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Sri Lanka

I want to speak on behalf of my constituents who are members of the Milton Keynes Tamil forum. I also want to mention another Sri Lankan community in Milton Keynes, the Sri Lankan Muslim community. It is very small but has an equal interest in a Sri Lanka that recognises all its minorities. I want to draw attention in particular to an interest of a significant section of the Tamil community, and indeed the wider community, in Milton Keynes. It is an orphanage that has been funded for a great many years by members of all communities in Milton Keynes. It is supported by the Hope Outreach UK charity, which is run by a Tamil GP in Milton Keynes, Dr. Sam Muthuveloe. After it was damaged in the tsunami, the orphanage was rebuilt thanks to contributions from many people in Milton Keynes. It is managed by the Anglican Church, but was bombed by Sri Lankan air force bombers, fortunately after the girls had been evacuated to another area. However, the Government did not know that it was empty when they bombed it. My contacts in Milton Keynes have been in direct contact with Foreign Office staff about the girls in the orphanage, because nobody knows where they are. They moved from the original orphanage to Visvamudu and then moved eastwards towards the safe area. For the last week, nobody from outside has known where those girls are. There are about 80 of them and my constituents are extremely concerned about their safety. Anything further that the Government can do to try to locate these Sri Lankan orphans and to get them to safety would be greatly appreciated. I want to make two more points. One is about the so-called safe areas that the Government have created and the way in which the Sri Lankan Government keep saying that the civilians can come out and separate themselves from the LTTE and they will be safe. Regrettably, because of the things that have been happening to Sri Lankan Tamils elsewhere in Sri Lanka, at least with the Sri Lankan Government's collusion if not their active participation, the civilians in the north do not feel that they can trust the Government with their safety. That is part of the reason they are not coming out. Of course they are not safe under bombardment, but they are not confident that they would be safe in the hands of the Sri Lankan Government either, particularly since my understanding is that almost all the men who come out are suspected by the Sri Lankan Government of being actively involved with the Tamil Tigers and are therefore under particular threat of harm. It is incredibly important that the Sri Lankan Government understand that they have to be seen as a protector of all their citizens and should not just assume that every Tamil is in league with the Tamil Tigers, because they are not, even though all Tamils would, of course, want their individual rights to be respected. My second point, which has not yet been made, is about the way the Sri Lankan Government had clearly been planning this onslaught for some time and had, for several years, been indulging in what might be called a massive shopping spree to upgrade their arms so that they were ready to take on the Tamil Tigers. Members of this House have been asking our Government for some time why the Sri Lankan Government were spending so much money on accumulating arms. We have asked them to look at the arms export process and to take into account what one might call disproportionate military expenditure, which might lead one to suspect that a Government were intending to use those arms for external aggression or internal repression. I know that such an approach is more difficult than dealing with it when it is going on, as it is now, but I would be grateful if the Government could take this point away and think about using their military intelligence, if I can put it that way, to try to perceive when a Government might be trying to build up their capacity to be used in a way that we would not support—the Sri Lankan Government have done so. I have no illusions about China's putting any pressure on Sri Lanka. China has its own way with its minorities and it probably thinks that the Sri Lankan Government are doing rather a good job, but I wonder whether we could be doing more with the Indian Government. They are, at least, adjacent to Sri Lanka and have an interest in stability in the region. We could enlist their support in trying to get the Sri Lankan Government to see sense and to start pursuing a political solution, not a military one.