Slice your defence whichever way
Dear Mr. Rock,
On October 29, I wrote to you before you embarked on the UN
assignment in Sri Lanka... "When I take away the past Liberal Party
mantle off you, a party that showed a bias in favour of the Tigers for
reasons aligned to domestic politics, I see you as a person of peace
that I envied so much in 1970 when you as the University Ottawa's
President of the Students' Union visited John Lennon and Yoko Ono while
they were bedding in Montreal's Queen Elizabeth Hotel suite 1742, for
wanting to change the world spreading peace of love.
I was a graduate student at Memorial University in New Foundland then
involved in the peace movement myself against the war in Vietnam as well
as South Africa's Apartheid." That retrospection of you as a student
activist was said in all sincerity.
I think you are smart enough to know that you flew into Colombo
carrying all the negative baggage you had collected being one of the
Liberal parliamentarians who also happened to be the Minister of Justice
and Attorney General, who favoured the Tigers and looked the other way
letting the Canadian Tiger sympathisers collect two million dollars each
month to stuff their war-chest.
All that to get their 100,000 votes to elect 10 Liberals in the
greater Toronto ridings, and you too depended on their votes in the
Etobicoke Centre riding.
And along the way you and your Liberals smeared the Canadian hands
with Sinhala blood as the massive truck bomb that brought down the
Central Bank building on January 31, 1996 killing 114 and maiming for
life another 1,400 was packed with high explosives bought from a Ukraine
chemical plant with Canadian dollars which your government let them
collect, and paid with a seven-and-a-half million dollar cheque cut
through a bank in Vancouver.
Which ever way you may wish to slice your defense, you know the
facts, I know the facts, the Tigers know the facts, the RCMP and CSIS
knows the facts, and almost all Canadians know the facts.
And this was the very reason why the ruthless Tiger terrorists'
political wing leader S.P. Thamilchelvam gave Canada's Prime Minister
Paul Martin and his Liberal Government the dubious honour in early 2005,
that "Canada is our greatest ally".
I listened to your interviews on 'As it Happens' as well as the
'Current' on CBC, read many news reports on your conclusions of your 10
day fact-finding mission as well as the press release from Colombo's UN
office, accusing "elements" of the Sri Lanka's Security Forces that
"...they rounded up children to be recruited by the Karuna faction" to
fight the Tigers who they were part of since 1976 until 2004.
The critical commentaries on your announcement have flayed you as a
disingenuous fact-finder who is a biased supporter of Tigers. The
Security Forces have vehemently denied your allegations, and have said
that they were "regrettable" and "misleading", and some have labeled you
as a "Snow Tiger", for minimising your focus on Tiger child recruitment
which has gone on for many, many moons, and focusing disingenuously on
the Sri Lankan Government Forces driven by hearsay. These observations
are valid and do I smell a rat here?
These commentaries have put you on the spot to defend yourself on the
findings which you have claimed to be from "credible evidence from
victimised mothers and eye witnesses". As you know your statement has
aroused controversy in human rights circles, and brought smiles on the
faces of the Tigers and their supporters in Sri Lanka as well as abroad.
And you have provided enough fodder for the anti-Sri
Lankan-Government media to exaggerate your announcement to the point of
saying that the Sri Lankan Armed Forces are recruiting child soldiers.
This is not healthy, and unfortunately you are placed in an untenable
position of being the catalyst of all this.
Did you ever wonder whether these witnesses were planted paid-actors
by the Tiger propagandists as well as the NGO peacenicks who are raking
in a billion rupee industry funded by foreign countries like Norway?
Have they done that before? Of course, they have, and gloat on their
successes.
I am not certain whether you depended on Tamil translators during
your interviews with these affected families and eye-witnesses. If so,
did you ever wonder whether the translators would provide you with
textbook translations, or hoodwink you by telling their concocted
stories to get at the Armed Forces personnel, and minimize your focus on
the Tiger child abductions for their Baby Brigade? Are they capable of
doing it? Of course they are and I was witness to one such a happening
in Ottawa.
