2066 Kings Grove Crescent . Gloucester . Ontario . K1J 6G1 . Canada

December 24, 2010

The UN  Advisory Panel of Experts on Sri Lanka                                                                                                                                                              New York, US

cc. Hon. Jack Layton, Leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada                                                                                                                                                            Paul Dewar, MP for Ottawa, Ontario, Ottawa Centre (NDP)                                                                                                                                                                                                      Patrick Brown, MP for Barrie, Ontario (Conservative)                                                                                                                                                                                    Glen Murray, MPP, Toronto Centre, Ontario

Dear UN  Advisory Panel of Experts on Sri Lanka:

I have read with impassioned interest the National Council of Canadian Tamils  (NCCT) submission –Towards Global Justice: Accountability for War Crimes in Sri Lanka, which the four of the above Canadian politicians have endorsed.

Although the submission made by the National Council of Canadian Tamils which claims to be a grassroots organization composed of elected representatives from across Canada, I am afraid this submission is suspect as it is an organization that is secretly working to re-establish and resurrect the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) terrorists to fight another day to establish their mythical separate Tamil state, Eelam, thus they have an axe to grind which is far from being honourable.

The NCCT are indeed a proxy group of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE aka Tamil Tigers) for the very fact that this association has deliberately adapted in its logo the poisonous lily which is the symbolic flower of the LTTE.  This flower has no relevance to the Tamil community at large nor represent the life in their adopted home, Canada.  This poisonous lily was introduced by the LTTE in 1991 to remember their fallen comrades and it is the floral emblem of their mythical separate Tamil state, Eelam.  Thus it is valid to argue that the mandate of the NCCT is that of the LTTE.  Thus the bias remains and is the reason to flay the Sri Lankan Government who wiped out the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam militarily on 18 May, 2009.

It also should be noted that all the above politicians who have endorsed the submission have been supportive of the Tamil separatist cause thus have a good reason for their endorsement of the submission. Thus, their endorsements should not be counted as credible due to their public pronouncements to establish a separate Tamil state in Sri Lanka.  This submission is suspect and calls for question.

When the submission was noticed by me, it was clear that it was drafted by a legal minded proxy Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam member who is still dreaming of his mythical, mono-ethnic, racist, Tamil separate state, Eelam even after his terrorist movement was whipped into oblivion on 18 May, 2009 by the Sri Lankan armed forces.  While you would assume that the submission was made in good faith, this document that is replete with misconceptions and half-truths should be studied carefully and accepted with caution to exercise any validity, if any.

1.       The Eelam War was between two protagonists, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam terrorists and the Sri Lankan Government Armed Forces.  Yet, the submission calls for the attention of the UN Advisory Panel of only on one of the protagonists, the Sri Lankan Government.   It is noteworthy to establish that the Sri Lankan Government forces had every right to defend the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of its country, and that is their business, from the non-state invaders, the LTTE terrorists who were quite rightly banned by Canada on April 26, 2006. The LTTE were attempting to claim one-third of the island’s territory bordered by 66 percent of the coastline for the then 12.6% of the Tamil population.  Presently the Tamil population is only 3.9% (World Watch statistics, January 2008) as the rest of the Tamil population has fanned out around the globe as conventional refugees since the Colombo riots of July 24, 1983, only to return home on visits once they receive their permanent residency status and their passport from their adopted country.

2.      While this whole exercise is an effort to prove that the Sri Lankan Government is guilty of War Crimes, providing the impression that no bullet was ever fired by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in this war.  I have difficulty to comprehend how innocent the LTTE were during the last months before the conclusion of this war as there were 7,000 deaths of Government soldiers during the last three months.   I assume that they just didn’t die by tripping over each other but died from bullet and bomb wounds from their enemy, the LTTE.  This is a somber comparison with the total NATO fatalities in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2010 shows 2,134 (US-1,321) and in Iraq from 2003 to date the Coalition’s total was 5,433 (US-4,424 killed.)  The Sri Lanka’s total in the last three months shows what astounding sacrifices were made to make victory certain and also save the 300,000 Tamil civilians who were held as a human shield by the LTTE and shot at when they tried to escape with several hundreds getting killed, and give back the right-to-life to all Sri Lankans which was high-jacked by the LTTE who were planting claymore mines almost daily around the island and used suicide bombers to kill the innocent civilians.   The final tally of suicide bombs, according my data were 382 in all by the LTTE.  So where are indeed the charges of War Crimes that have been meted out to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam by these sympathizing proxies of the National Council of Canadian Tamils  and the endorsing parliamentarians.?         

That itself shows that this submission is fraught with biases, ill-will and mischief against the Sri Lankan government who whipped the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam terrorists into oblivion on 18 May 2009.  Here lies the problem which has instigated this nonsensical charge of War Crimes against the Government of Sri Lanka and you have every right to reject this submission as a mischievous ploy to hurt the Sri Lankan Government’s humanitarian efforts to help the Tamil community in the North and East who were under the clutches of the LTTE and trampled under their jackboots.

3.      It is correct to say that the internationally (Scandinavian) monitored Ceasefire Agreement (CFA) was signed in 2002 (February 22, 2002).  It is equally correct to say that the Sri Lankan Government unilaterally ended the agreement in 2006 (January 16, 2006).

4.      What has not been mentioned is by January 2006, the LTTE had violated the Ceasefire Agreement 7308 times, while the Sri Lankan Government Forces had violated the Ceasefire less than 200 times.  That between February 2002 and December 2005 there were 6751 complaints against the LTTE, of which 3471 were ruled as violations of the Ceasefire.  There were 1313 complaints against the Government Armed forces, of which 162 were ruled as violations.

