Editorial
Tamil Camps
Published: July 15, 2009

More than two months after declaring victory over Tamil Tiger guerillas, Sri Lanka’s government is continuing to hold hundreds of thousands of displaced Tamil civilians in what it calls “welfare villages,” but what increasingly look like military internment camps.

The civilians, many of whom were held hostage by the guerrillas in the bloody last stage of the long war, are not being allowed out of the camps, and access by human-rights organizations or journalists is highly restricted.

The government claims it is looking for Tamil Tigers among the refugees and clearing Tamil villages of landmines before letting people return. It may well be that there are former guerrillas hiding among the civilians — the Tamil Tigers had no compunctions about using civilians as cannon fodder or forcibly conscripting men and children. But the screening process is dragging on far too long. And many refugees see it as another abuse of the country’s Tamil minority. As one prominent Tamil politician told The New York Times’s Lydia Polgreen, “This is simply asking for another conflict later on down the road.” If President Mahinda Rajapaksa means it when he says he seeks reconciliation with the Tamils, he should start by letting these people return to their homes.

The government’s strict control on visits to the camps has also raised suspicions that it may be trying to block any investigation into possible government abuses committed in the last months of the war. Soldiers corralled the Tigers, along with hundreds of thousands of civilians into a narrow stretch of beach and, according to human-rights organizations, shelled the area repeatedly. The United Nations says that thousands of civilians were killed, though how and by whom remains murky in the absence of independent investigations.

Donor countries — including the United States, the European Union and Japan — as well as international aid organizations are helping provide food, shelter and clothing to the camps. Most have kept quiet so far about the Tamils’ plight, evidently fearful that criticizing conditions in the camps could get them thrown out of the camps. The time for silence is over. The best way to help the Tamils is by demanding their freedom and an end to their long ordeal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/16/opinion/16iht-edtamil.html?_r=1
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Rajapaksa rules out separate ethnicity-based provinces

P K Balachandran

First Published : 15 Jul 2009 02:49:00 AM IST

Last Updated : 15 Jul 2009 08:21:34 AM IST

COLOMBO: Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa has said “no” to ethnicity-based separate provinces, in an interview to the latest edition of the American magazine Time.Asked if he believed in some kind of self-governance for the Tamils, Rajapaksa said: “Don’t say Tamils. In this country you can’t give separate areas on an ethnic basis, you can’t have this.” But provinces could certainly have powers, to enable them to handle local matters, he conceded.When asked if there was some kind of an effort to change the demography of the Tamil-majority areas, the President said: “No”. But he pointed out that demographic changes were happening in the Sinhalese-majority Colombo.“The Eastern Province Muslims have come here (Colombo district). The Tamils have come here. You ask them. Why are you coming here? Can I stop them? No. If anybody wants to come and live in any part of this island, it the right of a man,” he stated.Ruling out any special devolution for the wholly Tamil-speaking Northern Province, Rajapaksa said the North could not have a model of its own. “That I will not allow. The whole country must have a system.”He noted that there were differences among the Tamils as to what they should ask for, now that the LTTE has been defeated and its leader, Prabhakaran, is dead.“If you ask the IDPs (International Displaced Persons or the war refugees) they’ll say we want to go back to our villages. If you ask politicians, they’ll say, we want this and that. But yes, we need to give a political solution,” Rajapaksa explained.NO TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION: Rejecting a suggestion that there should be a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to heal the wounds of the past through an honest and public acceptance of past mistakes, the President said that he did not want to “dig into the past and reopen wounds.” When suggested that airing a wound would help it heal, he retorted: “This is where the West is different from the East.”WAR CRIMES: Asked about the move to punish Sri Lanka for alleged war crimes in the final stages of the battle against the LTTE in which 7,000 civilians were thought to have been killed, Rajapaksa said that it was wrong to punish a whole people through sanctions and embargoes, for the alleged wrongdoings of the leader or decision maker.“Are you going to punish (all the) citizens for that, or the man who is responsible? Take me. Say that I violated all these human rights, killed people, right? Do you punish me, Mahinda Rajapaksa, or the innocent people of this country by sanctions, embargoes, travel advisories? There are ways of punishing me if you want. There, by now saying that, I will get punished,” he said.However, he maintained that there were no human rights violations against the Tamil civilian population. “There was no violation of human rights. There were no civilian casualties. If I did that, it would’nt have taken two-and-a-half years to finish this. I would have done this in a few hours. These are all propaganda. In the Eastern Province (there were) zero casualties. I won’t say there were zero casualties in the North. The LTTE shot some of them (civilians) when they tried to escape,” Rajapaksa said.CHINA’S INTERESTS: The Sri Lankan President denied that China was gaining a strategic foothold in the island, by building a major port at Humbantota. “I asked for it. China didn’t propose it. It was not a Chinese proposal. The proposal was from us. They gave money. If India said, yes, we’ll give you a port, I will gladly accept. If America says, we’ll give a fully equipped airport – yes, why not? Unfortunately, they are not offering to us,” Rajapaksa said.BETWEEN CHINA AND INDIA: Asked if China was becoming a more important ally to Sri Lanka than India, the President said that he was not looking at China and India in that way. “India is our neighbour, our relation, our friend – we have special relationship. India is helping us (with money for development).”
http://www.expressbuzz.com/edition/story.aspx?Title=Rajapaksa+rules+out+separate+ethnicity-based+provinces&artid=K1ILrSdKsXE=&SectionID=oHSKVfNWYm0=&MainSectionID=oHSKVfNWYm0=&SEO=Sri+Lankan+President+Mahinda+Rajapaksa&SectionName=VfE7I/Vl8os=
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Hundreds dying' in Sri Lanka camp

