Trinco Campus under pressure from Colombo not to punish offending Sinhala students

[TamilNet, Thursday, 21 April 2016, 21:26 GMT]
The administration of Trincomalee Campus of the Eastern University has blamed both the Tamil and Sinhala students as culprits behind the ethnic-motivated violence against Eezham Tamil students at the unit of Siddha Medicine in March 2016. The move comes as the Colombo-based University Grants Commission (UGC) instructed the campus administration not to take disciplinary actions against the students belonging to one community alone, informed academic sources at Trincomalee campus told TamilNet this week. The Tamil students describe the assault against them as a result of two-year long campaign of hate crimes against them. The administration has failed to contain the hate crimes, the students have alleged.

In the meantime, the Tamil students who were subjected to the assault said they received a ‘charge sheet’ without any concrete accusation. The ‘charge sheet’ was an attempt to categorise the victims as violators in order to conveniently close the files without offending the real culprits.

The Tamil students said they had to respond to the empty charge sheet before 19th April.

Failing to respond to the letter within the given date would be interpreted as accepting their offence, stated the empty charge-sheet.

The Tamil students have sent their replies stating their position that they had not violated any rule as stated in the charge-sheet.

The Colombo-centric University Grants Commission (UCG) comprises of 5 Sinhala members and two symbolic representatives, one being a Tamil and the other a Muslim.

Tamil academics have called for a parallel institution in a federal arrangement to look after the academic institutions in the country of Eezham Tamils.

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