In May this year, when the Sri Lankan government was faced with the serious threat of an investigation by the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations, it made several promises to the international community that helped to sway the vote in its favor.
These promises included moving forward without delay in healing the wounds of war in the country, specifically resettling the displaced persons and finding a political solution to the ethnic conflict. The implementation of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which established devolved provincial governments, stood at the center of this promise.
On numerous occasions President Mahinda Rajapaksa has made reference to the government's commitment to implementing this partially implemented law. He has even said he is willing to go beyond it, as “13th Amendment plus 1.” But now, after the military victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, there is increasing emphasis placed by the government on a yet unspecified and vague “homegrown” solution.
Government spokepersons have stated that just as they defied international expectations in militarily defeating the LTTE with their own plan and strategy, so will they finally bring a political solution to the ethnic conflict in their own way.
The 13th Amendment to the Constitution was promulgated in the context of the Indian effort at mediating an end to the conflict in 1987 and was an outcome of the Indo Lanka Peace Accord. It is therefore not home grown and gave a degree of autonomy to the provinces that they had not enjoyed in the context of Sri Lanka’s unitary Constitution. There was an imposed aspect to the 13th Amendment, because it took place in the aftermath of the Indian invasion of Sri Lankan airspace and the halting of Sri Lankan military operations against the LTTE.
It is therefore to be expected that India would be particularly observant about the implementation of this law. The implementation of the 13th Amendment would help to restore some measure of Indian credibility as Sri Lanka’s superpower neighbor. If the Sri Lankan government were to strengthen the provincial council system along the lines of President Rajapaksa's earlier pledge of 13th Amendment plus 1, there is no doubt this would be satisfying to the Indian government and help to maintain its own credibility in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which is liable to become volatile on the issue.
The All Party Representatives Committee appointed nearly two years ago by the president to work out a mutually acceptable political solution has utilized the existing arrangements for the devolution of power as found in the 13th Amendment as the basis of its own proposal for a political power-sharing p proposal.
Although the sincerity of those who have met regularly in the APRC on more than 120 occasions cannot be doubted, there have been weaknesses in the structure that have eroded its credibility to some extent. One is that the largest opposition party, the United National Party, and the largest Tamil party, the Tamil National Alliance, have not been participating in the process, the former due to grievances with the government and the latter on account of not being invited to participate in the APRC.
A further weakness has been the cavalier attitude with which the government has often treated the APRC's proposals in the past. When the APRC was about to unveil its interim proposals the government withheld these proposals and instead proposed to implement the 13th Amendment as it existed.
On the other hand, the APRC has sought to clear the ambiguities in the existing provincial council law, such as the list of concurrent powers that are shared by both the central government and the provincial councils to the invariable disadvantage of the latter. The APRC has also proposed entirely new improvements to the scheme of devolution, by creating an entirely new upper chamber, by which representatives from the provincial councils will have a voice in central government.
In this context the most recent declarations by sections of the government spearheaded by representatives of the Sinhalese nationalist parties are neither surprising nor reassuring. With general elections looming and presidential elections also a possibility, the government would not wish to antagonize any section of the voting population, especially among the Sinhalese majority that constitutes about three-quarters of this electorate, and whose undivided vote would propel President Rajapaka and his government to yet another election victory.
The Sinhalese voters have been strongly influenced by the Sinhalese nationalist agenda. The government needs to balance this against earning the disfavor of the Tamil people and the international community to whom it has made promises.
There is concern within the government that the devolution of power will lead to the multiplication of separatist sentiment, even if only to carve out small ethnic enclaves from the Muslim and Hill Country Tamil people, in addition to the demand by the Sri Lankan Tamils of the north and east. An indication of the government's approach to dealing with the ethnic minorities was seen in the manner in which it compelled the leadership of the Eelam People’s Democratic Party and the Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Pulikal leaderships to contest elections under the ruling party's banner, rather than separately in a manner that highlighted autonomous Tamil political power.
On the other hand, in adopting the "homegrown" approach to the solution to the ethnic conflict, the government needs to bear two factors in mind. The first is that the political solution to the ethnic conflict cannot be imposed on the Tamil people. What the government has successfully demonstrated is that a militant movement can be defeated by military means. But the nationalism of one people cannot prevail by force of military victories or larger numbers over the nationalism of another people.
The solutions to ethnic conflicts, if they are to be sustainable, need to be negotiated based on mutual accommodation, with space for more negotiations and accommodations in the future. An imposed solution to an ethnic conflict, even if it is described as a political solution, is likely to break down in the longer term.
The imposed nature of the 13th Amendment in 1987 can also be given as evidence for its failure in implementation. The value of the APRC’s proposals is that they are the result of over 120 meetings within the ruling coalition and with some opposition parties, which seek to give a homegrown quality to the 13th Amendment.
The second factor the government needs to take into account is the promises it has made in the recent past, which are being watched by the international community. These promises include resettling the bulk of the internally displaced people by the end of the year, and also the implementation of the 13th Amendment.
At a time when its relations with the Western countries have become troubled in many respects, Sri Lanka needs to keep faith with the countries that have supported it during the period of war, especially India, which is its closest neighbor. This is a relationship that needs to be strengthened by keeping to promises made.(UPI Asia)
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Say 'No' to Sri Lanka: The time of judgement has arrived to the land of terror
“Money goes into the hands of Sri Lanka are now used to destroy individuals, families and communities therefore, it is rational, ethical, sensible and right to stop supporting a country that is determined continue with its genocide agenda, despite calls from the international community”
Death and destruction in a Terror Island
Fifty thousand innocent men, women and children were brutally murdered on the sandy beaches and in the jungles of Sri Lanka, by the Sri Lankan Military while the whole world stood back and watched.
Three hundred thousands are now locked up in the death camps of Sri Lanka. Men are tortured, Women are abused and raped, Children are psychologically tormented, foreign media is banned, aid workers are blocked and the Tamils are now let to die like flies without proper food, medicine and water. Dead bodies are thrown outside the tents and let to rot while the young and old stand in the hot sun for hours to beg for food.
Times UK has recently reported that fourteen hundreds are dying every week in the horror camps manly due to water Bourne diseases and many preventable illnesses. The rate at which people are dying now, the whole camp will be empty just in three years time. Many who are prisoned in these camps have relatives and friends living in other parts of the country and overseas, who are willing to help.
Sri Lankan government is so adamant that it is not helping the dying Tamils and also not letting others to help.
Purpose of these Nazi style camps is to cause death and maximum destruction to an oppressed and vulnerable Tamil community that is now pleading to the Nations for help. Few camps are purposefully built for propaganda purposes in order to deceive the international community.
Horrors in Sri Lanka are sending shock waves across the World
Torture, murder, rape, forced starvation, and all kind of human rights violations in the concentration camps of Sri Lanka, are now sending shock waves across the world.
Deportations of Western reporters, Journalists and Politicians from the Sri Lankan Airport and denial of access to the death camps of Sri Lanka for aid workers are showing the face of rebellious country that is willing go to any extent to defy international humanitarian laws.
Western countries have recently been pressurising Sri Lanka to stop the abuses and State sponsored killings. US, Britain and France including many other European countries are taking all the necessary measures to send strong messages to Sri Lanka.
US $1.9 Billion IMF loan to this country is now delayed. Sri Lanka had been denied a seat on UN Human Rights Council. US are delaying aid to the displaced people till the Sri Lankan government give free access to the camps.
There are also talks about suspending Sri Lanka from the commonwealth
Can an average Joe make a difference?
I have written few articles on the subject of Sri Lankan civil war. One of the popular questions, I received from the readers was “What can the average Joe do other than writing a letter to the local MP?”
While our international legal systems are still failing to bring the culprits to justice, Average Joe might probably be in a better position to send a powerful message to countries like Sri Lanka. Joe should see and understand the bigger picture of what is happening in Sri Lanka before start doing anything about the injustice done against the innocents.
Joe living in the West is a consumer just like many other millions around the world. Any marketing professional would know about the Power of a Consumer. Joe is an ethical shopper, who has the freedom to choose where to go on a holiday, which airline to fly with, where to buy his cloths and who to bank with. Joe can meet up with many like minded people and persuade his government to stop playing sports with countries that are persecuting its people. Joe is now on the net. He has access to email, facebook, twitter and many other social networking sites. He can share his views with millions around the world.
Even a great nation like China needs to sell its products in the world market in order to feed its people. Sri Lanka that is acting arrogantly with many countries should know, that it can't keep on killing the innocents and expect the people to buy their products and services that are covered in blood.
Joe along with millions around the world should be able to convince the People of Sri Lanka that they are not safe in the hands of corrupt regimes that are even prepared to sell the soul of a nation to satisfy the cravings of the Sinhala Buddhist extremists whose only goal is to wipe out Tamils.
“Sri Lanka for Dummies” is a simple Introduction to Sri Lanka and Sri Lankan war for the average Joe to get an understanding of the man made humanitarian crisis in this little island.
Sri Lanka for Dummies
1) Sri Lanka in a Nutshell
2) Tamil Rebellion against State Terrorism in Sri Lanka
3) War in the Vanni land that had revealed the face of the devil
Sri Lanka in a Nutshell
Sri Lanka is a tiny tropical island that was known as the pearl of the Indian Ocean and paradise on earth. This country was once very popular among the tourists but not any more.
Rulers of this country have made this place as one of the most dangerous places to visit and live on the planet. The US has recently given serious warnings to its citizens about the dangers of travelling to Sri Lanka. Westerners are no longer welcome there. Journalists and high profile diplomats are regularly deported back from the Colombo international Airport. The recent victims were Channel 4 TV journalists and Bob Rae who was once the Premier of Ontario Canada. Western embassies are frequently attacked by angry local mobs. British and Canadian High commissions became the latest targets.Sri Lanka is a graveyard for the journalists. Sri Lankan Government is using underground Mafia and death squads to abduct, torture and kill journalists, aid workers and any individuals who are critical of the government. Doctors and journalists are locked up in prisons but the evil ones are rewarded and let to roam around the streets with knives and guns.
Journalist Tissainayagam in chains. Telling the truth is a crime in Sri Lanka
Tamils are the prime targets but even foreigners, Sinhalese and Muslims are not the exceptions. This country is now at the bottom of the list in terms of human rights.
Sri Lanka has murdered fourteen journalists in the last few years. More than twenty journalists have been forced out of the country. Many are locked up in jails. Newspapers are burned, TV stations are attacked, and News web sites are blocked. Even BBC and CNN had received warnings in the past from the controversial defence secretary of the country. Sri Lanka only allows reporters who write well about the government.
Senior editor and Journalist Lasantha Wickramatunga was brutally murdered by the government backed mafia
Five medical doctors, who are praised as real heroes by the international community for their tireless work during the Sri Lankan war, are now locked up in Sri Lankan jails for speaking the truth from the war zone. Sri Lankan rulers have recently paraded these doctors in front of television cameras and forced them make false statements to support the government. This is another foolish attempt by a murderous regime to hide the war crimes it had committed .We all know how Al Qaeda had paraded western hostages on TV in the past and forced them to say things that were not true.
In Sri Lanka, People disappear from their homes, schools, work places and hospitals like flies. It is not the fulfilment of rapture that is taking place according to the book of Revelation in the Bible. But the Sri Lankan regime has mastered the art of using white vans to abduct and kill anyone who is dare to question the conducts of the government.
Half burned dead bodies with hands tied at the back is a typical scene, one would be able to see quite often in Sri Lanka. Killer demons regularly come on mysterious white vans without number plates on them.
A typical Sri Lankan leader would talk like he has the whole world under his feet and he doesn’t care about outside opinions. Many of us remember the controversial Sri Lankan defence secretary of Sri Lanka who appeared on many TV channels across the globe and thundered that he had the right to bomb hospitals and schools. He had indeed ordered to bomb several hospitals in the recent war in Sri Lanka. This short tempered leader and the current military commander of Sri Lanka are directly responsible for thousands of killings in Sri Lanka.
Some of the ministers from the Jumbo cabinet of Sri Lanka have degrees from western universities. They wear crisp clean suits and speak in Queens English. But what comes out of their mouth don’t reflect the real situation in Sri Lanka.
Sri Lankan rulers no longer tell the truth. According to them, the Sun raises in the West and the rooster crows only in the evenings. While murdering civilians with heavy weapons including tanks and missiles with unconventional war heads, Sri Lanka was lying to the world that they were only using light weapons.
