Rajiva Wijesinha

“ The current government is committed, as indeed its predecessors for the last twenty years or more have been, to policies of pluralism. Tamil was made an official language in 1987 by constitutional amendment, to remedy a situation that should never have arisen, but at least through that, through the assertion of the need for at least bilingualism amongst officials, we have done our best to uphold better values. ”

“ Delegates here may not be aware of the assassination two years ago of the Tamil Foreign Minister of Sri Lanka, the distinguished lawyer Lakshman Kadirgamar. My deputy is a senior Tamil diplomat who was our ambassador in Vienna amongst other places, but he is a brave man. His predecessor as Deputy Secretary General of the Peace Secretariat, the scholar Kethesh Loganathan, was assassinated after websites supportive of the Tigers described him as a collaborator.
In the armed forces there are senior Tamil officers, but enlistment has been forcibly discouraged amongst the young. ”

“ To give the Tigers their due, they have not practised such ethnic cleansing since. But it is disingenuous of the representative of Interfaith International to bandy similar charges when they apply most conspicuously to the organization he seems to adulate. ”