Swami Shankaranandaa
Editor-in-Chief, Eelam Mannin Suvadugal

Satire – Political Opinion

Swasthika Arulingam, you said: “What happened to the Muslim community in the North 35 years ago was neither migration nor displacement. It was expulsion. It was ethnic cleansing carried out by the Tigers at gunpoint. We cannot seek coexistence by concealing history.”

In 1990, the Liberation Tigers expelled Muslims from Jaffna for their own safety, to prevent them from being harmed if ethnic riots broke out in the North.

According to a study published by the Asian Development Bank in 2014, many of those expelled have made progress in trade, employment and other economic activities in places such as Puttalam and Colombo. In that sense, history shows that the Liberation Tigers moved them out safely and that they went on to live well.

But, counsel, are you aware that to this day there has been neither justice nor relief for the deaths of the many thousands of Tamils killed by armed Muslims over nearly a decade beginning in 1985?

You describe as ethnic cleansing the expulsion of Muslims for their safety by the Liberation Tigers, an organisation banned in Sri Lanka as a terrorist organisation and no longer active.

I put this question to you as a human rights lawyer: Can you explain, with evidence and reasoned argument, why you do not condemn the Muslim gunmen who took up arms and massacred innocent Tamils?

You were born Tamil. You speak about the Liberation Tigers, an organisation that was banned, whose leadership was destroyed and which is now inactive. Yet you do not address the wrongs of the Sinhala supremacists who sought to cleanse and destroy the Tamil people, or the wrongs of the Muslim gunmen.

I put this question to you as well: Is it to protect those still alive who killed Tamil people?

Swami Shankaranandaa
Editor-in-Chief, Eelam Mannin Suvadugal