In a country steeped in political murder and endemic violence, Joseph Pararajasingham stood like a beacon for the goodness, kindness and brotherhood that should mark the conduct of relationships between human beings. The Sri Lankan government and its armed forces will again attempt to exculpate themselves of responsibility for this heinous crime. But their excuses are starting to wear thin. Their protestations shall not and cannot be believed, as they had both the motive and the circumstances to perpetrate this sordid act and, of course they have previous history of gruesome murders carried out with impunity.



This killing is not the single dastardly act committed by a madman on the spur of the moment. It is a calculated act of political assassination of Tamil leaders carried out by the government and its unscrupulous surrogates to eliminate the leadership of the Tamil people and to cower them into subjugation.



The EU was quick to condemn the LTTE for Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar’s death without a scintilla of evidence and will, I hope, not be acquiescent in the death of Joseph Pararajasingham. The co-chairs of the Sri Lankan peace process will be complicit by their silence, if indeed they choose to do so, in encouraging the Sri Lankan government and its armed forces to terrorise and murder the Tamil civilian population in their homelands. Presently the Sri Lanka armed forces are carrying out a vicious campaign of murder and terror in Jaffna against unarmed civilians and university students. The co-chairs who have their representatives in the country, must know that the Sri Lankan government has unleashed this reign of terror upon the Tamils in contravention of all the provisions of the Ceasefire Agreement in order to subjugate them.



But while the co-chairs seem to want to rush into judgement whenever there is a complaint made by the Sri Lankan government and its Goebbelsian public relations organisations, they have done nothing at all to stop the Sri Lankan government from carrying out these attacks on the civilian population. Where is their moral authority and judgement? Why do they not ban the members of the Sri Lankan government and the armed forces from travelling to their countries? The Tamils have every right to ask themselves whether they should any longer depend on the co-chairs or Western governments to broker peace when they appear to have no sense of fair play or even-handedness in their approach.



The Sinhala Buddhist establishment has been toying with the Eelam Tamil nation, flirting with offers of federalism and equality, primarily for the benefit of the credulous Western governments that have abandoned their ethics or moral values and are willing to be used as pawns by Sri Lanka in their campaign to demonise the Tamil cause.



The Sri Lankan government will continue to play cat and mouse with the Tamils so long as they can use the co-chairs to their advantage. President Mahinda Rajapakse was prepared to jettison the Oslo accord on a federal constitution to win the presidential election, after exciting and exacerbating the massed ranks of extremist Buddhist monks and their febrile supporters to campaign against it.



The Sinhala masses and their political leaders have shown throughout the years that they will not brook any democratic campaign by the Tamils for their political rights. It is an exercise in total futility to depend on the Sinhala polity to negotiate and concede fundamental political rights to the Tamils. The Tamil nation has striven long and hard for a political concordat but the time has now come to tell the Sinhalese, the co-chairs and the world that we shall not stand idly by while our leaders are assassinated and our people terrorised.