Sri Lanka is the most militarised among the South Asian countries with 13000 military personnel per one million population. Every street corners of Sri Lanka are guarded by armed soldiers. Sri Lanka has 266K active armed personal (Total Troops 374K) which is much higher than many developed countries. [Australia (54k), Canada (65K), South Africa (56K), Norway (28K), United Kingdom (188K), Germany (248K), France (260K), Italy (230K)]
Sri Lanka has no foreign enemies. Multi barrel Rockets were used to kill thousands of Tamils in the recent war
In terms of military expenditure as percentage of GDP, Sri Lanka spends the most in South Asia. The figure is 6% in Sri Lanka which is much higher than the amount spent by its neighbours. (3.5% in Pakistan; 2.5% in India and Nepal; and 1.5% in Bangladesh)
Sri Lanka has now become like another Myanmar in the region. Close associations with nuclear armed China and Pakistan and friendships with Iran, Libya, and Myanmar are already giving the danger signs. Iran has indicated that it is willing to share nuclear technologies with Sri Lanka for peaceful purposes. Those who follow the current trend in the world, very well know what these peaceful purposes are.
Sri Lanka is trying to get hold of nuclear technology (to supplement its power needs). Having been turned away by India, Sri Lanka is turning to States like Iran to fulfil its nuclear ambitions. This is why Sri Lanka always backs Iran’s nuclear program
It may not be well known that Sri Lanka was instrumental in Iran acquiring nuclear technology. Some Sri Lankan businessmen and engineers are among those whose names appear in a United States blacklist over the alleged involvement in the world’s worst illicit nuclear proliferation racket, the British media reported recently.
Although, Sri Lanka is a democratic country, the majority Sinhala people support Nazi Style right wing parties. Racist politicians and military leaders are looked upon as heroes and saviours of the country. Tamils who once had their own nation are now considered as aliens and invaders even though the majority of the Tamils are the original inhabitants of this land. Politics is driven by the powers of ignorance, greed, lies and deceptions.
Today, three hundred thousands of Tamils in Sri Lanka are locked up in concentration camps and the rest live in homes that are heavily guarded by the Sri Lankan military. People who once lived dignified and prosperous lives are now treated like stray dogs. Tamil women are raped by the Sri Lankan army and young Tamil men are tortured and killed.
Tamil Rebellion against State Terrorism in Sri Lanka
Tamils, who are one of the most oppressed communities in the world, have been fighting to free themselves from the evil regimes of the country. But they have so far failed to achieve their goals. Tamils initially fought through democratic means. Democracy no longer works in favour of Tamils because the majority prefers the Tamils to be wiped out from the country.
Tamils were slaughtered in thousands with swords and knives in the buses, trains and in their own homes in the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties. Frustrated Tamil youth took arms to fight against fascism. Armed rebellion has now been crushed with the help of China and India.
Tamil rebels were initially functioning like how IRA did things in the eighties but from the early 2000s they did manage to build a well disciplined conventional force with their own Air force and Navy. According to the former Chief Justice of Sri Lanka, who retired only few weeks ago, Tamil rebels were better in honouring the laws of the land than the government of Sri Lanka. For instance, Seven Sri Lankan soldiers who were prisoners of war in the rebel camps were set free by the rebels without any scratches, even at a time when Sri Lankan forces were murdering Tamil women and babies in cold blood.
Tamil Rebels and the Sri Lankan government signed a ceasefire in 2002, after the Sri Lankan forces had suffered a heavy defeat in a conventional war between both parties. Negotiations were taking place between the Tamils and the Sri Lankan government for five years, with the help of the mediators from EU, Norway, Japan and US.
Sri Lankan government suddenly withdrew from the ceasefire unilaterally in 2007, and launched a war against the rebels with help of India and the weapons it got from China and Pakistan. War broke out at a time when there were signs of peace becoming materialised in Sri Lanka according to the former Norwegian mediator Eric Solheim, who is now the Minister of Environment.
Sri Lankan army did manage to slaughter more than fifty thousand Tamil civilians including women and children within few months time. Banned weapons like cluster bombs and phosphorous bombs were used against the innocents.
War in Vanni, that had revealed the face of the devil
Vanni is a Tamil land in the north eastern region of Sri Lanka that was once flowing with milk and honey. People prospered in every thing. Many of them did farming and deep sea fishing. They were not poor. Their barns were filled with grains throughout the year. These people ate a very healthy diet and lived in homes that were located in unpolluted areas. In our terms, people of Vanni ate organic grains, vegetables, fruits, meat and fish all their lives.
Few months ago, all of a sudden, Skis of Vanni became darkened. Children stopped playing. Dancing was turned into mourning. Chinese F7s, Russian MIGs f lied over Vanni and bombed homes, hospitals, schools and farms. Cluster bombs, phosphorous bombs and other banned weapons were used against innocent civilians.
They were slaughtered in their own homes
Men, women and children were hiding inside the bunkers without adequate food and medicine for months. More than fifty thousands innocents were slaughtered. Thirty thousands were injured. Thousands of children became orphans. Wounded and maimed crawled on mud and dirt to search for water and food.
Children were hiding inside the bunkers for weeks and months. Many were not fortunate
Thousands of surrendered and wounded rebels were brutally murdered. Military tanks rolled over the dying and the golden beaches of Sri Lanka were turned into red carpets with the blood of the innocents.
There were no more mourners left in the land of Vanni to mourn for the dead. Lands of the living didn’t send any comforters to the land of the dead. Hearts of the world became stones and the so called leaders of the world had once again revealed their ugly faces.
Nobody came to mourn for the dead
Number of people massacred on the beaches of Sri Lanka is almost ten times of the people died in the Tiananmen Square massacre in China.
If the war was conducted fairly according to the international laws, the outcome of the war would have been much different. Sri Lankan army defeated the rebels by using unconventional banned weapons that had caused thousands of civilian causalities and deaths.
Chemical weapons were used against the Civilians and Rebels
After killing so many thousands, the Sri Lankan government has sent the remaining to Nazi style concentration camps. Now they are dying in the death camps of Sri Lanka with lack of food and medicine. Tamil women are abused and raped by Sri Lankan military in these horror camps. Men are tortured and killed.
Although China, India and Pakistan are helping the Sri Lankan rulers, Genocide is being carried out with the complete freewill of this Nation. Sri Lankan leaders have made this beautiful country into a half naked prostitute in the India Ocean. Ministers of this country regularly fly to China and India to meet the political and military leaders of those nations. Sri Lanka has become a puppet of these superpowers with its own sweet will.
Sri Lanka is facing destruction by its own masters
People of this world are becoming more and more tolerant. Many colours and races are learning to live together in Europe and America. American people have even elected a Black president with a Muslim middle name to give a powerful message to the world.
Nations that have systems based on racial and religious supremacies should know that they are heading for isolation and destruction if they continue with their racist policies.
Here we see a country that has gone out of control and acting weirdly in the Indian Ocean. Beaches of Sri Lanka are stained with the blood of thousands men, women and children who were slaughtered by the cruel rulers of this country. There is no more media freedom. Local and foreign journalists are intimidated, prisoned and killed. Arrogant leaders of this country are confronting individuals, organisations and even nations that are opposing the killings.
Average Joe has the tools to send a message to Sri Lanka who are deliberately failing from the duties to protect its people.
Joe is conscious of the environment. He makes sure that papers, cloths and empty bottles end up in recycling bins. He is very concerned about the people living in the poorest countries on this earth. He buys fair trade tea and coffee that are produced in countries that need our help.
Joe takes his family for holidays at least once a year. As a matter of conscience, Joe will not be holidaying on the blood stained beaches of Sri Lanka where thousands of innocent men, women and children were brutally murdered by Bombs and shells. Joe will not be buying garments that are made in Sri Lanka, a country that has locked up three hundred thousands Tamils including babies, pregnant women and disabled in barbed wired concentration camps.
People of Vanni, who once lived prosperously, are now left to wander like vagabonds with skin and bones in the death camps of Sri Lanka. Family ties are broken, their dignity is destroyed, and thousands of children are psychologically tormented. Many thousands have already become mental.
Money goes into the hands of Sri Lanka is used to wound and kill innocent Civilians. It is time to say "No"
Fourteen hundreds dying in the death camps of Sri Lanka in a week is a clear proof that Sri Lanka is still mass murdering Tamils. These people are not terrorists but men, women and children who also have dreams and have every right on this earth to live with dignity. They were not born to die of starvation, torture and deliberate medical negligence in the hands foolish and arrogant rulers.
Sri Lanka should know that they can’t do business with the world while slaughtering the civilians. No country prospers with the blood of the innocents. Agents of the Sri Lanlan regime who live overseas are still justifying the killings of Tamils. They should learn to show respect the follow humans because they themselves enjoy equal rights in foreign countries. People of this world, no matter what their religion, race, colour and culture are, they all have the freedom to live without the fear of intimidation, torture rape and murder.
Time has for the international community say No to “Sri Lankan package Holidays”, No to “Sri Lankan Airlines”, No to “Sri Lankan Cricket”, No to “Ceylon Tea”, No to “Garment made in Sri Lanka” and No to “Any organisation that has commercial interests in Sri Lanka” until the killings stop and Sri Lanka come with clean hands.
We give money for Cancer Research, Save the Children, Christian Aid, Tear Fund and many other leading charities because we very well know that our money is used to protect, build and heal lives.
What goes in the hands of Sri Lanka is not used to build lives but to destroy lives therefore, it is rational, ethical and sensible to stop supporting a country that is continuing with its genocide agenda with arrogance.
Sri Lanka is already facing isolation and there will be serious consequences if the leaders of this country continue to orchestrate abductions, torture, rape and killings in order to suppress the voice of the oppressed.
Destroying individuals, families and communities will eventually lead to the destruction of the whole Nation of Sri Lanka by its own masters.
-- By Richard Dixon
Sri Lanka rights probe hampered, Probe into the killing of ACF aid workers inconclusive
Sri Lanka's probe into rights abuses including the killing of 17 aid workers in 2006 was hampered by the lack of witness protection and its abrupt winding-up, the Reuters said today quoting the commission's head. Army and the Navy have been totally exonerated by the Report of the Presidential Commission based on what had been done so far, The Island reported on the same case.
The article by Reuters, Tuesday further said: On Aug. 4, 2006, 17 mostly Tamil staff members of charity Action Contre la Faim (ACF) were gunned down inside the ACF compound in the northeastern town of Muttur, near where fighting was taking place between the government and Tamil Tiger rebels.
The government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) blamed each other for what was then the deadliest attack on aid workers since the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad in 2003.
Nordic peace monitors whom the government accused of a pro-rebel bias blamed the attack on security forces.
The report by the commission of inquiry appointed by President Mahinda Rajapaksa to investigate serious human rights abuses is inconclusive about who killed the aid workers.
Foreign observers to the panel two years ago predicted the commission would fail to find anything substantive and quit last year, saying it did not meet international standards and had been interfered with politically. The government denies that.
The commission's mandate was not extended when it expired in June, making it the latest in Sri Lanka's long history of probes into rights abuses that were incomplete or inconclusive.
"We have not been able to complete the whole thing because we didn't have the video conferencing facility and a witness protection bill...is still in parliament," retired Supreme Court Judge Nissanka Udalagama told Reuters.
A number of witnesses have fled the country in fear for their lives, and video-conferencing was needed to contact witnesses who live abroad, he said.
Udalagama, head of the eight-member commission, said they could have called other witnesses but the president wanted a report based on what had been done so far.
The report exonerates the army and navy, but says auxiliary police known as home guards could have carried out the killings.
"There was other evidence like the presence of Muslim home guards. They had access to the weapons. And it could have been LTTE," Udalagama said.
Rights watchdogs have reported hundreds of abductions, disappearances and killings blamed on both the government and the LTTE throughout the course of Sri Lanka's 25-year civil war, which ended in May.
Sri Lanka has a long history of failing to prosecute rights abuses, particularly when members of the security forces are involved, going back to the early 1970s when the government violently suppressed a Marxist insurrection.
On the same case this is what appeared in Sri Lanka's Island news:
Presidential Probe into Massacre of aid workers
Army and Navy exonerated; ACF must pay compensation for negligence; Severe strictures passed on several NGOs
There is strong evidence of LTTE presence in the city centre on the morning of the 4th August. A Rev. Father and a Divisional Secretary have also testified to the presence of the LTTE in the Mutur town on 4th August.
Army and the Navy have been totally exonerated by the Report of the Presidential Commission Inquiry into the Killing of the 17 aid workers of the INGO, Action Contre La Faim (ACF). The Commission led by Nissanka Udalagama, former Supreme Court Judge, has concluded that the death occurred on the morning of the 4th of August 2006.
The reports states:
"According to the statements until the night of 4th August the Mutur town and the surrounding area was subjected to LTTE attack. There is undisputable evidence that the LTTE were present in the Mutur town on the morning of the 4th August.
There is no evidence of any Army personnel being seen on the 4th in Mutur city centre. However, there is overwhelming evidence, in addition to TamilNet declaration that the LTTE were present in the town of Mutur on the 4th.
