Shiploads of fraud take shine off asylum drama

What’s happening today is the reverse of the mice leading a sinking ship. Boatloads of people are jumping off a country fast on the rise; scampering away from a land trying to achieve reconciliation under conditions of peace.

It was more than a decade ago that some Sri Lankan Tamils, went to London by air and tore up their passports and clothes on arrival at Heathrow. That was when we saw a rise in the drama of refugees from Sri Lanka’s battle with terrorists. An ominous warning of the strategic reach of the LTTE.

Some years earlier we saw former trade union leader K Vythyalingam of the Government Clerical Service Union, run up the aisle in the United Nations General Assembly raising a flag of the Tamils and demanding justice for them.

It was part of the histrionics that helped the cause of Tamil militancy, later hijacked by the LTTE and turned into machine of ruthless terrorism.

The Tamil refugee trail from Sri Lanka appears to have turned full cycle today. It is not anymore a matter of isolated drama. It is spread across the oceans. Sri Lankan asylum seekers are threatening the borders of their intended homelands. Whole populations are showing growing concern that what is now a trickle may soon turn into a deadly tide.

Sri Lanka’s Boat People

It is fast turning into the stuff of politics, especially in Australia and Canada, the most sought after destinations of the false asylum seekers from Sri Lanka - Sri Lankas Boat People, as many in the international media would prefer to describe them.

They are not drifters, but determined players of a serious game of hoodwinking ones would be hosts, and exploiting the laudable legislation that favours genuine refugees in those countries.

The LTTE was defeated more than one year ago. The vast majority of those displaced in the final moves to liberate the Tamils from the clutches of the LTTE have now been resettled in their villages, and this is accepted by independent observers.

The UNHCR, the organization that knows best about the refugees, is now on record stating that due to improving conditions in Sri Lanka, claims by asylum seekers from here should be considered on their individual merits rather than on a group basis.

It has praised the Canadian officials who have taken this approach to the latest ship load that arrived on board the MV Sun Sea, with the familiar litany of vengeful woes about conditions in Sri Lanka.

The return to normality in Sri Lanka is such that both the United States and the United Kingdom have lifted the last of the travel advisories to their citizens against visiting parts of the country, the very parts mostly populated by Tamils.

Is one to believe that either the US or UK or both would have lifted travel restrictions if Tamils were being killed or abducted in such a scale, or even a modicum of what is described by the asylum seekers, who say they preferred the hell they suffered on board the MV Sun Sea to the hell in Sri Lanka?

Tourism is on the rise here to the point when the New York Times, which has looked at Sri Lanka from a very critical eye over the years, states it is the World’s No. One tourist destination. Would the New York Times recommend visiting a place with so much killing of a minority people, as being alleged?

Rise of new business

What the world is seeing from these asylum seekers from Sri Lanka - the reality largely hidden by most of the international media - is the rise of a vast new business of human smuggling, by those seeking to continue the work of the LTTE, from vast funds at their disposal.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbot

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard

Those who report about these asylum seekers with a deliberate slant against Sri Lanka, fail to disclose the hand of the Trans-national Movement for a Tamil Eelam, which is continuing the LTTE’s policy for a separate state in Sri Lanka, and seeking to make more money through exploiting the liberal laws of countries such as Canada and Australia.

People smuggling from Sri Lanka, and possibly Afghanistan too, is showing all signs of being a huge business, which in the threat it poses to the boundaries and stability of nations can be considered as treacherous or even worse than the pirates operating on the Arabian Sea from Somalia.

The MV Sun Sea is just one example. As James Morton, a Toronto lawyer and past president of the Ontario Bar Association who teaches at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University states: Boats carrying refugees could be seized and kept as Crown property [as a disincentive to human smuggling] but as such boats are usually close to scrap metal and the profits from smuggling are huge such seizure is probably pointless.

The Sun Sea, for example, was worth perhaps $ One-million while the profits from its human smuggling are said to be ten to 20 times that. (National Post, Canada August 17, 10)

That shows the size of the business being unravelled by these shiploads of sham asylum seekers, who despite all the suffering and fear they have allegedly undergone in Sri Lanka have been able to afford anything from US $ 25,000 to 45,000 for their journey on a leaky and unsafe vessel.

From where did this money come? Is it a question to be probed by Sri Lankan Exchange Control or the countries they are seeking to settle down in as law abiding citizens?

The policy in vogue

The romance of refugees and asylum seekers is obviously now over despite the efforts of the chorus of deliberately misguided human rights organizations and media stooges of the pro-LTTE Tamil expatriates aka The Tamil Diaspora. Canada has decided to assess the MV Sun Sea humbugs on a case by case basis.

The Canadian Prime Minister promises tougher laws to deal with the problem. Other Canadian leaders are vocal about LTTE links to the asylum seekers and the people smugglers involved.

The UK has decided that asylum seekers will no longer be able to rely on state handouts to appeal decisions, Justice Secretary of the United Kingdom, Ken Clarke announced, affecting tens of thousands of asylum seekers there; and saving tens of millions of pounds each year when cost cutting in public expenditure is the current policy in vogue.

The issue of asylum seekers, especially those from Sri Lanka, will be the focus at today’s Australian General Election that will decide on its new Prime Minister.

The matter has come to the fore with both the Labour Prime Minister and her Conservative opponent are having a contest on who will be tougher in protecting the Aussie borders from this rising wave of fraud and human smuggling. It is possible that the issue of asylum seekers will be the deciding factor in this election.

We seem to be moving close to a scenario when the western world that was so sympathetic to the LTTE was finally compelled to ban it as an international terrorist organization.

It took some time for the truth about the LTTE to dawn on western leaders. It appears that a similar truth is emerging about these crooked Sri Lankans and their criminal handlers who seek to manipulate the liberal laws of the west to benefit them in a manner they have no entitlement to.