Colombo's paranoid secrecy

"Why must the military be in control of the camps, why not civilian agencies? Why can't visitors enter the camps? Why are journalists barred? Why are international agencies kept out? Why is it taking the courts so long to make a straightforward order to allow members of parliament to visit the camps?" and quoting Mangala Samaraweera, "I can walk into any prison at will and meet any criminal, but I am not allowed to meet these people held in detention for no reason," Prof Kumar David, in an opinion column in Sunday's Lakbima, writes, "[t]he reasons offered for this paranoid secrecy varied from the need to hide human rights violations to calculations relating to the upcoming elections. I think it will be some time before the real reason comes seeping out."

While Delhi pressures the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) to put forward a Delhi-centric political proposal for the Tamils for continued engagement with Rajapakse, Prof. David exposes the futility of it all, as he predicts a gloomy political scenario, saying, "[a]stute folks are pretty well reconciled that nothing will happen in the foreseeable future about devolution, thirteen plus, minus or zilch, and home-grown solutions. It's going to be the same old unitary state and constitution, with or without some superficial tinkering."


Full text of Prof. David's article follows:
What Ranil, Mangala and Mano Ganesan said on 3 September at a Platform for Freedom Press Conference on the IDP issue was fairly widely covered in the print and electronic media, but three other contributors, Siritunga Jayasuriya, Nimalka Fernando and Herman Kumara failed to attract coverage. They were more sharp and interesting, but not being parliamentarians, I guess, less news worthy. I will focus on them to redress this imbalance. But first a Mangala snippet which was both catchy and accurate; he defined the Vannie interns as FDPs (Forcibly Detained Persons) insisting that calling them internally displaced persons (IDPs) was simply not true.
First, let me have my say. It is my view that it is the FDP issue that will have more severe repercussions on the relationship between the Tamils and the government and on Sinhala-Tamil relations than the hotly canvassed political package uproar. Astute folks are pretty well reconciled that nothing will happen in the foreseeable future about devolution, thirteen plus, minus or zilch, and home-grown solutions. It’s going to be the same old unitary state and constitution, with or without some superficial tinkering, until and unless something dramatic happens, such as the change to a left government; and that’s not on the cards.

But between two and three hundred thousand people of one community, held in indefinite and illegal detention by the hegemonic state of another community, well that’s tertiary stage cancer and its repercussions are going to be far, far more serious than people seem to realise. I give it three more months and if the FDPs are not all released from forcible detention, then the gulf will again widen to distrust similar to the post 1972-Constitution, post Vattukkotai Resolution, or intensifying LTTE periods. The gulf will become unbridgeable again. In a word, it’s the FDPs stupid, not the package that will hinge, or if you prefer unhinge, Tamil consciousness.

Siritunga’s take on it: For those who need some background, Siritunga is the leader of the United Socialist Party (USP), a non government left party and as presidential candidate in 2005 he polled 36,000 votes, certainly much more than I expected. I have been closely associated with him politically from 1970 when he was a key leader in the Vama or left tendency in the LSSP which matured into the NSSP in 1977. He parted company with us on the Indo-Lanka Accord and 13th Amendment which he opposed while we (the majority in the NSSP) gave these measures our conditional support. Nevertheless, he and I have remained personal friends. The USP has fraternal ties with international Marxist currents in many countries but I am not aware what its active membership within the country is.

As a Sinhalese Marxist he expressed shock at the inadequate response in the South to the fact that such a large number of Tamils could be held in illegal detention for over 100 days. “Imagine the uproar in the country if two to three lakhs of ordinary Sinhalese people had been held behind barbed wire like this”. How much longer is this going to continue he inquired? And this inquiry continued to the heart of the matter. “These people have lived under LTTE Administration for nearly two decades. Of course a large number of them or a family member would have worked in that Administration, many would have associated with the LTTE, and to be perfectly frank, most would have supported or been sympathetic to the LTTE point of view”. This goes to the heart of the government’s conundrum; if the government intends to hold everybody who is or was sympathetic to the LTTE indefinitely, then it will have to hold some hundreds of thousands of people forever. The real problem is not a few thousand ex-cadres, the problem is hundreds of thousands who, come on be sensible about it, must have been pro-LTTE.

I think it is inevitable that he comes to the same conclusion as I have done in my third paragraph, but from an inside the camps perspective. I asserted that the FDP issue is destined to be the crucible in which the fires of broad ethno-political conflict will light up again. Siritunga says “If you hold people like this you are operating a farm for breeding the next generation of LTTEers, by whatever name they sprout. Is the government trying to breed another one lakh of terrorists?”

