Friday, December 18, 2009

Yes or no to Tamil Eelam( referendum in Canada )

As you know, the political vacuum left by LTTE after its debacle in Mulliyavaikkal can bring greater adversities to Tamils if they do not shake off from what happened there. Yes, there are many Tamil factions emerging in our circles since the brutal military victory of GoSL against Tamils back home. Any ambivalence of the broader Tamil public should not be replaced with anti-Tamil views that is what GoSL have already started to throw at us. Please be clear in one thing that as long as we do not deviate from the Tamil nationalism, we're in the right direction regardless of any short-term adversities. Arguing about what good can bring whether forming the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam or supporting the Vaddukoddai Resolution, won't help us. But it is all about keeping our Tamil Nationalism alive in these troubling times until we get the right time to strike back. And that opportune moment can come in 10 years down the stretch or 50 years but we can wait for it.

Leaving our youth back home in harms way by escaping into Western countries we also have blood in our hands. If anything in doubt, please see the CH4 clip. How many of our Tamil women are raped by SLA? How many are quietly suffering inside for their current turmoil?

The least thing you can do Tomorrow is paying a visit to any polling center that is close by in your area.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Pictures won't hide the truth!




The evil acts by Srilankan armed forces against Tamils have reached another new low.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Sell-outs are on making, too familiar scenes once again!



One man who would have prevented the bloodbath in Eelam that was none other than Mr. Karunanidhi, instead he made his name as biggest traitor of all in Tamil history books.

What can you expect from a man who being married three times and a father of a rapist son – Stanley? Isn’t that his daughter, Kanimoli, who bought 250 acres of land in Srilanka in her recent visit of IDP camps in Vavuniya ? Well, call it as a business trip.


Another Sell-out, TNA MP, Sivanathan Kisor- is making.


Not long ago, 1000s of Tamils were massacred like dogs by Srilankan armed-forces with the help of regional powers such as India and China, who wanted their own interests protected at the cost of Tamil lives. Tamils around the world took to streets and begged everyone to save their brethren back home but the world turned its blind eye just as it did in Rwanda, Congo and Darfur. To make things easy, naive LTTE leadership took series of amateur decisions one after one that helped the enemy to put the final nail on our coffins. Now shell-shocked Tamils are in total disarray as many factions are already starting to emerge even within our own camps. Given the Tamil history, traitors- eddapans - are nothing new but the way they emerge before the Tamil-blood gets dry it shows they're so desperate to make a move either for their own interests or Stockholm Syndrome that took the toll on them.

If you're concerned Tamil, I would say you should pretend to be in a deep sleep for next 3 or 4 years until things get consolidated.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Officially the LTTE is done deal ?

Revisiting the dirt will only add the pain to Tamils who have no shortage in that aspect but finding solutions to an unanswered questions will help them to think differently even in these adverse circumstances. If you've noticed the LTTE's official statement few days back - passing the torch to the diaspora Tamils from now on regards to Eelam struggles - you can easily come to the conclusion that LTTE is no more. Since the arrest of KP, many pro-Tamil websites started to hit the dust , and also many anti-Tamil elements started to emerge through various channels by using the favorable circumstances.

It seems Colonel Ram is reported captured in the east, so there are no pockets remaining except those who have managed to flee oversees, which is not so many. One can wonder about what happened to Colonel Ram's cyanide? It tells that Colonel Ram and GoSL agreed on some sort of deal that would have provided safe passage to Colonel Ram, in return, he may have agreed to silence his guns.

Also we have seen Rajapaksha freely visiting places like Tirupati and Nepal, with no fear of being attacked. His relative visited Madurai today, again without fear of attack. Fonseka has relatives in Oklahoma without any security, but they are also untouched. So all of this points out to a complete collapse of LTTE with no members left anywhere. From the day Prabhakaran was killed there has not been a single attack in Sri Lanka of any type.

It was a very selfish and stupid strategy at the end, which is unexplainable except for delusion and insanity. The leaders would not let anyone escape alive, everyone had to die with them. I think people like Lawrence were likely executed when they tried to escape. First Tamilnet reported him killed, and then was told to change the story to him being injured. Prior to that there were rumors he was arrested. According to some insider news, Ilanthiraiyan was also executed by LTTE in the final week after finding out that he was an informant to GoSL for many of the LTTE's failed attacks, including the mission of Deepan-Durka that cost at least 500 lives of LTTE cadres.

