M.K.Narayanan, who was National Security Advisor of
India at the time of Mullivaaikkal genocide, is now Governor of West
Bengal. Madam Sonia takes care of all those who carried out her
biddings and retire them to cosy jobs, not withstanding their failures
in their duty to secure India against genuine terrorist attacks.
Narayanan was NSA during the Bombay terrorist attack in 2008 and
Shivshankar was NSA during a similar attack in Bombay in 2011; both
were busy with LTTE ‘terrorism’ in a foreign country when their own
country was exposed to grievous risks from people who wanted to
destroy India.
Nirupama Rao’s position as foreign secretary will be taken over by
Ranjan Mathai, another native of Kerala. There are two types of
succession in India – one is family succession like the Nehru family
and the other is tribal succession like the Keralite mafias. That was
how the Keralites dominated the Indian intelligence organization, RAW,
and important positions in the Indian administrative service. They
were so powerful that they could even override the recommendations of
Indian IPKF commanders. The Eelam Tamil plight would not have reached
this stage, had it not been for these people; their hands are stained
by the blood of 200,000 over Tamil deaths since Rajiv Gandhi
interfered in Sri Lanka in 1987.
The American diplomats as per WikiLeaks had warned that Narayanan
along with Principal Secretary TKA Nair, constitute a Keralite ‘mafia’
in the Prime Minister's Office. "In a bureaucratic culture dominated
by North Indian Hindi speakers, this Keralite lock on the PM's inner
bureaucratic circle represents something of an anomaly, which could in
the long term create new faultlines around the Prime Minister," the
leaked document elaborated on the impact of the "Keralite mafia."
The ‘faultlines’ are now beginning to appear in Tamil Nadu.
Karunanidhi, who sacrificed the Tamils in Eelam to shield his family
against corruption charges, supported the Delhi Pundits. He was
unceremoniously removed from his power by Jayalalithaa, who has taken
over the reins in Tamil Nadu. The first thing she did was to pass a
resolution unanimously in the State Assembly stating that Rajapaksa be
brought to justice, failing which India must place economic sanctions
against Sri Lanka. Two months later she is reiterating that the Indian
government’s economic embargo is now overdue. Addressing a news
conference in Chennai, she asserted that AIADMK lawmakers would be
raising the issue before other parties during the Parliament's Monsoon
Session beginning on August 1.
"Yes, our Members of Parliament will definitely be raising the issue
on the floors of both houses of Parliament, with regard to the
atrocities committed against Sri Lankan Tamils and the resolutions
passed in the Tamil Nadu assembly to declare those guilty of war
crimes as war criminals and to see that they are made to appear before
the International Criminal Court for inquiry," said Jayalalithaa.
"We have also been insisting that an economic embargo should be
imposed against Sri Lanka. Our Members of Parliament will raise these
issues in both the houses," she added on 31 July. True to her word
AIADMK members led by M Thambidurai were on their feet raising slogans
on the plight of Lankan Tamils as the Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar
was introducing the Sri Lankan Parliament Speaker Chamal Rajapaksa and
his team, who happened to be in the house on 1 August. As this
embarrassed the visitors the speaker was very upset.
"They have come at our invitation and you must honour and respect
them," Kumar told the protesting members sternly. As the speaker
wished the visiting delegation a pleasant stay in the country, the
Congress members thumped their desks vigorously so as to drown cries
of 'shame, shame' from AIADMK members.
American Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, unexpectedly visited
Jayalalithaa in Chennai last month. In spite of the Indian
government’s advice to Hillary to avoid political discussions with
Jaya, she still ventured into the plight of Eelam Tamils. At the end
of her meeting she said that the Tamil problem in Sri Lanka must be
solved by an innovative method. Perhaps, because of Indian objections,
she didn’t even have a clue as to what that method would be.
Vaiko, one of the Tamil Nadu politicians, after watching the Channel 4
film on the Mullivaaikkal genocide, said every Tamil heart bleeds at
the sight of the sufferings of the victims. In trying to safeguard the
integrity and sovereignty of Sri Lanka the Delhi Pundits are
endangering the integrity and sovereignty of India. Those in Delhi
including the Keralite mafias, have scant respect for the feelings and
sentiments of the Tamils worldwide. Many Tamils are deceived with the
policies of India. This is exactly what happened to hill tribes, the
original natives of India. To exploit the riches under their feet the
government evicted them from their homeland; the net result was the
Maoist insurrection, which has shown no sign of abating.
