| SRI LANKA: Mass carnage of Tamils in war without witnesses , By Peter Westmore |
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While the war in Sri Lanka has ended, the underlying causes of the civil war have not been addressed, writes Peter Westmore. A civil war of merciless atrocity, in which tens of thousands of Tamils have been killed recently by the Sri Lankan army, came to an end last month when army troops finally occupied the territory controlled by the Tamil Tigers in north-east Sri Lanka.While the war has ended, the underlying causes of the civil war have not been addressed, and, arguably, have been exacerbated.The Tamil people, predominantly Hindu, are descendants of people who were brought to Sri Lanka by the British in the 19th century to work in the tea and coconut plantations. Their descendants now constitute around 15 per cent of the population. Separate culture Most of the rest of the people are Sinhalese. They are Buddhist, and have their own language and culture. Since Sri Lanka gained independence over 60 years ago, successive Sinhalese governments have discriminated against the Tamil minority, beginning with the disenfranchisement of plantation workers in 1949, establishment of Sinhala as the national language in 1956, and repeated anti-Tamil riots which have forced many to live as refugees or outcasts in Sri Lanka. Although there were several Tamil-based political parties, the polarisation of the country was evident when the separatist Tamil United Liberation Front won all seats in Tamil areas in elections in 1977. When discrimination and anti-Tamil violence continued, the Tamils took up arms, leading to the commencement of civil war in 1983. One of the Tamil groups which emerged in this period was the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), known universally as the Tamil Tigers. It was founded by an extreme and violent Tamil nationalist, Veluppilai Prabharkaran, who initially waged a war against other Tamil groups as well as against the Sri Lankan government. Prabharkaran pioneered the use of suicide-bombers, including female suicide-bombers - one of whom killed the Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, in 1991, after Indian peace-keepers were introduced into Tamil areas. The Tigers raised large amounts of money from Sri Lankan exiles in various countries. In 1996, Tamil Tigers suicide-bombers drove a truck laden with explosives into the Central Bank of Colombo, killing 90 and injuring a further 1,400 people, most of whom were Sri Lankan civilians. At its strongest, the Tigers controlled as much as a third of Sri Lanka. After the attack on the World Trade Center, New York, on September 11, 2001, the Tamil Tigers were put on an international terrorist list, and many governments took action to freeze the funds of the Tamil diaspora which were fuelling the civil war in Sri Lanka. After the last cease-fire collapsed in 2006, the Sri Lankan army commenced a war of attrition against the Tamil Tigers in the north-east of the island. Since then, an increasingly bitter war has taken place as the Sri Lankan army, using its substantial military might, pushed the Tamil Tigers into a smaller and smaller perimeter in the north-east of Sri Lanka. The Tamil Tigers reportedly used civilians as human shields. The Sri Lankan army simply ignored the plight of the civilians and continued to fight on, refusing to allow any humanitarian organisations, media or UN agencies to monitor the situation. The London Times reported that "China appears to have become the biggest arms supplier to Sri Lanka in the 1990s when India and Western governments refused to sell weapons to Colombo to use in its civil war ... "Beijing appears to have increased its arms sales significantly to Sri Lanka since 2007 when the United States suspended military aid amid human rights concerns." (The Times, May 15, 2009). Although the United Nations' local representatives knew of the brutality and barbarity of the fighting, when West European countries raised the matter at the United Nations, the UN Human Rights Council refused point blank to consider the matter. The UN Human Rights Council instead considered a resolution submitted by Sri Lanka itself, which welcomed the "liberation" of tens of thousands of the island's citizens, condemned the defeated Tamil Tigers, made no mention of the shelling of civilians and kept silent on the desperate need to allow the Red Cross and other humanitarian groups into the camps where some 200,000 Tamil civilians have been forcibly interned. The UN's whitewash of recent events in Sri Lanka, and the continued detention of hundreds of thousands of Tamils in what are virtually prison camps, will reinforce the council's critics in the West. The UN Human Rights Council's decision was strongly supported by China, Russia, India and Pakistan, all of whom supported the Sri Lankan resolution, on the grounds that the conflict there was an internal matter and that the council should not intervene in it. They were supported by Asian and Muslim countries, also wary of outside inspection of their own human rights record, who also saw this as a precedent for similar votes in the future. - Peter Westmore |
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