CHATURANGA PRADEEP SAMARAWICKRAMA 
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GTF welcomes President’s call for engagement with Diaspora
Global Tamil Forum (GTF), a leading Diaspora group, said President Gotabaya Rajapaksa wanting to engage with the Tamil diaspora is certainly a progressive move.
Asserting that it welcomes the move , the GTF, however, asked why the President had a sudden change of mind .
It says , “However, when meeting requests are made by democratically elected representatives of Tamil people (TNA) in Sri Lanka to meet with the President, which has been overdue and being deferred with flimsy excuses, now from New York, he has declared that he wants to engage with us, Tamil diaspora.
We wonder why the sudden change of mind, when only six months ago, in March 2021, his government gazetted proscribing organisations like the Global Tamil Forum (GTF) and individuals like my-self as terrorists.
The first impediment that the President will have is that he will have to somehow justify his actions or the seemed U-turn to his constituency.
The GTF didn’t stop its engagement with the people of Sri Lanka just because of ill-advised action of this administration proscribing us.
Even recently, we facilitated multi-million US dollars worth of medical equipment to assist in the fight against Covid 19 pandemic, not just in the north and east of the country but in the entire Sri Lanka.
Just for the record, we recently did a calculation of the potential loss of foreign currency income for Sri Lanka due to the proscription of organisations and persons being over US $300m per annum.
This is in addition to the professional help and assistance that many organisations and people used to render.
GTF met with President Maithripala Sirisena twice in London (2015/2018) and once in Berlin (2016). We are ready to talk to anybody if grievances of our people, in fact, grievances of all peoples of Sri Lanka can be resolved.
As for the domestic mechanisms that the President wants to talk to us about, in transitional justice, there are judicial and non-judicial processes and mechanisms.
We will be very happy to engage and discuss about the latter but as for the former, for judicial mechanisms, in the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) resolution 30/1 which describes what exactly needs to happen.
If the President so wishes, he can engage the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the relevant UN bodies and special mandate holders (Special Rapporteurs) and they will be very willing to progress these as described in the already adopted resolutions,”
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