My name is Mahinda Gunasekera. I'm the current president of the Sri Lanka United National Association.
Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I would like to thank you for giving us this opportunity.
As you know, Sri Lanka is a small island. It has a total land mass of roughly 25,000 square miles. It has a multi-ethnic, multi-religious population counting nearly 20 million, of whom about 78.4% are today from the Sinhala community. The Sri Lankan Tamil community has been reduced, from the prior number of 12.6% to just under 8%, due to large-scale migration from the country. The Indian Tamils, who were brought in by the British for work on the plantations, are roughly 5.4%. The Moors, who are Muslims, are about the same population as the Sri Lankan Tamils, also roughly 7.8% to 7.9%. There is a very small percentage of Malays and Burghers, the descendants of the Dutch.
I've come to the main grievances that we've heard from the Tamil community. The first issue is language.
Sinhala was made the official language, replacing the alien language of English, in 1956. With Sinhala spoken by 78% of the population as the official language, allowing the reasonable use of Tamil, including the right to free education in Tamil from kindergarten to university, was still considered discrimination against the Tamil population. English, introduced by the colonial administration, was spoken by less than 6% of the population, with the vast majority not having access to English education even after 133 years of British rule.
The linguistic rights of the Tamils were gradually enhanced. Their language was later elevated as a national language by the Second Republican Constitution of 1978. It was subsequently further upgraded to an official language following the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord of 1987 and placed on a par with Sinhala.
The grievance relating to linguistic rights was sorted out by 1978, within the short space of 22 years, and could therefore not become a cause for the armed insurrection that was launched in the 1980s.
The other question that was raised was the citizenship of the Indian Tamils, the indentured labourers brought in by the British. They had been brought over by the British colonial power as indentured labourers for work on the newly established tea, coffee, and cocoa plantations set up on land confiscated from Sinhala peasants and landowners without a penny in compensation being paid to the displaced Sinhala people.
These Indian Tamils, who did not consider Sri Lanka their homeland, were migrant workers who returned to their native Tamil Nadu in southern India after short periods of employment, and hence did not qualify for citizenship in newly independent Ceylon, now Sir Lanka. They lacked the stipulated residential qualifications for citizenship, which was seven years. Indian Tamils who failed to qualify for citizenship and remained stateless had their citizenship amicably settled between Sri Lanka and India under the Sirima-Shastri Pact of 1963.
The other issue was the alleged discrimination against Tamil students. The claim that Tamil students were discriminated against by the introduction of standardization of marks in the 1970s is yet another canard.
The scheme of standardization was introduced as an affirmative action program to offset some of the disadvantages faced by students from rural schools, which lacked quality teachers, libraries, laboratories, etc., as compared with better-facilitated and long-established city schools. This scheme required students from the city schools to score higher averages to qualify for admission to the universities. It equally affected students in the city schools located in the predominantly Tamil Jaffna peninsula and other southern cities such as Colombo, Galle, and Kandy.
Today, following the destruction of the education system in the Jaffna region owing to separatist violence, Jaffna students are benefiting from this very standardization scheme. The district is now considered a deprived region, where lower marks will qualify for admission to the university.
Yet another issue was the so-called settlement of Sinhalese on newly developed state lands. The Tamils have no claim to an exclusive homeland within the territory of Sri Lanka. Their national homeland is in Tamil Nadu in south India, where 65 million Tamils live. After independence, new development projects were undertaken to reclaim the land overrun by jungles. One such project was the Gal Oya project, which was initiated with U.S. technical assistance. Landless peasantry and unemployed people who had an agricultural background but were living in densely populated areas were settled into food production on very small allotments of land on 99-year leases. No Tamils were willing to take these subsistence-sized plots in mosquito-infested areas where malaria was widespread at the time, as they enjoyed more lucrative employment in both the government and private sectors.
The Tamil separatist movement began, not in 1976 after the passing of the resolution, but as far back as 1918, when the Justice Party of Tamil Nadu in south India campaigned to establish a separate country, called Dravidistan, in India.
Prior to the grant of independence in 1948, the British established a special commission in 1945, headed by Lord Soulbury, to hear the claims of the constituent groups on the island. The Tamils did not speak of their claims, if any, to a traditional homeland encompassing the north and east, which they recently invented following their moves to establish the separate monoethnic Tamil state called Eelam. They only sought balanced representation in the Parliament of the newly independent Sri Lanka, where the Tamil-speaking minorities would be guaranteed 50% of the seats, while the 78% Sinhalese would have to contest in order to fill the remaining 50% of the places. Lord Soulbury rejected this 50-50 demand as an insidious move to make a minority a majority, and instead introduced universal suffrage with voting rights for all persons over 21 years.
In the present situation, the total number of internally displaced civilians forced to move with the retreating Tiger forces is estimated at between 250,000 and 400,000 by various INGO and UN agencies. Now it appears to be not more than 120,000, of whom nearly 55,000 have already moved out of the diminishing sliver of land held by the LTTE to safety and welfare facilities in government-controlled areas, despite armed attacks on escaping civilians by the Tamil Tigers. Apparently the international non-governmental groups have been exaggerating the number of IDPs to receive enhanced funding for the operations and retain their high-paying jobs with various perks in this tropical isle. In fact, certain INGOs and a UN agency were not agreeable to releasing the displaced civilians in Muttur township, as they claimed they had negotiated funding for a period of three years, whereas the government had de-mined and restored the place, enabling the people to move back to their homes in 40 days.
After the rapid advance made by Sri Lanka's military to regain the use of territory illegally held by the Tamil Tigers, it has become clear that neither the LTTE nor any other non-governmental groups had made any worthwhile contribution to uplift the living conditions of the civilian population in the Vanni during the past 20 years. However, it has come to light that these INGOs, either willingly or unwillingly, provided a great deal of assistance to the Tamil Tiger military machine in acquiring highly sophisticated military hardware; ultra-modern communications equipment; technical know-how to develop various weapons, including submarines; chemical weapons; airstrips to land heavy cargo planes; and a lot more.
These INGO groups have hidden agendas. Some of them are known to surreptitiously engage in converting poverty-affected Sinhala and Tamil civilians to Christianity by providing allurements or bribes to qualify for assistance, and even getting these unethically converted people to openly smash images of their Hindu gods or Buddhist statues, giving rise to unnecessary friction within those rural communities.
One such project was code-named the Mustard Seed Project by World Vision, which too claims to be doing community development work in Sri Lanka.
Most of these INGO and NGO groups that are funded from overseas, including Canada, have a very hostile and confrontational approach to the Government of Sri Lanka, while they are known to maintain friendly ties to the LTTE.
As a result of this behaviour of the non-government groups that disburse Canada's foreign aid in the country, the close ties the people of Sri Lanka had with Canada are tending to go sour.