Messege from Mr. Mahinda Gunasekera of Toronto
I picked up two big lies that were told to twist their story. The first being the statement by Chelvanayakam's granddaughter, Malliha Wilson, who said that her family moved to Canada was that if she remained in Sri Lanka, she would have had to score 25 - 35% more marks to gain admission to the University. Her father, Prof. Wilson had got a post in the New Brunswick University which also she mentioned which was an incentive to migrate. Her father was a consultant to President J.R. Jayawardene on constitutional matters prior to his moving to Canada and even afterwards, as J.R. was in the process of drawing up the First Republican Constitution of 1978.
She is referring to the Standardization that was introduced after 1972, where children in districts considered as having better facilitated schools were required to score a higher aggregate of marks in the four Advanced Level subjects than those from districts having schools with poorer facilities including the lack of good teachers, school labs, libraries, extra-curricular activities, etc. I believe that at that time, there were only about 5-6 universities whereas now Sri Lanka has 20-25 universities. Among the districts with good schools were Colombo, Kandy, Galle, Jaffna, etc., where a gigher aggregate was required, and it certainly was not as high as 25-35% more marks. Even the USA had a similar program to allow children from poorer neighbourhoods to enter institutes of higher learning, just as Hom. Ambedkar included such a provision in the Indian Constitution to allow members of so called 'untouchable' castes to gain opportunities for higher education.
The other lie was by the young man who had moved out of Sri Lanka at a very young age as his parents had first moved to India, then to Oman and finally to Canada. He said that 100,000 Tamils had been killed during the last stages of the final war ended on May 19, 2009, which is a big lie that has no foundation to support it.
Also, they make it appear that their parents moved out of the island because of discrimination or harassment by the SL authorities, whereas it could well have been that the parents feared that the LTTE would abduct their child and make him a child soldier.
The interviewer should have asked if the parents also considered the fact of child abductions by the LTTE who according to UNICEF had forcibly conscripted over 6,000 children as child soldiers who were later used as storm troopers or suicide bombers as a motive for their moving out of Sri Lanka at the time. It would be interesting to hear their responses to such a question from them.
Mahinda Gunasekera
