An open letter to Rathika Sitsabaiesan

Asoka Weerasinghe, long time anti-LTTE advocate and one time diplomat has written to Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP MP, for Scarborough-Rouge River, Ontario House of Commons, Ottawa about her statements on Sri Lanka.  Sitsabaiesan was in Sri Lanka recently. She arrived on a tourist visa and met with representatives of several extremist Tamil groups.  She claimed they were not ‘political meetings’ but those who she met with claimed otherwise, i.e. they were most certainly ‘political discussions’.  We reproduce Weerasinghe’s letter below.

Dear Rathika:

You surprised me when I read your statement in ColomboPage and later in the National Post “……., but subjected to political intimidation.  I was warned I could be subject to arrest and deportation, as several Commonwealth MPs from New Zealand and Australia recently faced.”

 Wrong! That was not “political intimidation”, Rathika, it was a lesson given to you free of charge by the Police and Immigration personnel of Sri Lanka, on a sovereign country’s immigration laws, which you should accept as a Rookie MP as part of your learning curve.  They couldn’t care two masala vadais from a Take Out Curry Hut in Scarborough-Rouge River, whether you are a Canadian MP or not.  You just do not go into a foreign country as a tourist and disregard their statutes of  law.  You were damn lucky that you were not deported.

In simple language, if you still didn’t understand their English which is spoken in a non-Canadian accent, is that you just cannot enter Sri Lanka on a visitor’s visa, take off immediately to the North of the island and have your private political meetings with the proxy-Tamil Tiger politicians.  That’s what it is.   These Sri Lankan officials are paid to do a job.  To keep an eye on fraudulent tourists, who sneak into the island’s north to accomplish their anti-Sri Lanka political agenda.  So you got caught, Rathika, and I hope you learnt your lesson and not to repeat that cunning shenanigan again in Sri Lanka.

This issue is far worse than your learning curve of the number of people that make up the Canadian population when you said on February 5, 2012 “We’re almost 9 million if I remember the number correctly”, when a person in the audience prompted to correct you and educate you, that there were 34 million people in Canada.    That was embarrassing, wasn’t it, Rathika!  Again, I hope you took it as part of your learning curve as a rookie MP.
I don’t think you  should take your incident too badly as several Canadian MPs in the past  who thought that they were smart just like you, were kicked out of foreign countries,  when they tried to preach to them that ,”We are Holier than Thou!”  You know as much as I do, that is a lot of Bull!

  On January 9, 1992, after the Canadian Parliamentarians, Geoff Scott (Conservative), Beryl Gaffney (Liberal) and Svend Robninson (NDP) arrived in China, they did not respect the arrangements the Chinese side had made and abused the hospitality of their hosts by engaging in activities, (like you did in Sri Lanka) incompatible with the status, said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Wu Jiamin.

The three had met clandestinely with the wife of jailed dissident Wang Juntao, believed to be the mastermind behind the 1989 Beijing Spring movement, and had hoped to lay a wreath at Tiananmen Square (like Deepak Obhrai laying a wreath at Elephant Pass, and got away easily) where pro-democracy activists were massacred by the Chinese troops on June 4, 1989.
The Canadian MPs were summarily kicked out of China and put on a flight to Hong Kong.  They had to return to Canada with their tails between their legs in embarrassment.  They thought that they were being smart like you.  Smart, my foot!  They were a bunch of fools.

Likewise France’s President Charles de Gaulle on an official visit to Canada’s Montreal on July 24, 1967; was asked to leave Canada for uttering the words “Vive le Quebec Libre!” (Long live Free Quebec) while addressing a large crowd from the balcony at Montreal City Hall.  There you are Rathika.  What is good for the goose should be good for the gander.

As a bit of advice to you, so that you won’t embarrass Canada and yourself again, I think it would be worth it for you to take a University ‘distant learning’ course in How to deal with Foreign Country protocols and etiquette 101.  That would do you a world of good, now that you will be facing a formidable challenger to win your Scarborough-Rouge River seat – Logan Kanapathi, challenging you on a Liberal ticket.
Oh by the way, going down memory lane in Jaffna, I hope you spotted the Mango tree where you used to play hop-scotch at age 4, before you were brought to Canada a year later, to get away from the Tamil Tigers, in case they would kidnap to brain-wash you to become a suicide bomber.  Out of 388 suicide bombs that the Tamil Tiger terrorists detonated, over half of them were young women who had been kidnapped by the Tamil Tigers when they were kids.
Sincerely,

Asoka Weerasinghe