Just before her departure to Colombo on Friday, 29 July Nirupama Rao
gave an interview to Headlines Today, which had the distinction of
televising the Channel 4 documentary on the Sri Lankan genocide in
India. Obviously she had to counter and, perhaps, justify what took
place in the killing field. In the whole process she was meandering
aimlessly and at times incoherently during the interview. Here are
some of the snap shots of the interview.
“Obviously they have to look at this (cases of human rights violation)
very carefully, there will be, I am sure they will be assessing the
impact of that documentary (Sri Lanka's Killing fields). I believe
they are in touch with the western governments. In the last days of
the war, I would call it a war, they were fighting a terrorist outfit
LTTE and it was the last days of the conflict and we have seen around
the world. I am not justifying it, but it was a war zone.”
She says she was not justifying it, yet she calls LTTE a ‘terrorist
outfit’. What would she call the racialist Sinhala army? Is it not a
terrorist outfit? During the last days of the war most of the
civilized governments wanted Sri Lanka to go slow and save the
civilians and accept the surrender of the combatants; instead they not
only used excessive fire to kill everybody on the ground but also
drove the tanks over the dead and the wounded and raped and murdered
the victims. Please remember it was a war against its own people. Then
she went on.
“Very often things can go wrong in war, civilians can get caught and
civilians become victims.”
“I think the
civil war in SL was a human tragedy. You think of the people killed,
maimed, got displaced in the northern part of the country. On the
government side, many young soldiers were recruited from the
villages.”
Instead of shedding crocodile tears for the victims she should know
that there is the Geneva Convention and many others governing the
rules of war. The war that was fought in Sri Lanka was a barbaric war
that followed no rules; it had no witnesses, as the foreign media and
NGOs were asked to leave the war zone. India and Sri Lanka were
determined that everyone associated with the LTTE were eliminated.
Hence, the need for heavy weapons against unarmed civilians. All the
countries, including India knew what was happening on the ground. US,
Britain and France were calling for a ceasefire to save the civilians,
and as per WikiLeaks, two Keralite mafias were playing all sides to
continue the war, until all those in the war zone were killed or
maimed. The barbaric Sinhalese soldiers added to the agony of the
victims by raping and murdering the women in front of their kith and
kin. What a heinous crime! Hold on please, she had not finished yet.
“In the deep south of the country also, people lost their lives. These
wounds need to be healed. We must think of restoring normalcy in the
country, rehabilitation of the country and allowing minority to have
the voice, to be able to realise their aspirations, as citizens who
can contribute to the progress of their country, a lot of work needs
to be done.”
The young Sinhalese soldiers, recruited by the government, came in
with the full knowledge that their job was to subjugate the Tamils and
if they had died in battle it was their choice. If Prabhakaran had
killed his own people, he did it for three reasons. He had no patience
for informers, corrupted officials and rapist. The other set of people
whom he eliminated was those who were opponents, who were
treacherously working against him. Even the opponents of Prabhakaran
had acknowledged that the LTTE was a very disciplined and organized
army. There was not a single case of a Tiger cadre raping a Sinhalese
woman or killing people out of the combat zone. If there was any
bombing in the South it was in retaliation for Sinhalese bombing in
the North. Even most of the Indian commanders of the Indian Peace
Keeping Force have a lot of respect for Prabhakaran and LTTE, as a
disciplined and responsible army.
Then she ventured into the realm of healing the wounds, created by
India and Sri Lanka, and restoring normalcy in the country, which was
also shattered by India and Sri Lanka, as if some balm will do the
job. Sonia and her diplomats had done so much harm to the Tamil
psychic that it would take centuries to heal the wounds. One of the
bigwigs in the RAW, Col. R.Hariharan, a great supporter of Indian
objectives, have now concluded that India should have allowed the
February 2002 Ceasefire to succeed. By helping Rajapaksa to break the
ceasefire and start the war, India had done not only a great
disservice to the Tamils but also brought in the Chinese: thus
exposing India’s southern flanks to Chinese infiltration. All these
took place when Nirupama was Indian High Commissioner to Sri Lanka.
Before that the Chinese presence in China was almost zero. They didn’t
want to antagonize the LTTE; it was only when they were sure that the
Tigers were about to be defeated by a combined force of India and Sri
Lanka, they moved into the island in a big way.
