Ms. Benita Ferrero-Waldner
EU - Commissioner for External Relations
EU Commission
Brussels
Belgium
Mrs Ferrero-Waldner,
I write as the Chairman of the Tamil Writers Guild in the UK. This is
just a message to congratulate you on what appears to be a very sincere
and even-handed message from you released on Thursday, 12th January 2006
for peace in Sri Lanka.
Your equanimous call for peace in Sri Lanka, without taking sides,
shone through in a dire situation. I hope that the government, which is
patently militarily the better equipped, will heed your call and take the
first steps in defusing its military stance and instead seek the federal
solution that was agreed before President Mahinda Rajapakse upset the
status quo ante. The LTTE should then be able to ease its military
readiness to defend the people of the North and the East of Sri
Lanka. A new momentum has to be injected into the peace process.
The difficult political process to find a peaceful solution will have
a better chance if all the co-chairs of it avoid taking a partisan
stance. It is a pre-requisite for building trust on both sides and the
co-chairs have a duty to ensure that agreements painfully reached are not
squandered. The US Ambassador to Sri Lanka, a co-chair who like a
referee should avoid joining in the game, has merrily waded into it recently,
by trying to bully the Tamils with a statement that the US which is
helping to train government forces will enhance its support in the event of a
war. Such blatant partisanship would normally disqualify a person or
country from holding a position of trust such as a co-chair. In your effort
to garner peace in that country, I hope you will dissuade the US from
engaging in such evident military bragging. It did not do much for
them in Vietnam and they are in a quagmire in Iraq.
We might have had reservations about some previous EU statements but
we are with you wholly in this call for peace which demands a change of
heart and an understanding of the nature of freedom and equality of
mankind.
Yours sincerely,
Ivan Pedropillai
Chairman
TWG
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