During late August and early September 1986 when Canada was going
through an emotional-divide over the Tamil boat peoples refugee claims
and bringing negative publicity on the Tamil refugee claimants who were
flooding our shores, the Ottawa Tamils quite cleverly deflected the
media attention to Sri Lanka's High Commissioner General Tissa
Weeratunga as a torturer when he was the Army Commander in Jaffna.
On Monday, September 22, 1986, the Ottawa Tamils had a press
conference at Holiday Inn on Kent Street, with Umapathisivan
Pararajasegaran (Baby Para), a Tamil refugee who was flown in from Paris
to claim that he was tortured by General Weeratunga while in detention
in 1979. And AI too got involved in this media story in support of the
Tamil refugees who claimed that they were running away from persecution.
What transpired at this press conference was a classic example of the
Tiger sympathisers taking the Canadians down the garden path, knowing
that we have been a bunch of suckers and Goody Two-shoes when it came to
Tamil refugees.
When a reporter asked Baby Para a two line question in English, when
translated into Tamil, Baby Para responded with a three liner in Tamil.
Then the Tamil translator translated those three Tamil sentences with
about 20 sentences in English.
This went on for about 40 minutes and I walked out in disgust,
thinking that the Ottawa reporters too were getting sucked into this
theatre of the absurdity and lies.
I was an employee of DFO (200 Kent Street) then and I was contacted
at the office by reporter Dan Leger of the Canadian Press who had been
asked by Victor Parsons the Deputy Chief of the Canadian Press Bureau to
speak with me, as "Asoka is reliable and he will tell you the truth".
We met for lunch the following day at the Japanese Village on Kent
Street. During the conversation I did ask Dan, "Did you find it strange
that when you all threw a two sentence question at Pararajasegaran, and
he responded in Tamil with a three sentence answer, and the translator
translated those three Tamil sentences with 20 English sentences, every
time?" Dan's response was, "Funny you said that Asoka, after yesterday
morning press conference, Pararajasegaran had another press conference
in Toronto last evening, and we sent our most senior reporter to cover
that meeting.
The same thing had happened there too and he called us back and told
us to forget this press conference, as he understood that the Tamil
translator did not speak or understood a word of Tamil, and he was
reciting their scripted story against High Commissioner Weeratunga and
the Sri Lankan Government to legitimise their refugee claims."
And there you are and I was there to witness all that in a packed
conference room with reporters and Tamils. I happened to be one of two
Sinhalese at the conference and I was nearly thrown out of the room.
My question to you Mr. Rock is, were you subjected to the same
ballyhoo and did you fall hook-line-and-sinker to their ploy as all
Liberal parliamentarians have, which I suspect reflects in your
conclusions of the 10 day fact finding mission?
I have difficulty to accept your conclusions too regarding the Army
and here are my reasons, and you will know where I am coming from.
I have little faith in Liberals and you happen to be one, who are
still supporting the ruthless Tiger terrorist outfit. Some of the
culprits are, Jim Karygiannis, Maria Minna, Paul Martin, Bill Graham,
Judy Sgro, Albina Guarnieri, Joe Volpe, John McCallum, John McKay, Bryon
Wilfert and Roy Cullen, to name a few.
You may recognise them as the ones who lobbied in caucus not to ban
the Tigers when you were in charge of the Justice and Attorney General
Ministries.
And as you recall several of them patronised the fund raising dinner
for the Tigers in the spring of 2000, knowing damn well that the monies
were collected for terrorism to haemorrhage Sri Lanka further by killing
and miming innocent unarmed civilians. I still haven't forgiven the
Liberals for this crass and heartless act. All for a Tamil vote to get
back into parliament.