Insensitivity and secrecy: Nimalka introduced a women’s and welfare perspective as one would expect from a person of her background. Initially though she made a comment that was news to me. Most of the food, dry rations and other essential needs of the FDPs are provided by UN agencies and NGOs she said.

It is not GoSL but these organisations that foot the bill; the work in the camp is done by NGO volunteers and GoSL’s expenses, other than paying for the military, are small. Nimalka’s main grouse however was framed in these questions. “Do mothers have the right to take a fevered child to hospital? Can a woman who is bleeding seek emergency medical help?” The questions are rhetorical, the answers obvious.

Why must the military be in control of the camps, why not civilian agencies? Herman Kumara of the Fishermen’s Welfare Association was quite pointed in his repetition of the question on many people’s mind. Why can’t visitors enter the camps? Why are journalists barred? Why are international agencies kept out? Why is it taking the courts so long to make a straightforward order to allow members of parliament to visit the camps? As Mangala added “I can walk into any prison at will and meet any criminal, but I am not allowed to meet these people held in detention for no reason.” The reasons offered for this paranoid secrecy varied from the need to hide human rights violations to calculations relating to the upcoming elections. I think it will be some time before the real reason comes seeping out.

'Business can’t escape responsibility'

Britain as a country bears a big responsibility to the plight of Tamils in the internment camps of Sri Lanka. Because it was one of the major powers that had repeatedly asked the Tamil civilians of Vanni to go to the side of the Colombo government, knowing very well what awaited them were barbed-wire camps. The British business cannot shun its responsibility of freeing them through economic measures. British Retail Consortium sympathising Colombo government and campaigning against EU sanctions amounts to only encouraging the method of concentration camp as an effective tool of structural genocide in the island, blame Tamil activists in UK.

The British Retail Consortium (BRC) has expressed sentiments against the withdrawal of GSP Plus concession to Sri Lanka, citing that it would make businesses, especially the garment industry, to closedown and will affect hundred of thousands of workers.

Whatever the human rights concerns, any response has to be balanced. Otherwise, if the preferential access deal is withdrawn by the Commission, business in Sri Lanka could close,” was the comment of BRC circles.
“Sri Lanka has many very good textile factories, but profit margins are small, and if they lose their current import arrangements, there are textiles manufacturers in Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Thailand who will be ready to compete hard,” BRC circles said.
One supplier has gone to the extent of saying “I find the EU’s stance inconceivable considering that at the moment to my knowledge there is no certain proof of war crimes or crimes against humanity as mentioned. It’s easy to persecute a tiny Island like Sri Lanka whilst China and others like Burma are apparently invisible.”
Business circles in London said that some big British business houses like Marks & Spencer and Next produce garments in Sri Lanka. ';
news

How Sri Lanka governs through detentions

When the Sri Lankan government declared that the country's 25-year civil war was over in May, thousands of civilians took to the streets in celebration. The threat of the Tamil Tigers was gone for the first time in decades and the fears of violence that had held a nation in their clutch on a daily basis seemed to dissipate. But for many Sri Lankans things have only become worse since the war ended, says Global Post.