Having lost track of her arguments she took refuge under Gandhian
philosophy. I thought she was going to expound some profound wisdom,
like Gandhiji’s Salt March, when he marched 20 odd miles to the sea
just to take a few drops of sea water in his mouth. This was his
symbolic gesture to show that Indians do not have to pay salt tax in
their own land. Today, the Eelam Tamils are asking the same question;
why should they be raped, murdered and live like slaves in their own
land. According to her, Gandhi merely said that “SL is India’s nearest
neighbour”. I am of the view that you don’t need a great man like
Mahatma Gandhi to come out with that great wisdom. Any child in Kerala
would have told her that. This is the type of diplomats that India has
– totally ignorant and uneducated. Navi Pillay, the Human Rights
chief, having been rebuffed by Manmohan Singh when she tried to stop
the war in Sri Lanka in May 2009, wondered whether she was in the land
of Mahatma Gandhi. If Gandhi revisited India today, he would commit
suicide for having fathered such a nation.
She continued, “and as a nearest neighbour we also have certain
obligations to be aware and look at this 2020 vision, we have to avoid
any partial and jumping to conclusions based on what we see coming in
from other sources.”
Here she casts doubts on the horrific scenes in the Channel 4 ‘Killing
Field’,as she says it came “the other sources” presumably not from Sri
Lanka or India. UN sponsored specialists have confirmed that the
scenes in the ‘Killing Field’ are authentic.
She don’t seem to have the faintest idea of what their obligations
were as neighbours. Committing genocide on Eelam Tamils on such a vast
scale is definitely not one of them, especially when there are sixty
million Tamils across the Palk Straits. It is not a sin for the Tamils
to express a desire to go free. The Eelam Tamils have tried to live in
a united Sri Lanka for the last sixty years; what they experienced was
death and destruction. Asking the Tamils to “look at this 2020 vision”
is a puerile attempt to blur the vision of the Tamils and prolong
their genocide. Here are some ideas of what the Sinhalese have in mind
for the Tamils under her vision 2020.
J.R.Jayawardene, Former President of Sri Lanka - Daily Telegraph,
11th July 1983
"I am not worried about the opinion of the Tamil people... now we
cannot think of them, not about their lives or their opinion... the
more you put pressure in the north, the happier the Sinhala people
will be here... Really if I starve the Tamils out, the Sinhala people
will be happy."
Chandrika Kumaratunga, while addressing a South African television
sometime in the 1990s as the Sri Lankan President said that Blacks in
South Africa were entitled to fight for their rights because they were
the sons of the soil whereas Tamils did not belong to the country and
hence they cannot fight for their rights in Sri Lanka.
D.B. Wijetunge, another former president compared the Sinhala
'majority race' as a tree and the Tamils and other communities as
vines that can get entangled in it and grow.
Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka, former army commander in an interview with
Stewart Bell of the National Post newspaper of Canada, published on
September 23, 2008 has stated that: "I strongly believe that this
country belongs to the Sinhalese but there are minority communities
and we treat them like our people…We being the majority of the
country, 75%, we will never give in and we have the right to protect
this country…We are also a strong nation... They can live in this
country with us. But they must not try to, under the pretext of being
a minority, demand undue things."
Finally President Rajapaksa’s attitude towards Tamils
Sri Lanka's president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, at one of his election
campaign rallies in the north of Sri Lanka – which is part of the
Tamil homeland – raised his voice in anger during the general
elections last year shouted in Sinhala: "We are Sinhalese and I am
Sinhalese – you listen Tamils!", as the crowd hooted at him to express
their frustration and despair about his policies.
This is the vision 2020 awaiting the Tamils in a united Sri Lanka in
the future. The above is the recorded history for the past sixty
years. If the Pundits in Delhi expect the Tamils to wait for another
sixty years for justice to come by, then they are truly in their own
dreamland. The way matters are moving in Sri Lanka the Tamil identity
will be wiped out in the next few years. Let me wind up the discussion
with a statement from Mahatma Gandhi about the spread of Islam in the
7th century Arabia. This is a reflection on why the Indians failed to
protect India against foreign invasions. The Maoist rebellion and the
Tamil genocide are invitations for foreigners to move into the
country.
The citizens of any country must have a sense of belonging to that
country; otherwise they have every reason to break off. Mahatma Gandhi
once said, “When the smoke from the chimneys of factories cover the
sky, man is separated from God”. This is exactly what has happening to
India today. Corporate culture had made Indians greedy and blind. This
led to Boffers scandal, 2G scam and many others. All the tribal
uprisings in the sensitive Sino-Indian borders and elsewhere are a
product of this greed. The rulers have no regard for smaller and
weaker communities, resulting in such wars as caste wars. Now they are
hurting the sentiments of Tamils in Tamil Nadu and overseas, just to
appease the Sinhalese who had always been anti- Indian rather than
pro-Indian.
