Gotabhaya exonerates US-refused SL general

Genocidal Sri Lanka’s Defence Secretary and presidential sibling Gotabhaya Rajapaksa on Sunday tried to exonerate a Sinhala military general, Maj. Gen. Sudantha Ranasinghe, who was refused admission into a US military training programme on grounds that he had served the war-crimes-accused 53 Division of the SL military. The said general, recently appointed as SL Military Secretary, had not commanded the 53 Division or any other fighting formations, but he was only ‘Commissioner General of Rehabilitation’ taking over a state-run project to ‘rehabilitate’ ex-LTTE cadres in Feb 2010, Gotabhaya said, accusing the US for its blunder in the denial of opportunity to a senior officer of a friendly country to enhance his knowledge, Colombo defence writers reported on Monday.

According to Sri Lanka’s defence websites the genocidal war was a ‘humanitarian operation’ and the post-war killings and abductions to structural genocide committed on Eezham Tamils is ‘rehabilitation’, commented Tamil activists in the island.

Colombo defence writers said on Monday that Sri Lanka’s Army Commander Jagath Jayasuriya had raised the issue of Ranasinghe with the US Embassy in Colombo and the Embassy acknowledged that a mistake had been made.

The most fundamental problem stems from the US and the so-called international community deliberately failing to acknowledge the total picture of genocide committed in the island by the Sinhala State, Tamil activists said.

By reducing the crime of chronic genocide into war crimes of a particular period, by further toning it down into individual command responsibilities of select military officials and by staging the drama of diplomatic manoeuvrings and a game of delay, both Sri Lanka and the Establishments in complicity hoodwink the world. There is no difference between one mobilisation leading to the genocidal war and another facilitating time and space to the structural genocide. Both have the same agenda and the actors are the same, Tamil activists in the island commented.

The ‘reaching out’ policy of the US and India towards Sri Lanka has now encouraged certain sections in the Sinhala South to deny even the well-established crime of burning the Public Library of Jaffna 30 years back.

A former Sinhala DIG, Edward Gunawardena now writes a book saying that the Public Library was actually burnt by the LTTE seeking political mobilisation and not by Sri Lanka’s police and politicians. There were two Sinhala academics, Prof Carlo Fonseka and Dr. Gunadasa Amarasekera to endorse the book and to lament for wrongly indicting certain Sinhala politicians for the act, Colombo media reports said.

On Monday, Colombo’s Daily Mirror cited SL President Mahinda Rajapaksa saying that Most non-Buddhists in the island were conducting their religious activities in places, which belonged to Buddhist temples or sacred lands.

What the SL president says needs careful perusal and unless the nation and territory of Eezham Tamils in the island are not demarcated, completion of genocide is inevitable, commented Tamil activists in the island.

Meanwhile, three US Deputy Assistant Secretaries of the State and Defence Departments are scheduled to visit the island between 26 January and 01 February.

Sri Lanka is expected to raise the matter of the training-refused general with the delegation, a Colombo defence writer said in The Island on Monday.

Bargains related to geopolitics, defence and economy marginalising the question of Eezham Tamils has become the pattern of the visits of the US and Indian delegations to the island over the last several years.

It becomes possible just by maintaining a vacuum in the Tamil power in the region and this has to be particularly realised in Tamil Nadu, political observers in the occupied country of Eezham Tamils said.

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