The article by Maura R. O'Connor in GlobalPost said: As part of the government's continued efforts to weed out possible terrorists and sympathizers, the military has begun detaining large numbers of people it suspects of collaborating with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). In the majority of cases, the arrest and detainment is shrouded in secrecy under provisions of "emergency regulations," a set of vague but sweeping laws that give the government in effect unlimited powers.
Since the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) was passed 30 years ago, Sri Lanka has operated nearly every year under emergency regulations ordered by the executive branch. Under the most current regulations issued by President Mahinda Rajapaksa, suspects can be arrested without warrants and held for 18 months without formal charges or access to legal representation. Few details of alleged crimes are ever released and trials, when they occur, are rarely publicized.
“No one can tell you what's in them," said James Ross, the legal and policy director for Human Rights Watch, of the country's anti-terrorism laws. "That’s part of the problem. It’s getting worse for journalists, it’s getting worse for human rights activists. Where restrictions should be lessening, they are actually getting tighter.”
The recent spate of detentions appear to resemble the United States government’s actions after Sept. 11, 2001, when Guantanamo Bay was filled with suspected terrorists who could be held indefinitely under an executive order issued by President George W. Bush in 2002.
But the use of unchecked detentions as a counter-terrorism strategy in Sri Lanka pre-dates 9/11, according to Nagaioh Manoharan, a senior fellow at the Center for Land Warfare Studies in New Delhi. “What is new now,” said Manoharan of post-war Sri Lanka, “is detentions in large numbers. The PTA and emergency regulations are used without much hesitation. The rule of law has not been abided by even approximately.”
Arguably the biggest difference between terrorism suspects detained by the United States government at Guantanamo Bay and Sri Lanka’s current detainment policies is that of citizenship: Detainees in Sri Lanka are citizens held in their own country. In many recent cases, they are the government’s own employees.
On Aug. 1, Nagalingam Vedhanayagam, a government bureaucrat, was arrested by the government's Terrorist Investigation Division which was reportedly given a tip by a detained LTTE cadre. Vedhanayagam worked in Kilinochchi when the area was under LTTE control. When fighting overwhelmed the region last January, he moved to the government-controlled area but continued to make frequent trips into the conflict zone to ensure that humanitarian assistance was being provided. Since his arrest, defense officials have not released any information about his whereabouts or what the accusations against him are.
In May, five government doctors were detained by the Terrorist Investigation Division and held for 100 days without access to legal representation. The doctors had worked inside the war zone during heavy fighting for months and communicated information via telephone and email reporting often desperate conditions facing civilians. One of the doctors remains in prison while the others are on parole, awaiting a court hearing in November for spreading "false information to the international community."
On Aug. 31, the Tamil journalist Jayaprakash Sittampalam Tissainayagam was sentenced to 20 years of hard labor under Sri Lanka's Prevention of Terrorism Act. Tissanayagam was the editor of a Tamil language magazine and the government accused him of accepting money from the Tamil Tigers and fomenting "communal disharmony" through his coverage of the war.
Even NGO workers are not immune from the government's far reaching efforts to prosecute suspected terrorists. Two United Nations employees, Charles Raveendran Navaratnam and Kanthasamy Sounthararajan, were arrested on June 11 and, according to a U.N. official in Sri Lanka, are accused of collaborating with the Tigers. Similar to the case of Vedhanayagam, the U.N. staff were originally reported as “missing” or “disappeared” and only later was it revealed that they were in government custody. Both of their lawyers have filed complaints in Sri Lanka claiming torture by security forces following their arrest.
Since Sri Lanka regained independence in 1948, the country has operated more often than not under an official state of emergency, allowing the repeated implementation of emergency regulations. The actual content of the regulations are difficult to obtain and cannot be challenged in court. In 2005, regulations were passed that allow the use of confessions made to police in a trial. Contrary to normal standards of criminal law, in Sri Lanka it is up to the defendant to prove that a confession was coerced, according to the International Crisis Group.
Many argue that the country's deeply unstable history — insurgencies include the separatist LTTE and the leftist People's Liberation Front, or JVP — since independence requires extreme measures. "The legal system here cannot cope with the breakdown of law and order, like two insurgencies by the JVP in 1971 and 1987-89 and a separatist insurgency by the LTTE the last thirty years," said Sinha Ratnatunga, a lawyer and president of the Editor’s Guild of Sri Lanka. "Does it lead to abuses? Of course it does. But, if the strict application of the 'rule of law' applied in both letter and spirit the JVP might well be running a 'Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat,’ and the LTTE might have their own Eelam.”
Ratnatunga argued that striking a balance between quelling armed uprisings and upholding the standard of innocent until proven guilty is easier said than done when violence overwhelms the system. In the last 25 years, at least 80,000 Sri Lankans have died due to the civil conflicts. “That does not mean that civil liberties must be given a complete holiday,” he said.
Since the end of the war in May, the Sri Lankan government has continued to operate under an official state of emergency. In a special debate held Sept. 10 in parliament, Leader of the House Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva argued that because “certain groups” were plotting to assassinate President Rajapaksa, upholding emergency laws was critical, according to the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation. The motion received 87 out of 100 votes in favor.
Secretary to the Minister of Disaster Management and Human Rights Rajiva Wijesinhe said that the threat of terrorism is still a reality in Sri Lanka and that emergency regulations should continue because, “we also owe it to our friends who supported us against terrorism to ensure that information pertaining to possible attacks on them, as part of the globalization of terror, will also be prevented.”
“Overall, regimes in Colombo have gotten used to 'rule by emergency,'” said Manoharan at the Center for Land Warfare Studies. “It is an exceptional case among democracies. By some pretext or the other, they are imposed and extended.”
By Maura R. O'Connor — GlobalPost, in addition to O'Connor, who reported from New York, one journalist in New York and one in Sri Lanka contributed to this story but wish to remain anonymous to maintain their safety and that of their colleagues.

