Editor

‘Conde’Nast Traveler’

Dear Editor

Sri Lanka: paradise for travellers

We are shocked to find that Sri Lanka has been promoted as a travellers’ paradise by some international publishers while social scientists around the world find that it is poisoned(Paradise Poisoned by Prof John Richardson – 2005) and that it is a case study of genocide:

New Direstions in Genocide Research, edited by Adam Jones and published December 2011, is a collection of case studies including that of Sri Lanka.

Eminent Sinhalese have been telling the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission in late 2010  how the ethnic minorities have been politically and economically oppressed from the time of independence in 1948. It has gone to such an extent that the country is upgraded as a middle income country though the oppression has made the ethnic minorities very poor:

”Food security is becoming a growing concern in Sri Lanka´s war-ravaged north where a majority of the inhabitants live on less than a dollar a day. Only 23% of the joint UN-Government of Sri Lanka-NGO reconstruction programme for the war ravaged northern provinces in Sri Lanka has been financed. Paradoxically, the World Bank reclassified Sri Lanka in late 2010 as a middle-income country and some analysts blame this for the funding shortfall” – http://www.unric.org/en/sri-lanka/27120-living-on-a-dollar-a-day-in-a-middle-income-nationa

Sri Lankan government has been aggressively promoting tourism by grabbing coastal land from i. ethnic minorities who are being dumped in cleared forests and ii. poor Sinhalese fishermen. This has been criticised by national civil societies and by Tourism Concern, UK charity fighting exploitation in tourism.

It is up to the international community to raise this at the UN and the Commonwealth to get justice for the oppressed.

Thank you for your kind consideration,

Yours sincerely

P.Selvaratnam

Women for Justice and Peace