The agony in Sri Lanka
April 25, 2009
ONE OF THE WORLD'S longest, bloodiest conflicts is coming to a gruesome conclusion on the island nation of Sri Lanka. The United Nations estimates that some 6,500 civilians have died and 14,000 have been injured in the government's merciless offensive against the Tamil Tigers in the northeast of the country. The Obama administration and other governments, particularly India and China, should pressure both the Sri Lankan government and the Tigers to halt the fighting and permit trapped civilians to escape.
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This sort of humanitarian intervention would be more likely to succeed if the interveners make it clear that Sri Lankan government officials and Tiger leaders will be held responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Accounts from refugees leave little doubt that both sides have perpetrated such crimes. It was probably to hide those crimes that Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa and Defense Minister Gotabahaya Rajapaksa, his brother, banned international aid groups and independent journalists from the theater of war.
At a time when 100,000 refugees need medical care, food, and shelter, and another 50,000 are under shelling in a five-square-mile war zone, the international community has proved impotent to live up to the UN's 2005 adoption of a "right to protect" civilians who are not protected by their government. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon deserves credit for announcing Thursday that he was sending a humanitarian aid team to the war zone. "So many lives have been sacrificed," Ban said. "There is no time to lose." Welcome as the UN chief's humanitarian initiative must be, the sad truth is that it comes woefully late, after too much preventable human suffering.
The Rajapaksa brothers have been able to get away with their no-quarter assault on the Tigers, with all the collateral damage that entailed, because they dressed it up as a war against terrorists. Their propaganda has been effective because it is grounded in a half-truth. The Tigers have committed terrorist acts. But the overwhelming majority of the victims in the Rajapaksa brothers' war have been Tamil civilians. For more than a quarter century, successive Sri Lankan governments have refused to grant ethnic Tamils in the north and northeast of the country some form of autonomy or self-rule in a confederal state.
The Tigers may be crushed in the next few days. But the anger and alienation of the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka is more acute than ever. The ultimate solution for Sri Lanka's communal conflict can only be political, not military. If the Tamil populace sees no hope for autonomy within Sri Lanka, it may come to demand a separate state - after all, the secessionist goal of the Tigers.
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.
READER COMMENTS (22)
ampanai wrote:
This is first "hell from earth" for Obama administration. Such individuals as Ms.Susan Rice and Ms.Samantha Powers have a responsibility to protect civilians from war crimes. If we do not act in the next few days, we may witness skyrocketing casualties.
Yes, separation is the only solution left!
4/24/2009 9:46 PM EDT
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Varathan wrote:
"I am not worried about the opinion of the Tamil people... now we cannot think of them, not about their lives or their opinion... the more you put pressure in the north, the happier the Sinhala people will be here... Really if I starve the Tamils out, the Sinhala people will be happy."
J.R.Jayawardene, Former President of Sri Lanka - Daily Telegraph, 11th July 1983
Whoever the president the message is same, It is Tamil Genocide. "We are witnessing an enormous human tragedy. People, who have done well in their professions, are as good as beggars today. There should be immediate efforts to stop the tragedy,'' Ravi Shankar said. SRI LANKA,S NO-FIRE ZONE IS, ZONE OF DEATH, NO-FOOD ZONE, NO-CARE ZONE, now NO-SAFETY ZONE, FIRE ONLY ZONE... World Watches Helplessly Genocide of Eelam Tamils in Vanni by Sinhalese
http://www.tamilcanadian.com/page.php?cat=145&id=5729
Sri Lanka used Chemical weapons, Cluster bombs, dropped over 5000 bombs per day. Tigers are not the root cause of the long conflict in Sri Lanka. Tigers are mere symptom of chauvinist and terror state of Sri Lanka to defend the rights of Tamils. The mother died while nursing the baby.The baby was still breastfeeding..." screams of the child when it was taken away from its dead mother http://www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=79&artid=28924, Has anyone seen a picture of a full term pregnant mother who was killed by a shell, which lacerated her womb exposing the leg of the fetus? Or the baby that was born with shrapnel embedded in its thigh? It is most disheartening to see thousand of our mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters being brutally killed by the occupying Sri Lankan security forces in the North and the East and enduring long and immense sufferings in the hands of the Sinhalese chauvinism for more than six decades, but particularly during the last three years under the current regime, which is brutal and bloody to the Tamils. We are witnessing the barbaric slaughter of our race including indiscriminate bombings and torture of innocent civilians. Civilian casualties top 20,000 in Vanni: Leaked UN document,
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Sri Lankan case is a classic ‘how to’ guide book on committing the worst human rights crimes and still escape criminality. The agony of the Tamils is unlikely to end as long as long as India effectively Delhi (Tamil Nadu excluded) is complicit in the genocide in SL. Initially covert but now is overt India uses various pretences to justify its complicity. Delhi killed off all the hard work on SL’s human rights crimes by UNHRC and other mandated Human rights groups at the May Council meeting.
