2ND LEAD

http://tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=13&artid=36532

Tamils should boycott Conservatives: British activist

[TamilNet, Sunday, 04 August 2013, 20:35 GMT]
“There is no point in any vote or any penny of Tamil money or Tamil votes going to the Conservative party. They have shown time and again whose side they are on. They are not on our side,” Sarah Sachs-Eldridge, British activist working with Tamil Solidarity, stated. In a video interview to TamilNet, referring to the systematic deception of the British Conservatives on the issue of Sri Lanka, Sachs-Eldridge said that “The Tamil community is getting nothing from these people.” The British activist, commenting on the recent response of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to the trade union Unison, wherein the FCO had defended Britain’s participation in CHOGM, argued that the British government had no intention of putting any significant pressure on Sri Lanka.

 

Referring the FCO response to Unison, where they harped on the implementation of the LLRC, Sachs-Eldridge said it was “farcical on a number of levels.”

“The LLRC goes nowhere near what is needed to find justice and to defend the rights of the Tamils in Sri Lanka.”

Opining that the Sri Lankan government has no intention of implementing its own farcical LLRC report, she added “we know from history that the British government has no real intention of putting serious pressure on the Sri Lankan government to act in any way on any of these.”

She talked about how, under the Conservative government, arms were exported to the Sri Lankan government over the past few years despite the public knowledge of continued abuses in the island.

Tamil asylum-seekers were still being deported despite evidence on what is happening to those deported, she observed.