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Weighing in on the recent diplomatic row between India and Canada, regarding the killing of Canadian Khalistani leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar, Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister Ali Sabry accused Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of making “outrageous allegations”, and remarked that some “terrorists have found a safe haven in Canada”.
Sabry sought to liken Trudeau’s accusation linking Indian government agencies to the killing of the chief of the Khalistan Tiger Force, to his remarks on Sri Lanka earlier this year.
‘Similar remarks on Sri Lanka’
“The Canadian PM has a way of coming out with these outrageous allegations without any supporting proof. I am not surprised…The same thing they did with Sri Lanka, with a terrible, total lie, saying Sri Lanka had a genocide,” Foreign Ministry Sabry told ANI news agency in an interview in New York, on the sidelines of the ongoing session of the United Nations General Assembly.
Sections within Sri Lanka’s Tamil community maintain that the violence unleashed by the Sri Lankan state against minority Tamils amounts to a genocide, but successive governments have denied the allegation, even as Tamils in the island’s north and east flag discrimination that persists.
In May this year, Sri Lanka “condemned and rejected outright” the remarks made by Canadian PM Trudeau on May 18, that the stories of the Tamil-Canadians affected by the conflict “serve as an enduring reminder that human rights, peace, and democracy cannot be taken for granted.”
The North American country, with a substantial Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora population, marks May 18 — the day when the island’s civil war ended in 2009 — as ‘Tamil Genocide Remembrance Day’ since 2022, following a motion in the Canadian Parliament that was unanimously adopted.
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