Response to The Australian Age

(Created date: 09-Oct-2011)

The following letter was sent to the Editor of an Australian paper that carried a crude attack on the current Australian High Commissioner in Sri Lanka. It was based on misrepresentation of the situation here, and seems part of an increasingly forceful campaign to disrupt the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting that will be held in Perth later this year.

5th October 2011
The Editor The Australian Age

Dear Sir,

I was sent today, by an Australian friend, a copy of the editorial that appeared yesterday in The Age. Whilst I suspect the attack on the current Australian High Commissioner in Sri Lanka may relate to political concerns in Australia, I was disappointed at the regurgitation of falsehoods about the Rehabilitation Programme in Sri Lanka.

2009 - Child soldiers on combat duties- Killinochchi bund May 2009 2011 - John Dowd - condemned the rehabilitation programme in the camps as ‘re-education, not rehabilitation’

Responsible investigative journalism would reveal that our programme is about the best in the world. Coincidentally, your editorial reached me on the day we concluded an Entrepreneurship Training Programme for ex-combatants, funded through my decentralized budget as a national list Member of the Sri Lankan Parliament. I had prepared a photo essay on the event, which I am taking the liberty of forwarding to you. I would be grateful if you could let me know if any other rehabilitation programme provides such training to former combatants, let alone to members of a terrorist group.

Our indulgence springs from the fact that we believe most of these youngsters were forcibly conscripted. I was appalled therefore to read the ease with which you reproduced John Dowd’s facile characterization of the programme as ‘re-education not rehabilitation’. Sadly some basic education too is essential for these youngsters, some of whom were taken away from school before they were in their teens.

It was upsetting for instance to find a boy who said he had been to Hartley College, one of the best schools in the North, barely literate. The reason was revealed when he said he had only had primary schooling and not permitted to go beyond Grade 5. Unfortunately the heedless posturing of people like Mr Dowd permits this type of brutality to go unnoticed.

When I was in Australia in May, I was finally told why Australia, alone I believe in the Western world, failed to proscribe the Tigers. The reason, which some politicians told me had to be kept confidential, until one more honest or more indiscreet than the others made it clear, was that such proscription requires the support of the states, and some states with Labour governments at the time would have made political capital against the then Prime Minister Mr Howard. I suspect Mr Dowd as Attorney General of New South Wales may have been one of the individuals thus playing politics with people’s lives. After all Wikileaks has revealed that the passion about Sri Lanka of Mr David Miliband in Britain was primarily for electoral considerations.

Such monsters, careless of lives in other countries provided they perpetuate their controls in their own, should be ashamed of themselves, but that is not a trait one associates with politicians. I hope however that a newspaper can do better. Please feel free to question me about this programme and others, study the photographs, and then let me know whether your blind adherence to the tenets of Mr Dowd is justifiable.

Yours sincerely

Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha, MP
Advisor on Reconciliation