Another element that has moved into the Indian society is the mafia
culture, where rape and cold blooded murders are justifiable means of
achieving Indian objectives. When the Western society who are not
supposed to be as cultured as the Indians are, as they are not
protected by a 5,000 year old civilization, are gunning Sri Lanka to
make them accountable for genocide, India is one of the few countries
who are giving excuses for Sri Lanka’s barbaric conduct. Russia and
China are supporting Rajapaksa for their own geopolitical interests,
but how is India’s geopolitical interest served when China is moving
into Sri Lanka. One of Hillary Clinton’s interests in Tamil Nadu was
the danger China’s involvement in Sri Lanka posed to the Indian Ocean
sea lanes. That is not the worry of the Delhi Pundits; as long as
Sonia’s desires are served, they are safe. Perhaps, the Gandhian
advice below may help to awaken the Indian leaders.
“...I became more than ever convinced that it was not the sword that
won a place for Islam in those days in the scheme of life. It was the
rigid simplicity, the utter self-effacement of the prophet, the
scrupulous regard for his pledges, his intense devotion to his friends
and followers, his intrepidity, his fearlessness, his absolute trust
in God and his own mission. These and not the sword carried everything
before them and surmounted every trouble.” YOUNG INDIA, 1924
This was Gandhiji’s advice to Indians on why India lost the country to
foreigners. He made this statement 70 years after the Indian Mutiny,
when Indians were dejected and were treated like slaves by the
British. They were in the same state as the Tamils are today in Eelam.
India is not upholding any of the qualities mentioned in the quotation
of Mahatmaji. The Tamils were India’s friends for centuries, while the
Sinhalese were hostile towards India all throughout history,
especially after independence in February 1948. In the Bandung in the
early fifties, President Kotelawala supported the Western powers
against India. During both the Indo-Pakistani wars and during the
Chinese invasion in the Himalayas Sri Lanka was on the side of India’s
enemies. Yet India can reverse Indira Gandhi’s policies and adopted
policies that led to Mulliavaakkal genocide.
Contrary to the conduct of the Delhi Pundits, Prabhakaran lived up to
the qualities enunciated by Mahatmaji. He observed ‘rigid simplicity,
the utter self-effacement’ and his ‘scrupulous regard for his pledges,
his intense devotion to his friends and followers’ were well known.
His intrepidity and his fearlessness in the face of odds were
exemplary. He stood with his people right up to the end with his
father, mother wife and children. He fought valiantly even when the
end was near and thus bestowed pride and dignity on the eighty million
Tamils. He observed all the ceasefires to the last word and the
clauses to which he attested his signature. He may not have absolute
trust in God, but was absolutely principled. He never lost sight of
his mission to bring salvation to his people; his cadres were
disciplined to the core and never caused more pain to their enemy than
was absolutely necessary. Rape and murder was never heard of in the
territories he ruled. The IPKF commanders would attest to the above.
It is about time India change course and realize how dangerously
India’s southern flanks are exposed. Sooner rather than later India
will have to recognize the legitimacy of the Tamil aspirations and
redeem the trust of the Tamils.
Visvanathan
Reproduced from GTF-Malaysia
[GTF-Msia:3711]
time, would prefer to spend the last few days at home with our
families. Not so with India’s Foreign Secretary Nirupama Menon Rao;
she hurriedly left for Colombo on Friday night 29 August, to spend her
last three days with the genocidal Sri Lankan President Rajapaksa. She
was the Indian High Commission in Colombo during the critical period
from 2004 to 2006, when the Mullivaaikkal genocide was hatched.
According to sources, Rao had been given a personal invitation to
visit Colombo before the end of her term by President Mahinda
Rajapaksa when she was part of the troika of top Indian officials to
the island nation in June. “A few days ago, the President wrote a
letter to Rao inviting her to Sri Lanka,” said a senior MEA official.
After reaching Colombo on Friday night, Rao was hosted to a farewell
breakfast meeting on Saturday morning by President Rajapakse, with
whom she shared a close rapport.
“There is no official mission or objective to this visit,” said the
official. Rao will return on Sunday, which will be the last day of her
two-year term. She will shortly be going to Washington to take charge
as India’s Ambassador to the United States. The Brahminic newspaper,
Hindu, saying that the meeting was a result of spontaneous invitation
from Rajapaksa, cited officials describing the meeting as a “farewell”
Rajapaksa had wanted to accord her because of the special relationship
she shared with the country. But political observers said Nirupama’s
fascination with Colombo on the eve of her retirement is connected to
her new assignment as India’s ambassador to the US.
