[Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa.]
By Peter Boyle, Green Left Weekly
October 22, 2011 -- Several prominent Australian human rights advocates have called for protests when Sri Lanka’s “war criminal” president, Mahinda Rajapaksa comes to Perth in late October to attend the Commonwealth Heads Of Government Meeting (CHOGM).
The Rajapaksa government is guilty of committing “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity,” said Professor Damien Kingsbury, the director of the Centre for Citizenship, Development and Human Rights at Deakin University. Kingsbury spoke at an international conference on “Accountability In Sri Lanka: Common Justice In The Commonwealth” in Sydney on October 20.
[Image: Visuvanathan Rudrakumaran.]
By Ron Ridenour
October 4, 2011 -– Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- “We Tamils, inside and outside the island of Sri Lanka, still want an independent state. And because the war crimes and severe brutality of the Mahinda Rajapaksa government against our people has become well known, our cause is being spoken about all over the world”, Visuvanathan Rudrakumaran told me recently in Manhattan, New York.
A positive sign of recognition for Tamil rights is the dramatic Channel 4 UK documentary, Sri Lanka Killing Fields, shown first at a June Human Rights Council session and then worldwide.
[Tamils mourn the dead in Jaffna].
By Tony Iltis, Green Left Weekly
July 10, 2011 -- A British TV documentary and a United Nations-commissioned report have confirmed long-standing Tamil allegations that the Sri Lankan Army (SLA) committed large-scale war crimes in the course of its May 2009 victory over the pro-independence Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
Atrocities perpetrated by the army during and after its recapture of the rebel-held areas of Tamil Eelam (Tamil areas in the north and east of Sri Lanka) included shelling civilians, depriving civilians of access to food, water and medicine, executing and torturing prisoners of war, systematic rape and holding civilians in concentration camps.
By Paddy McGuffin
June 18, 2011 -- The British government continues to license millions of pounds in arms to the Sri Lankan regime despite suggestions that they may have been used in war crimes, the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) said on June 15.
By Danielle Sabai, Asia Left Observer
June 2, 2011 -- In February 2011, the president of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa, celebrated the 63rd anniversary of the island’s independence. In his speech, he stressed the necessity of “protecting the reconstructed nation”, as well as protecting “one of the oldest democracies in Asia”, its unity and its unitary character.
This speech came nearly two years after the end of the war on May 19, 2009, between the Sri Lankan state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The military command of the LTTE was decimated in the last two months of a merciless war that has had led to tens of thousands of deaths since the early 1980s.
[Tamils are held in miserable conditions in IDP camps.]
By Ron Ridenour
May 16, 2011 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- Forty-seven governments on the Untied Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) will discuss and decide, beginning at its May 30 session, what to do about an unusually truthful report in the world of international politics.
The “Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka” was delivered to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on March 31 concerning: 1) alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the last phases of the 26-year-old civil war, September 2008 to May 19, 2009; 2) consequences for approximately 300,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) and, by extension, for 2.7 million Sri Lankan Tamils, 13% of Sri Lanka's 21 million population.
[Tamil refugees. Image: Free Malaysia Today.]
The following statement was released by the Socialist Alliance in Australia.
May 22, 2011 -- The report of the three-person panel appointed by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to advise him on human rights issues in Sri Lanka has found “credible allegations, which if proven, indicate that a wide range of serious violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law was committed both by the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam], some of which would amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity”.
[Hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians were forced into concentration camps during the Sri Lankan Army’s attack in 2009.]
By Sam Pari
April 30, 2011 -- Two years ago, a war without witness was executed by the state against the Tamil people in the island of Sri Lanka.
In September 2008, after ordering all United Nations personnel, non-government organisations and media out of the Vanni region, the Sri Lankan government embarked on a vicious military campaign.
[Within the box is one of the Tamil areas targeted by the Sri Lankan government for Sinhalese settlements. Map from Tamilnet.]
By Chris Slee
March 14, 2011 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — The Tamilnet website has accused the Sri Lankan government of waging a "colonisation war" against the Tamil people of the island of Sri Lanka. The government has been establishing Sinhalese settlements in traditional Tamil areas. The website compares this to Israel’s policy of establishing Jewish settlements in the West Bank, saying: "Sri Lanka is aiming at creating an Israeli model situation as fast as possible".[1]
Just as Israel uses Jewish settlements to break up the areas inhabited by Palestinians into small fragments, thereby trying to make a Palestinian state impossible, Sri Lanka is using Sinhalese settlements to break up the Tamil areas of northern and eastern Sri Lanka, with the intention of making an independent Tamil state impossible.
By Lee Yu Kyung, Green Left Weekly
October 31, 2010 -- It seems no one bothers about “them” in Sri Lanka. No lawyer or rights groups in the country dare to talk of “their” basic rights. Do they deserve to be abandoned or “disappeared”?
Alleged former members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE — popularly known as the Tamil Tigers), an armed group that fought for an independent state for the Tamil ethnic minority, have become indefinite “prisoners of war” ever since the LTTE was militarily defeated by the Sri Lankan state in May 2009.