Trincomalee Tamils appeal to Kofi Annan

[TamilNet, Monday, 24 December 2001, 13:40 GMT]
“ Successive Sri Lankan governments have repeatedly disregarded the request for peace talks put forward by the LTTE by adducing various motives while it continued the pernicious war against the Tamils by using all state resources. At the last parliamentary general elections, the entire Tamil community in the northeast province overwhelmingly supported the Tamil National Alliance which stood for accepting the LTTE as the sole representative of the Tamils in Sri Lanka”, states a memorandum sent Monday by community leaders, civil society groups NGOs and trade unions in Trincomalee to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan with copies the United States of America, United Kingdom, India, Norway, Canada, Australia and member states of the European Union.

The memorandum urges the UN secretary general “to exert pressure on the new Sri Lankan government not to delay the peace process but to embark on a programme to talk to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) accepting them as the sole representative of Tamils of Sri Lanka”.

The memorandum further states “according to a UNHCR report, more than 75 thousand Tamils have been killed or maimed for life and more than sixty percent of the properties of Tamils in the northeast have been destroyed due to the ongoing war”.

“The Sinhala governments continue the war to make Tamils a minority in their traditional homeland in northeast province of Sri Lanka”, the memorandum points out.

Senior lawyers and representatives of the Consortium of the Trincomalee District Non-Governmental Organization, the Ceylon Tamil Teachers Union, Eastern Rehabilitation Organization, Trincomalee District Graduates Union, Northeast Tamil Teachers Union and Trincomalee District University Students’ Association are among the signatories of the memorandum.