This is not a farewell but the beginning of a new line-up in the
crime-filled war partnership in Colombo and in the National
Security-Foreign Service junta in New Delhi. Their original planning
was sabotaged by WikiLeak and Channel 4 revelations and Colombo and
Delhi are now standing exposed in front of the world community. They
are now forging a shield to evade international justice and to impose
a silencing political model in the island, a political analyst in
Colombo said.
Evidence of this is already available as soon as she departed from
Colombo. The president’s powerful brother, Gotabaya Rajapaksa admitted
for the first time that there were civilian casualties at the end of
the war, but he downplayed it as collateral unavoidable causality and
not a deliberate attempt to kill to kill the Tamils.
“The Sri Lankan
government is finally admitting that its forces caused civilians
losses during the conflict’s final months, but unconvincingly claims
no responsibility,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights
Watch. “This is just the latest and glossiest effort to whitewash
mounting evidence of government atrocities during the fighting.”
“The use of unmanned aerial drones by Sri Lankan commanders to gain a
clear picture of the battlefield raises concerns that artillery
attacks on hospitals and other civilian areas were deliberate, and not
mere mistakes resulting from the ‘fog of war,’” Adams said.
“The Sri Lankan Defense Ministry report is yet another feeble attempt
to convince the world, despite growing evidence to the contrary, that
government forces committed no crimes in the conflict with the Tamil
Tigers,” Adams said. “Concerned governments should use this factually
challenged report to jump-start international accountability efforts
as the UN Panel of Experts recommended.”
Nirupama Menon Rao has a close working relationship with Shiv Shankar
Menon, the current National Security Advisor of India, who previously
as Foreign Secretary was one of the key persons handled India’s role
in the genocidal war in the island of Sri Lanka. The other prominent
Keralite mafia M.K.Narayanan, who was National Security Advisor of
India at the time of Mullivaaikkal genocide, is now Governor of West
Bengal. Madam Sonia takes care of all those who carried out her
biddings and retire them to cosy jobs, not withstanding their failures
in their duty to secure India against genuine terrorist attacks.
Narayanan was NSA during the Bombay terrorist attack in 2008 and
Shivshankar was NSA during a similar attack in Bombay in 2011; both
were busy with LTTE ‘terrorism’ in a foreign country when their own
country was exposed to grievous risks from people who wanted to
destroy India.
Nirupama Rao’s position as foreign secretary will be taken over by
Ranjan Mathai, another native of Kerala. There are two types of
succession in India – one is family succession like the Nehru family
and the other is tribal succession like the Keralite mafias. That was
how the Keralites dominated the Indian intelligence organization, RAW,
and important positions in the Indian administrative service. They
were so powerful that they could even override the recommendations of
Indian IPKF commanders. The Eelam Tamil plight would not have reached
this stage, had it not been for these people; their hands are stained
by the blood of 200,000 over Tamil deaths since Rajiv Gandhi
interfered in Sri Lanka in 1987.
The American diplomats as per WikiLeaks had warned that Narayanan
along with Principal Secretary TKA Nair, constitute a Keralite ‘mafia’
in the Prime Minister's Office. "In a bureaucratic culture dominated
by North Indian Hindi speakers, this Keralite lock on the PM's inner
bureaucratic circle represents something of an anomaly, which could in
the long term create new faultlines around the Prime Minister," the
leaked document elaborated on the impact of the "Keralite mafia."
The ‘faultlines’ are now beginning to appear in Tamil Nadu.
Karunanidhi, who sacrificed the Tamils in Eelam to shield his family
against corruption charges, supported the Delhi Pundits. He was
unceremoniously removed from his power by Jayalalithaa, who has taken
over the reins in Tamil Nadu. The first thing she did was to pass a
resolution unanimously in the State Assembly stating that Rajapaksa be
brought to justice, failing which India must place economic sanctions
against Sri Lanka. Two months later she is reiterating that the Indian
government’s economic embargo is now overdue. Addressing a news
conference in Chennai, she asserted that AIADMK lawmakers would be
raising the issue before other parties during the Parliament's Monsoon
Session beginning on August 1.
"Yes, our Members of Parliament will definitely be raising the issue
on the floors of both houses of Parliament, with regard to the
atrocities committed against Sri Lankan Tamils and the resolutions
passed in the Tamil Nadu assembly to declare those guilty of war
crimes as war criminals and to see that they are made to appear before
the International Criminal Court for inquiry," said Jayalalithaa.
"We have also been insisting that an economic embargo should be
imposed against Sri Lanka. Our Members of Parliament will raise these
issues in both the houses," she added on 31 July. True to her word
AIADMK members led by M Thambidurai were on their feet raising slogans
on the plight of Lankan Tamils as the Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar
was introducing the Sri Lankan Parliament Speaker Chamal Rajapaksa and
his team, who happened to be in the house on 1 August. As this
embarrassed the visitors the speaker was very upset.
