"Tamils Now Languish in Sri Lanka Camps", New York Times reports

by Tamiya | July 17, 2009 at 10:09 am

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Using violence is accepted as self-defense in many courts in the world. However, using violence to self-defend a community from chuvanists is harder to defend, espcially after the 9/11 attack, in which Osama Bin Ladden hi-jacked all freedom struggle in the world to "terrorists" list.

The fight for freedom stuggle has gotten easier in some sense to Tamils in Sri Lanka despite the fact the Tamils' lives are at the worst; now the many journalists feel free and obligated to discuss the sufferings of Tamils after the demise of LTTE.

In a latest article published in New York Times, the

Tamils Now Languish in Sri Lanka Camps

“The government told these people it would look after them,” said Veerasingham Anandasangaree, a prominent Tamil politician who has been a staunch supporter of the government’s fight against the Tamil Tigers. “But instead they have locked them up like animals with no date certain of when they will be released. This is simply asking for another conflict later on down the road.”

The cost of winning the LTTE for the happiness of Sinhalese has not been cheap, close to 30,000 Tamils civilians have been killed in last few months of war, and nearly 20,000 were killed just in last few days of the war. The Sri Lankan government refuses to allow independent investigation on war crime and death toll, leaving the world estimate the numbers and facts based on satellite images and information gathered from the "safety zone" during the war time.

Sri Lanka’s government has celebrated its triumph over the Tigers as the world’s first purely military defeat of an insurgent terrorist group. The war spanned nearly three decades and left tens of thousands of people dead and uprooted hundreds of thousands more.

But human rights organizations here and abroad have documented some of the other heavy costs of the victory.

The government has clamped down hard on dissent. Journalists have been mysteriously killed, arrested and chased from the country.

Thousands of Tamils have disappeared, presumably arrested by the government on suspicion of being Tamil Tiger fighters, according to Mano Ganesan, a Tamil member of Parliament who has been tracking disappearances for years.

Questions remain about how many civilians were killed in the last bloody weeks of the war, when the Tigers were pushed onto a narrow stretch of beach along with hundreds of thousands of civilians.

After insisting for months, improbably, that no civilians had died, Mr. Rajapaksa acknowledged that some must have been killed and said that the government was investigating the last days of the war.

“My instruction was there cannot be any single civilian casualty,” he said. “The army was very careful.”

But the United Nations has said that at least 7,000 people died up to the end of April, when the last push began. No one is sure how many were killed in those last few weeks of fighting, but witnesses said the battlefield was covered with bodies.

Satellite images of the zone seem to contradict government claims that no heavy weapons were used there, revealing large, scorched craters.