Western inaction the building blocks of Chinese vassal state - Former Australian Diplomat
[TamilNet, Friday, 11 September 2009, 00:22 GMT] Nations operating behind the Sri Lankan Governments’ manipulation of the post 9-11 global climate in equating 'Tamil and terrorist' continue to ignore their humanitarian obligations to the point of complicity accused former Australian diplomat Bruce Haigh, referring to the imprisonment of 300,000 Tamil refugees in government camps. Speaking at a forum held at The University of Sydney last week, Haigh described the actions of the Sri Lankan Government as one of “pure vindictiveness…towards people who are totally dispossessed and totally powerless”, before warning that the island may become “a vassal state of China.. not averse to carrying out acts of terror and in the future that may be directed towards India in ways to be determined by the Chinese".
Speaking at the launch of the Sri Lankan Human Rights project, a joint initiative between the Centre for Peace And Conflict Studies (CPACS) and the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism (ACIJ) with the support of Amnesty International, the former Deputy High commissioner to Sri Lanka slammed the “reprehensible” actions of his own government, citing a meeting between an Australian delegation as recently as July 2009 where military Rear Admiral David Thomas “urged and encouraged the Sri Lankan authorities to keep the Tamils in detention, so Australia is now party to keeping these people in detention”.
“That rear admiral should have gone to Sri Lanka and should have argued the case, humanitarian assistance to people in those camps. But we did not, in fact we went along with this incarceration of Tamils” Haigh said, attributing this partly to the success of the SL Government who “have successfully sold to the American administration, the Bush administration and to the Australian government the fact that the Tamils represented terror”.
Haigh warned that Sri Lankan authorities were “exacerbating the very problem that they wish to eliminate” before challenging “any representative of the Sri Lankan government or supporter of the Sri Lanka government as to how they can justify holding people in these camps under the conditions that they are being held without access by humanitarian organizations and without access by the media..it is disgusting and I would really like to hear a case made for that continued situation”.
Highlighting the involvement of the Bush administration, Haigh accused the U.S of using Sri Lanka as an opportunity to bolster its fledging “War on Terror” campaign, providing funding and allowing the Rajapakse regime to abrogate its ceasefire with the LTTE in 2006 “with the objective, as we have seen, of conducting a very wide ranging and broad military operation against the North”.
Slamming the Sri Lankan Governments plan to recruit another 100,000 soldiers to be “used as an army of occupation in the east and the north”, Haigh urged the Australian Government to use all avenues available to end the captivity of thousands of refugees by a nation that has that has “moved itself much closer to becoming a military/police state”.
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