Anti-Lanka move defeated
The Australian government and the Opposition voted together yesterday
to defeat a motion moved in the Senate by Australian Greens Senator Lee
Rhiannon (Senator for New South Wales) to suspend Sri Lanka from the
Commonwealth, states the Sri Lanka High Commission in Canberra.
Speaking on the motion, a representative for the Australian
government said that they do not believe that complex foreign policy
issues can be resolved through motions such as the one mooted by Senator
Rhiannon. Senator Rhiannon also convened a closed door round-table
discussion earlier in the week, the participants for which included pro-LTTE
lobby group representatives and critics of the Sri Lankan government.
No invitation was extended by the Senator for any Sri Lankan
government representative to participate in this discussion.
Senator Rhiannon recently requested the Australian Immigration and
Citizenship Minister to provide details of those that had applied for
visas to Australia to attend the forthcoming CHOGM meeting as a part of
the Sri Lanka delegation.
The minister declined to provide that information.
Several articles have appeared in the Australian media on the
attempts by the Global Tamil Forum (GTF) and the Australian Tamil
Congress (ATC) calling on governments including Australia to suspend Sri
Lanka from the Commonwealth and to seek to prevent the participation of
the Sri Lanka delegation at the forthcoming CHOGM meeting in Perth.
The sole aim of these groups is to resurrect the militarily defeated
LTTE terrorists and their cause of creating a separate mono-ethnic state
of Tamil Eelam in the North and East of Sri Lanka. The efforts of these
groups have concentrated in the aftermath of the war in targeting key
Sri Lankan government officials and damaging their reputations
internationally. Their calls are being ignored worldwide.
Sri Lanka's High Commissioner to Australia Admiral Thisara
Samarasinghe has given extensive interviews to the Australian Associated
Press (AAP) and ABC Radio Australia this week countering allegations
made against Sri Lanka.
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