September 11, 2002
A prominent Tamil activist is still
banned from Australia, the land of her birth, writes Eric Ellis
The strains of Waltzing Matilda won't exactly
be ushering delegates to their seats at the historic Sri Lankan peace talks set
for neutral Thailand from next Monday. But the strong Australian presence on the
Tamil Tiger side underlines Canberra's particular interest in their outcome.
Two of the four representatives of the Tamil Tigers, or the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam as they are officially known, are Australians: Jay Maheswaran, a Melbourne agronomist and erstwhile reader of SBS Radio's Tamil-language news, and Adele Wilby, better known by her nom-de-guerre Adele Ann.
She is married to the LTTE delegation leader, Anton Balasingham, regarded as the Tigers' chief theoretician and, by many Tamils, as their real leader, carrying more intellectual clout than the group's enigmatic Gusmao-figure, Velupillai Prabhakaran, who will not be at the talks.
Whereas Maheswaran is Sri Lankan-born and a prominent member of Australia's 50,000-strong Tamil community, Adele Balasingham was born in Warragul, Victoria, one of four children of a railway worker. She met the charismatic Anton Balasingham at university in London in the 1970s, married him and for much of the period since has helped him lead a nomadic campaign from the northern Sri Lankan jungles, before they were both exiled to Britain in the early 1990s. She has visited Australia just once in the past 30 years, in the 1980s to visit her ailing father, who has since died. Her husband, too, is believed to be ill with kidney disease and the talks venue, a Thai naval base near the the resort town of Pattaya, has been chosen partly for its proximity to medical facilities.
She and her husband, like the LTTE, are banned in Australia, despite Canberra's declared support for the Norwegian-brokered peace process, which aims to end decades of a civil war that has claimed 65,000 lives, including that of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. Despite opposition from Sri Lankan president, Chandrika Kumaratunga, the Sinhala-dominated Colombo government last week lifted the political ban on the Tigers ahead of the talks.
Last December, Sri Lankans elected a government that promised to deliver peace to the war-weary island. It is negotiating to hand as much as one-third of the island, or 2 million people, in the mostly Tamil north and east, to an interim LTTE administration. Secession is ruled out by Colombo; this week's talks seem more about autonomy for Eelam, as the Tigers call their homeland.
Foreign governments, however, including Australia, are adopting a wait-and-see approach on the peace process before any similar un-banning. The LTTE remains officially outlawed in Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia, the four main centres of the Tamil diaspora. Washington, which stepped up its watch on the Tigers after September 11, recently sent military advisers and materiel to Colombo to assist its own war on terror.