Northern Provincial Councillor and civil society activist Ananthy Sasitharan, has called the suggestion that she should be ‘rehabilitated’ an atrocious threat, made to silence voices like herself in the run-up to the UN Human Rights Council session in March.
Responding in a press release to the threat by a defence ministry official and to accusations that she was propagating ‘separatism’, Sasitharan accused the Sri Lankan government of encouraging Sinhalese supremacists and identifying extremists in the south as “patriots” while demonising human rights activists as separatists.
Sasitharan expressing her outrage said that she “would not be surprised if the Sri Lankan government attempted to rehabilitate the entire international community” for challenging Sri Lanka on its rights record. Sasitharan said that her views represent more than 80,000 people who voted for her to speak up for their rights, and speculated that the TNA leadership and all those who voted for her should then also be put through rehabilitation.