There is also the evidence of the death of Lance Corporal Ubayasekera succumbing to gunshot injuries caused from the direction of the town area whilst he was on duty in the marshland adjacent to the Mutur Police station on the morning of the 4th August. This fatal shot had been fired from the direction of the town by the LTTE. Therefore, there is strong evidence of LTTE presence in the city centre on the morning of the 4th August. A Rev. Father and a Divisional Secretary have also testified to the presence of the LTTE in the Mutur town on 4th August."
A report of the UTHR(J) implicated Sri Lanka Naval Special Forces in the killings. The charge has been debunked by the Commission which in the report states, "The evidence does not disclose the presence of the commandos anywhere near the ACF office during the period, that is, on the morning afternoon or evening of the 4th. There are no Naval Special Forces in the Navy. Furthermore, the ballistic expert has identified the weapons used for the death of the 17 workers as T-56 weapons; weapons identified in the UTHR (J) report as the instrument of death does not include T-56 weapons."
The Report states there has been gross negligence on the part of the ACF office and has made the recommendation of payment of 10 years salary to their next of kin by the ACF.
"The workers were pleading to save their lives and to go out of the office. But they were stubbornly told by the Trincomalee ACF office not to leave the office and stay together as it would be difficult for the ACF to collect them if they leave and go to the camps. ACF was looking more for their comfort and convenience than that of the safety and security of their workers. They, by their conduct, before the Commission established this fact, by abandoning the cause of their deceased employees, by leaving the Commission without notice, left the families of the deceased in the lurch. In fact, one family member of a deceased complained in writing to the Commission the plight he was faced with and having to seek the assistance of the counsel for the Army/Navy to have the compensation package enhanced."
The Commission has passed strictures on the seven civil society organisations consisting of Centre for Policy Alternatives, Home for Human Rights, INFORM, Law and Society Trust, Mothers and Daughters of Lanka, Right Now -collective for Democracy and Sri Lanka National Commission of Jurists.
The lawyers who represented the said organisations and the next of kin though purportedly watching matters of public interest as set out in the civil society mandate placed in writing before the Commission, showed total disregard in matters affecting the interests of the deceased persons’ next of kin. This aspect should have been the prime fact of concern in terms of the mandate presented to show their interest and gain representation in the case but they appeared to be more anxious to safeguard the interest of the foreign based NGO, the ACF. It was said that their contribution was negligible with regard to enhancing the compensation package due to the next of kin, which should have been a matter in which they should have interested themselves. Instead they left it to the others who assisted the Commission."
"It appears there has been a preconceived plan or a conspiracy to discredit the Commission by making false allegations and or exaggerating and twisting the truth to suit their purpose in order to achieve the long term objective of interested parties including their paymasters to discredit and disrupt the Commission for the consumption of some international organisations.’
Mr. R. K. W. Goonesekera represented the unofficial bar for the prosecution. Mr. Yasantha Kodagoda with Dulip Jayakody and Lakmali Karunanyake represented the Commission.
Gomin Dayasri and Manoli Jinadasa appeared for the Army and Navy with Army/Navy legal officers.
Source: Reuters and Island
The article by Reuters, Tuesday further said: On Aug. 4, 2006, 17 mostly Tamil staff members of charity Action Contre la Faim (ACF) were gunned down inside the ACF compound in the northeastern town of Muttur, near where fighting was taking place between the government and Tamil Tiger rebels.
The government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) blamed each other for what was then the deadliest attack on aid workers since the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad in 2003.
Nordic peace monitors whom the government accused of a pro-rebel bias blamed the attack on security forces.
The report by the commission of inquiry appointed by President Mahinda Rajapaksa to investigate serious human rights abuses is inconclusive about who killed the aid workers.
Foreign observers to the panel two years ago predicted the commission would fail to find anything substantive and quit last year, saying it did not meet international standards and had been interfered with politically. The government denies that.
The commission's mandate was not extended when it expired in June, making it the latest in Sri Lanka's long history of probes into rights abuses that were incomplete or inconclusive.
"We have not been able to complete the whole thing because we didn't have the video conferencing facility and a witness protection bill...is still in parliament," retired Supreme Court Judge Nissanka Udalagama told Reuters.
A number of witnesses have fled the country in fear for their lives, and video-conferencing was needed to contact witnesses who live abroad, he said.
Udalagama, head of the eight-member commission, said they could have called other witnesses but the president wanted a report based on what had been done so far.
The report exonerates the army and navy, but says auxiliary police known as home guards could have carried out the killings.
"There was other evidence like the presence of Muslim home guards. They had access to the weapons. And it could have been LTTE," Udalagama said.
Rights watchdogs have reported hundreds of abductions, disappearances and killings blamed on both the government and the LTTE throughout the course of Sri Lanka's 25-year civil war, which ended in May.
Sri Lanka has a long history of failing to prosecute rights abuses, particularly when members of the security forces are involved, going back to the early 1970s when the government violently suppressed a Marxist insurrection.
On the same case this is what appeared in Sri Lanka's Island news:
Presidential Probe into Massacre of aid workers
Army and Navy exonerated; ACF must pay compensation for negligence; Severe strictures passed on several NGOs
There is strong evidence of LTTE presence in the city centre on the morning of the 4th August. A Rev. Father and a Divisional Secretary have also testified to the presence of the LTTE in the Mutur town on 4th August.
Army and the Navy have been totally exonerated by the Report of the Presidential Commission Inquiry into the Killing of the 17 aid workers of the INGO, Action Contre La Faim (ACF). The Commission led by Nissanka Udalagama, former Supreme Court Judge, has concluded that the death occurred on the morning of the 4th of August 2006.
The reports states:
"According to the statements until the night of 4th August the Mutur town and the surrounding area was subjected to LTTE attack. There is undisputable evidence that the LTTE were present in the Mutur town on the morning of the 4th August.
There is no evidence of any Army personnel being seen on the 4th in Mutur city centre. However, there is overwhelming evidence, in addition to TamilNet declaration that the LTTE were present in the town of Mutur on the 4th.
There is also the evidence of the death of Lance Corporal Ubayasekera succumbing to gunshot injuries caused from the direction of the town area whilst he was on duty in the marshland adjacent to the Mutur Police station on the morning of the 4th August. This fatal shot had been fired from the direction of the town by the LTTE. Therefore, there is strong evidence of LTTE presence in the city centre on the morning of the 4th August. A Rev. Father and a Divisional Secretary have also testified to the presence of the LTTE in the Mutur town on 4th August."
A report of the UTHR(J) implicated Sri Lanka Naval Special Forces in the killings. The charge has been debunked by the Commission which in the report states, "The evidence does not disclose the presence of the commandos anywhere near the ACF office during the period, that is, on the morning afternoon or evening of the 4th. There are no Naval Special Forces in the Navy. Furthermore, the ballistic expert has identified the weapons used for the death of the 17 workers as T-56 weapons; weapons identified in the UTHR (J) report as the instrument of death does not include T-56 weapons."
The Report states there has been gross negligence on the part of the ACF office and has made the recommendation of payment of 10 years salary to their next of kin by the ACF.
"The workers were pleading to save their lives and to go out of the office. But they were stubbornly told by the Trincomalee ACF office not to leave the office and stay together as it would be difficult for the ACF to collect them if they leave and go to the camps. ACF was looking more for their comfort and convenience than that of the safety and security of their workers. They, by their conduct, before the Commission established this fact, by abandoning the cause of their deceased employees, by leaving the Commission without notice, left the families of the deceased in the lurch. In fact, one family member of a deceased complained in writing to the Commission the plight he was faced with and having to seek the assistance of the counsel for the Army/Navy to have the compensation package enhanced."
The Commission has passed strictures on the seven civil society organisations consisting of Centre for Policy Alternatives, Home for Human Rights, INFORM, Law and Society Trust, Mothers and Daughters of Lanka, Right Now -collective for Democracy and Sri Lanka National Commission of Jurists.
The lawyers who represented the said organisations and the next of kin though purportedly watching matters of public interest as set out in the civil society mandate placed in writing before the Commission, showed total disregard in matters affecting the interests of the deceased persons’ next of kin. This aspect should have been the prime fact of concern in terms of the mandate presented to show their interest and gain representation in the case but they appeared to be more anxious to safeguard the interest of the foreign based NGO, the ACF. It was said that their contribution was negligible with regard to enhancing the compensation package due to the next of kin, which should have been a matter in which they should have interested themselves. Instead they left it to the others who assisted the Commission."
"It appears there has been a preconceived plan or a conspiracy to discredit the Commission by making false allegations and or exaggerating and twisting the truth to suit their purpose in order to achieve the long term objective of interested parties including their paymasters to discredit and disrupt the Commission for the consumption of some international organisations.’
Mr. R. K. W. Goonesekera represented the unofficial bar for the prosecution. Mr. Yasantha Kodagoda with Dulip Jayakody and Lakmali Karunanyake represented the Commission.
Gomin Dayasri and Manoli Jinadasa appeared for the Army and Navy with Army/Navy legal officers.
Source: Reuters and Island
Outbreak of Meningitis and encephalitis in IDP camps, GMOA accuses health ministry
Six doctors are to visit IDP camps in Vavuniya tomorrow to investigate a suspected outbreak of meningitis and encephalitis, reported from the Vavuniya General Hospital, with the Government Medical Officers Association (GMOA) charging that a severe shortage of nurses and pharmacists in the camps is compounding health problems there.
Reports say while 65 adults are suffering from either one of the ailments, 35 have died so far. Several displaced children at the Vavuniya General Hospital too are suspected to be suffering from the two illness, Sunday Times reported.
More than 1200 IDPs are receiving treatment at the Vavuniya Hospital, for different ailments, currently.
The Health Ministry could not confirm the number of deaths, however a high ranking official who did not want to be quoted admitted that the fatality rate in cases such as meningitis is high as it affects the brain.
“Fatalities are high in such cases, but there is nothing to be alarmed about these figures as they are normal when compared with the population of IDPs we are dealing with,” he said. The Ministry official also said the problem has been in existence in the camps over the past three to four months.
“This issue has been going on for some time now but the hospital does not have the expertise to diagnose the cause. The deaths occurred during the past three to four months,” he said. He also said there was no danger of an epidemic breaking out as the cases were reported from the hospital and not from the camps.
“If cases were identified in the camps then there is a heavy risk of an epidemic breaking out. But right now there is nothing to worry about,” he said. According to him the required medicine has been sent to the hospital to treat the suspected cases.
“The medicines are quite expensive but nevertheless we have taken steps to send the needed supplies,” he said. According to this ministry official there are only 20 nurses serving all the camps and 80 doctors on duty at the medical centres.
“There were no nurses yesterday. We only saw one nurse and she too came from outside with a team of doctors. We need about 120 doctors and at least 300 nurses in the camps. At the Chettikulam hospital there are 130 children receiving treatment and there is only one doctor but no nurses. How can one doctor look after all the patients?” asked Dr. Upul Gunasekara, spokesperson of the GMOA.
The Director of IDP Health Care heading the IDP Health Coordination Centre at Chettikulam, Dr. Hemantha Herath admitted that they were short of staff at the health centres. According to him the problem is mainly during the day, as nurses and doctors are brought from other hospitals for the night shifts.
The ministry is planning to send a batch of 300, recently qualified nurses to the camps in two weeks time. “We are planning to give permanent appointments to these nurses in hospitals in Vavuniya, Mannar, Chettikulam and the IDP camps. Until then we will be sending small batches of nurses to serve in the area,” Dr. Ajith Mendis the Director General of Health said.
The Ministry also dismissed allegations that there were insufficient number of pharmacists working in the camps. However the GMOA alleges that the Ministry had no clear plan on how to handle the growing crisis at the camps.
“The ministry has no plans to send nurses to these camps and the people are just criticising the doctors who are working there. The doctors are frustrated with the situation,” Dr. Gunasekara said.
He also alleged there were severe lapses in the administration of health matters at the IDP camps. According to Dr. Gunasekara the doctors working at the IDP camps are not paid overtime, although doctors working in area hospitals are paid. Further, he claimed that there were no proper lodging facilities for the IDP camp doctors although the GMOA had raised the issue many times.
“These doctors have not visited their families in weeks as they live in the area and serve the people. But they do not even receive any overtime payment,” he said.
Meanwhile the Regional Director of Health Services (RDHS) of Vavuniya Dr. M. Mahendran said they were facing a problem of insufficient funds to make overtime payments to these doctors.
“We have exceeded the provincial budget for health. I have been advised by the ministry to pay only four hours of the seven hours of overtime the doctors’ work. I have to stick to these instructions,” he said.
According to the GMOA the fuel bill for the ambulances have not been paid and the fuel station has refused to give anymore fuel on credit. Of the three ambulances only one was functioning as the other two did not have fuel.
