Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa made an opening speech to Sri

Lanka’s parliament on 19th May where he commemorated the victory over the

LTTE.  In the early part of his speech, he spoke specifically to the Tamil

people in the Tamil language (Sinhala and Tamil are related, but different

languages. It should be noted that for people of Mr Rajapaksa’s background, an

ability to communicate in Tamil, is not uncommon). An adaptation of the Tamil

language portion is as follows:

This is our motherland. We should live in this country as children of one