Secret meeting between Government and some sections of Tamil Representatives
A secret meeting is in progress from last Thursday in London with the participation of Government of Sri Lanka(GOSL), Tamil National Alliance (TNA) and the representatives of certain Tamil Diaspora organizations.
The Sri Lankan Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mangala Samaraweera, TNA MP, M.A. Sumanthiran, a representative of former Sri Lankan President, Chandrika Bandaranayake Kumaranathunge, Former Norwegian Minister and facilitator of Sri Lanka’s peace process, Erik Solheim, Martin Stürzinger of the Switzerland Foreign Ministry, representatives of South Africa’s In Transformation Initiative (ITI) Organisation, Suren Surenthiran, the spokesperson for Global Tamil Forum, and Dr. Ramanan , a senior member of Norwegian Council of Eelam Tamils and Global Tamil Forum are participating in this meeting.
This London meeting is being held as a continuation of meetings held earlier in Singapore and some other countries under the aegis of ITI.
Earlier, it was reported that, theses meeting are being held with an objective of establishing peace and reconciliation in Sri Lanka. However, the President of Sri Lanka and the Cabinet of Ministers have been silent on this matter.
Suspicions and accusations were expressed among Tamil organizations and Diaspora activists that, these meetings are being held secretly and the true representatives of Tamil people in homeland and in the Tamil Diaspora are being sidelined in these meetings and hence the real purpose of these meetings remains puzzling.
International Council of Eelam Tamils (ICET), had expressed its suspicions regarding the Media release of ITI in connection with the meeting in Singapore, while accusing that the exclusion of true representatives of Tamil polity had made this meeting a question mark.
Meanwhile, former TNA MP and a current member of the NPC, M.K.Sivajilingam had heavily criticized these meeting which are held under the aegis of ITI while speaking in a Media Conference held at the Jaffna Press Club yesterday. He described these meetings as deception and an attempt to weaken the just demands of the Tamil people and to save the perpetrators of Genocide.
He also had said that the Global Tamil Forum is a weak organization and that it cannot represent Tamil Diaspora.
Meanwhile British Tamil Forum which had expressed its severe dissatisfaction publicly last year regarding the activities of the Global Tamil Forum, had announced that they are not playing any role in the decisions and activities of Global Tamil Forum and that they had distanced them from the Global Tamil Forum.
Severe criticism was levelled against the Global Tamil Forum, in that, they have excluded all its Organizational Norms of joint- decisions, democratic rule, transparency and integrating everyone and had lost its path.
“As our protracted and well-intended efforts to resolve the above issues with GTF have not been acknowledged, let alone reciprocated, we hereby declare openly that we have been denied any representation on the GTF Board – i.e. that we play no part in the decision-making process at GTF; hence we publicly distance ourselves from any of GTF’s initiatives or actions” BTF had said in its Press Release.