"They have come at our invitation and you must honour and respect
them," Kumar told the protesting members sternly. As the speaker
wished the visiting delegation a pleasant stay in the country, the
Congress members thumped their desks vigorously so as to drown cries
of 'shame, shame' from AIADMK members.
American Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, unexpectedly visited
Jayalalithaa in Chennai last month. In spite of the Indian
government’s advice to Hillary to avoid political discussions with
Jaya, she still ventured into the plight of Eelam Tamils. At the end
of her meeting she said that the Tamil problem in Sri Lanka must be
solved by an innovative method. Perhaps, because of Indian objections,
she didn’t even have a clue as to what that method would be.
Vaiko, one of the Tamil Nadu politicians, after watching the Channel 4
film on the Mullivaaikkal genocide, said every Tamil heart bleeds at
the sight of the sufferings of the victims. In trying to safeguard the
integrity and sovereignty of Sri Lanka the Delhi Pundits are
endangering the integrity and sovereignty of India. Those in Delhi
including the Keralite mafias, have scant respect for the feelings and
sentiments of the Tamils worldwide. Many Tamils are deceived with the
policies of India. This is exactly what happened to hill tribes, the
original natives of India. To exploit the riches under their feet the
government evicted them from their homeland; the net result was the
Maoist insurrection, which has shown no sign of abating.
Just before her departure to Colombo on Friday, 29 July Nirupama Rao
gave an interview to Headlines Today, which had the distinction of
televising the Channel 4 documentary on the Sri Lankan genocide in
India. Obviously she had to counter and, perhaps, justify what took
place in the killing field. In the whole process she was meandering
aimlessly and at times incoherently during the interview. Here are
some of the snap shots of the interview.
“Obviously they have to look at this (cases of human rights violation)
very carefully, there will be, I am sure they will be assessing the
impact of that documentary (Sri Lanka's Killing fields). I believe
they are in touch with the western governments. In the last days of
the war, I would call it a war, they were fighting a terrorist outfit
LTTE and it was the last days of the conflict and we have seen around
the world. I am not justifying it, but it was a war zone.”
She says she was not justifying it, yet she calls LTTE a ‘terrorist
outfit’. What would she call the racialist Sinhala army? Is it not a
terrorist outfit? During the last days of the war most of the
civilized governments wanted Sri Lanka to go slow and save the
civilians and accept the surrender of the combatants; instead they not
only used excessive fire to kill everybody on the ground but also
drove the tanks over the dead and the wounded and raped and murdered
the victims. Please remember it was a war against its own people. Then
she went on.
“Very often things can go wrong in war, civilians can get caught and
civilians become victims.”
“I think the
civil war in SL was a human tragedy. You think of the people killed,
maimed, got displaced in the northern part of the country. On the
government side, many young soldiers were recruited from the
villages.”
Instead of shedding crocodile tears for the victims she should know
that there is the Geneva Convention and many others governing the
rules of war. The war that was fought in Sri Lanka was a barbaric war
that followed no rules; it had no witnesses, as the foreign media and
NGOs were asked to leave the war zone. India and Sri Lanka were
determined that everyone associated with the LTTE were eliminated.
Hence, the need for heavy weapons against unarmed civilians. All the
countries, including India knew what was happening on the ground. US,
Britain and France were calling for a ceasefire to save the civilians,
and as per WikiLeaks, two Keralite mafias were playing all sides to
continue the war, until all those in the war zone were killed or
maimed. The barbaric Sinhalese soldiers added to the agony of the
victims by raping and murdering the women in front of their kith and
kin. What a heinous crime! Hold on please, she had not finished yet.
“In the deep south of the country also, people lost their lives. These
wounds need to be healed. We must think of restoring normalcy in the
country, rehabilitation of the country and allowing minority to have
the voice, to be able to realise their aspirations, as citizens who
can contribute to the progress of their country, a lot of work needs
to be done.”
The young Sinhalese soldiers, recruited by the government, came in
with the full knowledge that their job was to subjugate the Tamils and
if they had died in battle it was their choice. If Prabhakaran had
killed his own people, he did it for three reasons. He had no patience
for informers, corrupted officials and rapist. The other set of people
whom he eliminated was those who were opponents, who were
treacherously working against him. Even the opponents of Prabhakaran
had acknowledged that the LTTE was a very disciplined and organized
army. There was not a single case of a Tiger cadre raping a Sinhalese
woman or killing people out of the combat zone. If there was any
bombing in the South it was in retaliation for Sinhalese bombing in
the North. Even most of the Indian commanders of the Indian Peace
Keeping Force have a lot of respect for Prabhakaran and LTTE, as a
disciplined and responsible army.
