Tamara Kumamayakam, the weeping Sri Lankan Tamil woman in diplomatic service

Tamara Kunanayakam, Sri Lanka’s Permanent Representative to the UN in Geneva is crying.


Her tone has changed to the tone similar to other Tamils, the Diaspora Tamils, the LTTE Tamils or the other disgruntled Tamils. 


Listen to Tamara! She says, “Removing one of the very few Tamils heading diplomatic missions abroad will allow questioning of the bona fides of the Government’s commitment to reconciliation, will reinforce extremist elements on all sides, and validate the argument that mine was only a token appointment.”


Why does she have highlight that very few Tamils are in diplomatic missions? This is the country's ethnic problem what she tried to show as the government is managing well amidst international pressure to resolve it through reforms. 


This is the ethnic problem that legitimized the Tigers' brutal armed struggle in Tamil polity which led to counter measures that amount to war crimes, another threat she helps the government to face. 


Finally, she herself laments saying Tamils are victims of discriminations. What a pity! Again to the beginning after a full circle. 


This is how Dayan Jayathilaka described Tamara Kunanayakam in an article to Sri Lanka Guardian in August 2011 by the time she assumed the post now she is asked to vacate. 

She is not only the best read, politically literate, most intellectual and probably the most intelligent among our diplomats today (her last book on the political economy of global development was favorably reviewed in the prestigious Le Monde Diplomatique), she is also perhaps the clearest and most committed among our DPLs on the crucial matter of defending sovereignty from neo-colonialism, imperialism, hegemonism and external intervention.
Of Tamil ethnicity, she is completely Sri Lankan, and is above all, a progressive, a broad internationalist and a Third Worldist. She is immune as Lakshman Kadirgamar was, to narrow ethnocentric loyalties and what he called ‘tribalism’. It is the duty of all patriotic Sri Lankans to fully support Ambassador Kunanayakam.

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