news

Let's help Sri Lanka win the peace

Sadly, the government's willingness to ignore universal principles of human rights and humanitarian law (which Sri Lanka agreed to uphold when it signed and ratified many treaties and conventions) has met with very little international resistance. Even the United States, which has urged the rapid release of all civilians and deplored the government's slow timetable on political reform, is encouraging U.S. investors to “make Sri Lanka your next business stop.” The Sri Lankan government has won the war. It must now win the peace, and the world, including Canada, must help.full story

Propaganda war: Truth is first casualty

Written by Marvin Kurz
If you repeat the same libel over and over again, at what point does it become true? That must be the question that occupies the minds of Israel bashers like Naomi Klein and John Greyson. Their letter of ‘objection’ to a film series dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the city of Tel Aviv has been taken up as a rallying call for a boycott of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).

For ideologues, like them, there is no mention of Israel too benign, no event too apolitical that it cannot be transformed into an agitprop exercise to delegitimize the Jewish state. For them, any mention of Israel must be prefaced by the libel ‘Apartheid’ and must be followed by the discriminatory mantra ‘boycott, divestment, sanctions.’ The issue is not – as Klein et al claim – Gaza, or Lebanon, or even ‘the occupation.’ It is the existence of Israel, the lone island of liberal democracy in an ocean of Arab dictatorships.
More to the point, the issue of their campaign is the right of Israel to defend itself from the 10,000 missiles launched from Gaza, the kidnapping of its soldiers by terrorist groups and the intention of a number of its malign neighbours, including a soon-to-be nuclear-armed Iran to wipe it off the map.
In recent years, Israel has faced more existential threats than any comparable nation in the world. Yet it has maintained a judiciary that is the envy of much of the world, even the Middle East, a Parliament that has seen Arabs sitting in cabinet and an army that telephones civilians in their homes before an attack begins. It is far from perfect, but its record is better than numerous other nations at war around the world. At the same time though, it is the subject of more one-sided criticism for its defensive actions than any other nation in the world. The ironically named United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC), led by such luminaries as China, Saudi Arabia and Kyrgyzstan, is a perfect example of this hypocritical approach.
The committee spends more time on issuing rote condemnations of Israel than it does on any other state. In doing so, it ignores the violations of favoured states such as China, Iran and Zimbabwe. When Sri Lanka killed about 20,000 Tamil civilians in the brutal end game to its civil war, the UNHRC did not see fit to condemn the Sinhalese regime. In fact, it congratulated the victors. In contrast, when Israel’s Gaza mission, which even by Palestinian figures led to the death of only about 5 per cent as many civilians as the Sri Lankan offensive, the UNHRC raced to condemn Israel’s “massive [human rights] violations.” Only then did it create a ‘fact-finding mission’ to prove its pre-existing determination. This is the stuff of the old British Star Chamber, not a legitimate human rights arbiter.
Closer to home, left-aligned unions, churches and student unions have joined in the crescendo of attempts to criminalize Israel. But did CUPE Ontario see fit to boycott Chinese academics to protest the occupation of Tibet? Did the Anglican Church seek to divest from Russia when its army was killing up to 35,000 civilians, including 5,000 children in the 1994-5 storming of Grozny in Chechnya? Did university student groups have a Sri Lankan Apartheid Week in solidarity with the Tamil nation? Has Naomi Klein and her coterie organized a political event to boycott anything to do with Sudan in protest for the genocide in Darfur? You know the answers to each of those questions.
In her op-ed piece in the Globe and Mail (Sept. 8, 2009) Klein claims that she is not looking to do anything as nasty as to boycott let alone censor TIFF over the Tel Aviv film series. Nor do they have any problems with the showing of the Israeli films at the festival. She and her group just wish to “protest” the use of the festival by the powerful “Israeli propaganda machine.” Ignoring the fact that her declamation is an echo of the nasty canard that the Jews control the media and even the fact that two Palestinian filmmakers are represented at TIFF, her statement is also demonstrably false. Her co-organizer John Greyson is more honest when he links this protest to the global boycott movement against Israel. He further admits the boycotters’ bullying tactics by writing that he and his co-organizers have set up “a type of picket line” around the TIFF. So there you have it, only one country’s films deserve to be picketed, even if Klein is ashamed to admit what she and her group are doing.
They say that in war, truth is the first casualty. The adage seems particularly apt when it comes to the propaganda war against Israel.
Marvin Kurz is National Legal Counsel to League for Human Rights of B'nai Brith Canada.
story

Tamil medic describes camp conditions

British medical volunteer Damilvany Gnanakumar, detained for four months in one of Sri Lanka's Tamil internment camps, describes to Jonathan Miller the bleakness of the conditions she found there.
A senior UN official has arrived in Sri Lanka to put pressure on the government over the detention of tens of thousands of Tamil refugees in camps following the 25-year civil war.