5.      What was not mentioned was that the LTTE showed their trade mark display of slaughtering 27 innocent civilians mostly women and children and seriously injuring 60 others when they targeted and exploded a crowded bus in Weliara near Okkampitiya in south-eastern Sri Lanka on Wednesday, 16 January, the very day that the Sri Lankan government effectively withdrew from the Ceasefire Agreement having given 14 days notice for the termination as was required by the Agreement.

6.      What was not mentioned was that during the Ceasefire Agreement, that it had provided a window of opportunity for the LTTE to bring in 11 shiploads of armoury; built seven airstrips of which two were wide and long enough to land large cargo transport planes; and  brought four dismantled single engine propeller driven ZLIN 143 aircraft which were converted into night bombers thus creating the first terrorist group in the world to have an air wing.

7.      Paragraph 2, line 7, states, “…the final weeks of the onslaught saw at least 20,000 Tamil civilians killed”.  This statement has some unacceptable logistic implications. And here is my problem and hope you will follow my thread.

By April 2009, the war was fought in a narrow sliver of land which was apparently sardined packed with the 300,000 Tamils who were herded as a human shield by the LTTE from the west to east of the island during the last 30 months of the war.  Of this enormous volume of people, according to the submission 20,000 were apparently killed by the armed forces.

If indeed an average Sri Lankan is 5 foot and 6 inches tall and has a body depth of 30 inches, and if these bodies were heaped into a narrow sliver of land, it would have found itself to be the size of a mini-pyramid. Twenty thousand people happen to be a lot of bodies.    To bury these bodies one would imagine it would have wanted an adequate burial plot and perhaps a sizable grave to bury 20,000 bodies.   The grave should have been at least 50 meters deep or more.   This digging had to be done quickly, not with one excavating tractor with a back hoe and bucket but perhaps five if not more.   Did the army have them on site?  The earth that was dug had to be a mini-mountain, and once the bodies were buried which would have taken only one-fifth of the mountain of earth, the other four-fifth had to be compacted as a mini-mountain or spread out and leveled.    This certainly couldn’t have been a clandestine operation and all the refugees would have witnessed this sordid event.  A mountain of dead bodies before they were buried.  An infra-red aerial scanner would have spotted this burial ground with much ease.  But they haven’t so far. I have no qualms to suggest that this insinuation has every reason to be suspect as mischievous and enough grounds to reject this submission in Toto as fallacious.

While the Channel 4 was swift in showing an alleged execution by Sri Lankan soldiers, they seem to have had difficulty to show the mountain of the 20,000 dead bodies.  I personally suspect that this is a mischievous ploy by the National Council of Canadian Tamils who has been out to disgrace the Sri Lankan government for the very reason that they managed to wipe out their LTTE terrorists after a good three decades of battle on the ground as well as on the seas.

8.      I found it a naïve attempt by the National Council of Canadian Tamils to point their fingers at the Sri Lankans for the alleged deaths of 20,000 Tamils when the responsibility should lie truly on the LTTE for the simple reason that on February 3, 2009, the European Union, Japan, USA, Norway and Canada jointly requested the LTTE to free the civilians to cross over to the government controlled areas and the LTTE to surrender.  And so did the President of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa, kept requesting the LTTE to let his people go as well as that they should surrender to stop further deaths and destruction of the Tamil people as the prognosis of winning the war was nil by March, 2009.  But the LTTE never did, and that Eelam War finally ended up as a Liberation War, as the world saw the government of Sri Lanka liberating 300,000 Tamil civilians by May 18, 2009.

9.      The statement on page vii of the submission which states, “Instead, close to 30,000 Tamil civilians continue to languish in government interment camps where they are denied the freedom of movement or the ability to voluntarily leave the camps; and have very little access to medicine, adequate food, and potable water,”  is an abominable lie.                             On December 7, 2010, The Daily News reported that, “A total of 325,820 persons (102,081 families) have been resettled in the Northern Province since August 2009 up to December 2, 2010, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

10.  It is a fair statement to conclude that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and their proxies, the Directors of the National Council of Canadian Tamils (NCCT) should be charged as being culpable of these War Crimes for the alleged deaths of 20,000 Tamils during the last few months of the war for not agreeing to the international countries request on February 3, 2009 to allow the Tamil civilians who were held as a human shield by the LTTE  to go to the Government controlled areas, and  for not to have surrendered as called for when it was clear by February-March that the end of the LTTE terrorism was just a matter of days, so as to stop further suffering and unnecessary deaths of the Tamil civilians as well as the soldiers who were trying to liberate these Tamil civilians.

11.  And I conclude and submit to you my assessment of the submission to your panel by the National Council of Canadian Tamils – Towards Global Justice: Accountability for War Crimes in Sri Lanka, as a mischievous ploy and should be rejected lacking honesty and worth on all humanitarian grounds. And it would be worthwhile to note that the 300,000 Tamil civilians who were liberated by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces and were in temporary welfare camps were well looked after.  It was a miracle at work when a million meals were cooked every day to feed these people three meals a day, and cooked almost all by the Sinhalese community who had nothing but love and compassion for these unfortunate Tamil civilians who were herded as a human shield by the LTTE who are now being defended by their proxies, the National Council of Canadian Tamils.

Sincerely,

Asoka Weerasinghe