Friday, 27 February 2015 00:32
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As positions harden in the formerly embattled Northern Province and in Diaspora communities active overseas about the new Government’s efforts to get the UN war crimes report deferred, reports have emerged that a section of a Tamil group active in Canada has arrived in Sri Lanka.
Several members belonging to the Tamil Coordinating Committee (TCC), widely believed to be a LTTE front organisation, have landed in Colombo, the Daily FT learns. Under the previous Government’s proscription order gazetted last year, the TCC remains a banned terrorist organisation in Sri Lanka.
At least one of the aims of the group is to launch political attacks on moderate Tamil politicians perceived as being too lenient with the newly elected Government in Colombo, led by President Maithripala Sirisena and Premier Ranil Wickremesinghe, authoritative sources told the Daily FT.
The past week has seen a surge of protests in the Northern Province against the new Government and moderate politicians in the Tamil National Alliance, including Party Leader R. Sampanthan and national list legislator M.A. Sumanthiran. Effigies of Sampanthan and Sumanthiran were burnt during a protest against the delay of the UN war crimes report on Sri Lanka by six months in London earlier this week. Sumanthiran’s effigy was also burnt during a protest by the families of the disappeared held in Jaffna last Saturday (21).
Concern is mounting among hardline sections of the northern polity that moderate TNA politicos like Sumanthiran, who is a national list MP for the Tamil Party, will contest at parliamentary elections likely in June from the Jaffna District, the sources said.
The TCC group has arrived with considerable financial resources, the sources said. At least one part of the agenda includes the public humiliation of moderate TNA leaders in the Northern Province. The plan includes efforts to stage interruptions at events, with members of the ‘public’ denouncing these leaders or launching minor physical attacks, the sources said. The campaign is aimed at embarrassing the politicians and portraying their rejection by the Tamil people, the sources told the Daily FT.
The TNA Leader and the national list MP are being accused by hardline sections within the Tamil polity, both locally and overseas, of being too lenient with the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe Government and backing a domestic mechanism to achieve accountability for major rights abuses allegedly committed during the last stages of the war. (DB)