“We have exceeded the fuel allocation by four times. We don’t have allocations in the provincial ministry to pay for fuel. We have informed the national ministry of the situation and are awaiting instructions,” said Dr. Mahendran.
Reports say while 65 adults are suffering from either one of the ailments, 35 have died so far. Several displaced children at the Vavuniya General Hospital too are suspected to be suffering from the two illness, Sunday Times reported.
More than 1200 IDPs are receiving treatment at the Vavuniya Hospital, for different ailments, currently.
The Health Ministry could not confirm the number of deaths, however a high ranking official who did not want to be quoted admitted that the fatality rate in cases such as meningitis is high as it affects the brain.
“Fatalities are high in such cases, but there is nothing to be alarmed about these figures as they are normal when compared with the population of IDPs we are dealing with,” he said. The Ministry official also said the problem has been in existence in the camps over the past three to four months.
“This issue has been going on for some time now but the hospital does not have the expertise to diagnose the cause. The deaths occurred during the past three to four months,” he said. He also said there was no danger of an epidemic breaking out as the cases were reported from the hospital and not from the camps.
“If cases were identified in the camps then there is a heavy risk of an epidemic breaking out. But right now there is nothing to worry about,” he said. According to him the required medicine has been sent to the hospital to treat the suspected cases.
“The medicines are quite expensive but nevertheless we have taken steps to send the needed supplies,” he said. According to this ministry official there are only 20 nurses serving all the camps and 80 doctors on duty at the medical centres.
“There were no nurses yesterday. We only saw one nurse and she too came from outside with a team of doctors. We need about 120 doctors and at least 300 nurses in the camps. At the Chettikulam hospital there are 130 children receiving treatment and there is only one doctor but no nurses. How can one doctor look after all the patients?” asked Dr. Upul Gunasekara, spokesperson of the GMOA.
The Director of IDP Health Care heading the IDP Health Coordination Centre at Chettikulam, Dr. Hemantha Herath admitted that they were short of staff at the health centres. According to him the problem is mainly during the day, as nurses and doctors are brought from other hospitals for the night shifts.
The ministry is planning to send a batch of 300, recently qualified nurses to the camps in two weeks time. “We are planning to give permanent appointments to these nurses in hospitals in Vavuniya, Mannar, Chettikulam and the IDP camps. Until then we will be sending small batches of nurses to serve in the area,” Dr. Ajith Mendis the Director General of Health said.
The Ministry also dismissed allegations that there were insufficient number of pharmacists working in the camps. However the GMOA alleges that the Ministry had no clear plan on how to handle the growing crisis at the camps.
“The ministry has no plans to send nurses to these camps and the people are just criticising the doctors who are working there. The doctors are frustrated with the situation,” Dr. Gunasekara said.
He also alleged there were severe lapses in the administration of health matters at the IDP camps. According to Dr. Gunasekara the doctors working at the IDP camps are not paid overtime, although doctors working in area hospitals are paid. Further, he claimed that there were no proper lodging facilities for the IDP camp doctors although the GMOA had raised the issue many times.
“These doctors have not visited their families in weeks as they live in the area and serve the people. But they do not even receive any overtime payment,” he said.
Meanwhile the Regional Director of Health Services (RDHS) of Vavuniya Dr. M. Mahendran said they were facing a problem of insufficient funds to make overtime payments to these doctors.
“We have exceeded the provincial budget for health. I have been advised by the ministry to pay only four hours of the seven hours of overtime the doctors’ work. I have to stick to these instructions,” he said.
According to the GMOA the fuel bill for the ambulances have not been paid and the fuel station has refused to give anymore fuel on credit. Of the three ambulances only one was functioning as the other two did not have fuel.
“We have exceeded the fuel allocation by four times. We don’t have allocations in the provincial ministry to pay for fuel. We have informed the national ministry of the situation and are awaiting instructions,” said Dr. Mahendran.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
1,400 Tamil detainees die a week at Menik Farm camp in SL
The death toll will add to concerns that the Sri Lankan Government has failed to halt a humanitarian catastrophe after announcing victory over the Tamil Tiger terrorist organisation in May. It may also lend credence to allegations that the Government, which has termed the internment sites “welfare villages”, has actually constructed concentration camps to house 300,000 people, reports 'The Times, UK.'
Further the report quoted Mangala Samaraweera, the former Foreign Minister and now an opposition MP, saying: “There are allegations that the Government is attempting to change the ethnic balance of the area. Influential people close to the Government have argued for such a solution.”
News of the death rate came as the International Committee of the Red Cross revealed that it had been asked to scale down its operations by the Sri Lankan authorities, which insist that they have the situation under control.
Mahinda Samarasinghe, the Minister of Disaster Management and Human Rights, said: “The challenges now are different. Manning entry and exit points and handling dead bodies, transport of patients, in the post-conflict era are no longer needed.”
Last night, the Red Cross was closing two offices. One of these is in Trincomalee, which had helped to provide medical care to about 30,000 injured civilians evacuated by sea from the conflict zone in the north east.
The other is in Batticaloa, where the Red Cross had been providing “protection services”. This involves following up allegations of abductions and extrajudicial killings, practices that human rights organisations say have become recurring motifs of the Sri Lankan Government.
The Manik Farm camp was set up to house the largest number of the 300,000 mainly Tamil civilians forced to flee the northeast as army forces mounted a brutal offensive against the Tigers, who had been fighting for an ethnic Tamil homeland for 26 years.
Aid workers and the British Government have warned that conditions at the site are inadequate. Most of the deaths are the result of water-borne diseases, particularly diarrhoea, a senior relief worker said on condition of anonymity.
Witness testimonies obtained by The Times in May described long queues for food and inadequate water supplies inside Manik Farm. Women, children and the elderly were shoved aside in the scramble for supplies. Aid agencies are being given only intermittent access to the camp. The Red Cross was not being allowed in yesterday.
Experts suggest that President Rajapaksa, the country’s leader, is yet to make good his victory pledge to reach out to the minority Tamil community. “The discourse used by the Government is of traitors and patriots,” Paikiasothy Saravanamuthu, of the Centre for Policy Alternatives, a Sri Lankan analyst, said. “There is no indication that this mode of thinking is slipping.”
Mr Rajapaksa is known for not tolerating dissent; a trait that human rights organisations say was demonstrated this week when five Sri Lankan doctors who witnessed the bloody climax of the country’s civil war and made claims of mass civilian deaths recanted much of their testimony.
The doctors said at a press conference on Wednesday that they had deliberately overestimated the civilian casualties. As government officials looked on, they claimed that Tigers had forced them to lie.
The five men added that only up to 750 civilians were killed between January and mid-May in the final battles of the war. They were then taken back to prison, where they have been held for the past two months for allegedly spreading Tiger propaganda.
The number was far below the 7,000 fatalities estimated by the United Nations. An investigation by The Times uncovered evidence that more than 20,000 civilians were killed, mostly by the army.
The doctors denied other former testimony, including the government shelling of a conflict-zone hospital in February for which there are witnesses from the UN and the Red Cross.
The statements met with scepticism from human rights campaigners. Sam Zarifi, the Asia- Pacific director for Amnesty International, said that they were “expected and predicted”. He added: “There are very significant grounds to question whether these statements were voluntary, and they raise serious concerns whether the doctors were subjected to ill-treatment.”
China EXIM bank to assist in development of Sri Lanka's north
The Export-Import (EXIM) Bank of China has agreed to provide assistance to Sri Lanka for rebuilding the war-torn northern region in the country.
China EXIM Bank President Li Ruogu, who met Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama, said he was ready to extend facilities for the reconstruction phase in the North and requested Sri Lanka to forward a list of projects based on priority for consideration, a foreign ministry statement said.
During his meeting with Mr. Li, Mr. Bogollagama appreciated the EXIM bank for its continued "generosity and goodwill" towards Sri Lanka by way of assistance extended to various development projects.
China EXIM Bank is funding projects such as the Puttalam Coal Power in the western Coast and the Hambantota Port project in the southern province.
"The Minister lauded the bank's "start early–finish soon" policy which facilitated the generation of early income thereby ushering in economic and political empowerment of the people," the ministry said.
Mr. Bogollagama also gave a detailed account of the need to construct a second international airport in the south of Sri Lanka and sought assistance from the Bank to make this project a reality. (Source: PTI)
China EXIM Bank President Li Ruogu, who met Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama, said he was ready to extend facilities for the reconstruction phase in the North and requested Sri Lanka to forward a list of projects based on priority for consideration, a foreign ministry statement said.
During his meeting with Mr. Li, Mr. Bogollagama appreciated the EXIM bank for its continued "generosity and goodwill" towards Sri Lanka by way of assistance extended to various development projects.
China EXIM Bank is funding projects such as the Puttalam Coal Power in the western Coast and the Hambantota Port project in the southern province.
"The Minister lauded the bank's "start early–finish soon" policy which facilitated the generation of early income thereby ushering in economic and political empowerment of the people," the ministry said.
Mr. Bogollagama also gave a detailed account of the need to construct a second international airport in the south of Sri Lanka and sought assistance from the Bank to make this project a reality. (Source: PTI)
Ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka: brainwashed people, brought up on lies and myths, their intelligentsia told what to think, their journalists forbidden to speak the truth on pain of death, the militarising of civil society and the silencing of all opposition.
A nation bound together by the effete ties of language, race and religion has arrived at the cross-roads between parliamentary dictatorship and fascism. It is for the Sinhalese people I fear now - for if they come for me in the morning, they'll come for you that night.'
The Institute of Race Relations' Director explains the roots of ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka in a speech to 'Marxism 2009'.
'It's difficult to talk dispassionately about what is going on in my country, when the horror of what the government is doing to a civilian Tamil population - already shelled and burned out of their existence and now herded into concentration camps and starved of food and medicine - revisits me to the pogrom of 1958 when my parents' house was attacked by a Sinhalese mob, my nephew had petrol thrown on him and burnt alive, and friends and relatives disappeared into refugee camps. I was a Tamil married to a Sinhalese with three children, and I could only see a future of hate stretching out before them. I left with my family, and came to England.
There is nothing, nothing, so horrendous as communal war, ethnic war. Overnight your friend becomes your enemy, every look of your neighbour is laden with threat, every passer-by is an informant. You walk the streets on tiptoe, casting nervous glances over your shoulder; you are tight, on edge, the sky lowers with menace.
Only one thing is worse - and that is when your government exploits communal differences, stokes ethnic and religious fears, all in the pursuit of power. In the process, it engenders a political culture of censorship and disinformation, assassination of journalists who speak out, extra-judicial killings by police and army, government without opposition - a culture that has to be broken if it is not to descend into dictatorship.
And it is with that in mind that I want to examine briefly the 150 years (more or less) of British rule, the sixty years of independence, the fifty years of ethnic cleansing within that and, within that, the twenty-five years of civil war that have brought Sri Lanka to this pass.
The Portuguese and the Dutch had occupied the Maritime Provinces in the 16th-18th centuries in pursuit of the spice trade and strategic sea routes. But it was the British who from 1815 came to occupy the whole of the country, turned paddy fields into tea estates, dispossessed the peasantry and brought in indentured labour from South India to work in the plantations. English was made the official language and Christianity the favoured religion and a pervasive British culture won over the subject peoples to their own subjection. Incidentally, it is important to distinguish between the Tamils who were brought to Ceylon by the British and the indigenous Tamils who have been there from time immemorial.
Ceylon got its independence in 1948 on the back of the Indian nationalist struggle. Hence it did not go through the process of nation building that a nationalist struggle involves. Instead, it was regarded as a model colony -with an English-educated elite, universal suffrage, and an elected assembly - deserving of self-government.
These however turned out to be the trappings of capitalist democracy super-imposed on a feudal infrastructure - a democratic top-dressing on a feudal base. But then, colonial capitalism is a hybrid, a mutant. It underdevelops some parts of the country while the part it develops is not consonant with the country's needs or growth. Nor does it throw up institutions and structures that sustain democracy. Capitalism in the periphery, unlike capitalism at the centre, does not engender an organic relationship between the political, economic and cultural instances. It is a disorganic capitalism that produces disorganic development and a malformed democracy.
Power, then, was still in the hands of the feudal elite, the landed aristocracy. And almost the first thing that an independent government under D. S. Senanayake, "the father of the nation", did was to disenfranchise the "plantation Tamils" who were now into their third and fourth generations - thereby establishing a Sinhalese electoral majority in the upcountry areas. This was followed by colonisation schemes that settled Sinhalese peasants in the predominantly Tamil-speaking north-east - thereby changing the ethnic demography of the area. And although elections were on party lines, the parties themselves - with the exception of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) Trotskyists and the Communist Party (CP) - operated on feudal allegiances. Hence the government that ensued was government by dynasty. The first prime minister was succeeded by his son, Dudley Senanayake, and subsequently by his nephew, Sir John Kotelawela and so on. So that the ruling United National Party, (U.N.P.), was more appositely known as the Uncle Nephew Party.
