Humanitarian wise the present military was the best. They treated the IDPs so well. If the military is engaged in humanitarian work I welcome them, stated Veerasingham Anandasangaree, leader of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF).

Mr. Anandasangaree stated this making representations at the third day of the Public Sitting of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) held at the Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute of International Strategic Studies today (13 April).

He also stated that the administration of the conflict affected areas should be given to civilians. He emphasized that establishing civil administration in those areas is one of the measures to achieve true reconciliation. He also said that the Government Agents (GAs) know the area better than the army. ‘This country is now ready. It does not lack intelligent people’, he stressed.

He also emphasized that there are capable Tamil expatriates who are willing to assist in the post-conflict reconstruction in the country. ‘There is no need to rely on a single person to get the support of the expatriates,’ he stressed.

Mr. Anandasangaree added that there was no need for a large military presence in the Northern areas as not a single gun shot was heard after the death of the leader of the LTTE, Velupillai Prabhakaran.

‘Now terrorism is over. There is no terrorist activity in the North. The people in those areas do not want to see even a toy gun. So why do we need to have army camps? For whose protection?’, he questioned.

Mr. Anandasangaree also stated that ex-LTTE combatants being detained by the government are not criminals as a majority of them were recruited forcibly by the LTTE. He pointed out that a mechanism should be drawn to assess these ex-combatants case by case and receive information as to how they were recruited and take appropriate measures to integrate them into civilian life. He suggested that the government, through this commission, appoint a committee to make such inquiries.

‘They are our children. It is a crime to call them combatants. They were misled by the LTTE leadership. When they were recruited no one dared to do anything about it. Even the so called Diaspora misled them’, he stressed.

Referring to an incident occurred during forceful recruitment by the LTTE, Mr. Anandasangaree stated that the Diaspora did not do anything to stop it and those children had to give up their education.

‘They were severely tortured by the LTTE. I haven’t heard that kind of torture in this civilization. My heart bled having seen all that.’

‘I wrote to Prabhakaran and called him a coward for sacrificing the lives of others and hiding all the time’.

Mr. Anandasangaree also stated that instead of large scale infrastructural development, the urgent need of the people in conflict affected areas, especially Vavuniya and Kilinochchi is houses and land.

‘The people in Jaffna are happy. They are capable of self-development as they have houses and property to call their own. But the people in Vavuniya and Kilinochchi are the worst affected. They are unable to engage in agriculture as they do not have land’, Anandasangaree pointed out and added that this is the kind of compensation they need.

‘The Sinhalese and Tamils can accommodate each other. The problem is with the leaderships not the people. My best friends are Sinhalese and Muslims,’ he said and added that reconciliation is made easier when each learn the language of the other.

‘However, the language problem cannot be solved without solving the ethnic problem. They go hand in hand,’ he said.

Mr. Anandasangaree also stated that the Cease Fire Agreement was a failure because the LTTE was ‘violently abusing it’. ‘They were allowed to travel to the government controlled areas. The LTTE did everything without the knowledge of others and the others did everything with the knowledge of the LTTE,’ he said.

I challenged the LTTE’s claim of being the sole representative of the Tamil people. Even the Tamil media made the same mistake of carrying this image although I appealed to them not to do so. But no one dared to say otherwise, Mr. Anandasangaree stated.