Peace forum on Sri Lanka
By Sue Bull
CANBERRA — A group called Friends of Peace in Sri Lanka held a lively forum of 50 people on August 31 to explore the possibilities of an end to the war in that troubled country.
The group is an association of Australian Sinhalese and Tamils which invited representatives from each of the major stakeholders in the conflict to submit their perspectives before a panel of non-Sri Lankan academics and interested observers.
Unfortunately, the Sri Lankan high commission, which originally agreed to participate, declined to attend on the day. Consequently, a similar position was put by Mahindapala, a member of the Sinhalese Cultural Association in Sydney.
Ranjith Soysa from the Society for Peace, Unity and Human Rights for Sri Lanka (SPUR) put what he believed to be a position similar to that of the Sinhalese masses, and Siva Subramanium put the Tamil perspective.
Mahindapala believed that when Tamil leaders developed the Vaddukoddai Resolution of 1976, which called for a separate Tamil state, this provoked the Sinhalese people into violence against the Tamils. Mahindapala also suggested that the idea of a Tamil homeland was a myth and that the leader of the Tamil Tigers (LTTE), Prabaharan, is a "totalitarian monster".
Ranjith Soysa compared Prabaharan to Hitler and Sadam Hussein, due to allegations of ethnic cleansing in the areas under LTTE control and claimed that the call for Tamil Eelam was racist.
Siva Subramanium argued that there have been two distinct nationalities in Sri Lanka since 1000 AD. He said that the many pogroms carried out against Tamils, especially since the 1970s, had strengthened the desire for a separate state. He believed that the average Sinhalese confuses nationalism with racism.
Subramanium said that the LTTE do represent the aspirations of the Tamil people, whereas the Tamil groups in Colombo, which the present government attempts to deal with, do not. For a lasting peace, the LTTE had to be seen as an equal with the Sri Lankan government and included in all negotiations.
The forum ended by voting for a statement which "... calls upon the warring parties to stop the current war immediately and to negotiate a just and lasting peace". The two representatives from SPUR registered their disagreement with the statement.