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CABINET MINISTER CHANDRASEKAR BLAMES CABINET MINISTER THONDAMAN FOR NOT SEEKING THE HELP OF THE LTTE’S PRABHAKARAN By Walter Jayawardhana reporting from Los Angeles Periyasamy Chandrasekar, a cabinet Minister of Sri Lanka’s Ranil Wickremesinghe government blamed his trade union rival Arumugam Thondaman, another cabinet Minister for not seeking the help of terrorist leader Velupillai Prabhakaran to solve some problems of the plantation Tamils. Chandrasekar blamed Thondaman for relying on the Sri Lankan government to solve the problems of the Tamils and questioned whether his grandfather Saumyamoorthi Thondaman had ever resolved the problems of the plantation Tamils by going to the Sri Lankan governments for the last twenty-five years. The UNF cabinet Minister in a very controversial attack on the government said that all plantation Tamils should seek the assistance of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam to get their problems resolved through terrorist leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Chandrasekar was speaking to the BBC’s Sinhala language program after he returned from a Kilinochchi meeting with the LTTE ‘Thalaivar’ Prabhakaran from whom he said, he requested leadership for the struggles of plantation Tamils. Chandrasekar said he went to see Prabhakaran to seek his assistance to take up at the Thailand talks the problems of the plantation Tamils, who were descendants of indentured laborers and whom the British imported from India to work on hundreds of thousands of upcountry acres. The land grab was done after ousting the Sinhalese and depriving them of their ownership under an imperialist law called the wastelands act. Chandrasekar said he wanted equality for the plantation Tamils on par with the descendants of the ancient Sinhalese living at these hill stations but did not describe what are the rights the plantation Tamils did not lack from the Sinhalese. Some opposition critics have said that Chandrasekar was seeking another “homeland” for the plantation Tamils called “Malaya Nadu” following the Jaffna peninsula based LTTE and the Tamil National Alliance who claimed their ancestors lived in the area for thousands of years like the Sinhalese. But some historians point out that Jaffna Tamils were brought to the area 400 years ago like the plantation Tamils by the Dutch as indentured laborers to cultivate Tobacco. Hence they speak an identical Tamil like their counterparts in Tamil Nadu showing no natural evolution or variation of the language that would occur naturally during thousands of years as they claim. But Chandrasekar admitted that Prabhakaran only accepted the problems to be taken up for discussions at the Thailand meetings not immediately but after a lapse of time. But he denied that he was asking Prabhakaran to help establish another Eelam in the in the hill country in the South. When asked why he took his problems to Prabhakaran and not to the Ranil Wickremesinghe government Chandrasekar said he could take them to the government too. (EOM) (02/09/28 go2lanka.com)

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