The breakthrough came in 1956 when the Oxford-educated Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike decided that the only way that a distant relative like him could break into the dynastic succession was to resort to the ethnic politics of language and religion that would guarantee him a ready-made electoral majority. The Sinhala speaking population, after all, amounted to something like 70 per cent (the Tamils around 20 per cent) and they were mostly Buddhists. All he was doing, as a nationalist and patriot was returning power to the people, restituting their ancient rights. And so he came to power on the twin platforms of making Sinhala the official language and Buddhism the state religion. The language policy was to be introduced within 24 hours of his taking office - and all government servants would have to learn to conduct business in Sinhala within a given period if they were to keep their jobs. Sinhala would also constitute the medium of instruction in schools.
Bandaranaike had struck at the heart of Tamil livelihood and achievement. Coming from the arid north of the country, where nothing grew except children, the Tamil man's chief industry was the government service, and education, English education, his passport. And Britain's divide and rule policies encouraged and reinforced the growth of a class of Tamil bureaucrats. So that at independence they were over-represented in the administrative services and the professions.
Bandaranaike's policies were meant to put an end to that but, in the event, they degraded the mother tongue of a people who held up Tamil as an ancient language (which it was) and its considerable literature as their bounteous heritage. In protest Tamil leaders staged a mass non-violent sit-down in front of the Houses of Parliament and were beaten up by government-sponsored goondas for their pains - giving meaning to the phrase sitting ducks.
And there begins the two trajectories of ethnic cleansing: the "legal" and the illegal, the civil and the military, the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary, each overlapping and reinforcing each other. Ethnic cleansing is a process not an isolate, genocide its logical conclusion.
The prime minister, having divested himself of his Oxford bags for national dress, Christianity for Buddhism, English for Sinhala, was caught now between his social democratic principles and his nationalist practice, and proposed to make Tamil a regional language. But his ministers and the Opposition upped the racist ante and the Buddhist monks, whom Bandaranaike himself was instrumental in bringing out of the monasteries and on to the hustings where their influence was decisive, demanded that he return to his original remit. Peaceful Tamil demonstrations were met with police violence, participants travelling to a Tamil convention in the North in May 1958 were taken off the trains, cars and buses and beaten up by goon squads organised by Sinhalese politicians. Attacks on Tamils in their homes, on the street and work-places right across the country followed. Bandaranaike vacillated and a monk shot him dead. The chickens had come home to roost.
From then on the pattern of Tamil subjugation was set: racist legislation followed by Tamil resistance, followed by conciliatory government gestures, followed by Opposition rejectionism, followed by anti-Tamil riots instigated by Buddhist priests and politicians, escalating Tamil resistance, and so on - except that the mode of resistance varied and intensified with each tightening of the ethnic-cleansing screw and led to armed struggle and civil war.
I do not want to go into the details of that sequence here (for those who are interested there is a 1984 article of mine on the IRR's website which goes into the specifics and is entitled 'Sri Lanka: racism and the politics of underdevelopment'). It is enough to note the key acts of successive Sinhalese-dominated governments that led to the spiralling cycle of repression and resistance. If Mr Bandaranaike had cut out the mother tongue of the Tamils, it was left to Mrs Bandaranaike to bring the Tamils down to their knees - by using the language provision to remove and exclude Tamils from the police, the army, the courts and government service generally, further colonising traditionally Tamil areas of the north-east with Sinhalese from the South, repatriating the already disenfranchised Indian Tamil plantation workers and, more crucially, requiring Tamil students to score higher marks than their Sinhalese counterparts to enter university - on the grounds that Tamils should not continue to be over-represented in higher education and the professions.
At one stroke, Mrs Bandaranaike had cut the ground from under the feet of Tamil youth. At one stroke she had blighted their future. You take away a people's language and you take away their identity. You take away their land and you take away their livelihood. You take away their education and you take away their hopes and aspirations. They had seen their parents try reason and reconciliation, but to no avail. They had seen them try non-violent resistance only to be met with violence. They had seen their representatives in the Federal Party running between the government and the Opposition with their electoral begging bowl. And they had seen the Left, the Trotskyists and the CP, who had once stood square against racist laws and for the parity of language, succumb at last to Mrs Bandaranaike's blandishments of nationalisation in exchange for dropping their call for parity, and join her United Front government.
The Left in Ceylon, and the Trotskyist LSSP, in particular, had hitherto had a noble history. Formed in the 1930s, during the malaria epidemic and led by doctors, they had set up people's dispensaries in the villages to treat patients free of charge. They had, along with the CP, politicised the urban working class and engendered a flourishing trade union movement. And in 1953, when the UNP government withdrew its subsidised rice ration at a time of rising food prices, they brought out the country in a hartal (cessation of all work) and drove a beleaguered cabinet into the safety of a ship in the harbour. But 1953 also marks the Left's failure - for instead of pressing home the advantage, a middle-class leadership took fright at the enormity of its own success, agreed to talks and called off the hartal. The moment of revolution had passed, and from then on Parliament became the Left's pitch - landing them, as I mentioned before, in Mrs Bandaranaike's racist government. But the final degradation was yet to come. Asked to frame a new constitution, Dr Colin R de Silva, LSSP historian, now made a constitutional proviso for the repatriation of disenfranchised Tamil plantation workers.
There was still the self-styled Marxist Sinhala youth movement, the JVP, the People's Liberation Front, whom the Bandaranaike government had to contend with. But their insurrection in 1971 was ruthlessly put down and their protagonists murdered by the army and the police. Their politics though claiming to be Marxist stirred up racial animosity by stoking fears of "Indian expansionism". Their second coming in 1987-89, though laced with anti-Tamil propaganda, was even more mercilessly put down by the Jayawardene government. Today they are the most virulent racists in the Rajapakse coalition government - second only to the Aryanists of the JHU, National Heritage Party of the Buddhist monks.
The degradation of the Left engendered the degradation of the intelligentsia who now turned to middle of the road reformist politics. The Tamil youth looked around and saw no allies in the South. Nothing and no one seemed to work for them. They had only themselves to rely on. They had no choice but to take up arms. (The violence of the violated is never a matter of choice, but a symptom of choicelessness - and often it is a violence that takes on a life of its own and becomes distorted and self-defeating.)
The youths began with robbing a bank or two, stealing arms from police stations - and making their getaway on bicycles. The north, and Jaffna in particular, is not orthodox guerrilla country with mountains and forests to hide in, but its villages - a maze of narrow twisting lanes and by-lanes tucked away behind large dense palmyrah-leaf fences - are bicycle country inhospitable to motor vehicles. Bicycles, besides, were the Jaffna man's chief mode of transport even in the towns, and "the getaways" were lost among them. And as the frustrations of the police increased and the stories of the hold-ups became legend, the parents and elders closed ranks behind their young. Their generation had been stereotyped as weak and cowardly and they had been brought down to their knees by government after Sinhalese government. Their young had now set them on their feet. They were "their Boys" and "Thambi" (younger brother) their leader. They would keep faith by them, give them sanctuary, let them disappear among their midst - be water to their fish.
But the romance of the Robin Hood period turned sour and vicious in the late 1970s when the Jayawardene government let the police loose in Jaffna to break up peaceful demonstrations, arrest and torture Tamil youth, burn down the Jaffna bazaar when refused free foodstuffs - and generally lord over it the Tamil people. And this in turn led to the reprisal killings of policemen by the Boys. In 1979 the government passed the Prevention of Terrorism Act and sent the army to Jaffna with instructions to "wipe out terrorism within six months". The imprisonment and torture of innocent Tamils that followed in the wake of the PTA drove the civilian population further into the arms of the emerging militant groups, all demanding a separate Tamil state, Eelam, the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) the most militant of them.
In 1981 security forces burnt down the Jaffna library, with its "ola" manuscripts and rare literature, the epicentre of Tamil learning and culture. In the same year Gandhiyam, a refugee camp turned farm, set up by a Tamil doctor to restore refugees to some sort of normal life, was over-run by the police - and its organisers killed or imprisoned. In 1983 the Tigers killed thirteen soldiers in Jaffna and the government brought their bodies to Colombo and put them on display before an angry Sinhalese crowd and so provoked "the riots"(pogroms really) that followed culminating in the killing of Tamils prisoners in Welikade jail, awaiting trial under the PTA, by Sinhalese prisoners whose cells the guards forgot to lock!
That's when the civil war began in earnest - with each side, the government and the guerrillas, ratcheting up the terror count, with the occasional pause for "talks" or peace mediation, during which each side refurbished its forces and came out more intransigent than ever. The government now added an official military dimension to civil ethnic cleansing by letting loose its private armies to terrorise Tamils and drive them from their homes. Refugee camps were attacked, its inmates killed or driven out, Tamil plantation workers were forcibly taken from their houses and dumped hundreds of miles away by thugs in the pay of the Minister of Industries in trucks provided by him. (The state against its Tamils.)
The LTTE's guerrilla struggle, likewise, had degenerated into ad hoc militarism with suicide bombings and assassinations. And politics went out of the window. The military tail had begun to wag the political dog - and instead of winning people to their cause, whether among the Sinhalese or their own people, the Tigers began to eliminate anyone who stood in their way, be it one of their own dissenters or the Indian prime minister - an act of self-defeat in that it alienated the Tamils of India. Two years later, 1993, they assassinated Sri Lanka's President Ranasinghe Premadasa. The final self-defeat came in 2004 with the defection of Muralitharan, their military strategist and their second-in-command to the side of the Rajapakse government. And it was the inside information that he and his men provided on guerrilla positions and strategies that helped the government to finally overcome the Tigers. He is today the Chief Minister of the Eastern province and a member of the Rajapakse government and held up as a symbol of the government's goodwill towards the Tamils, and an indication of its intention to afford them some sort of regional government.
But the President's own actions since the defeat of the Tigers and, more importantly, the political culture that his government, even more than all the previous governments, has created, belies any such democratic outcome. For what has evolved in sixty years of independence is an ethnocentric Sinhala-Buddhist polity reared on falsified history reinforced by feudal customs and myths, with a voting system that seals the ethnic majority in power for ever - while reducing the party system to a war between dynasties, flanked by monks and militias.
And within that polity the Rajapakse government or, rather cabal (he has three brothers in the cabinet) has instituted a regime of blanket censorship under cover of which it has conducted a ruthless war not just against the equally ruthless Tigers but against harmless Tamil civilians, a "war without witness" someone termed it, while feeding the Sinhalese public with government-manufactured facts and seeing off any journalist who dared to criticise the government. (You will all remember the case of Lasantha Wickramatunga, the editor of the Sunday Leader, who sent a letter to his friend President Rajapakse, excoriating him for murders of outspoken journalists and predicting his own at the hands of government thugs. And so it came to pass.)
What, in sum, we are faced with in my country today, is a brainwashed people, brought up on lies and myths, their intelligentsia told what to think, their journalists forbidden to speak the truth on pain of death, the militarising of civil society and the silencing of all opposition. A nation bound together by the effete ties of language, race and religion has arrived at the cross-roads between parliamentary dictatorship and fascism.
It is for the Sinhalese people I fear now - for if they come for me in the morning, they'll come for you that night.'
--By A. Sivanandan
The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) was established as an independent educational charity in 1958 to carry out research, publish and collect resources on race relations throughout the world. In 1972, the IRR's membership backed the staff in a radical transformation of the organisation from a policy-oriented, establishment, academic institution into an anti-racist 'thinktank'.
The Institute of Race Relations is precluded from expressing a corporate view: any opinions expressed are therefore those of the authors.
A nation bound together by the effete ties of language, race and religion has arrived at the cross-roads between parliamentary dictatorship and fascism. It is for the Sinhalese people I fear now - for if they come for me in the morning, they'll come for you that night.'
The Institute of Race Relations' Director explains the roots of ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka in a speech to 'Marxism 2009'.
'It's difficult to talk dispassionately about what is going on in my country, when the horror of what the government is doing to a civilian Tamil population - already shelled and burned out of their existence and now herded into concentration camps and starved of food and medicine - revisits me to the pogrom of 1958 when my parents' house was attacked by a Sinhalese mob, my nephew had petrol thrown on him and burnt alive, and friends and relatives disappeared into refugee camps. I was a Tamil married to a Sinhalese with three children, and I could only see a future of hate stretching out before them. I left with my family, and came to England.
There is nothing, nothing, so horrendous as communal war, ethnic war. Overnight your friend becomes your enemy, every look of your neighbour is laden with threat, every passer-by is an informant. You walk the streets on tiptoe, casting nervous glances over your shoulder; you are tight, on edge, the sky lowers with menace.