VIDIOThe Sri Lankan government says it need to weed out Tamil Tiger fighters at the camps before most of the inmates can be released.
Our foreign affairs correspondent Jonathan Miller has talked to a British Tamil who knows how bleak conditions are in the camps, after being detained in one of them for four months.
"Dead bodies everywhere," recalls Damilvany Gnanakumar. "Wherever you turn round, it's dead bodies."
She estimates that 20,000 civilians may have died in the final five-day onslaught by Sri Lankan government forces - a figure also cited by some relief agencies, but one dismissed as unsubstantiated by Sri Lanka.
And she says many people inside the camps are dismayed that the world has done so little to help. "After all this happened, they lost their trust... They don't feel safe to speak out.
"They don't trust the international (community) now because they think OK, all this happened - nothing happened, the international (community) didn't come and help us."
Channel 4 News was unable to visit the combat zone during the fighting nor the camps in recent months, and is unable to verify independently her testimony.
The Sri Lankan Attorney General Mohan Peiris told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva this week that "It is quite inaccurate to state that internally diplaced persons are detained under conditions of internment.The resettlement programs have (he says) been speeded up."
STORY

In Sri Lanka, Speed Up All Removals from IDP Camps, UN's Holmes Says

In Sri Lanka, the UN funds and works in what the government calls welfare centers and others characterize as internment camps. From these camps, the government removes people it thinks have supported the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam rebels. Also, according to BBC and others, pro-government militia groups "disappear" internees in what are called dolphin vans. The UN's positions on these issues are not clear. At a Wednesday news conference, Inner City Press asked top UN humanitarian John Holmes if there are militias in the camps, and if it knows and tries to raise toward international standards the government's protocols for grabbing, arresting and taking away people in UN-funded IDP camps.FULL STORY

The Internment – A Collective Punishment?

The widespread indifference to the continuing misery of 280,000 interned IDPs, most of them already unlawfully detained for about four months without any charges, is a sad reflection on the moral values of our society. The reported release of a few thousand is most welcome, but what of the remaining 270,000? Attempts made to justify the internment on the grounds that some of the areas from which they were displaced may yet be land-mined is patently false, in that these internees could then be permitted to move temporarily to other areas to live with relatives or friends, or in accommodation provided by organisations that have already indicated a willingness to help. As in the case of other IDPs, the state could establish a few welfare (not detention) camps to accommodate the few who cannot find accommodation on their own. Any decision to move out should be taken by the IDPs solely on their own responsibility. Concern for the welfare of IDPs cannot possibly be a reason to detain anyone or to restrict their movements or to prevent access to them. If, on the other hand, the IDPs are being held on suspicion of being responsible for criminal activity, and if evidence is available, they should be duly arrested and charged. If, four months after the commencement of their detention, there is no evidence found to charge them, they should be freed forthwith.