The government declared victory over the LTTE in May after eliminating the top leadership [AFP] About 1,400 people are dying every week in a camp set up in Sri Lanka to detain Tamil refugees from the country's civil war, a British newspaper reports. Quoting senior international aid sources, The Times reported on Friday that the death toll at the Menik Farm internment will add to concerns that the Sri Lankan government has failed to halt a humanitarian catastrophe. Most of the deaths are the result of water-borne diseases, particularly diarrhoea, the paper said, quoting a senior relief worker it said spoke on condition of anonymity. Women, children and the elderly were shoved aside in the scramble for supplies, it said. The Menik Farm camp, in the northern district of Vavuniya, was set up to house the largest number of the 300,000 mainly Tamil civilians forced to flee the northeast as the military mounted an offensive against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). he government announced victory over the LTTE in May, ending a civil war that lasted decades. The Times said witness testimonies it obtained in May described long queues for food and inadequate water supplies inside the camp. Women, children and the elderly, it said, were shoved aside in the scramble for supplies. Aid agencies are being given only intermittent access to the camp. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was not being allowed in, The Times reported. Toll controversy The Times also said that its investigation had uncovered evidence that more than 20,000 civilians were killed, mostly by the army, in the final stages of the conflict. But Sri Lankan doctors said at a news conference on Wednesday that they had deliberately overestimated the civilian casualties. The Times said women and children are pushed aside in the scramble for food [AFP] As government officials looked on, they claimed that the Tigers had forced them to lie, The Times reported. It quoted Mangala Samaraweera, the former foreign minister and now an opposition MP, as 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." Mahinda Samarasinghe, the minister of disaster management and human rights, told the paper that "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," he said. Curbs on Red Cross The Times further reported, quoting the ICRC, that the agency was closing two offices in the country. One of these was in Trincomalee, which had helped to provide medical care to about 30,000 injured civilians evacuated by sea from the conflict zone in the northeast, the report said. The other was in Batticaloa, where the ICRC had been providing "protection services". The ICRC has revealed that it has been asked to scale down its operations by the Sri Lankan authorities, who insist that they have the situation under control. Source: Al Jazeera Friday, July 10, 2009 http://english.aljazeera.net/news/2009/07/200971035954492173.html -----------------------------------------------------

www.theatlantic.com

Sri Lanka's brutal suppression of the Tamil Tigers offers an object lesson in how to defeat an insurgency. Or does it?

by Robert D. Kaplan

To Catch a Tiger

Though it was only a one-day news story in the United States, a momentous event occurred last spring, with worldwide military significance. After 26 years of heavy fighting, the Sri Lankan government decisively defeated an ethnic insurgency, killing all of its top leadership, whose bodies were displayed on national television. Massive victory parades followed.

