UNP leader Ranil Wickramasinghe, holding the Lion flag of genocidal Sri Lankan state along with TNA leader R. Sampanthan in Jaffna on Tuesday challenged SL President Mahinda Rajapaksa that he could try doing the same with Selvarasa Pathmanathan alias KP who is in captivity of the regime. While the need of the times is for Tamils to forge alliance with the Muslims in making an alternative State for the Tamil-speaking people in the North and East, Mr Wickramasinghe recollected Sir Ponnampalam Ramanathan bailing out the Sinhala leaders in 1918 who were indicted by the British for a pogrom against the Muslims in 1915. Muslims to this day regard it as a treachery of Colombo-centric Tamils and Sinhalese against them.
Whether the UNP leader envisage such a scenario back again in which the Colombo-centric elite commit ‘treachery’ to both the Tamils and the Muslims by upholding the genocidal State and negating the independence of long-oppressed Tamil-speaking people in the island, ask political circles that were listening to the speech of Ranil in Jaffna on the May Day.
Ranil also recollected that it was Sir P Ramanathan who worked for declaring Wesak Day, sacred for the Sinhala Buddhists of the island, a holiday under the British.
Ranil also cited Mr Sampanthan saying that he was born as a Sri Lankan and would like to die as a Sri Lankan. The island gained the name ‘Sri Lanka’ only in 1972 before that it was Ceylon. In Tamil, the official name remains ‘Ilangkai’ throughout the colonial and post-colonial periods.
Meanwhile, Mr R. Sampanthan, addressing the same gathering along with Ranil said that Rajapaksa government will never come out with a political solution to the question of Tamils in the island. Therefore, there is a pertinent need for all the opposition parties in the island to forge unity, Sampanthan said. The May Day demonstration in Jaffna is an example for how Tamils and Sinhalese could forge unity, he further said.
While the UNP has brought around 10,000 Sinhalese from the South for the May Day in Jaffna, on the TNA side only less than a hundred Tamils participated the procession and the meeting. The local people didn’t even come out even to watch the fun, news sources in Jaffna said.
In the meantime, media clippings showed a person displaying the Tamil Eelam flag of Tiger emblem at the UNP, TNA rally. However, informed sources told TamilNet that this was an act of Sri Lanka’s military intelligence to imply to the public in the South that the UNP-TNA alliance is an alliance of Ranil Wickramasinghe with the Tigers. Ranil, in his address referred to such campaigns against him in the South.
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