Is the ethnicity of the IDPs a factor that contributes to the tacit acceptance of the detention without any charges of virtually the entire population caught up in the territory conquered from the LTTE? Are they being held as prisoners of war? When natural disasters, such as the tsunami of December 26, 2006, devastated the shores of this island and the lives of hundreds of thousands of our population, many of all ethnic groups were motivated to disregard any ethnic or religious differences and help the victims. Identifying with natural disaster-stricken victims and generously helping them is an admirable characteristic of Sri Lankans of all ethnic groups. Do ethnic differences suppress our generosity when the disaster is caused by ethnicity-related political oppression or violence? Is that the kind of people we are? Is that how we see ourselves?
When the Indian Tamils in our midst were suddenly deprived of citizenship and voting rights in 1949, it was a tragedy for the one million Indian Tamils. Most of the other ethnic groups, including a significant proportion of Sri Lankan Tamils, appeared to be indifferent to the injustice inflicted on Indian Tamils. Again, when Tamil-speaking persons were suddenly deprived of their language rights in 1956, most of those of other linguistic groups appeared to be indifferent to the pain of the Tamil-speaking population. When various acts of brutal ethnic violence or ethnic cleansing took place over the years, whether of Sinhalese at the hands of the LTTE and other Tamil armed groups, or of Tamils at the hands of Sinhalese and Muslim armed groups, or of Muslims at the hands of Sinhalese and Tamil armed groups, it appeared that those most concerned were of the same ethnic group as the victims. Is such selectivity in our concerns in keeping with our Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim or Christian or ethical values? Or are our tribal instincts superseding our religious and ethical principles?
Four months ago, close to the end of the civil war, when groundviews posed the hypothetical question “Would killing 50,000 civilians to finish off the LTTE bring peace?” most of those who responded replied, “No, this is just wrong.” But, sadly, there were a few who replied “Yes” or “Maybe”. It may be instructive to explore our responses to a similar question: Suppose the LTTE had been cornered by the armed forces of the State and retreated into your old school premises, occupied by 1,000 students, staff, and family members, who were then held hostage by the rebel group. The school premises have been sealed off by the armed forces of the State, who effectively control all entry and exit, but are unable to rescue the captives. Any attempt by the armed forces to forcibly enter the premises to capture the rebels free the captives is likely to lead to the death of at least 500 of the latter. What is to be done?
In the heat of the conflict the instinct of the armed forces may be to go in and finish off their task, irrespective of the scale of civilian casualties. Would you recommend that they do that, or would you urge negotiating the release of the hostages in exchange for some concessions to the captors? For the captors, there is no other option available, because they are effectively surrounded. Most of us would surely urge that there should be a negotiated settlement so as to avoid large scale civilian deaths. Since the students, teachers, and family members are of our own school, it is easy to identify with the victims.
Would our concern be less and our decision be different if it was not our own school, but a remote school, and the captives are mainly of ethnic, religious, linguistic, and class identities different to our own? When Madeleine Albright justified sanctions against Iraq, even after it was known that sanctions had led to the deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children as well as very large numbers of other civilians, she was rightly condemned as a racist; so too George Bush, Tony Blair, and many others who held that the invasion of Iraq was worthwhile despite the tragedy it brought on the population. Was it worthwhile for them or the Iraqi people? Are we less racist than they? Four months ago, in the midst of the war, we could have been excused for paying inadequate attention to humanitarian issues and letting our political objectives and tribal instincts overcome our religious and ethical values. Today, four months after the end of the war, that excuse will not hold. We know that the internment is wrong as surely as we know that all the massacres and all the ethnic cleansing over the decades were wrong.
Should we not urge the immediate release of those wrongfully detained?
NEWS

UN's Gaza Report Favors EU Cases on Geneva Conventions, Sri Lanka Raised, Pascoe Waits

Justice Richard Goldstone of South Africa, what he thinks of indicting Olmert, and if his investigation identified war crimes by any nationals of a state which is a member of the International Criminal Court, which would give the ICC jurisdiction even absent a referral from the UN Security Council...that grave breaches of the Conventions are just a "narrow ambit of the matters we reported," one wonders why for example this theory could not be applied to the Sri Lanka conflict which continued to escalate after the "hot" conflict in Gaza ended in January 2009.
FULL STORY

'As the shells fell, we tried to save lives with no blood or medicine'

Damilvany Gnanakumar witnessed Sri Lanka's bloody conflict from a Tamil hospital - then spent months detained in a camp. She tells Gethin Chamberlain her story

videoThe young mother was standing by the side of the road, clutching her baby. The baby was dead.