Only one thing is worse - and that is when your government exploits communal differences, stokes ethnic and religious fears, all in the pursuit of power. In the process, it engenders a political culture of censorship and disinformation, assassination of journalists who speak out, extra-judicial killings by police and army, government without opposition - a culture that has to be broken if it is not to descend into dictatorship.
And it is with that in mind that I want to examine briefly the 150 years (more or less) of British rule, the sixty years of independence, the fifty years of ethnic cleansing within that and, within that, the twenty-five years of civil war that have brought Sri Lanka to this pass.
The Portuguese and the Dutch had occupied the Maritime Provinces in the 16th-18th centuries in pursuit of the spice trade and strategic sea routes. But it was the British who from 1815 came to occupy the whole of the country, turned paddy fields into tea estates, dispossessed the peasantry and brought in indentured labour from South India to work in the plantations. English was made the official language and Christianity the favoured religion and a pervasive British culture won over the subject peoples to their own subjection. Incidentally, it is important to distinguish between the Tamils who were brought to Ceylon by the British and the indigenous Tamils who have been there from time immemorial.
Ceylon got its independence in 1948 on the back of the Indian nationalist struggle. Hence it did not go through the process of nation building that a nationalist struggle involves. Instead, it was regarded as a model colony -with an English-educated elite, universal suffrage, and an elected assembly - deserving of self-government.
These however turned out to be the trappings of capitalist democracy super-imposed on a feudal infrastructure - a democratic top-dressing on a feudal base. But then, colonial capitalism is a hybrid, a mutant. It underdevelops some parts of the country while the part it develops is not consonant with the country's needs or growth. Nor does it throw up institutions and structures that sustain democracy. Capitalism in the periphery, unlike capitalism at the centre, does not engender an organic relationship between the political, economic and cultural instances. It is a disorganic capitalism that produces disorganic development and a malformed democracy.
Power, then, was still in the hands of the feudal elite, the landed aristocracy. And almost the first thing that an independent government under D. S. Senanayake, "the father of the nation", did was to disenfranchise the "plantation Tamils" who were now into their third and fourth generations - thereby establishing a Sinhalese electoral majority in the upcountry areas. This was followed by colonisation schemes that settled Sinhalese peasants in the predominantly Tamil-speaking north-east - thereby changing the ethnic demography of the area. And although elections were on party lines, the parties themselves - with the exception of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) Trotskyists and the Communist Party (CP) - operated on feudal allegiances. Hence the government that ensued was government by dynasty. The first prime minister was succeeded by his son, Dudley Senanayake, and subsequently by his nephew, Sir John Kotelawela and so on. So that the ruling United National Party, (U.N.P.), was more appositely known as the Uncle Nephew Party.
The breakthrough came in 1956 when the Oxford-educated Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike decided that the only way that a distant relative like him could break into the dynastic succession was to resort to the ethnic politics of language and religion that would guarantee him a ready-made electoral majority. The Sinhala speaking population, after all, amounted to something like 70 per cent (the Tamils around 20 per cent) and they were mostly Buddhists. All he was doing, as a nationalist and patriot was returning power to the people, restituting their ancient rights. And so he came to power on the twin platforms of making Sinhala the official language and Buddhism the state religion. The language policy was to be introduced within 24 hours of his taking office - and all government servants would have to learn to conduct business in Sinhala within a given period if they were to keep their jobs. Sinhala would also constitute the medium of instruction in schools.
Bandaranaike had struck at the heart of Tamil livelihood and achievement. Coming from the arid north of the country, where nothing grew except children, the Tamil man's chief industry was the government service, and education, English education, his passport. And Britain's divide and rule policies encouraged and reinforced the growth of a class of Tamil bureaucrats. So that at independence they were over-represented in the administrative services and the professions.
Bandaranaike's policies were meant to put an end to that but, in the event, they degraded the mother tongue of a people who held up Tamil as an ancient language (which it was) and its considerable literature as their bounteous heritage. In protest Tamil leaders staged a mass non-violent sit-down in front of the Houses of Parliament and were beaten up by government-sponsored goondas for their pains - giving meaning to the phrase sitting ducks.
And there begins the two trajectories of ethnic cleansing: the "legal" and the illegal, the civil and the military, the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary, each overlapping and reinforcing each other. Ethnic cleansing is a process not an isolate, genocide its logical conclusion.
The prime minister, having divested himself of his Oxford bags for national dress, Christianity for Buddhism, English for Sinhala, was caught now between his social democratic principles and his nationalist practice, and proposed to make Tamil a regional language. But his ministers and the Opposition upped the racist ante and the Buddhist monks, whom Bandaranaike himself was instrumental in bringing out of the monasteries and on to the hustings where their influence was decisive, demanded that he return to his original remit. Peaceful Tamil demonstrations were met with police violence, participants travelling to a Tamil convention in the North in May 1958 were taken off the trains, cars and buses and beaten up by goon squads organised by Sinhalese politicians. Attacks on Tamils in their homes, on the street and work-places right across the country followed. Bandaranaike vacillated and a monk shot him dead. The chickens had come home to roost.
From then on the pattern of Tamil subjugation was set: racist legislation followed by Tamil resistance, followed by conciliatory government gestures, followed by Opposition rejectionism, followed by anti-Tamil riots instigated by Buddhist priests and politicians, escalating Tamil resistance, and so on - except that the mode of resistance varied and intensified with each tightening of the ethnic-cleansing screw and led to armed struggle and civil war.
I do not want to go into the details of that sequence here (for those who are interested there is a 1984 article of mine on the IRR's website which goes into the specifics and is entitled 'Sri Lanka: racism and the politics of underdevelopment'). It is enough to note the key acts of successive Sinhalese-dominated governments that led to the spiralling cycle of repression and resistance. If Mr Bandaranaike had cut out the mother tongue of the Tamils, it was left to Mrs Bandaranaike to bring the Tamils down to their knees - by using the language provision to remove and exclude Tamils from the police, the army, the courts and government service generally, further colonising traditionally Tamil areas of the north-east with Sinhalese from the South, repatriating the already disenfranchised Indian Tamil plantation workers and, more crucially, requiring Tamil students to score higher marks than their Sinhalese counterparts to enter university - on the grounds that Tamils should not continue to be over-represented in higher education and the professions.
At one stroke, Mrs Bandaranaike had cut the ground from under the feet of Tamil youth. At one stroke she had blighted their future. You take away a people's language and you take away their identity. You take away their land and you take away their livelihood. You take away their education and you take away their hopes and aspirations. They had seen their parents try reason and reconciliation, but to no avail. They had seen them try non-violent resistance only to be met with violence. They had seen their representatives in the Federal Party running between the government and the Opposition with their electoral begging bowl. And they had seen the Left, the Trotskyists and the CP, who had once stood square against racist laws and for the parity of language, succumb at last to Mrs Bandaranaike's blandishments of nationalisation in exchange for dropping their call for parity, and join her United Front government.
The Left in Ceylon, and the Trotskyist LSSP, in particular, had hitherto had a noble history. Formed in the 1930s, during the malaria epidemic and led by doctors, they had set up people's dispensaries in the villages to treat patients free of charge. They had, along with the CP, politicised the urban working class and engendered a flourishing trade union movement. And in 1953, when the UNP government withdrew its subsidised rice ration at a time of rising food prices, they brought out the country in a hartal (cessation of all work) and drove a beleaguered cabinet into the safety of a ship in the harbour. But 1953 also marks the Left's failure - for instead of pressing home the advantage, a middle-class leadership took fright at the enormity of its own success, agreed to talks and called off the hartal. The moment of revolution had passed, and from then on Parliament became the Left's pitch - landing them, as I mentioned before, in Mrs Bandaranaike's racist government. But the final degradation was yet to come. Asked to frame a new constitution, Dr Colin R de Silva, LSSP historian, now made a constitutional proviso for the repatriation of disenfranchised Tamil plantation workers.
There was still the self-styled Marxist Sinhala youth movement, the JVP, the People's Liberation Front, whom the Bandaranaike government had to contend with. But their insurrection in 1971 was ruthlessly put down and their protagonists murdered by the army and the police. Their politics though claiming to be Marxist stirred up racial animosity by stoking fears of "Indian expansionism". Their second coming in 1987-89, though laced with anti-Tamil propaganda, was even more mercilessly put down by the Jayawardene government. Today they are the most virulent racists in the Rajapakse coalition government - second only to the Aryanists of the JHU, National Heritage Party of the Buddhist monks.
The degradation of the Left engendered the degradation of the intelligentsia who now turned to middle of the road reformist politics. The Tamil youth looked around and saw no allies in the South. Nothing and no one seemed to work for them. They had only themselves to rely on. They had no choice but to take up arms. (The violence of the violated is never a matter of choice, but a symptom of choicelessness - and often it is a violence that takes on a life of its own and becomes distorted and self-defeating.)
The youths began with robbing a bank or two, stealing arms from police stations - and making their getaway on bicycles. The north, and Jaffna in particular, is not orthodox guerrilla country with mountains and forests to hide in, but its villages - a maze of narrow twisting lanes and by-lanes tucked away behind large dense palmyrah-leaf fences - are bicycle country inhospitable to motor vehicles. Bicycles, besides, were the Jaffna man's chief mode of transport even in the towns, and "the getaways" were lost among them. And as the frustrations of the police increased and the stories of the hold-ups became legend, the parents and elders closed ranks behind their young. Their generation had been stereotyped as weak and cowardly and they had been brought down to their knees by government after Sinhalese government. Their young had now set them on their feet. They were "their Boys" and "Thambi" (younger brother) their leader. They would keep faith by them, give them sanctuary, let them disappear among their midst - be water to their fish.
But the romance of the Robin Hood period turned sour and vicious in the late 1970s when the Jayawardene government let the police loose in Jaffna to break up peaceful demonstrations, arrest and torture Tamil youth, burn down the Jaffna bazaar when refused free foodstuffs - and generally lord over it the Tamil people. And this in turn led to the reprisal killings of policemen by the Boys. In 1979 the government passed the Prevention of Terrorism Act and sent the army to Jaffna with instructions to "wipe out terrorism within six months". The imprisonment and torture of innocent Tamils that followed in the wake of the PTA drove the civilian population further into the arms of the emerging militant groups, all demanding a separate Tamil state, Eelam, the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) the most militant of them.
In 1981 security forces burnt down the Jaffna library, with its "ola" manuscripts and rare literature, the epicentre of Tamil learning and culture. In the same year Gandhiyam, a refugee camp turned farm, set up by a Tamil doctor to restore refugees to some sort of normal life, was over-run by the police - and its organisers killed or imprisoned. In 1983 the Tigers killed thirteen soldiers in Jaffna and the government brought their bodies to Colombo and put them on display before an angry Sinhalese crowd and so provoked "the riots"(pogroms really) that followed culminating in the killing of Tamils prisoners in Welikade jail, awaiting trial under the PTA, by Sinhalese prisoners whose cells the guards forgot to lock!
That's when the civil war began in earnest - with each side, the government and the guerrillas, ratcheting up the terror count, with the occasional pause for "talks" or peace mediation, during which each side refurbished its forces and came out more intransigent than ever. The government now added an official military dimension to civil ethnic cleansing by letting loose its private armies to terrorise Tamils and drive them from their homes. Refugee camps were attacked, its inmates killed or driven out, Tamil plantation workers were forcibly taken from their houses and dumped hundreds of miles away by thugs in the pay of the Minister of Industries in trucks provided by him. (The state against its Tamils.)
The LTTE's guerrilla struggle, likewise, had degenerated into ad hoc militarism with suicide bombings and assassinations. And politics went out of the window. The military tail had begun to wag the political dog - and instead of winning people to their cause, whether among the Sinhalese or their own people, the Tigers began to eliminate anyone who stood in their way, be it one of their own dissenters or the Indian prime minister - an act of self-defeat in that it alienated the Tamils of India. Two years later, 1993, they assassinated Sri Lanka's President Ranasinghe Premadasa. The final self-defeat came in 2004 with the defection of Muralitharan, their military strategist and their second-in-command to the side of the Rajapakse government. And it was the inside information that he and his men provided on guerrilla positions and strategies that helped the government to finally overcome the Tigers. He is today the Chief Minister of the Eastern province and a member of the Rajapakse government and held up as a symbol of the government's goodwill towards the Tamils, and an indication of its intention to afford them some sort of regional government.
But the President's own actions since the defeat of the Tigers and, more importantly, the political culture that his government, even more than all the previous governments, has created, belies any such democratic outcome. For what has evolved in sixty years of independence is an ethnocentric Sinhala-Buddhist polity reared on falsified history reinforced by feudal customs and myths, with a voting system that seals the ethnic majority in power for ever - while reducing the party system to a war between dynasties, flanked by monks and militias.
