Dear Mr. President, Recently your administration lent its approval to the proposed partition of Sudan into two countries. This will end a long-running civil war that has been shedding blood in the area for decades. We cheer and approve of the partition and of your administration’s encouragement of it. We would like to point out some parallels between Sudan’s situation and Sri Lanka’s. First, Sudan has been fighting an ethnically and religiously motivated civil war for longer than most US voters have been alive. Sri Lanka’s civil war started in the 1950s, with government-directed nation-wide anti-Tamil rioting that recurred every few years after that. It is plain to us that the purpose of this systematic government-inspired oppression was to drive as many Tamils as possible out of the country and to suppress those who remained. Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of a subcommittee that pays attention to south Asia , said that the Sri Lankan government’s behavior probably made the Tamil uprising inevitable. The civil war is temporarily subdued, but the government of Sri Lanka’s behavior has not improved—if anything, it has become worse—and so as Senator Leahy might have observed, the civil war is almost inevitably going to break out again. We would like to note also that China, Iran, and Pakistan have been supplying arms, money, and moral support to the Sri Lankan government. These are countries that have no good wishes for either the United States or India. We guess that any trouble they can make in the Indian Ocean will increase the value of the investments they have made in buying Sri Lanka’s friendship and cause distress and anxiety for India, the US, and everyone in the world except for the trouble makers. We think that a renewed Sri Lankan civil war will bring renewed attention from the trouble makers and will require attention from India and the US. We see an ethnically partitioned Ceylon as a prudent way to avoid the emergence of another persistent world trouble spot, as well as a way to restrain the government of Sri Lanka’s genocidal impulses toward the Tamils and perhaps restore the Tamils’ millennia-old community. We believe that it is in the interest of the world’s two biggest democracies to look ahead to the time when it will be necessary to divide Ceylon as Sudan is shortly to be divided. We urge you to raise this subject with the Indian government while you are visiting India this weekend. Thank you. Sincerely,
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