The Tamil Tigers were no ordinary insurgency. Built on the ethnic hatred of the minority Hindu Tamils against the majority Sinhalese Buddhists, the movement was among the best organized and most ruthless to have emerged anywhere since the Second World War. The Tigers boasted their own air force and navy to go along with their unconventional ground troops. They helped pioneer the use of suicide bombers. (Recall that it was a female Tiger suicide bomber who killed Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.) They regularly embedded their fighters among noncombatants, using them as human sheilds. In other words, they were as organized and heartless as any insurgent group in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The Tamil Tigers, moreover, had a brilliant, charismatic leader by the name of Vellupilai Prabakharan, who was venerated by many ethnic Hindu Tamils to the same extent that radical Muslims have venerated Osama bin Laden. His following was cult-like and was largely responsible for the war that killed 70,000 people since 1983, in an island of only 22 million people. Compare that to the deaths of 3,000 in the World Trade Center out of a population of 300 million in the United States. So when the Sri Lankan government displayed Prabakharan's body on television last May, it represented the culmination of a counterinsurgency campaign that the U.S. could only dream about.

Clearly, then, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps should be studying the Sri Lankan civil war for valuable lessons about how to win a counterinsurgency, right? Actually—no. In fact, there are no useful pointers to be gleaned from the Sri Lankan government’s victory. The war was won using techniques like the following, which the United States could and should never employ.

The insurgents are using human shields? No problem. Just keep killing the innocent bystanders until you get to the fighters themselves. There is no comparison between the few civilians that have been killed by American Predator drones in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, and the many that were killed by the Sri Lankan government. The Americans have carefully targeted select al-Qaeda members and, in the process, killed a few—at the most, dozens—of civilians among whom the fighters were surrounded. By contrast, the Sri Lankan military indiscriminately killed large numbers of civilians—as many as 20,000 in the final months of fighting, according to the United Nations.

Bad media coverage is hurting morale and giving succor to the enemy? Just kill the journalists. That's what the Sri Lankan authorities did. Precisely because insurgencies are unconventional, there are no easy-to-follow infantry advances and retreats, so the media holds the power to shape a narrative for the public. Aware of the need for a compliant media to aid the war effort, the Sri Lankan government struck fear into the ranks of journalists. There were hundreds of disappearances of top opinion leaders.

“Murder has become the primary tool whereby the state seeks to control the organs of liberty,” wrote journalist Lasantha Wickramatunga in a self-penned obituary that anticipated his own assassination in early 2009. Sources told me that he was killed by having iron rods with sharp points driven through his skull. “If Lasantha, with all of his connections, could be killed in broad daylight, then they could do this to anybody,” one journalist in the capital of Colombo told me. This journalist told me stories about reporters being beaten black and blue, leading to an atmosphere of extreme self-censorship—“the worst and most insidious kind.” Another journalist told me: “Lasantha’s fate really scared us. People like me decided it was more important to stay alive than to report the news.” No journalist I met in Colombo was willing to cross the line and publicly attack the government.

The international community disapproves of your methods and cuts off military aid because of the human rights violations you've committed? Again, no problem. Get aid from China, whose assistance comes without moral lectures. That’s just what the Sri Lankan Government did. In return, the Chinese got the right to help construct a deep water port in Sri Lanka, close to world shipping lanes.

So is there any lesson here? Only a chilling one. The ruthlessness and brutality to which the Sri Lankan government was reduced in order to defeat the Tigers points up just how nasty and intractable the problem of insurgency is. The Sri Lankan government made no progress against the insurgents for nearly a quarter century, until they turned to extreme and unsavory methods. Could they have won without terrorizing the media and killing large numbers of civilians? Perhaps, but probably not without help from the Chinese, who, in addition to their military aid, gave the Sri Lankan government diplomatic cover at the UN Security Council.

These are methods the U.S. should never use. But the fact that this is what it took for the Sri Lankan government to subdue the Tamil Tigers makes clear just what a hard grind lies ahead for the U.S. in Afghanistan.

Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, in Washington, D.C.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200907u/tamil-tigers-counterinsurgency

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Monday, July 06, 2009 05:41 Mecca time, 02:41 GMT No welfare for Sri Lanka's Tamils

By Tony Birtley, Asia correspondent

A constant stream of refugees fled the war zone in the last days of the conflict [EPA] The latter stages of the war in Sri Lanka have been carefully choreographed and hidden from the outside world, with the voices of victims silenced through fear and insecurity. There are allegations of war crimes, rape and torture, summary executions and prolonged bombardments by a government which, it is believed by human rights organisations, killed thousands of its own civilian citizens. Al Jazeera has conducted its own investigation into the conflict and spoken to Tamils who have suffered and aid workers who have remained silent until now, revealing testimonies that call into question the version of events Sri Lanka's government wants the world to believe. In video Sri Lanka's 'welfare camps' Sri Lanka denies accusations After enduring months of appalling conditions in the final stages of the war between the Sri Lankan military and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the suffering continues for the Tamils displaced by the fighting. One month after the government declared victory in the war, Tamils continue living in what the government calls "welfare" camps but what critics claim are little short of the world's biggest open air prisons. It is almost impossible for journalists to get into the camps except for strictly controlled government tours such as the one given to Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, in May. But these visits do not show the reality of life in the camps. Crammed into camps More than 250,000 men, women and children are crammed into conditions human rights groups call a disgrace, with as many as 15 people living in tents designed for five. Contrary to international law there is no freedom of movement for the displaced, and no transparency in registration and interview processes. The standards and amounts of water, food and sanitation are well below what they should be and half of the children under age five are suffering from malnutrition. There have been outbreaks of diseases such as Hepatitis A, chicken pox and skin ailments, and there are fears that cholera may develop. There have already been protests in some of the camps. Menik farm, one of the biggest camps, was supposed to cater for 100,000 people but is home to 180,000. Poor conditions "We are now in refugee centres and there is no proper water, food or sanitation for us," one Tamil refugee says. "For the past three days we have not taken a bath. We are only getting one meal a day in the night. We have been living in dirt and there is a bad odour in the air everywhere." The refugees, who are guarded by armed security services, are scared to speak out for fear of reprisals. Even international aid workers are scared. "The conditions are very poor, shelters are inadequate, the water and sanitation is extremely inadequate, they are extremely overcrowded," one aid worker says. "And what they all share in common are the IDPs [internally displaced persons] are detained within the camps, they are surrounded by razor wire and no one's allowed out so, yes, I think I would call them prison camps." Abuse allegations There are also increasing allegations of sexual and physical abuse, impossible to prove conclusively without independent investigation which the government refuses. "There are cases of abuse by the army, some of the cases include girls and women who have become pregnant," the aid worker says. "I couldn't say who the perpetrators were … there's also harassment and inappropriate behaviour among the IDPs, and because of the frustration those incidents are growing, but I think the more serious incidents have tended to be from the army." The government rejects all allegations, maintaining that it has liberated the Tamil civilians from the tyranny of the LTTE and saying the accusations are part of a propaganda campaign. "At one time it was murder. Other times it was killings. And now it has come to the extent of rape and other sexual abuses," says Rohita Bogollagama, Sri Lanka's foreign minister. "These are all made up. And in the event any such abuses is there, we have had the most disciplined administration in taking care of the IDPs all this time. Why is it surfacing now? And why is it being planted like this? Because they want to discredit every effort of the government of Sri Lanka." Those who are criticising the government have little power or influence. The UN voted against pushing for a war crimes investigation, mainly because countries such as China and Russia, which supported Sri Lanka in the war, were against the move. But the strenuous denials that the Sri Lankan military continually shelled and bombed the so-called safe zones during the war do not convince everyone, especially those who say they endured it. Surviving witness One man who was in the conflict area until May 16 - just days before the war ended - says he knows the Sri Lankan military was shelling them during the final assault despite government claims all civilians were out of the zone. Independently verifying government views of the conflict has been impossible [AFP] "The rounds of gunfire were by the Sri Lankan army [SLA]. We know for sure it is the SLA because of the sound. We had difficulty in moving and running as there were people falling dead and lying all over the place and we tripping on dead bodies as we ran for our lives. "The people died in buses, bunkers and open spaces as they were hit by bombs landing in areas wherever they were. We also saw people being shot at close range by the Sri Lankan army." The Sri Lankan government is refusing to allow neutral observers to examine the combat zone which gives ammunition to those who claim a clean-up operation is being carried out to hide evidence. John Holmes, the UN's humanitarian chief, says it is "the primary responsibility of any government to establish accountability". "If you look at the record of the Sri Lankan government … if you look at its records on impunity … records as one of the top countries in the world with the highest number of disappearance, you may appreciate that we would like this to be an international, as opposed to a national, investigation." World silent The UN is co-operating with the Sri Lankan government in developing zone five at Menik farm even though its own guidelines state displaced people should not be put in camps with more than 20,000 people. Assurances have been given by the government that 80 per cent of the civilians will be able to return to their homes within 180 days but critics feel this is an unrealistic pledge. The building of banks, a post office and stores lead some to believe that this is the start of a semi permanent settlement. The government also promises peace and reconciliation, a fair political process and a life for the Tamils free from tyranny. But there questions about who will keep the government accountable since international criticism and action have so far been insignificant at best. Governments and aid organisations have remained silent for a variety of reasons and the people living in the squalid camps of Sri Lanka have paid the price for that silence. http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/06/200961962329963252.html ------------------------------------------------------------------

