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Professor C. Suriyakumaran has in a letter to the editor Daily News personally taken me to task on what he has understood as the meaning of a statement issued by the LSSP on its inability to acquiesce in the handing over of the N and E provinces to an interim administration run by an armed LTTE. The professor's letter is a cryptic statement of his own views. What he attributes to the LSSP's statement are regrettably a distortion of what is states.

The LSSP can have no reservations on the scenario presented by Professor CS, when he poses the question "who else shall be leaders in the N.E. if the LTTE embraces the political process (chastised earlier for not doing so) and wins?" The LSSP would welcome the LTTE winning an election and administering both or either of these provinces. A free and fair election is the only means to enter the democratic process and the door to that should be open to all political entities no matter what their views are. But it is idle to think that any body of persons could enter the democratic process whilst still remaining a military apparatus. That is the point made in the LSSP's statement in regard to the "interim administration" which the Prime Minister says, as in his May Day speech, is on the LTTE's agenda for discussion.

Professor CS mentions anti-Tamil pogroms in the South. His feelings in this regard are respected. Pogroms be they in the South or the North result in the same consequences. When as a PA Minister I was briefly in charge of the subject of ethnic affairs and national integration I saw in the Puttalam camps of the displaced the misery caused by LTTE pogroms in Jaffna and Mannar. I attempted to promote a "Return Home" project among these displaced families but they refused to return even to the Army held areas in Mannar for fear of the LTTE.

These people will certainly find it difficult to reconcile themselves to the idea of an administration by an armed LTTE functioning with the sanction of government. It could be very much the same with this ethnic segment in the East too. I am speaking for myself in this matter. Even so I do not think the LSSP - nor the late Mr. Bernard Soysa cited by the professor with a pat on his back - will in silence allow a people to be haunted by such trauma. This is LSSP history too, and the respected professor need have no fear that we would forget anything in it.

I wish to ignore the unnecessarily vituperative element in the learned professor's letter. His reference to sec. 29 of the Soulbury Constitution is misplaced. It was whilst this Constitution and its section 29 were as yet operative that the Language Act was made law - and prior to that, the population on the plantations was disfranchised and disinherited.

- Batty Weerakoon

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