Damilvany Gnanakumar watched as she tried to make a decision. Around them, thousands of people were picking their way between bodies strewn across the road, desperate to escape the fighting all around them.
"The mother couldn't bring the dead body and she doesn't want to leave it as well. She was standing … holding the baby. She didn't know what to do … At the end, because of the shell bombing and people rushing – there were thousands and thousands of people, they were rushing in and pushing everyone – she just had to leave the baby at the side of the road, she had to leave the body there and come, she had no choice. And I was thinking in my mind 'What have the people done wrong? Why are they going through this, why is the international government not speaking up for them? I'm still asking."
Four months later and Gnanakumar is sitting on a cream leather sofa in the living room of the family home in Chingford, Essex, reliving the final days of Sri Lanka's brutal civil war.
For most of those four months, the 25-year-old British graduate was imprisoned behind razor wire inside the country's grim internment camps, home to nearly 300,000 people. She was released last week, partly as a result of pressure from this newspaper, and flew back into London on Sunday.
The last time she publicly spoke about the conflict was from the hospital where she was working inside the ever-shrinking war zone in Sri Lanka's north-east. Then, the national army had surrounded the small sliver of land where the remnants of the Tamil Tiger guerrillas held out and where hundreds of thousands of civilians had taken refuge. She had been in despair: a shell had just struck the hospital and dozens were dead. "At the moment, it is like hell," she said then.
Gnanakumar was one of a small group of medics treating the wounded and providing a running commentary to the outside world from behind the lines. For months she had managed to stay alive while around her thousands died. At night, she lived in bunkers dug in the sand. During the day, she helped in the makeshift hospitals, dodging the shells and the bullets, tending the wounded and the dying, as the doctors tried to operate with butchers' knives and watered-down anaesthetic.
Now her damning account provides a powerful rebuke to the claims of the Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, that the defeat of the Tamil Tigers was achieved without the spilling of a drop of civilian blood.
Born in Jaffna in the Tamil-dominated north of Sri Lanka in 1984, Gnanakumar and her family moved to Britain in 1994. Until 28 February last year, she had not been back. She had just completed a biomedical degree at Greenwich University, but her short-lived marriage was on the rocks and she decided it was time to make a clean break. She left the house, telling no one where she was going.
Arriving in the capital, Colombo, she headed for Vanni, the Tamil heartland, to stay with a relative she calls her brother (her real brother is back in the UK, along with her two sisters). There seemed little sign of danger, but by June 2008 fighting was getting worse: the Tamil Tigers, or Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), still thought they would be able to negotiate a ceasefire, as they had done in the past, but the government had other ideas. They were determined to destroy the LTTE once and for all. Gnanakumar decided to stay on to try to help those who were trapped by the advance.
Even before the arrival of the government's ground forces, there had been regular air raids by air force Kfir jets. But in early January artillery barrages began, forcing the population to move.
That was when the reality of the war hit Gnanakumar for the first time.
"It was raining and … you could see everywhere on the road the blood is running with the water and the bodies were left there because there was no-one to identify who was dead and who is alive, the bodies were just laid down on the floor and that's the first time I saw dead bodies and wounded people crying out, shouting."
Wherever they stopped, they built a bunker, digging down until they could stand up in the hole, cutting down palm branches and laying them across the top for a roof and packing sandbags on the top and around the sides.
As the frontline advanced, trapping as many as 300,000 people inside a shrinking enclave of LTTE-held land, Gnanakumar went to the makeshift government hospital, which had moved into a former primary school, and volunteered to help, dressing wounds and administering first aid.
Her laboratory training had not prepared her for anything like this, but she learned as she went along. As the fighting intensified, they were treating as many as 500 people every day in two rooms. "They had a shortage of medicine but they had to somehow save the people. The last two weeks or so there was a shortage of everything."
With replacement blood running out, she had to filter what she could from the patients through a cloth before feeding it back into their veins. When the anaesthetics ran short, they diluted them with distilled water. "I watched when there was a six-year-old boy," she said. "They had to take off the leg and also the arm, but they didn't have proper equipment, they just had a knife that the butchers use to cut the meat, and we have to use that to take off his leg and arm. He cried and cried."
As the army closed in, it got worse.
"People were running and running to get them safe away from the shell bombing, but they couldn't and it came to a point where we thought we are all going to die, there is no way we can be safe anymore here, but we just have to take it. I mean, you can't get out of the shell-bombing. I didn't think that I would be alive and I would be here now. I said OK, I'm going to die, that is the end of it.
"One day I was inside the [operating] theatre and the next room was bombed. We had a lot of the treated people left in the room for the doctors to go and monitor and they all died in that shell bomb. And they [the Sri Lankan forces] again bombed the hospital and one of the doctors died in that."
Inside the hospital, there was no respite. Gnanakumar cannot forget the day a mother was brought in, injured, clutching her baby.
"She had the baby on her lap, the baby is dead and the mother didn't know and the doctor said: 'Don't tell her, because if we tell her now she will start crying out and shouting and … we have to save the mother first.' So we said: 'OK, give the baby to us, we'll look after her you go and get the treatment from the doctor,' and only after she got the treatment we told the truth, that your baby is dead. I can easily say it, but at that moment I was in so much pain, the innocent baby, the mother didn't know the baby was dead, she thought 'my baby is sleeping'.