Sri Lanka’s Peace Endangered by Judicial System,
Group Says

By Paul Tighe

July 1 (Bloomberg) -- Sri Lanka’s return to peace after a 26-year war with the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam is threatened by a judicial system that has raised ethnic tensions, the International Crisis Group said.

“Rather than assuaging the conflict, the courts have corroded the rule of law,” the group said in a report. “An overhaul of counterproductive emergency laws is essential if the military defeat of the LTTE is to lead to a lasting peace that has the support of all ethnic communities.”

Changes in the judicial system should include an independent mechanism for choosing judges, the Brussels-based ICG said. Magistrates should use their powers to monitor the conditions of an estimated 10,000 LTTE fighters or suspected members held since the end of the conflict, it said.

Sri Lanka’s army defeated the LTTE in May, ending its fight for a separate homeland for Tamils in the north and east of the island nation. President Mahinda Rajapaksa, in an address last month marking the victory, said the end to LTTE terrorism will allow the Tamil community to live “without fear and mistrust.”

Judges and magistrates have failed to “provide remedies” for illegal or abusive detention under emergency laws and the criminal code, said the Crisis Group, which aims to prevent and resolve conflicts. The appointment of a new attorney general last month is an opportunity to depoliticize the system.

“The judiciary has not acted as a check on presidential and legislative power, but instead has contributed to the political alienation of Tamils,” Robert Templer, the group’s Asia program director, said in an e-mailed statement.

The emergency laws should be changed as they are used disproportionately against Tamils, the ICG said.

Reconciliation

Rajapaksa yesterday created an all-party committee to discuss development and reconciliation in the country now the war has ended, according to the government’s Web site. Tamils make up almost 12 percent of Sri Lanka’s population of 20 million, while Sinhalese account for 74 percent, according to a 2001 census.

Sri Lanka’s army stepped up its offensive on the LTTE’s bases in the north when the government formally banned the group in January. It scrapped a 2002 cease-fire with the group a year earlier. The Tamil Tigers said that accord recognized the de facto existence of a Tamil homeland with its own civil administration, defense force and judiciary.

A political settlement in Sri Lanka won’t include “space for racism and separatism,” Rajapaksa said at last month’s victory parade.

Travel Alerts

The end to terrorism has allowed the country to lift travel alerts, Rajapaksa said last week in an address to promote a new program to attract tourists to the South Asian island.

The U.S. on June 26 issued a new travel advisory saying its nationals should evaluate the risks of traveling to Sri Lanka.

“Despite the Sri Lankan government’s announcement of a military defeat of the LTTE, remnants of the insurgency group still remain, and thus there is a lingering potential for continued instability,” the State Department said.

The LTTE is designated a terrorist organization by the U.S., the European Union and India.

The U.S. statement is part of a strategy to undermine the country, Sri Lanka’s government said on its Web site two days ago. The alert “demonstrates the sheer lack of understanding of the ground situation” and the fact that the LTTE has been comprehensively defeated, Foreign Secretary Palitha Kohona said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Paul Tighe in Sydney at ptighe@bloomberg.net.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601091&sid=aeYyMkrdsmHk
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