And the story of "silencing the guns" is another ridiculous thing Tamilnet continues to mention. They only did it after every single LTTE fighter had been sacrificed and no one was left except the leaders. At that time they were restricted to a 100 meters area. That is just stones throwing distance. After every fighter having been killed and only leaders left in a few bunkers covering a tiny area of 100 meters, they announce they have silenced their guns to save the people! And immediately following that the first group of leaders tries to surrender. After forcing at least 30,000 LTTE fighters to be killed and 30,000 civilians to be massacred, the leaders wanted to silence their guns and surrender?

Monday, November 2, 2009

US to question Sri Lanka army chief over war crimes allegations

By Randeep Ramesh, South Asia correspondent
A video grab shows civilians fleeing a strip of land held by Tamil rebels

A video image shows civilians fleeing a strip of land held by Tamil rebels during the civil war. Photograph: Reuters/Reuters

Sri Lanka today objected to attempts by the US to question the chief of its army over allegations of war crimes during the final stages of the conflict with the Tamil Tigers.

US immigration authorities told General Sarath Fonseka, who is currently visiting his daughters in Oklahoma, that they would like to interview him before renewing his green card.

The Sri Lankan government said it was "worried" about the questions he might have to face because the US state department had made "allegations of crimes committed by the Sri Lankan armed forces".

Officials in Colombo are concerned that the US could also seek to ask the army chief about the involvement of the defence secretary, Gotabaya Rajapaksa – the brother of the Sri Lankan president and a US citizen – in the war.

The Sri Lankan embassy in Washington has retained lawyers from Patton Boggs, a leading law firm, to make the case that Sri Lanka could resist US attempts to question Fonseka over the defence secretary's conduct.

Fonseka and Rajapaksa are seen as the brains behind the government's bloody victory in May, which saw the Tamil Tiger leadership wiped out on the Indian Ocean island's north-eastern beaches.

Tamil groups have long urged the US to prosecute both the general and the defence secretary for what they describe as "genocide".

Bruce Fein, a lawyer for the US-based group Tamils Against Genocide, has argued that the political justification for a genocide investigation was strengthened because the "United States has been vocal with Serbia, Bosnia and other nations about policing and punishing their own citizens or residents for genocide".

There have been persistent allegations of war crimes committed during the final months of the 25-year Sri Lankan civil war.

Last month, the US state department's leading war crimes official, Stephen Rapp, called on Sri Lanka to conduct a "genuine" investigation into allegations of war crimes by both government troops and the Tigers.

Rapp's statement came as the state department released a 68-page report, based on US embassy findings, satellite imagery and aid agencies accounts, that painted a bleak picture of civilian life in a war zone under constant bombardment and where the death toll was rising. According to the UN and human rights groups, between 7,000 and 20,000 civilians were killed in the north-east between January and May.

The report blamed both the government and the Tigers. It said rebels had shot people trying to flee from their territory, forcibly recruited child soldiers and used suicide bombers.

But it also alleged that government forces shelled civilian populations, hospitals and schools in rebel-controlled territory, often in areas that had been described by the authorities as no-fire zones.

The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy, who wrote the legislation requiring the report, said it "eliminates any reasonable doubt that serious violations of the laws of war were committed by both the LTTE [Tamil Tiger] rebels and Sri Lankan government forces".

Sri Lanka dismissed the document as "unsubstantiated and devoid of corroborative evidence" .

Since then, Colombo has promised to investigate the final stages of the war, but many observers have raised doubts over its commitment to investigating itself.

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Survival of Maoists will pave the path to Tamil separate land in Sri Lanka, and India will pay the price for its game on Eelam Tamils.

By JIM YARDLEY for NY Times

BARSUR, India — At the edge of the Indravati River, hundreds of miles from the nearest international border, India effectively ends. Indian paramilitary officers point machine guns across the water. The dense jungles and mountains on the other side belong to Maoist rebels dedicated to overthrowing the government.

“That is their liberated zone,” said P. Bhojak, one of the officers stationed at the river’s edge in this town in the eastern state of Chattisgarh.

Or one piece of it. India’s Maoist rebels are now present in 20 states and have evolved into a potent and lethal insurgency. In the last four years, the Maoists have killed more than 900 Indian security officers, a figure almost as high as the more than 1,100 members of the coalition forces killed in Afghanistan during the same period.