The record of UNHRC and related Hunan Rights groups is impeccable. Its field work supported statements/reports produced successful prosecutions of the world’s most renowned human rights abusers/criminals. In SL’s case, the Human Rights groups report ‘unacceptably high’ civilian deaths. Though war crimes Delhi (Raman) a partner in SL’s crime quibbles over the civilian numbers killed in SL’s ‘no fire zone’ and the interning and ill-treating of civilians as prisoners of war. To divert culpability Delhi accuses the West especially the personnel of the UN and mandated Human Rights groups of using the ‘Eelam issue to embarrass the SL government and put its senior officers in the dock by disseminating unauthenticated high figures of civilian casualties’ not mentioning the savage SL’s attacks on civilians. Intense bombardment in the narrow India blessed ‘no-fire zone’, SL troops throwing grenades into bunkers where unarmed civilians were sheltering, and bulldozing civilians ‘into mass graves along with the dead’. Though leaks of graphic details of these crimes are effectively plugged the ‘human shield’ Tamils now liberated into the Vanni camps are sure to provide dispositions later to the dis-comfort of the offenders. TV images of the long marches to the camps of emaciated civilians vouch to SL's savage use of starvation as a weapon of war on unarmed civilians. After starving for days in live saving bunkers in the ‘no fire zone’ the interns are starved behind barbed wire camps. These acts fall within the war crime category. A well informed analyst cynically observed that SL crimes received praise in that Council meeting which also ordered an investigation into Gaza atrocities though SL’s crimes were easily 10 times worse; the difference; there were no cameras in the SL case for the world see.
The 'no fire zone' and the concentration camps were the brain children of Narayanan/Menon duo. These were for the massacres to occur in utmost secrecy without independent witnesses to frustrate potential SL war crimes proceedings. Tamil civilians in the war front trustingly moved into the India blessed 'no fire zones'not realizing tThey were actually well planned 'massacres zones'. Lurid pictures of the SL massacres are in the public domain worldwide, thanks to the internet. The Sunday Times Gothabhaya Rajapakse interview incriminates the Indian trio’s (Foreign Secretary, National Security Advisor and Defense Secretary) step by step liaising with the SL counterparts on the timing /details of the (May 16 to 19) massacres, including that RAW be involved in the capture and massacre of the Ltté leadership and the number of civilians casualties politically acceptable to Delhi. RAW's over flights gave precise co-ordinates of the targets and ground conditions for the massacres. Hence India had to act in the May UNHRC meeting prudently as it did. India viewed the West's SL war crimes initiatives in the UNHRC as a threat. The Tamils viewed that the west was acting perfectly morally exposing SL's inhuman crimes against unarmed civilians. An unabashed Delhi continuing to frustrate UNHRC’s pains to establish the criminality of the SL genocide will p[rolong the agony of the Tamils. Sri Lanka lost its membership in the UNHRC as an HR abuser almost exactly a year ago. SL’s success in the UNHRC this May is the result of India’s robust lobbying for SL for which the Tamils in their tens of thousands became sacrificial lambs. .
vssubramaniam
SINGAPORE
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