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McCully: NZ Urges Long-Term Peaceful Solution In Sri Lanka

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Murray McCully
Murray McCully

26 May 2009 - Finding a long-term peaceful solution that benefits all the people of Sri Lanka is crucial now that nearly three decades of fighting is over, Foreign Minister Murray McCully said today.

"The end of 26 years of conflict between the Sri Lankan Army and the Tamil Tigers is to be welcomed. However if a long-term, durable peace is to be secured, there must be reconciliation with the Tamil people, and political participation for all Sri Lankan minorities," Mr McCully said.

"The immediate focus must also be on helping and protecting the many thousands of civilians who have been displaced during the conflict, and are now living in makeshift camps.

"Even with the fighting now over, it is imperative that international aid agencies are allowed in to the former conflict zone to help the displaced and injured, and that urgently-needed supplies of food, water and medicine are allowed through to those who need it," Mr McCully said.

Comments

Unless the international

Unless the international community urges for access for
i. aid agencies into camps(all over Northeast), starvation and malnutrition are going to take a greater toll and
ii.media into the Northeast which has been cut off for nearly three years from the rest of the country, ongoing abductions, killings and other atrocities cannot be halted.
Please remember:
Virginia Leary: Ethnic Conflict and Violence in Sri Lanka - Report of International Commission of Jurists 1981
"The South African Terrorism Act has been called 'a piece of legislation which must shock the conscience of a lawyer.' Many of the provisions of the Sri Lankan Act are equally contrary to accepted principles of the Rule of Law. .... The application of the principle of self-determination in concrete cases is difficult. It seems, nevertheless, that a credible argument can be made that the Tamil community in Sri Lanka is entitled to self-determination. The fate of the Tamils in Sri Lanka remains a matter of international concern''.
The Review, International Commission of Jurists, December 1983:
"The impact of the communal violence on the Tamils was shattering... The evidence points clearly to the conclusion that the violence of the Sinhala rioters on the Tamils amounted to Acts of Genocide".

The last thirty years of

The last thirty years of Prevention of Terrorism Act and the last eight years of ''war-on-terror'' have been giving limitless impunity to the government and its armed forces to unleash limitless atrocities on Tamils that were unleashed on them through a series of anti-Tamil pogroms by thugs hired by Sinhalese politicians in the previous 30 years.

Inclusion the way to real

Inclusion the way to real peace by Howard Debenham(a former Australian Ambassador to Sri Lanka), 6 March 2009:
''It is often overlooked that Tamil militarism was, in the first place, spawned by the deliberate demonisation of Tamils (both Hindu and Muslim) in the early years of Sri Lanka's independence from Britain....
For those trapped in the north during the current Government offensive, the risk of accepting a "haven" on the Government side must be weighed against the risk of putting themselves in the hands of Government forces. ....
The essential interest of Sri Lanka's Sinhalese political parties and personalities is still how to exploit the struggle with the Tigers to maintain power in Colombo.
Successive governments have more or less dressed up their intention to negotiate to assuage the feelings of the United Nations and donor countries, including Australia, but not nearly enough to fool any informed observer into believing that the underlying issue of rapprochement between Sinhalese and Tamils is any more on the government's agenda than it was 50 years ago.
When a small group of uniquely qualified Americans and a former Australian high commissioner quietly tried, working with the highest levels of the Sri Lankan Government, to build capacity for statesmanship and progress before peace talks with the LTTE scheduled for Geneva in October of that year, Sri Lanka's leaders only pretended to listen, and so doomed a country and a people once so full of promise to more mindless death and destruction, the worst of which may yet be to come.''

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