If the Maoists were once dismissed as a ragtag band of outdated ideologues, Indian leaders are now preparing to deploy nearly 70,000 paramilitary officers for a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign to hunt down the guerrillas in some of the country’s most rugged, isolated terrain.

For India, the widening Maoist insurgency is a moment of reckoning for the country’s democracy and has ignited a sharp debate about where it has failed. In the past, India has tamed some secessionist movements by coaxing rebel groups into the country’s big-tent political process. The Maoists, however, do not want to secede or be absorbed. Their goal is to topple the system.

Once considered Robin Hood figures, the Maoists claim to represent the dispossessed of Indian society, particularly the indigenous tribal groups, who suffer some of the country’s highest rates of poverty, illiteracy and infant mortality. Many intellectuals and even some politicians once sympathized with their cause, but the growing Maoist violence has forced a wrenching reconsideration of whether they can still be tolerated.

“The root of this is dispossession and deprivation,” said Ramachandra Guha, a prominent historian based in Bangalore. “The Maoists are an ugly manifestation of this. This is a serious problem that is not going to disappear.”

India’s rapid economic growth has made it an emerging global power but also deepened stark inequalities in society. Maoists accuse the government of trying to push tribal groups off their land to gain access to raw materials and have sabotaged roads, bridges and even an energy pipeline.

If the Maoists’ political goals seem unattainable, analysts warn they will not be easy to uproot, either.

Here in the state of Chattisgarh, Maoists dominate thousands of square miles of territory and have pushed into neighboring states of Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand and Maharashtra, part of a so-called Red Corridor stretching across central and eastern India.

Violence erupts almost daily. In the past five years, Maoists have detonated more than 1,000 improvised explosive devices in Chattisgarh. Within the past two weeks, Maoists have burned two schools in Jharkhand, hijacked and later released a passenger train in West Bengal while also carrying out a raid against a West Bengal police station.

Efforts are under way to open peace negotiations, but as yet remain stalemated. With the government offensive drawing closer, the people who feel most at risk are the tribal villagers who live in the forests of Chattisgarh, where the police and Maoists, sometimes called Naxalites, are already skirmishing.

“Earlier,” said one villager, “we used to fear the tigers and wild boars. Now we fear the guns of the Naxalites and the police.”

The counterinsurgency campaign, called Operation Green Hunt, calls for sending police and paramilitary forces into the jungles to confront the Maoists and drive them out of newer footholds toward remote forest areas where they can be contained.

“It may take one year, two years, three years or four,” predicted Vishwa Ranjan, chief of the state police in Chattisgarh, adding that casualties would be inevitable. “There is no zero casualty doctrine,” he said.

Once an area is cleared, the plan also calls for introducing development projects such as roads, bridges and schools in hopes of winning support of the tribal people. Also known as adivasis, they have faced decades of exploitation from local officials, moneylenders and private contractors, numerous government reports have found.

“The adivasis are the group least incorporated into India’s political economy,” said Ashutosh Varshney, an India specialist at Brown University, calling their plight one of the “unfinished quests of Indian democracy.”

The Maoist movement first coalesced after a violent 1967 uprising by local Communists over a land dispute in a West Bengal village known as Naxalbari, hence the name Naxalites.

Some Communists would enter the political system; today, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is an influential political force that holds power in West Bengal. But others went underground, and by the 1980s, many found sanctuary in Chattisgarh, especially in the region across from the Indravati River known as Abhujmad. From here, the Maoists recruited and trained disgruntled tribal villagers and slowly spread out. For years, the central government regarded them as mostly a nuisance. But in 2004, the movement radicalized, authorities say, when its two dominant wings merged with the more violent Communist Party of India (Maoist).

Keith Bedford for The New York Times

Indian officers patrolled a forest around their base in Barsur, right on the edge of rebel-controlled territory in Chattisgarh.


Indigenous women walked to a market in Chattisgarh State, where villagers are caught between the Indian government and Maoist rebels.

Authorities in Chattisgarh then deputized and armed civilian posses, which have been accused by human rights groups of terrorizing innocent villagers and committing atrocities of their own in the name of hunting Maoists. Now, violence is frequent, if unpredictable, like the ambush near the village of Laheri, in Maharashtra State, carried out by the Maoists on Oct. 8.