And within that polity the Rajapakse government or, rather cabal (he has three brothers in the cabinet) has instituted a regime of blanket censorship under cover of which it has conducted a ruthless war not just against the equally ruthless Tigers but against harmless Tamil civilians, a "war without witness" someone termed it, while feeding the Sinhalese public with government-manufactured facts and seeing off any journalist who dared to criticise the government. (You will all remember the case of Lasantha Wickramatunga, the editor of the Sunday Leader, who sent a letter to his friend President Rajapakse, excoriating him for murders of outspoken journalists and predicting his own at the hands of government thugs. And so it came to pass.)
What, in sum, we are faced with in my country today, is a brainwashed people, brought up on lies and myths, their intelligentsia told what to think, their journalists forbidden to speak the truth on pain of death, the militarising of civil society and the silencing of all opposition. A nation bound together by the effete ties of language, race and religion has arrived at the cross-roads between parliamentary dictatorship and fascism.
It is for the Sinhalese people I fear now - for if they come for me in the morning, they'll come for you that night.'
--By A. Sivanandan
The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) was established as an independent educational charity in 1958 to carry out research, publish and collect resources on race relations throughout the world. In 1972, the IRR's membership backed the staff in a radical transformation of the organisation from a policy-oriented, establishment, academic institution into an anti-racist 'thinktank'.
The Institute of Race Relations is precluded from expressing a corporate view: any opinions expressed are therefore those of the authors.
Statements by Sri Lankan detained doctors underline need for independent inquiry
Amnesty International raised several concerns about the credibility of the doctors' recent comments, including:
-the doctors' ongoing detention without access to lawyers and their vulnerability to torture and ill-treatment and pressure from the Sri Lankan government, which has a record of mistreatment of detainees and witnesses;
-the contradiction between the doctors' statements and independently verified facts;
-the two-month long period between the doctors' departure from LTTE-held areas and their recent 'recanting' of their earlier statements.
Amnesty International remains concerned about the safety and well-being of these men, who provided the only medical services available to hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped by the fighting, for which they should be commended, not punished.
The Sri Lankan authorities have a long history of extracting confessions by force and compelling detainees to give media interviews that support the government's position, as documented in Amnesty International's recent report, Twenty Years of Make Believe: Sri Lanka's Commissions of inquiry. Under such conditions it is impossible to assess the validity of their statements, but Amnesty International pointed out that information from independent international organisations engaged in humanitarian assistance in the midst of the crisis contradicts the doctors' recent claims, including the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Between mid-February and 9 May, the ICRC said it evacuated almost 14,000 wounded or sick patients and accompanying caregivers with the assistance of these doctors. This contradicts statements made by Dr. Varatharajah at the government press conference that only around 600 to 650 people had been injured between January and mid- April 2009.
At their press conference, the doctors also retracted reports that their hospital at Puthukkudiyiruppu was hit by artillery in February, although UN and ICRC staff reportedly witnessed the attack and confirmed the incident. Eyewitness testimony obtained independently by Amnesty International confirmed events experienced by these doctors after artillery damaged their hospitals in Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu in December 2008.
Amnesty International pointed out that the doctors remain in detention and have not had access to lawyers. Senior government officials have consistently raised the threat of pursuing serious charges, including treason, against the men, despite acknowledging the doctors' claim that they were operating under pressure from the LTTE. Amnesty International has documented the LTTE's heavy pressure on Tamil civilians, including medical personnel.
Amnesty International urges the United Nations, international humanitarian organisations and other members of the international community who were able to amass information about conditions and incidents in the final phase of the war to disclose all information they possess. This information should contribute to a systematic and independent investigation of allegations of war crimes that must include confidential interviews with witnesses - most of whom are currently detained in government internment camps.
World must boycott Sri Lanka until reconciliation begins: The Times
Colombo’s order to the Red Cross to cut back its work at Tamil internment camps is an outrage. The world must boycott Sri Lanka until it starts releasing detainees, says 'The Times' in its article "Doctors’ orders" Friday.
There is something despicable about forcing doctors to lie about war crimes. By their calling, doctors are committed to relieving human suffering, to helping the sick and preventing disease. It is therefore particularly disturbing to see the five doctors who remained with the besieged Tamil civilians as the Sri Lankan Army closed in being paraded before journalists to deny their earlier casualty reports. Men who risked their lives to save lives are now being forced to take part in a political charade to cover up the appalling suffering two months ago — suffering that is still being inflicted on 300,000 Tamils interned in detention camps in northern Sri Lanka.
As the army squeezed the Tamil Tigers into an ever smaller strip of beach, the doctors were the only source of news about the slaughter caused by the military’s indiscriminate shelling. The United Nations found that more than 7,000 civilians were killed between January and May. Subsequent aerial photographs of beach graves, revealed in The Times, suggested that the figure was more than 20,000. World outrage embarrassed the Colombo Government. The doctors were swiftly arrested and nothing further was heard of them until Wednesday.
Their recantation, clearly made under duress, was as ludicrous as it was humiliating. Mechanically rehearsed but clearly nervous, they drastically reduced the death toll estimates, denied that a key hospital had been shelled and insisted that they had been forced to exaggerate the totals by Tiger fighters. In response the UN yesterday asserted tersely that it stood by its figures.
Few people will be fooled by Colombo’s crude attempt at a propaganda victory. For the Government took a far more sinister and callous step yesterday when it ordered the International Committee of the Red Cross to scale back its operations in Sri Lanka, leave the camps where it has been monitoring conditions and halt its aid programmes. The need for expatriate assistance was much less now than before, the Government asserted. Sri Lankans were fully able to meet all the needs of those detained in “welfare villages”.
The claim is an outrageous lie. Senior international aid figures said yesterday that about 1,400 people a week are dying at one of the big internment camps. Tamil civilians, rounded up after the government victory on the pretext of a security need to weed out former fighters, are suffering from hunger, disease, insanitary conditions, overcrowding and the enforced separation of families. The Government has taken almost no steps to free them. Indeed, a former Sri Lankan foreign minister has accused it of a policy of deliberate “ethnic cleansing” to change the population balance.
Colombo’s order puts the Red Cross in a difficult position. Historically, it has rarely spoken out — even about Nazi concentration camps — so as not to jeopardise access to those in greatest danger. It was the only aid agency allowed inside the war zone in the final stages of the conflict. But its few statements angered the Government. Sri Lanka wants no witnesses to what is now being done in these modern concentration camps.
If the Red Cross is forced to withdraw, however, the outside world should step in. The Sri Lankan Government is awaiting a $1.9 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund to address its balance-of-payments crisis and postwar development. None of this money should be paid until independent aid agencies are guaranteed access to the Tamil camps and until Sri Lanka starts to release those detained. Other world bodies — the Commonwealth, the United Nations and even world cricketing organisations — should boycott Colombo until reconciliation begins. A nation cannot run concentration camps and expect the world to look away.
There is something despicable about forcing doctors to lie about war crimes. By their calling, doctors are committed to relieving human suffering, to helping the sick and preventing disease. It is therefore particularly disturbing to see the five doctors who remained with the besieged Tamil civilians as the Sri Lankan Army closed in being paraded before journalists to deny their earlier casualty reports. Men who risked their lives to save lives are now being forced to take part in a political charade to cover up the appalling suffering two months ago — suffering that is still being inflicted on 300,000 Tamils interned in detention camps in northern Sri Lanka.
As the army squeezed the Tamil Tigers into an ever smaller strip of beach, the doctors were the only source of news about the slaughter caused by the military’s indiscriminate shelling. The United Nations found that more than 7,000 civilians were killed between January and May. Subsequent aerial photographs of beach graves, revealed in The Times, suggested that the figure was more than 20,000. World outrage embarrassed the Colombo Government. The doctors were swiftly arrested and nothing further was heard of them until Wednesday.
Their recantation, clearly made under duress, was as ludicrous as it was humiliating. Mechanically rehearsed but clearly nervous, they drastically reduced the death toll estimates, denied that a key hospital had been shelled and insisted that they had been forced to exaggerate the totals by Tiger fighters. In response the UN yesterday asserted tersely that it stood by its figures.
Few people will be fooled by Colombo’s crude attempt at a propaganda victory. For the Government took a far more sinister and callous step yesterday when it ordered the International Committee of the Red Cross to scale back its operations in Sri Lanka, leave the camps where it has been monitoring conditions and halt its aid programmes. The need for expatriate assistance was much less now than before, the Government asserted. Sri Lankans were fully able to meet all the needs of those detained in “welfare villages”.
The claim is an outrageous lie. Senior international aid figures said yesterday that about 1,400 people a week are dying at one of the big internment camps. Tamil civilians, rounded up after the government victory on the pretext of a security need to weed out former fighters, are suffering from hunger, disease, insanitary conditions, overcrowding and the enforced separation of families. The Government has taken almost no steps to free them. Indeed, a former Sri Lankan foreign minister has accused it of a policy of deliberate “ethnic cleansing” to change the population balance.
Colombo’s order puts the Red Cross in a difficult position. Historically, it has rarely spoken out — even about Nazi concentration camps — so as not to jeopardise access to those in greatest danger. It was the only aid agency allowed inside the war zone in the final stages of the conflict. But its few statements angered the Government. Sri Lanka wants no witnesses to what is now being done in these modern concentration camps.
If the Red Cross is forced to withdraw, however, the outside world should step in. The Sri Lankan Government is awaiting a $1.9 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund to address its balance-of-payments crisis and postwar development. None of this money should be paid until independent aid agencies are guaranteed access to the Tamil camps and until Sri Lanka starts to release those detained. Other world bodies — the Commonwealth, the United Nations and even world cricketing organisations — should boycott Colombo until reconciliation begins. A nation cannot run concentration camps and expect the world to look away.
UN mum, when Sri Lanka taxes and cuts NGOs, parades the detained Doctors
Inner City Press asked Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's spokesperson Michele Montas on July 9 about the Red Cross, for example, being forced to close its operations in Trincomalee and Batticaloa where it has 150 staff members. When Sudan threw out some 200 staff from Darfur, the UN criticized it immediately and loudly. Here, the UN said nothing and, when asked, Ms. Montas said "we are trying to get more information." Video here, from Minute 15:18.
On July 8, the Sri Lankan Army put on display the doctors, imprisoned for seven weeks, who had remained in the northern conflict zone offering treatment and casualty figures. Again, the UN had nothing to say. Ban Ki-moon and his top humanitarian aide John Holmes had both in the past spoken about the doctors and their treatment. But confronted with the grotesque display of imprisoned and presumptively threatened humanitarians being forced to make pro-government statement the UN -- a club of governments -- had nothing to say.
Inner City Press on July 9 asked Ban's spokesperson about the doctors. She said, there were their statements earlier and then their statements when they got "out of jail... I can't say what is true." Amnesty International and others have said that statements after detention like this are not credible. But the UN apparently no longer cares what the doctors say.
Inner City Press asked if Ban is requesting that they not be put on trial. Ms. Montas said "he didn't mention trial because there was no question of trial...As far as I know they've been released."
The UN is trying and largely succeeding, for now, in putting into the past its shameful inaction during the carnage in Sri Lanka.
In recent days the UN has promised but not delivered answers on a series of troubling developments in Sri Lanka.
Inner City Press asked about reports of government soldiers firing their weapons in the UN-funded internment camps in Vavuniya. We don't know about that, Ban's spokesperson Michele Montas said, we just don't have access. Inner City Press asked why the UN provides funds if it cannot verify and answer for its use. Ms. Montas said she would look into how it works. But after that, no information or answers were provided.
Nor did the UN's Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs have anything to say when asked about the Sri Lankan government taxing NGOs, which is otherwise only done in Burma. Now, no comment on the government's order to the Red Cross and others to scale back their operations. Even in following up on the Joint Statement Ban issued with Mahinda Rajapaksa, the UN has no follow through. (Matthew Russel Lee, ICP)
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Sri Lanka orders ICRC to reduce operations
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said Thursday it had been ordered by Sri Lanka to scale down relief operations. As a result, the ICRC said it was withdrawing expatriate staff from the battle-scarred northeast, where it has been helping civilian war victims, AFP reported. The ICRC has had a strained relationship with the Sri Lankan government which accused the Geneva-based charity of inciting panic over civilian deaths, AFP added. As a first step, the ICRC will pull out of the Eastern Province, where rights abuses by government forces and allied paramilitaries are continuing.
The BBC’s correspondents say that the announcement is significant because if the ICRC cuts back staff considerably, it could mean that eventually there is no independent monitoring of barbed-wire ringed camps in which over three hundred thousand people are interned.
“The government of Sri Lanka has asked the ICRC to scale down its operations in the country," the charity said in a statement Thursday.