Then she ventured into the realm of healing the wounds, created by
India and Sri Lanka, and restoring normalcy in the country, which was
also shattered by India and Sri Lanka, as if some balm will do the
job. Sonia and her diplomats had done so much harm to the Tamil
psychic that it would take centuries to heal the wounds. One of the
bigwigs in the RAW, Col. R.Hariharan, a great supporter of Indian
objectives, have now concluded that India should have allowed the
February 2002 Ceasefire to succeed. By helping Rajapaksa to break the
ceasefire and start the war, India had done not only a great
disservice to the Tamils but also brought in the Chinese: thus
exposing India’s southern flanks to Chinese infiltration. All these
took place when Nirupama was Indian High Commissioner to Sri Lanka.
Before that the Chinese presence in China was almost zero. They didn’t
want to antagonize the LTTE; it was only when they were sure that the
Tigers were about to be defeated by a combined force of India and Sri
Lanka, they moved into the island in a big way.
Having lost track of her arguments she took refuge under Gandhian
philosophy. I thought she was going to expound some profound wisdom,
like Gandhiji’s Salt March, when he marched 20 odd miles to the sea
just to take a few drops of sea water in his mouth. This was his
symbolic gesture to show that Indians do not have to pay salt tax in
their own land. Today, the Eelam Tamils are asking the same question;
why should they be raped, murdered and live like slaves in their own
land. According to her, Gandhi merely said that “SL is India’s nearest
neighbour”. I am of the view that you don’t need a great man like
Mahatma Gandhi to come out with that great wisdom. Any child in Kerala
would have told her that. This is the type of diplomats that India has
– totally ignorant and uneducated. Navi Pillay, the Human Rights
chief, having been rebuffed by Manmohan Singh when she tried to stop
the war in Sri Lanka in May 2009, wondered whether she was in the land
of Mahatma Gandhi. If Gandhi revisited India today, he would commit
suicide for having fathered such a nation.
She continued, “and as a nearest neighbour we also have certain
obligations to be aware and look at this 2020 vision, we have to avoid
any partial and jumping to conclusions based on what we see coming in
from other sources.”
Here she casts doubts on the horrific scenes in the Channel 4 ‘Killing
Field’,as she says it came “the other sources” presumably not from Sri
Lanka or India. UN sponsored specialists have confirmed that the
scenes in the ‘Killing Field’ are authentic.
She don’t seem to have the faintest idea of what their obligations
were as neighbours. Committing genocide on Eelam Tamils on such a vast
scale is definitely not one of them, especially when there are sixty
million Tamils across the Palk Straits. It is not a sin for the Tamils
to express a desire to go free. The Eelam Tamils have tried to live in
a united Sri Lanka for the last sixty years; what they experienced was
death and destruction. Asking the Tamils to “look at this 2020 vision”
is a puerile attempt to blur the vision of the Tamils and prolong
their genocide. Here are some ideas of what the Sinhalese have in mind
for the Tamils under her vision 2020.
J.R.Jayawardene, Former President of Sri Lanka - Daily Telegraph,
11th July 1983
"I am not worried about the opinion of the Tamil people... now we
cannot think of them, not about their lives or their opinion... the
more you put pressure in the north, the happier the Sinhala people
will be here... Really if I starve the Tamils out, the Sinhala people
will be happy."
Chandrika Kumaratunga, while addressing a South African television
sometime in the 1990s as the Sri Lankan President said that Blacks in
South Africa were entitled to fight for their rights because they were
the sons of the soil whereas Tamils did not belong to the country and
hence they cannot fight for their rights in Sri Lanka.
D.B. Wijetunge, another former president compared the Sinhala
'majority race' as a tree and the Tamils and other communities as
vines that can get entangled in it and grow.
Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka, former army commander in an interview with
Stewart Bell of the National Post newspaper of Canada, published on
September 23, 2008 has stated that: "I strongly believe that this
country belongs to the Sinhalese but there are minority communities
and we treat them like our people…We being the majority of the
country, 75%, we will never give in and we have the right to protect
this country…We are also a strong nation... They can live in this
country with us. But they must not try to, under the pretext of being
a minority, demand undue things."
Finally President Rajapaksa’s attitude towards Tamils
Sri Lanka's president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, at one of his election
campaign rallies in the north of Sri Lanka – which is part of the
Tamil homeland – raised his voice in anger during the general
elections last year shouted in Sinhala: "We are Sinhalese and I am
Sinhalese – you listen Tamils!", as the crowd hooted at him to express
their frustration and despair about his policies.
