Sydney, Oct 28 (ANI): Tamil protestors in Perth, Australia, have demanded that visiting Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa should be arrested and charged with war crimes over atrocities in his country that eventually led to the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009.
Around 60 members of Perth's Tamil community took part in a rally of hundreds of diverse protesters before marching to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), which Rajapaksa is attending as one of the delegates.
Tamil speaker Yogan Tharma said Rajapaksa had been given a "red carpet welcome" to CHOGM, but he was a war criminal who should be arrested.
"His place is not in the parliament, it's behind the barb wire. Please Australia, put him into jail, don't send him back home," he shouted to the crowd, the Herald Sun reports.
Tharma, standing in front of a grisly banner showing dead and mutilated Tamil children, said he had lost 79 family members in the Sri Lankan civil war.
A Tamil woman said the Commonwealth "does have teeth," which had been used to suspend four member nations - Nigeria, Fiji, Pakistan and Zimbabwe.
"The crimes committed in Sri Lanka are far more serious and much larger in scale than those attributed to the four members who faced suspension," she said.
Referring to the civil war, which led to the death of nearly 500,000 and displacement if around one million people, she added: "We need Australians to support suspension of Sri Lanka from the Commonwealth, we need to stop the genocide of Tamils and support the independents of Tamils." (ANI)
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