Down Under and beyond for a million rupees

By Chris Kamalendran

Australia and New Zealand are turning out to be new destinations for Sri Lankans who are seeking refugee status and are willing to pay upto one million rupees to reach these countries through risky sea routes, without any documentation.

The recent Christmas Island ship tragedy which claimed the lives of at least 14 Sri Lankans has revealed details of a major racket of smuggling human cargo to Australia.

Five survivors of the tragedy are being grilled by Australian immigration authorities to obtain full details of the human cargo smuggling racket.

Family members of two victims told The Sunday Times that they had not obtained full details of the boat-people operation but they were aware that each person had pocketed out up to a million rupees for the risky journey.

"I knew that my husband was travelling to Australia via Singapore. But I was not aware that he would be taking such a risky journey'," Yalini Neelawannan, (22), said.

Her husband, Dharmalingam Neelawannan (23) displaced from Punguduthivu in Jaffna had come to Colombo three years ago. He had been trying go abroad and his brother in Canada had arranged the passage for him.

Yalini said her husband spoke to her from Singapore before he left. But she was not aware of the exact route they would be taking. It was later revealed that they had boarded the ship in Indonesia.

Although her brother organised the trip there was an agent in Colombo who co-ordinated the trip. He was in regular contact with the family and even after the tragedy occurred he had claimed that Dharmalingam may still be alive since the Australian High Commission had not released the full details of those drowned.

The Sunday Times investigations have revealed that agents were charging between Rs. 700,000 and Rs. one million and were prepared to smuggle anybody out of the country.

Another victim, Balasingham Dushyanthan, 21, had also apparently left through the same agent in Colombo, but had failed to inform his father who was living in Puttalam.

A relative, T. Jeyakanthan, told The Sunday Times that Balasingham who was working for about one and half years in Puttalam had then moved to Colombo and was working at Bambalapitiya.

"On the day prior to the trip he called from Colombo and said he was leaving for Australia via Singapore. He did not disclose details of his route. He had not even informed his father. We came to know about the incident only through the newspapers," he said.

"We later found out that his brother living in Denmark had organised the trip for him and paid Rs. 150,000 to the local agent with the balance to be paid later."

The victim's father , P. Balasingham said he had only been informed that his son had drowned.

'The last time he came was about a month ago, but he never disclosed his plans to me. We came to live in Puttalam after being displaced from Jaffna in 1996."

Meanwhile the Australian High Commission spokesman in Colombo said they were still awaiting further details about the human cargo smuggling racket.

More intelligence or more opportunities?

By Kumbakarana

In November 1944 G.G. Ponnambalam told the All Ceylon Tamil Congress in Jaffna that government service, professional and technical capabilities were the inherited wealth of the Tamil community. What he meant was that the Jaffna Tamils were intellectually superior to other communities. What he said was true. In 1933, 55 percent of the doctors were Sinhala and 26 percent Tamils. In the Civil Service 40 percent were Sinhalese and 33 percent Tamil. In 1870 Sinhala participation in these services were minimal while they were dominated by Tamils and Burghers.

But were the Tamils actually superior intellectually to the Sinhalese? For a time even ethnically oriented anthropologists believed that the intellect depended on the size of the brain, on colour, genes and race. They have argued that black children show poor results in IQ tests while white children show special abilities. It has also been argued that the Jews have special abilities in theoretical science because of inherited qualities.

But during the last decade it has been shown that children of the yellow races from Singapore and Hong Kong take a pre-eminent lead. In the theoretical sciences India and Japan take lead position. Hence the intellect is conditioned by culture. It has been shown that the Jews show excellence in the sciences because it is based on a religious foundation.

For all the claims made on intellect and high attainments made by the Tamils, it is clear that it is not based on innate inherited qualities, but on a schools system built up by American missionaries during the colonial era. While the Sinhalese rose in rebellion against the colonial rulers, the Tamils took advantage of the educational system.

The change in the medium of instruction to swabasha was to enable children to be educated in their mother tongue. In 1921 8.5 percent of Tamils spoke English while the Sinhala percentage was 5.9. Chelvanayagam saw the change into swabasha as an attempt to deprive the Tamils of their competence in English.

Engineering and Medicine were exempted from the swabasha rule. While Sinhala students flocked to the Arts faculties, the Tamils went in for Medicine and Engineering. As a result in 1969 there were 48.3 percent Tamils and 51.7 percent Sinhalese in the Engineering faculties. In the Medical faculties each community had 50 percent students.

What the 1971 rebellion highlighted was the plight of the Arts students. The commission on youth unrest recommended that if technical text books cannot be translated into swabasha, then there should be ethnic-wise standardisation. From 1972-1976 this was implemented. In 1978 a fairer system based on merit and quotas was introduced.