That morning, following a tip, a police patrol chased two Maoist fighters and stumbled into a trap. Two hundred Maoists with rifles and machine guns lay waiting and opened fire when the officers came into an exposed area of rice paddies. Seventeen officers died, fighting for hours until they ran out of ammunition.

“They surrounded us from every side,” said Ajay Bhushari, 31, who survived the ambush and is now the commanding officer in Laheri. “They were just stronger. They had more people.”

The Maoists felled trees across the only road leading to the village. The police, already wary of using roads because of improvised explosive devices, marched their reinforcements 10 miles through the jungle, arriving too late at the scene.

Officer Bhushari said violence in the area had risen so sharply that the police now left the fortified defenses of their outpost only in large groups, even for social outings. The Maoists also killed 31 police officers from other nearby outposts in attacks in February and May.

“It’s an open jail for us,” he said. “Either we are sitting here, or we are on patrol. There is nothing else.”

About 40 miles from Laheri, a processing plant owned by Essar Steel has been closed for five months. Maoists sabotaged Essar’s 166-mile underground pipeline, which transfers slurry from one of India’s most coveted iron ore deposits to the Bay of Bengal. “I’ve told my management that I’ll take a team and do the repairs,” said S. Ramesh, the project manager for Essar. “But I can’t promise how long it will last.”

The Essar plant is part of broader undertaking by the government and several private mining companies to extract the resources beneath land teeming with guerrillas. Mr. Ramesh said 70 percent of India’s iron ore lay in states infiltrated by Maoists; production in this area is stalled at 16 million tons a year even though the area has the potential to produce 100 million tons.

Mr. Ramesh fretted that India’s growth would be stunted if the country could not exploit its own natural resources. Yet he also cautioned that the counterinsurgency operation was no cure-all. “That alone is not going to help,” he said. “We are not fighting an enemy here. We are fighting citizens.”

With police officers dying in large numbers and Maoists carrying out bolder attacks, the debate around the insurgency has sharpened in India’s intellectual salons and on the opinion pages and talk shows.

The writer Arundhati Roy recently called for unconditional talks and told CNN-IBN that the Maoists were justified in taking up arms because of government oppression. Others who are sympathetic to the plight of the adivasis say the Maoist violence has become intolerable.

“You can’t defend the tactics,” said Mr. Varshney, the Brown University professor. “No modern state can accept attacks on state institutions, even when the state is wrong.”

Local people are caught in the middle. On a recent market day in the village of Palnar, women balancing urns of water on their heads and bare-footed, emaciated men came out of the forests to shop for vegetables, nuts or a rotting fruit fermented to produce local liquor. As peddlers spread their wares over blankets, the nearby government office was locked behind a closed gate.

“It’s a bad situation,” said one villager who asked not to be identified, fearing retribution from both sides. “The Naxalite activities have increased. They have their meetings in the village. They tell the people they have to fight. The people here do not vote out of fear.”

Another man arrived on a motorcycle from a more distant village. Several months ago, the police raided his village and arrested more than a dozen people after accusing them of being collaborators. A few were Maoist sympathizers, the man on the motorcycle said, but most were wrongly swept up in the raid. Now, Operation Green Hunt portends more confrontation.

“Life is very difficult,” the man said. “The Naxalites think we are helping the police. The police think we are helping the Naxalites. We are living in fear over who will kill us first.”

Friday, October 23, 2009

Sri Lanka Pressed to Investigate Possible War Atrocities - NY Times.

By LYDIA POLGREEN and VIKAS BAJAJ

International pressure is mounting on Sri Lanka’s government to investigate atrocities that may have been committed during the final stages of its war with the Tamil Tiger insurgency as two new reports from the European Union and the State Department detailing alleged human rights abuses were released this week.

The reports come as Sri Lanka also faces intensifying criticism for its decision to keep more than 250,000 Tamils who were displaced by the fighting in closed camps that critics have likened to internment camps. The government says it plans to allow 80 percent of these people to return to their homes by the end of January, but insists that it must first weed out any remaining Tamil Tiger rebels hiding among them.

The European Union report in particular, which could lead to the withdrawal of trade concessions worth tens of millions of dollars to Sri Lankan garment and fisheries industries, represents the first time the Sri Lankan government has faced a serious sanction as a result of its conduct of the war.

Economists and business officials said the loss of the trade concessions, known as GSP-plus, could be a serious blow to an already ailing Sri Lankan economy. The country’s large garment industry will likely bear the brunt of the impact because as much as 60 percent of the country’s apparel exports go to the European Union.

