Sri Lanka's Ambassador to the United Nations, Ravinatha Aryasinha has said politically mobilized LTTE front organisations abroad act to sustain hatred and prevent reconciliation in Sri Lanka and that with groups having such a pre-disposition meaningful engagement was not possible.
 

Noting that the transnational political opportunity structures prevalent in host states help shape and sustain such diaspora activism, he observed that countries which continue to condone with the hostility and disruptive tendencies shown by such pro-LTTE elements are giving a wrong signal.
 

Ambassador Aryasinha made these observations when he addressed the International Dialogue on Migration 2013 -- Diaspora Ministerial Conference, on the theme 'Diasporas and Development: Bridging between Societies and States' organized by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and held in Geneva, 18 -19 June 2013. 
 

The IOM defines diaspora as “Emigrants and their descendants, who live outside the country of their birth or ancestry, either on a temporary or permanent basis, but continue to maintain affective (emotional) and material ties with their countries of origin”. The International Ministerial Conference was aimed at considering the various contributions that diaspora communities make both to their countries of origin and the countries where they reside, and to suggest some areas for maximizing the impact of diaspora engagement and to create an enabling environment towards achieving that goal. 
 

Ambassador Aryasinha noted that about three million Sri Lankans are estimated to comprise the diaspora. While a small share of these are traditional migrants living in the West, more than 1.8 million represent what is essentially regarded as a migrant work force in many parts of the world, mainly the Middle East, East Asia and South East Asia. The rest of the Sri Lankan Diaspora, belonging to all ethnicities of Sri Lanka -- Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim and Burghers, mainly reside in the Western hemisphere, Australia, New Zealand, India and the African continent. Of these, estimates suggest that Sri Lankan Tamils number more than a million, of which a bulk are refugee claimants and constitute sizeable vote banks with considerable leverage within those political systems. 
 

Ambassador Aryasinha said Sri Lanka offered an instructive example, of both the scope as well as the complexities encountered in the nexus between diaspora, home state and host states. He cautioned that while in general, the diaspora can play significant roles in the development of their country of origin, particularly in assessing the role of diaspora from countries that remain conflict-affected or have recently emerged from protracted conflict, the academic discourse clearly demonstrates that diaspora are rarely autonomous actors. They are known to be compelled by organized networks to fund, arm, engage in propaganda and be electoral vote blocks in host countries, there-by having the potential to act as 'spoilers' in conflict resolution and post-conflict reconciliation in their home states. He said there are ample instances where even when home states might want to end a conflict or pursue reconciliation, diaspora resist such moves, for it is not their sons and daughters who die, and often, keeping the pot boiling in the home states become opportune, so that they might retain greater leverage, particularly in their quest to seek to legally reside or gain citizenship in a chosen host country. He said we should recognize the complexity of this challenge, acknowledge the pre-disposition among some diaspora categories to make meaningful engagement difficult, and try to explore modalities through which both home states and host states could better influence diaspora in processes of conflict resolution, reconciliation and development in their home states.