This is the vision 2020 awaiting the Tamils in a united Sri Lanka in
the future. The above is the recorded history for the past sixty
years. If the Pundits in Delhi expect the Tamils to wait for another
sixty years for justice to come by, then they are truly in their own
dreamland. The way matters are moving in Sri Lanka the Tamil identity
will be wiped out in the next few years. Let me wind up the discussion
with a statement from Mahatma Gandhi about the spread of Islam in the
7th century Arabia. This is a reflection on why the Indians failed to
protect India against foreign invasions. The Maoist rebellion and the
Tamil genocide are invitations for foreigners to move into the
country.
The citizens of any country must have a sense of belonging to that
country; otherwise they have every reason to break off. Mahatma Gandhi
once said, “When the smoke from the chimneys of factories cover the
sky, man is separated from God”. This is exactly what has happening to
India today. Corporate culture had made Indians greedy and blind. This
led to Boffers scandal, 2G scam and many others. All the tribal
uprisings in the sensitive Sino-Indian borders and elsewhere are a
product of this greed. The rulers have no regard for smaller and
weaker communities, resulting in such wars as caste wars. Now they are
hurting the sentiments of Tamils in Tamil Nadu and overseas, just to
appease the Sinhalese who had always been anti- Indian rather than
pro-Indian.
Another element that has moved into the Indian society is the mafia
culture, where rape and cold blooded murders are justifiable means of
achieving Indian objectives. When the Western society who are not
supposed to be as cultured as the Indians are, as they are not
protected by a 5,000 year old civilization, are gunning Sri Lanka to
make them accountable for genocide, India is one of the few countries
who are giving excuses for Sri Lanka’s barbaric conduct. Russia and
China are supporting Rajapaksa for their own geopolitical interests,
but how is India’s geopolitical interest served when China is moving
into Sri Lanka. One of Hillary Clinton’s interests in Tamil Nadu was
the danger China’s involvement in Sri Lanka posed to the Indian Ocean
sea lanes. That is not the worry of the Delhi Pundits; as long as
Sonia’s desires are served, they are safe. Perhaps, the Gandhian
advice below may help to awaken the Indian leaders.
“...I became more than ever convinced that it was not the sword that
won a place for Islam in those days in the scheme of life. It was the
rigid simplicity, the utter self-effacement of the prophet, the
scrupulous regard for his pledges, his intense devotion to his friends
and followers, his intrepidity, his fearlessness, his absolute trust
in God and his own mission. These and not the sword carried everything
before them and surmounted every trouble.” YOUNG INDIA, 1924
This was Gandhiji’s advice to Indians on why India lost the country to
foreigners. He made this statement 70 years after the Indian Mutiny,
when Indians were dejected and were treated like slaves by the
British. They were in the same state as the Tamils are today in Eelam.
India is not upholding any of the qualities mentioned in the quotation
of Mahatmaji. The Tamils were India’s friends for centuries, while the
Sinhalese were hostile towards India all throughout history,
especially after independence in February 1948. In the Bandung in the
early fifties, President Kotelawala supported the Western powers
against India. During both the Indo-Pakistani wars and during the
Chinese invasion in the Himalayas Sri Lanka was on the side of India’s
enemies. Yet India can reverse Indira Gandhi’s policies and adopted
policies that led to Mulliavaakkal genocide.
Contrary to the conduct of the Delhi Pundits, Prabhakaran lived up to
the qualities enunciated by Mahatmaji. He observed ‘rigid simplicity,
the utter self-effacement’ and his ‘scrupulous regard for his pledges,
his intense devotion to his friends and followers’ were well known.
His intrepidity and his fearlessness in the face of odds were
exemplary. He stood with his people right up to the end with his
father, mother wife and children. He fought valiantly even when the
end was near and thus bestowed pride and dignity on the eighty million
Tamils. He observed all the ceasefires to the last word and the
clauses to which he attested his signature. He may not have absolute
trust in God, but was absolutely principled. He never lost sight of
his mission to bring salvation to his people; his cadres were
disciplined to the core and never caused more pain to their enemy than
was absolutely necessary. Rape and murder was never heard of in the
territories he ruled. The IPKF commanders would attest to the above.
It is about time India change course and realize how dangerously
India’s southern flanks are exposed. Sooner rather than later India
will have to recognize the legitimacy of the Tamil aspirations and
redeem the trust of the Tamils.
Visvanathan
Reproduced from GTF-Malaysia
[GTF-Msia:3711]
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