Colombo, October 3 (NIA): The Chief Minister of Sri Lanka’s Tamil-majority Northern Province C.V.Wigneswaran has said that he is continuously receiving information about a plot to assassinate him and blame it on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
According to Sunday Virakesari and other weekend Tamil dailies, Wigneswaran said this in his message to a function organized to launch a book on the constitutional history of Sri Lanka from Donoughmore to Sirisena (1931-2016) in Jaffna on Saturday.
The Chief Minister, whose message was read out at the function, said that the history of Sri Lanka shows that the dominant ideology in Sinhalese-majority South Sri Lanka has always been that the island country should be turned into an exclusive property of the Sinhalese. The Tamils could enjoy only those rights given by the Sinhalese. He pointed out that so far, the practice has been to deny the Tamils even those rights due to them under the law.
When the Tamils demand their rights, the demands are misrepresented to show that the Tamils are bent on sharpening communal differences. Giving a couple of examples, Wigneswaran referred to his demand that illegally erected statues of the Buddha should be removed and said that this valid objection has been projected as total opposition to the construction of Buddhis temples in the North. Again, if the demand is for an end to state-sponsored colonization by the Sinhalese in the North to bring about a change in the ethnic ratio, it is portrayed as a plan to drive out all Sinhalese from the North.
The idea behind all this misrepresentation, Wigneswaran said, is to tell the Tamils that they should not speak about their problems but only accept what is given to them.
The Chief Minister went on to say that with politics getting mixed up with such misrepresentations, he is getting information of plans to put his life in jeopardy and to falsely implicate the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the plot.
Wigneswaran appealed to the Tamils who had gone through slaughter in Muliwaikkal, to unite and rise like the Jews after Hitler’s holocaust in Europe. The Tamils should give up mutual animosities and political competitiveness and jealousies and stop betraying the interests of the community. Time has come for all Tamils to learn lessons from the past and unite to fight for their rights, regardless of where they belong, whether to the North or the East, the Central Highlands or Colombo, the Chief Minister said.
