McDermott’s allegations: Australia-based SPUR urges Labour to set the record straight
Australia-based Society for Peace Unity and Human Rights for Sri Lanka (SPUR) has urged the Labour Party to reject its member Hugh McDermott’s recent anti-Sri Lanka statement detrimental to Sri Lanka’s interests.
The following is the text of the statement issued by Dr. Dasarath Jayasuriya, President, SPUR: “The Society for Peace Unity and Human Rights for Sri Lanka (SPUR), as a long-serving organization representing Australians of Sri Lankan origin, deplores the ethnically divisive and blatantly inaccurate statement made by Hugh McDermott, the Labor MP for Prospect, NSW on the 11th anniversary of Sri Lanka’s hard-won peace through eradicating terrorism and restoring the territorial integrity of the island nation.
McDermott also made outrageous allegations of a “genocide that targeted the Tamil community in Sri Lanka resulting in the death of 160,000 innocent unarmed men, women and children” and that “many were murdered because of their culture, faith, language and traditions”.
This inflammatory statement is a blatant lie. McDermott’s fanciful claims can be rebutted using numerous on-grund accounts and credible reports, some from within the Tamil community itself. An exhaustive study of casualty figures was done by Rt Hon. Lord Naseby, Chairman of the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Sri Lanka. The House of Lords was informed on 07 January 2020 that Lord Naseby “spent 10 years looking at reports by the UK’s Military attaché in Colombo Col. Anthony Gash, Tamil university teachers, census data and all the coverage that I could find. The net result is about 6,000 people killed, of whom a quarter are Tiger Terrorists”.
Referring to War Crimes allegations, he said, “Colonel Gash’s reports made it clear that the army behaved admirably and looked after the civilians. If it had wanted to knock them off, then over 295,000 would not have been safely brought across the lines to safety, would they” end quote.
Obviously, McDermott has chosen to ignore facts and figures that do not fit the false narrative socialised by the pro-LTTE lobby, which itself is a major obstacle to reconciliation in Sri Lanka. Furthermore, his inflammatory statements have caused tension and distrust among Australians of Sri Lankan background and damaged the good relationship between the wider Sri Lankan community and the Australian Labor Party.
19th May 2009 marks the end of a three-decade long tyranny of the Tamil Tiger Terrorists who had used suicide bombings, blowing up of public transport, assassinating political rivals including non-compliant Tamils, as well as ethnic cleansing of Sinhalese and Muslim civilians from Sri Lanka’s North and the East.
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