News: Diaspora

Earlier this year, Raj Rajaratnam, founder of the Galleon Group hedge fund, was convicted of conspiracy and securities fraud in one of the biggest insider-trading cases in the history of Wall Street. But there was another reason the federal government was interested in Rajaratnam—his alleged financial support for Tamil separatists in Sri Lanka, whose cause is spearheaded by the ferocious Tamil Tiger terrorists. Vanity Fair’ s David Rose gets the untold story from a Tamil Tiger turned F.B.I. informant.

With 300,000 Tamils living in Canada, the demand that Colombo reconcile with its minority is based on a mixture of principle and politics

"Tamils from across Europe demonstrated at the UN's European headquarters on Monday, calling for a probe into alleged war crimes committed by Sri Lanka at the end of the country's 2009 civil war."

Indeed, the Government’s inadequate response to the problem of accountability for war atrocities does not bode well for the future of Sri Lanka. It lays the ground for suspicion, fueling calls for international action, which are then used by those in power to justify their repression of domestic critics—actions that only indicate growing authoritarianism and raise further questions. Evasions of accountability thus serve to undermine local efforts at post-war rebuilding and reconciliation, and in fact leave the back door open for those who would make an example of the state’s failures. These efforts toward truth and justice—and not the whitewash of an international propaganda battle–are the real challenges for a democratic Sri Lanka, as it strives for everyday and political reconciliation, and the prosperity of its citizens in the years to come. After watching the Channel 4 film, many of us asked: What will the Government do now? If these scattered, frenzied “responses” are the answer, don’t the people of Sri Lanka—and in particular, the war-battered people in this film – deserve better?