'Political solution, not politics of food': Mano Ganesan to India

[TamilNet, Monday, 03 November 2008, 16:47 GMT]
The leader of the Western Province People's Front (WPPF) Mano Ganesan on Sunday said the need of hour for India was to push the Government of Sri Lanka to fair and reasonable political solution alluding that India was not needed for the job of supplying 800 MT humanitarian supplies. Three basics of the upheavals in Tamil Nadu were: stop the war, stop the military aid to Sri Lanka and send humanitarian aids to the needy in Vanni. "The Indian Government virtually dismissed first two and got hold of the last, comparatively easy one," Mr. Mano Ganesan said in a press statement issued from Colombo.

"Let our friends in the other parts of the world take care of the humanitarian subject, however difficult it is, as they have been doing for the last two decades," he said, thanking India for 800 MT supplies that would last for 10 days.

Meanwhile, humanitarian officials in Colombo said UN agencies were sending in 650 MT food supplies per convoy needed for the IDPs in Vanni per week.

Mr. Ganesan referred to a recent meeting in Colombo where Indian High Commissioner Alok Prasad sat with presidential advisor Basil Rajapaksa and other officials to discuss ways and means for proposed Indian humanitarian aid reaching the IDPs of Vanni.

"The food and medicine cannot substitute the all important power-devolved political solution to the national question of Sri Lanka," said the convener of Civil Monitoring Commission, which registered complaints from the relatives of the missing, especially in the South.

"India can firmly demand for a political solution beyond 13th Amendment to the Lankan ethnic question. The customary Indian assurances for political solution are not going to comfort the Tamils today. The logistics to a political solution should be tabled," he said.

"President Rajapaksa’s hurried public commitments for a political solution, reported through selected Indian media, are not bringing any new hopes to us, the Tamils at the receiving end in this six decade old ethnic struggle," he said.

Neither GoSL's 'latest statements of understanding' of Tamil Nadu's concerns for the Tamils in Lanka, which went to the extend of thanking Chief Minister Karunanidhi, were convincing the Tamils, Ganesan added.

Hinting that there was no attitudinal change in the policies of the Sri Lankan government, he said Colombo was even not prepared to devolve powers within the Tamil -Muslim majority provincial council in the east, citing complaints from the Muslim parliamentarians of the ruling party itself.

"The change, if any, is too slow and too small, even at the level of provincial council. On the other hand, the phase of the military machine is very speedy and very deadly," he said.