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Journalism of Courage
NEW DELHI, APRIL 24: External affairs Minister Jaswant Singh is `personally’ attending to the controversy involving the Sri Lankan government and MDMK leader M Vaiko’s alleged threat on the life of President Chandrika Kumaratunga, at a pro-Tamil rally in Geneva two weeks ago.
But even as the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) is moving fast to contain any damage to relations with Colombo, an English transcript of the Tamil speech made by Vaiko, at the rally on April 3 in front of the Palais des Nations at Geneva and elsewhere, reveals other damaging remarks.
In remarks indicating that New Delhi was distancing itself from Vaiko’s remarks, an MEA spokesman said that any solution to the problems in Sri Lanka should be peacefully resolved within the “framework of the unity, territorial integrity and sovereignty” of that country.
Calling for the unification of the Tamil people into a single nation at the Geneva rally, Vaiko, the MP from Sivakasi in Tamil Nadu, could stir an ethnic hornet’s nest, which could have dangerous consequences for the volatile mix of peoples who inhabit South Asia, analysts here said.
“It is necessary,” said Vaiko, “for the Tamil nation to have a single nation, a single country and a single language. Today, the motherland of Tamil people has become a cemetery `scattered with corpses’.”
The comment, however, that is the key to the controversy so far is the following remark made by Vaiko and reported in the national and international press. “She needs to be lucky every time but we need to be lucky only once,” the MDMK leader said, referring to Sri Lankan President Kumaratunga, who recently only barely escaped an assassin’s attack, but lost an eye in the blast.
The remark, pregnant with consequence, so upset Colombo, that Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar shot off a letter last week to Jaswant Singh, formally protesting the Indian MP’s indirect threat and that too in a third country.
In fact, Colombo is believed to have also expressed its displeasure to the Swiss government, since Vaiko’s remarks were made on Swiss soil. UN authorities, who otherwise are reasonably generous about letting NGOs and minority organisations making critical comments about their states, took the precaution of not allowing meetings between Vaiko and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees as well as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Vaiko, however, was not fazed. In an interview published on April 4 with a newspaper from Geneva called the `Tribune de Geneve’, Vaiko invoked Yasser Arafat’s PLO to justify the use of terrorism. “In order to carry out a way for independence, some things are unavoidable,” Vaiko told the paper.
At the pro-Tamil rally in Geneva, the MDMK leader eulogised Prabhakaran, whose LTTE group is banned in India since the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. Equating him with Napoleon Bonaparte, Vaiko invoked the recent and ancient past conflict between Sinhalas and Tamils, peppering his speech with remarks about atrocities committed by Colombo’s forces.
“Our sisters are being raped in Jaffna. They are also… killed and (their) bodies concealed. Can anybody tolerate this? The fight is in progress under the leadership of Prabhakaran. Prabhakaran can be equated to Napoleon Bonaparte,” he said.
In Chennai today, Vaiko, whose MDMK party with 3 MPs is a partner in the NDA government currently in power claimed his comments at the Geneva rally had been twisted out of context. And that the remark threatening Kumaratunga had first actually been made by the Irish Republican Army, who owned responsibility for a failed assassination attempt of former British PM Margaret Thatcher.
Describing the Sri Lankan government’s complaint as “condemnable and objectionable” and aimed at tarnishing his image, Vaiko said he had given an explanation to Jaswant Singh. Nowhere, he added, had he spoken against Kumaratunga or even mentioned her name.
