CTC President’s Speech at the 10th Year Mullivakkal Remembrance in Canadian Parliament

May 15, 2019 – Good evening Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests.

On behalf of the Canadian Tamil Congress, I want to thank all of you for being here today.

We have several members of parliament with us this evening—I want express our sincere appreciation to all of you for being here – for a day so important to Tamil Canadians from coast to coast.

May 18 is a day of remembrance for Tamils in Canada and around the world. Today, we mourn for the innocent lives lost,remember the families torn apart and left with no answers.

According to UN reports,during the last stages of the war 40,000-70,000 people were killed or not accounted for in a war without witnesses.Journalists, along with UN observers, were banned as thousands were wiped out.

Ten years later, the wounds linger, of justice forgotten, of human rights buried alongside the innocent.

Many Tamil Canadians still have or know of loved ones who have gone missing, never to be heard from again. Year passes after year and there are no answers for the human rights violations that occurred or the crimes against humanity that took place. There is no comfort, no consolation for the children who will grow up without their parents, and the wives without their loved ones.

As we remember, we call for investigation and accountability for the serious violations and abuses of human rights and war crimes in Sri Lanka. What is at stake when the democratic world ceases to push for human rights, for accountability, for justice? What is at stake when democratic countries remain silent?

While UN bodies have acknowledged the loss of thousands of lives and indiscriminate shelling in safe zones, minimal progress has taken place.

We urge UN member states, including Canada to prevent perpetrators of these international crimes in Sri Lanka from evading justice, to adopt a parallel process on accountability, such as an international criminal tribunal, to supplement efforts by the UNHRC to deal with mass atrocity crimes committed in Sri Lanka during and after the war that ended ten years ago.

The UN Human Rights Council’s High Commissioner must ensure that member states to take steps to “investigate and prosecute, wherever possible, in particular in accordance with universal jurisdiction principles, those allegedly responsible for such violations as torture, enforced disappearance, war crimes or crimes against humanity; and explore other options to advance accountability in the absence of credible domestic processes.”

At this point I would also want to extend our sympathies to the families of those who lost their lives in the recent tragic bombings on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka.

We also support the call for accountability for these heinous acts, however, accountability needs to be universal, for a society to prosper, justice needs to be meted out in an equitable manner, regardless of the ethnicity or religion of the perpetrators, something that is yet to occur in Sri Lanka.

While the path to justice, accountability and reconciliation may be long, we must stand up for what is right. At a time when human rights are threatened all over the world, we must not be silent.We must vow to uphold the principles of human rights, truth and justice whenever we can and in that context we condemn the recent violence against the Muslim community and call upon the Sri Lankan government to immediately implement security measures to prevent such occurrences in the future.

In closing, I thank you all for taking the time to come today and for standing with Tamil Canadians and Tamils around the world,as we continue to seek truth and justice for crimes committed.

To quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice”.

We request that the Canadian Government take urgent appropriate action and work with the international community so that this will become reality in Sri Lanka in the not too distant future.