"There were so many incidents. Another time the mother was dead and the baby was still suckling."
The fighting was getting closer. They ate what they could find and slept, those who could, in the occasional lulls.
"You have to be ready to run, you can't relax and go to sleep, any minute you just have to be ready," she said.
Gnanakumar could not take any more. On 13 May the hospital had been hit, killing about 50 people. "The bunker right next to ours had a shell on top of it and there were six people in the same family died and three were wounded.
"I saw them … suddenly I start hearing people are crying out and I thought, it has to be somewhere really close … I came out of my tent and I saw blood everywhere and the people – I couldn't even imagine that place, there was blood and then the bodies were into pieces everywhere and my brother said: 'Just pack up and let's get away from this place.'"
In the last five days, she says, she believes about 20,000 people died. It is a very high estimate, though the UN has acknowledged the true death toll may never be known. Tamil groups such as the Global Tamil Forum say her account corroborates their own figures drawn from interviews with survivors.
Over the course of the three-decade war, it is estimated that up to 100,000 people died. But independent confirmation of the death toll in the final days has been impossible. The Sri Lankan government has barred independent journalists from the war zone to this day, and has expelled UN officials and aid workers.
Meanwhile, the survivors of the final assault have been spirited away inside sprawling camps in a militarised zone.
It was to those camps, at Menik Farm, that Gnanakumar was taken. Following that last bombing, she joined thousands fleeing towards the government lines. "We start moving and after walking about one hour or so we saw the Sri Lankan army. They were saying: 'Come, you are safe now, food will be provided for you.' There were bodies everywhere, like into pieces. We had to just walk." That was when she saw the mother agonising over what to do with her dead baby. No one had time to bury the bodies, she says. Some pushed them into bunkers and covered them with a little sand. That was the best they could do.
That night, they slept in a school, then they were taken by bus to the town of Vavuniya. She called her mother: "I said, Mum, just get me out of here, I just want to get out of this place. And the phone got cut off."
The Sri Lankan government has built a series of camps to house the estimated 300,000 people who poured out of the war zone. It claims that it needs to hold the civilians until it can weed out the former Tamil Tiger fighters; its critics, including many UN organisations and independent aid groups, question why, even if that is true, it needs to imprison children and the elderly behind barbed wire, and why it has not more quickly identified the rebels. Despite pledges to start sending the internees back to their homes "at the earliest possible opportunity", the UN says only 2,000 have so far been released.
There was no food the first day Gnanakumar arrived, and she had lost contact with the people she had been with. She slept in a tent with strangers.
Even after the privations of the war zone, conditions in the camp still came as a shock.
"Wherever you go there are big queues, whatever you want you have to queue. The toilets are terrible, I can't describe how disgusting. Flies everywhere, mosquitoes, unhygienic … People had all sorts of illnesses.
"People have lost their family members, they are separated from their families … and they are going through depression."
Accounts circulated of rapes and murders, of people disappearing. Some people committed suicide: a teacher was found hanging from a tree.
Military intelligence officers were roaming the camps, looking for former Tamil Tigers, she said. "It is an open prison, you are free to walk but you are inside a prison, you are not allowed to step out. You can't. There were guards everywhere and checkpoints."
A couple of days after she arrived, the British high commission made contact through the UNHCR. An appeal from her parents in the Guardian brought fresh hope and a flurry of activity: she was moved from the overcrowded zone two to zone one, the part of the camp the authorities show to visitors.
"I was there when the UN secretary Ban Ki-moon came in … He stayed there for about 10 minutes and just went. Why didn't he go into the camp and talk to the people and spend some time asking them what their problems were? I thought he has a responsibility and people were expecting something from him. They expected much from him and he just spent 10 minutes and that's it."
The officials told Gnanakumar she would be staying for a couple of days and would then be released. "And then the 48 hours turned into three days and then it turned into weeks and months and I thought OK, now I understand it is not going to happen." She was interrogated five times – what was she doing there? Why had she been in the hospitals?
The call to say she was going home came last week. She was taken to Colombo to meet the president's brother, Basil Rajapaksa.
"He said OK, you went through so much in the country and now you are released you can go and join your family and be happy. He wasn't sorry about it." She was then handed over to British officials.
She speaks in a matter-of-fact way, rarely betraying emotion. Her hair has been tied back tightly – she had beautiful hair before she left, she says, but lost most of it in the camps. She is not sure what she will do now, maybe something in the field of medicine.
"I'm happy and proud of myself that I was able to help the people. I still think it is unreal that I am in the UK … I never thought I would be alive and coming back, even in the camp.
"After looking at the people dying and dead bodies everywhere, it is like nothing threatens me any more, it is like I have had the hard time in my life and I think I am prepared to take up whatever happens in life now.
"I'm not that old Vany that sits down and cries for little things. I'm stronger now after going through and seeing all that problem. My mind is clear now."
The Sri Lankan high commission in London last night denied Gnanakumar's allegations and called the claim of more than 20,000 civilian deaths "unsubstantiated and fabricated". A spokesman said that at no time did it target "government hospitals or any other civilian infrastructure where the civilians were accommodated".
The spokesman said: "The government of Sri Lanka has all reasons to believe that Ms Gnanakumar has gone to Sri Lanka and worked in the conflict area according to the LTTE's agenda, while overstaying her visa."
He said the government was "continuously assisting the internally displaced Sri Lankans".
news