LTTE atrocities taboo for some, Minister Ranawaka tells LLRC

Human rights allegations against the Sri Lankan security forces is baseless since over 9,000 LTTE cadres who were actively engaged in the war surrendered to the Army. All these LTTE cadres would have been killed if the security forces were fighting without considering the rules of combat, Power and Energy Minister Patali Champika Ranawaka said.

Testifying before the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) yesterday he further said all these allegations were fabricated by certain local and foreign sections to put the blame on the Sri Lankan Government. The embryo of Tamil terrorism was not laid in recent history. Red Bana, Sarvodaya and TRRO organisations were systematically establishing the notion of a separate Tamil homeland and the culmination of their demand was LTTE terrorism, he said.

After the war, a group of Sinhalese who migrated to Jaffna to settle down was rousingly welcomed by the Tamil community as brothers. But certain racist Tamil political parties are still protesting against the Sinhala migration, he said.

“All the blunders are being done by the Tamil politicians and not by the Tamil people. Tamil politicians should be responsible for the bloodshed among all communities in the history,” he said.

He said Sri Lanka was the only country that treated all the ethnic communities equally.

Only one section of the crisis has been identified by the people. The Sinhalese were the aggrieved party due to this war. In the 1983 riot, all Tamils who were discriminated by politically backed groups were returned within six months, but the Sinhalese who were chased away from the Jaffna Peninsula and the North and East regions are still deprived of their basic human rights even to return to their residences where they had been staying for long periods, he said. (www.info.gov.lk)