Sri Lankan president and Commander-in-Chief of the occupying Sinhala military Mahinda Rajpaksa put the figure of the SL soldiers in the North as 12,000 in responding to a plea by Northern Provincial Council Chief Minister CW Wigneswaran, at the same stage in Thellippazhai, where a cancer hospital was declared opened on Sunday. Credible sources put the figure of the occupying military at minimum 136,000. At least 36,000 soldiers are stationed in Jaffna peninsula and the remaining 100,000 are in the Vanni mainland. The SL president thinks that the international Establishments would be buying his figures as they did during the genocidal onslaught on Vanni in 2009, political observers in Jaffna said.
During the final stages of the war, while around 360,000 civilians were facing genocidal onslaught in the war zone, Colombo government lied to the world that there were only 70,000 civilians.
The then Indian Foreign Minister and current Indian President Mr Pranab Mukherjee echoed the same lie. The UN Establishment also partially accepted the deliberate SL downplay.
On Sunday, the CM of the NPC openly placed a plea, urging the SL president to transcend above politics in the name of humanity to guarantee the self-respect of the Tamil speaking civilians by ‘reducing’ the number of the military personnel who occupy and do corporate businesses in the lands appropriated from the people.
The CM also complained of the military interference in the civil affairs in the North and pleaded with the president of the genocidal State to implement what he had assured earlier with regards to the functioning of the Northern Provincial Council.
“What I have been saying is that we were quite aware of the inadequacy of the Thirteenth Amendment in solving our political problems but that we obtained our People’s mandate to enable us to work for the betterment of our People specially those affected by the War. We were also aware that the Thirteenth Amendment cannot be worked without the co-operation of the Central Government,” Mr Wigneswaran said in his pleading address to the SL president.
“We showed our goodwill in many ways and Your Excellency reciprocated that goodwill by saying that you would favourably consider our requests to enable our Provincial Council to function without hindrance. We are awaiting the implementation of the assurances given by Your Excellency. Your Excellency is no doubt aware that the earliest possible implementation of the assurances given would facilitate the smooth functioning of our Council. We on our part wish to reiterate that we remain committed to a co-operative approach and we trust that it would be reciprocated at all levels of the Government,” Wigneswaran said.
However, the SL president was responding that the SL military was reduced from 75,000 to 12,000.
“Mr Wigneswaran had earned our respect as a Chief Justice. But now, As a politician, he seems to use all the avenues for his advantage and I don’t know whether to be happy or sad about it,” Mr Mahinda Rajapaksa rebuked.
Rajapaksa, claiming as usual that Colombo had resettled more than 300,000 people, removed land mines and conducted elections, said that he didn’t want to go in detail in responding to the issues raised by Mr Wigneswaran.
Wigneswaran, pleading for the restoration of the ‘self-respect’ of Tamils was in fact pawning the self-respect of the nation of Eezham Tamils in the way he was pleading with Rajapaksa for crumbs, the political observers in Jaffna further said.
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