McCain Scores Support From Conservative Tamil-Americans

- Republican candidates Senator John McCain and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin have gained another support group in their campaign for the White House. The group, Conservative Tamils for McCain, has announced their support of the McCain-Palin ticket. The group appended the following statement, which describes their hopes for a McCain presidency.

The statement reads:

We Conservative Tamil Americans hope that when John McCain becomes president of the U.S. next January, he will be sympathetic to our concerns. Specifically, we are distressed by the continuing slow genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka. We think that he will be as concerned as we are about the destruction of the Tamil people and their culture in Sri Lanka.

We support Senator McCain in his pursuit of the presidency because we agree with him that the Sri Lankan civil war will be a continuing 'headache' for the U.S. as this war continues. We hope that President McCain will use the influence of the U.S. to achieve a political settlement that will end the civil war and allow all Sri Lankans to live in peace on their island

We urge the 44th president of the Unite States, Mr. McCain, to send an envoy like former senator George Mitchell (as in Ireland and the Middle East) to talk to both parties in Sri Lanka and draw a road map to peace in Sri Lanka. The road map can be drawn from the successful models of Montenegro, Bosnia, East Timor, Quebec, Slovakia, and Kosovo.

Successive Sri Lankan governments have done nothing to resolve this vicious civil war for more than sixty years, and we believe that they will do nothing to resolve it unless they are forced to do so.

Tamils are weary of waiting for a reasonable devolution from Colombo. German Ambassador to Sri Lanka Jurgen Weerth in August 2008 said that he has also given up hope of finding any solution for Tamils that involved the Colombo government. Germany, he said, did not believe in allowing the majority community to rule over minorities. 'A country should have a give-and-take policy when ruling. Each community should be given preference, instead of supporting one community,' he said.

Weerth further said that Sri Lanka should establish the rule of law, and eliminate human rights violations in the country. He said that while Sri Lanka has a good constitution, the government ignores it.

An outgoing British High Commissioner in Sri Lanka, Dominic Chilcott, gave a speech on the Sri Lankan national question, in which he referred to other matters like 'the lack of good governance, transparency, law and order, and the presence of institutional racism, racist stereotyping, demonizing of the UN agencies, discrimination, sense of impunity,' etc. He also drove home the blatant truth about the deplorable condition of the veritable jungle of corruption, nepotism, dire human rights violations, conflicts of interest, and hypocrisy that Sri Lanka is.

Besides George Mitchell, there are many more potential peace envoys or mediators we can find in the U.S., including Bill Clinton, James Baker, Richard Holbrooke, Jim Leach, Colin Powell, and certainly many others.

In 2002, Mr. Richard Armitage and some other Republican officials helped to arrange what was later called 'the Norwegian backed cease-fire.' We expect that these experienced diplomats will be active in the McCain administration.

We Tamils know that we urgently need help from a strong and kind friend. We hope that the U.S. under President McCain will be that friend.

We know that Senator McCain expressed his sympathy for the oppressed Tamil minority in Sri Lanka during an interview with Larry King when Bill Clinton was president. We are confident that he will remember those sentiments and make them into policy when he is president.

When Mr. McCain is president we expect that he will use his own judgment as to how this goal, the goal of peace in Sri Lanka, can best be achieved.

We Conservative Tamils are looking forward to the day when President McCain and his advisers get to work resolving so many of the world's problems, and we trust that this problem will be among them. We offer Mr. McCain our enthusiastic support and look forward to seeing his foreign policy evolve when he is president.

We emphasize that stability in Sri Lanka will give all peoples living there a better chance to improve their lives in a stable island.

To contact the group, email any communication to info(at)ConservativeTamilsForMcCain.com
Visit their website at www. ConservativeTamilsForMcCain.com

Conservative Tamils for McCain - 2008


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