With the launching of the open economy in 1977 the Sinhalese broke into the Engineering, Medical, Law, and managerial professions, reducing the ethnic gap of the previous years. This happened not through constitutional means but through competition. With the outbreak of the ethnic conflict the Tamils lost their prominent place in higher education. What is happening now (especailly among men) is that the Sinhalese are not seeking higher education, while more Tamils and Muslims are entering the universities.

Hower, standardisation which was said to have been one of the causes which justified the fight for Eelam is now taking place in several directions. There are 12 universities now with 10,000 students. With more universities being established the figure is bound to rise to 38,000 in the future. Jaffna and Batticaloa will be exclusively for Tamils. Thondaman is demanding that Sabaragamuwa University too be reserved for the Tamils alone. The South Eastern University would be mainly for the Muslims.

More than 50 percent of the students in Peradeniya are Tamil speaking and there are more Tamil students in Colombo and the Open Universities. What is evident is that there is a national policy on universities. But Prabhakaran's ethnic standardisation operates in Jaffna and Batticaloa and Sinhala students are shut out from them. Tamil students can enter any of the 12 universities, including the modern ones like Colombo and Moratuwa.

As a result there are 17 vacancies in the Medical faculty at Jaffna University, but Sinhala students cannot fill them. This is Prabhakaran's ethnic standardisation.

Now Thondaman is suggesting that plantation Tamils be allowed to enter the Moneragala University according to the marks system. Once this is granted more Sinhala students will be shut out. It is ironical that Thondaman who earlier hit out at standardisation is now exploiting it.

In Nuwara Eliya Tamils form 56 percent of the population. But the admission of teacher trainees into the district's only Training College, Sri Pada College is according to a strange kind of standardisation. 75 percent of places are reserved for plantation Tamils, and 25 percent for Tamils from surrounding areas. So the college goes 100 percent Tamil student-wise.

Have the Sinhalese of these areas no human rights?

In pursuit of the Sinhala/Tamil division, Sathasivam has now ordered that a wire fence be put up separating the Sinhala and Tamil sections at the Nuwara Eliya Technical College.

Even the standard five scholarship test discriminates against Sinhala children. Sinhala children have to obtain more marks than Tamil children to win a scholarship.

inside the glass house:

Illicit arms: From where to whom?

NEW YORK— As Sri Lanka continues its seemingly endless battle against the Tamil Tigers, one of its more worrisome tasks is to track down the source of weapons in the LTTE military arsenal.

In the shadowy world of clandestine arms dealers, there are even governments who surreptitiously sell weapons to separatist movements and armed groups— but publicly deny it.

Sri Lanka has long advocated a proposal for an international agreement to curb the flow of illicit arms transfers as a means to monitor the movement of these weapons. The proposal is expected to come up at a major UN conference on small arms scheduled to take place in Geneva by the year 2001. Ambassador Janaka Nakkawita, Sri Lanka's Deputy Permanent Representative who also serves on a panel of governmental experts on small arms, says the UN is taking a serious look at the whole issue of small arms. "They are bigger killers than nuclear weapons,'' he says, adding that there are more than 500 million small arms and light weapons currently in circulation worldwide.

"They are also the type of weapons which could easily be used by children or without any form of training," he adds.

Sri Lanka has also advocated the marking of ammunition and explosives by manufacturers so that they can be easily identified and traced back to the source.

A third proposal being pushed by Sri Lanka, he says, is for a UN study on illicit arms brokerage. Last week, a group of UN-commissioned arms experts recommended the establishment of a UN database to gather information on ammunition and explosives. The proposed database will be part of an exercise in transparency aimed at curbing the flow of small arms to war zones.

The eight-member group argued that small arms can be made ineffective if ammunition supplies are cut off from firearm users.

In a 19-page report released last week, the experts said they have very little information on the extent of ammunition stocks legitimately held by armed and security forces, and on the extent of surplus and obsolete stocks.

The stockpile of conventional ammunition in the US, for example, has been estimated to be worth more than $80 billion, of which $31 billion has been considered "excess", according to the Washington-based General Accounting Office (GAO). Although the sales of firearms are regulated in the US, ammunition sales are not.

The expert group also points out that the types of ammunition most commonly encountered in conflict areas are small arms ammunition— specifically for use in pistols, rifles and machine guns.

The United Nations said last week that while the ability to manufacture major weapons is limited to a fairly small number of industrial countries, the production of small arms is more widespread.

In 1994, close to 300 companies in 52 countries were manufacturing small arms and light weapons: a 25 percent increase in the number of such countries since the mid-1980s. The leading suppliers for the period 1993-1997 were the US, Russia, UK, France, Germany and China.

The 15-member European Union and the US together account for 80 percent of the global arms trade. At least 22 developing nations are producing small arms, 16 of which are also exporting them.

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