The ICRC would now re-assess its operations, which presently include providing relief to those displaced by the fighting and visiting captured rebels to ensure their proper treatment in custody.
"As a first step, it will close its offices and withdraw its expatriate staff from the Eastern Province while winding down its operations in the area. … However, the ICRC will continue its dialogue with the Sri Lankan government on issues of humanitarian concern," the charity said.
ICRC spokesman Simon Schorno told the BBC the ICRC had to respect the government's decision.
He said: "Two sub-delegations are closing, Batticaloa and Trincomalee. A total of 140 national staff and about 10 expatriates worked in these offices."
As fighting escalated in the final days of the conflict with the Tamil Tigers, the ICRC had spoken of an unfolding "humanitarian catastrophe" in the war zone amid a surge in civilian casualties.
The ICRC was the only outside agency with access to the area of combat, taking in aid and evacuating wounded people by ship, the BBC pointed out.
The ICRC and Sri Lankan government were also at loggerheads over the issue of camps for the displaced, with the charity, like many international actors, demanding "unimpeded access" to the sites.
"In accordance with its mandate, the ICRC reaffirms its commitment to address the humanitarian needs of those directly or indirectly affected by the recent conflict, including displaced people and returnees," the ICRC said.
The ICRC has had a permanent presence in Sri Lanka since 1989, the BBC reported. It first began work in the southern part of the country in the late 1980s and continued its work in other parts as the conflict between government forces and the Tamil Tigers intensified.
The BBC’s correspondents say that the announcement is significant because if the ICRC cuts back staff considerably, it could mean that eventually there is no independent monitoring of barbed-wire ringed camps in which over three hundred thousand people are interned.
“The government of Sri Lanka has asked the ICRC to scale down its operations in the country," the charity said in a statement Thursday.
The ICRC would now re-assess its operations, which presently include providing relief to those displaced by the fighting and visiting captured rebels to ensure their proper treatment in custody.
"As a first step, it will close its offices and withdraw its expatriate staff from the Eastern Province while winding down its operations in the area. … However, the ICRC will continue its dialogue with the Sri Lankan government on issues of humanitarian concern," the charity said.
ICRC spokesman Simon Schorno told the BBC the ICRC had to respect the government's decision.
He said: "Two sub-delegations are closing, Batticaloa and Trincomalee. A total of 140 national staff and about 10 expatriates worked in these offices."
As fighting escalated in the final days of the conflict with the Tamil Tigers, the ICRC had spoken of an unfolding "humanitarian catastrophe" in the war zone amid a surge in civilian casualties.
The ICRC was the only outside agency with access to the area of combat, taking in aid and evacuating wounded people by ship, the BBC pointed out.
The ICRC and Sri Lankan government were also at loggerheads over the issue of camps for the displaced, with the charity, like many international actors, demanding "unimpeded access" to the sites.
"In accordance with its mandate, the ICRC reaffirms its commitment to address the humanitarian needs of those directly or indirectly affected by the recent conflict, including displaced people and returnees," the ICRC said.
The ICRC has had a permanent presence in Sri Lanka since 1989, the BBC reported. It first began work in the southern part of the country in the late 1980s and continued its work in other parts as the conflict between government forces and the Tamil Tigers intensified.
Sri Lanka restricts aid visas, equates its camps with Italy’s
Sri Lanka’s Disaster Management and Human Rights Minister, Mahinda Samarasinghe this week drew parallels between his government’s running of barbed-wire ringed militarized camps in which 300,000 Tamils are held with Italy’s management of camps for survivors of the L’Aquila earthquake. The state-owned Daily News also quoted Mr. Samarasinghe as saying Sri Lanka “would welcome all [foreign] help it can get if relevant organizations would fall in line with the national agenda.” On Thursday, the minister said future visa applications for foreign aid workers will be granted only if their work “could not be carried out by locals.”
The Minister’s comments equating Sri Lanka’s camps to Italy’s were made in a speech as Chief Guest at the inauguration of a National Symposium on “Promoting Knowledge Transfer to Strengthen Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaption” in Colombo.
The Minister had pointed out that 80,000 Italian earthquake victims in Akila were being looked after solely by one of its government arms, the Civil Protection Authority, supported by the Army and the Navy, the paper reported.
No UN, INGO, NGO presence is allowed in these camps and also journalists are escorted by designated officials when visiting these welfare centres, the paper quoted Mr. Samarasinghe as saying.
The Italian Government has taken an independent decision and others should honour it, he is reported to have pointed out.
He made the same observation two weeks ago, rejecting more international calls for free access to Sri Lanka’s militarized camps from which persistent reports emerge of killings, torture, rapes and even officials running a prostitution ring.
“The EU ambassador tells us that they want unfettered access to the camps. Yet Italy right under their noses is doing something quite different. So if Italy can do that why can’t Sri Lanka?” Mr. Samarasinghe asked.
“ Of course we are a developing country and we need assistance. That is why we have asked the UN to help but we are not willing to give anyone unfettered access because we are an independent sovereign country,” he said.
Unnecessary meddling in domestic affairs would bring forth political issues such as the ones experienced after certain organisations requested unhindered access to conflict affected areas and displaced people’s camps, the Daily News quoted him as saying this week.
In mid-May, Walter Kälin, the UN Secretary-General’s Representative for the Human Rights of Displaced Persons called on Colombo to allow the UN and other agencies “full and unfettered access to all civilians and detainees.”
The call was repeated by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon himself when he visited the island in late May as Sri Lanka interned hundreds of thousands of Tamils in militarized, overcrowded tent camps.
The United States also pressed for unimpended access for humanitarian agencies.
The calls were flatly rejected by President Mahinda Rajapakse and government officials.
The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Jakob Kellenberger, also called for access to the camps on 27 May, saying: “Needs [in the camps] are great, especially for medical care, and those needs are not being fully met.”
This week Sri Lanka ordered the ICRC to reduce its operation in Sri Lanka.
Mr. Samarasinghe said the order was extended to all aid agencies in Sri Lanka.
"We have not specifically targeted the ICRC. It is something we have told all international agencies," he told AFP.
"Since there is no more fighting now, we have told them and others that they should scale down their work.”
"We have told all foreign relief organisations that we will let them bring down expatriates only if they can't find people locally to do their job," he said.
"What we are looking for is to add value to what we are doing."
The Minister’s comments equating Sri Lanka’s camps to Italy’s were made in a speech as Chief Guest at the inauguration of a National Symposium on “Promoting Knowledge Transfer to Strengthen Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaption” in Colombo.
The Minister had pointed out that 80,000 Italian earthquake victims in Akila were being looked after solely by one of its government arms, the Civil Protection Authority, supported by the Army and the Navy, the paper reported.
No UN, INGO, NGO presence is allowed in these camps and also journalists are escorted by designated officials when visiting these welfare centres, the paper quoted Mr. Samarasinghe as saying.
The Italian Government has taken an independent decision and others should honour it, he is reported to have pointed out.
He made the same observation two weeks ago, rejecting more international calls for free access to Sri Lanka’s militarized camps from which persistent reports emerge of killings, torture, rapes and even officials running a prostitution ring.
“The EU ambassador tells us that they want unfettered access to the camps. Yet Italy right under their noses is doing something quite different. So if Italy can do that why can’t Sri Lanka?” Mr. Samarasinghe asked.
“ Of course we are a developing country and we need assistance. That is why we have asked the UN to help but we are not willing to give anyone unfettered access because we are an independent sovereign country,” he said.
Unnecessary meddling in domestic affairs would bring forth political issues such as the ones experienced after certain organisations requested unhindered access to conflict affected areas and displaced people’s camps, the Daily News quoted him as saying this week.
In mid-May, Walter Kälin, the UN Secretary-General’s Representative for the Human Rights of Displaced Persons called on Colombo to allow the UN and other agencies “full and unfettered access to all civilians and detainees.”
The call was repeated by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon himself when he visited the island in late May as Sri Lanka interned hundreds of thousands of Tamils in militarized, overcrowded tent camps.
The United States also pressed for unimpended access for humanitarian agencies.
The calls were flatly rejected by President Mahinda Rajapakse and government officials.
The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Jakob Kellenberger, also called for access to the camps on 27 May, saying: “Needs [in the camps] are great, especially for medical care, and those needs are not being fully met.”
This week Sri Lanka ordered the ICRC to reduce its operation in Sri Lanka.
Mr. Samarasinghe said the order was extended to all aid agencies in Sri Lanka.
"We have not specifically targeted the ICRC. It is something we have told all international agencies," he told AFP.
"Since there is no more fighting now, we have told them and others that they should scale down their work.”
"We have told all foreign relief organisations that we will let them bring down expatriates only if they can't find people locally to do their job," he said.
"What we are looking for is to add value to what we are doing."
US concerned about IDPs, peace process: ambassador-designate to India
The Ambassador-designate of Obama administration to India, Tim Roemer, appearing before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Wednesday, said the US is very concerned about the internally displaced people, resettlement, reconciliation and a peace process to go forward. “I think that’s something that would be important for the next ambassador, to continue to work with the Indian government on, to see that the Sri Lankan situation moves in a peaceful process, with reconciliation as a high goal”, he said in his testimony. While appreciating India’s role to US in Afghanistan, about Sri Lanka, the nominee was appreciative of India’s humanitarian aid.
“With respect to Sri Lanka, the Indian government has sent high-level, I think their foreign minister and their national security advisor have been there if not once, twice. They have committed 20 million dollars in aid. They have pledged another 100 million dollars in aid,” he said.
The nominee was of the opinion that it is important for US to “grow the middle class in India spiritually and economically” so that they can buy US products and exchange trade.
Academic circles of India said that this is an area of overlapping interest between the two governments. The Indian Establishment in the last two decades has been grooming the growth of such a class for the benefit of its own capitalism, they said.
Tamil circles, while recognizing the importance of strategic partnership and agreement between US and India in resolving their long-standing national question, said that so far either the competition or connivance of US and India have brought in only misery to Eezham Tamils.
Adding comments, they said: “Both US and India have made a mistake in allowing China and Pakistan to militarily meddle with the national question in the island. So far in contemporary history, China has not demonstrated anywhere that its political culture is capable of resolving issues of the kind faced in the island of Sri Lanka.”
“Only US and India have to do it. US have a long global experience. India actively helped liberation movements in Asia and Africa in the past. Both have to see the realities of the deep divide in the island and the humanitarian questions involved. They have to seriously work together in conceiving a model to identify their geopolitical interests with the aspirations of Eezham Tamils who are always victimised by the geopolitics of the region,” the Tamil circles said.
However, an Asian diplomat in a Western country was sceptical. India at the moment has no idea or preparedness for any innovative political solutions other than appeasement with Colombo for maintaining its status quo, he said, adding that the US may have to put an extra effort to convince India.
In his opinion, the US, which was the first to tilt the balance against Tamils, cannot now simply pass the blame only on India and China. Any change in the outlook has to be again first demonstrated by the US and it is now perhaps time for it to consider strengthening the politics of Eezham Tamils by removing all proscription.
“With respect to Sri Lanka, the Indian government has sent high-level, I think their foreign minister and their national security advisor have been there if not once, twice. They have committed 20 million dollars in aid. They have pledged another 100 million dollars in aid,” he said.
The nominee was of the opinion that it is important for US to “grow the middle class in India spiritually and economically” so that they can buy US products and exchange trade. Academic circles of India said that this is an area of overlapping interest between the two governments. The Indian Establishment in the last two decades has been grooming the growth of such a class for the benefit of its own capitalism, they said.
Tamil circles, while recognizing the importance of strategic partnership and agreement between US and India in resolving their long-standing national question, said that so far either the competition or connivance of US and India have brought in only misery to Eezham Tamils.
Adding comments, they said: “Both US and India have made a mistake in allowing China and Pakistan to militarily meddle with the national question in the island. So far in contemporary history, China has not demonstrated anywhere that its political culture is capable of resolving issues of the kind faced in the island of Sri Lanka.”
“Only US and India have to do it. US have a long global experience. India actively helped liberation movements in Asia and Africa in the past. Both have to see the realities of the deep divide in the island and the humanitarian questions involved. They have to seriously work together in conceiving a model to identify their geopolitical interests with the aspirations of Eezham Tamils who are always victimised by the geopolitics of the region,” the Tamil circles said.
However, an Asian diplomat in a Western country was sceptical. India at the moment has no idea or preparedness for any innovative political solutions other than appeasement with Colombo for maintaining its status quo, he said, adding that the US may have to put an extra effort to convince India.
In his opinion, the US, which was the first to tilt the balance against Tamils, cannot now simply pass the blame only on India and China. Any change in the outlook has to be again first demonstrated by the US and it is now perhaps time for it to consider strengthening the politics of Eezham Tamils by removing all proscription.
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