South Asian Centre Urges Collective Action against Sri Lanka

South Asian Centre Urges Collective Action against Sri LankaSource: ITP - August 8, 2006

London, ITP: Dr. Raymond Philipps, Founder-Director of the South Asian Centre for Racial Equality and Peace (SACREP) has written a strongly worded letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations and to the International War crimes Commission stating that it is time these world bodies acted in favor of the Rule of Law to protect the most oppressed community in South Asia, namely, the Tamils of the proto-State of Eelam. The International community has a responsibility to save them from extinction and annihilation by the lethal Sinhala military machine.

Though he was unwilling to reveal the details of his letter, in his interview with our reporter from ITP, Dr. Philips said that the horrific military actions of Sri Lanka’s hawkish President Mahinda Rajapaksa and especially the premeditated assassination attempt on the Scandinavian Monitoring Mission (SLMM) Head Major General Ulf Henricsson, call for an unreserved international condemnation of the government of Sri Lanka. Commenting on the allegation that the assassination attempt on SLMM monitors was hatched by the Rajapaksa brothers, Dr. Philpps said that the International community is dealing with a dangerous and deceptive lawbreaker whose defiant pursuit to resolve the country’s ethnic conflict by military means is ill-advised and barbaric. This belligerent attitude of the governmenbt should be condemned in the strongest possible terms. A collective attention, effort and action from the democratic world is urgently needed to isolate Sri Lanka as a State that sponsors, uses and promotes terrorism and to impose economic sanctions that would prevent the country from its rapid erosion into a totalitarian state.

Dr. Philipps who is a highly respected authority on South Asian politics also runs an independent Research Centre for over thirty years and is known across the world-academia through his most quoted South Asian Documentation Bulletin. He further commented that Sri Lanka has a track record of vicious forms violations of the fundamental Human Rights of the Tamil community and that the International community by its silence and negligence has encouraged this failed State to continue its mayhem and murder of innocent Tamil and Moslem children, men and women. He commented that unless word bodies such as the UN acts swiftly and sharply it may be too late to contain the evil unleashed by the Sinhala terror campaign. He said that the world community has a responsibility to prevent another pogrom as the one let loose by the animal instinct of the Sinhala nation in July 1983 which took a toll of over four thousand Tamil lives within fort eight hours, encouraged by the criminal-minded J. R. Jayawardene