Why on earth should, Karuna want anyone else to round up the Tamil
children in the east, when he has been and still is an excellent
terrorist leader who has the wherewithal to abduct children and train
them as suicide bombers and front line fighters? He knows the terrain,
the urban and village human-geography and the families who have
children. He is quite capable of rounding them up. I am stymied with
your conclusion.
One of the comments you did make during the radio interview was that
you suspected the Army collaboration with these abductions to bolster
the Karuna para-military army, as the vehicles carrying these children
were not investigated at Army checkpoints.
I am not sure whether the Army mandate allows the soldiers to extend
beyond checking the identity of the people in vehicles and to see
whether the vehicles are transporting lethal weapons.
Any activity beyond that would be construed as human rights
violations of the person by harassment knowing well that all human
rights activists have their hawk eyes directed at the Armed Forces to
pounce at every wrong move. This is just a thought in defense of the
Army protocol at In and Out checkpoints. One has to be fair on these
observations.
I am looking forward to you making public the evidence that you claim
to be in your possession, so that President Rajapaksa can make a
thorough and an intelligent investigation and bring to task the wrong
doers. Your allegations are serious and needs immediate attention by the
Government and your transparency and help will be paramount.
And no doubt this probe will be the litmus test for further
fact-finding missions by UN organisations such as yours, as any missive
by you showing bias towards the Tigers will fly on your face and in turn
the organisation that you represented, and the Government of Sri Lanka
should not tolerate such intrusions by any international institution
anymore.
I am hoping that your conclusions after subjecting yourself to
hearsay, like village gossip, should not go unchallenged, as it would
readily be used by the international community, some human rights
groups, and your colleagues in Canada's Liberal Party to use it to paint
Sri Lanka as a pariah among democratically elected sovereign states.
Such conclusions that you felt fit to publicise around the world
based on hearsay is the biggest blow that can be dealt to global
democracy by harassing small sovereign states, thus helping further
under the guise of helping to achieve peace the interests of terrorist
outfits like Tigers.
I hope your final report will be judicious colouring honesty for your
mission and will not show even a modicum of bias in favour of the Tigers
thus providing them a cloak of respectability. You have done enough on
that score while you were a Liberal parliamentarian.
By the way, former Liberal Justice Minister Irwin Cotler did admit to
the Editorial Board of the National Post that not banning the Tigers was
a political decision not wanting to antagonise the Tamils as they were
seeking their votes in the greater Toronto area. I say pox on the
Liberals who have been part of the problem in Sri Lanka's separatist
conflict.
You saw the devastation on the people and property in the North and
East of that beautiful island with your own eyes. All this has been done
by the collective effort of major countries like Canada that let Tamil
separatist supporters fill one-third of the Tiger war-chest with
Canadian dollars to win 100,000 votes for the governing Liberal party;
Indira Gandhi's India taking the bare-footed Tamil rebels after the 1983
riots, who couldn't even shoot straight with a pistol to train them for
terrorist warfare in her army camps at Kanchiupuram, Salem, Anna Nagar
and Uttar Pradesh by the foothills of the Himalayas, and sent them back
fitted with infantry-boots, fatigues and cradling AK47s to fight a
terrorist war against a legitimately elected democracy.
All this geo-political venom was to seek support from 55 million
Tamils in Tamil Nadu for her Congress Party which was running third in
the upcoming elections; and Norway that has provided high powered
communication systems to the Tigers using diplomatic channels
contravening the Vienna Convention (1961) and the training Tiger cadres
at Rena and Pukut in Thailand, and providing millions of kroner for
their sustenance..
All this wanting to strut on the world stage as international
peacemakers. Damn you all, I say, for wanting to destroy an elected
democracy of this small nation where I was nurtured during my formative
years and had many Tamil friends and still do.
I hope that your final report will provide me with the opportunity to
respect your response to me on October 29 "...and I approach it with
genuine respect for its complexity. I shall do my very best to make a
constructive contribution." And I sincerely hope you will.
Asoka Weerasinghe
(Canada)
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