The Australasian Federation of Tamil Associations (AFTA), the umbrella body of the peak Tamil Associations in Australia and New Zealand calls on the Australian government to show compassion towards the 260 Tamil refugees who had been intercepted by the Indonesian Navy reportedly on the request of our Prime Minister Hon. Kevin Rudd.
The violence unleashed against the Tamil people and the suffering they have been subjected to in Sri Lanka have been well documented by several human rights agencies including Amnesty International and the US based Human Rights Watch. The UN and several foreign dignitaries including our Rudd Government have called on Sri Lanka to comply with international law and norms in the treatment of internally displaced Tamil people who are held in internment camps. Tamil people elsewhere in the north and east in their homeland are held in an open prison environment under army and paramilitary occupation. The Tamil people living in the south are subject to extrajudicial killings, abductions, torture, extortion and disappearances. Following the military defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the Tamil people in Sri Lanka feel insecure and are continuing to flee the country in their thousands.
AFTA, whilst joining the Australian Government in condemning those who are involved in human trafficking, call on the Rudd Government and the Federal Opposition to approach these traumatised victims of a slow genocide in the hands of successive Sri Lankan governments humanely, and process them in consultation with the UNHCR as obliged under the human rights charter of the United Nations to which Australia is a signatory.
AFTA wishes to point out that only strong diplomatic action against Sri Lanka to end the genocide and negotiate with the Tamil leadership a meaningful political solution to the long standing ethnic conflict will stop the exodus of Tamil people.
AFTA calls on the Australian media, the NGOs, eminent persons and the wider Australian community to pressure the Rudd Government and the Federal Opposition to take a bi-partisan humane and principled approach towards the desperate victims of genocide in Sri Lanka.