Tariffs on some products could go from zero or near zero to between 5 percent and 18 percent, said E. M. Wijetilleke, the secretary general and chief executive of the National Chamber of Commerce of Sri Lanka. Such increases could sink smaller companies that cannot cut costs to match bigger and lower-cost producers in China and India, he added.

“Some small-scale firms will not be able to survive and they will have to lay off the workers from their jobs,” Mr. Wijetilleke said. “There will be a huge impact on the economy.”

The garment industry in Sri Lanka employs about 270,000 workers directly and an additional 50,000 indirectly, according to estimates by Oxford Analytica, a research firm.

The State Department report , which was released Thursday, was largely a catalog of mostly unverified abuses by Sri Lankan forces and the Tamil Tigers based on reports from the American Embassy in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s largest city and commercial capital.

Because of limited access to the war zone by independent aid groups, human rights investigators and journalists, the report does not draw conclusions but urges the Sri Lankan government to investigate the allegations.

Questioned why the report did not take a tougher line, a State Department spokesman, Ian Kelly, defended the conclusions at a briefing with reporters this week.

He said the Obama administration was calling on the Sri Lankan government to open the closed areas to international scrutiny, to investigate the allegations and to bring to justice anyone responsible for atrocities.

So far, the Sri Lankan government has proved adept at eluding international scrutiny and seemingly indifferent to even the harshest criticism of the Western countries on human rights issues.

It successfully maneuvered its allies on the United Nations Human Rights Council to transform a stern demand for an international war crimes inquiry into a resolution celebrating its triumph over the Tigers. Efforts by Western countries to stall a $2.6 billion loan to Sri Lanka from the International Monetary Fund also failed.

International efforts to press Sri Lanka to release Tamil civilians from a vast network of army-run camps in the country’s north have borne little fruit. More than halfway to the government’s self-imposed deadline to let almost all of the displaced people return to their homes, fewer than 10 percent have been allowed to leave, according to the United Nations, human rights organizations and aid groups. And some who have left the camps have been settled in other camps rather than being sent home, according to Brad Adams of Human Rights Watch.

“I think it is fair to say now they never intended to keep their commitment to return the displaced because they have consistently reneged on their promises,” Mr. Adams said. “Their promises are not to the international community, they are to the people in the camps.”

Sri Lankan officials denied this, saying that the government had in the past few days begun relocating 41,685 people from the camps to their homes in what was the battle zone. They rejected the notion that the Tamil civilians were being held prisoner.

“It is not a concentration camp where they are, and they are not being taken to a lesser concentration camp anywhere else,” said Lucien Rajakarunanayake, a spokesman for Sri Lanka’s president, Mahinda Rajapaksa.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

KP's arrest led to many downfall of pro-Tamil channels?

It puzzles me that why "pro-Tamil" channel- www.puthinam.com- won't function anymore. Here is the message from its website.


தனிப்பட்ட காரணங்களுக்காக இந்த இணையத்தளம் இயங்கமாட்டாது என்பதனை அறியத்தருகின்றோம்.
This is to advise due to personal reasons this website will not be functioning anymore.

Friday, October 16, 2009

Happy Diwali to All !

India gets ready with new dress for Diwali while 300k+ Tamils who are confined into concentration camps in Vavuniya look for the ways to change the ones that they're wearing for months and weeks.

Friday, October 9, 2009

Behind The Sri Lankan Bloodbath

Thousands of noncombatants, according to the United Nations, were killed in the final phase of the Sri Lankan war this year as government forces overran the Tamil Tiger guerrillas. Nearly five months after Colombo's stunning military triumph, the peace dividend remains elusive, with President Mahinda Rajapaksa setting out--in the name of "eternal vigilance"--to expand by 50% an already-large military. Little effort has been made to reach out to the Tamil minority and begin a process of national reconciliation.

China, clearly, was the decisive factor in ending the war through its generous supply of offensive weapons and its munificent aid. It even got its ally Pakistan to actively assist Rajapaksa in his war strategy. Today, China is the key factor in providing Colombo the diplomatic cover against the institution of a U.N. investigation into possible war crimes, or the appointment of a U.N. special envoy on Sri Lanka. In return for such support, Beijing has been able to make strategic inroads into a critically located country in India's backyard.

Unlike China's assistance, India's role has received little international attention. But India, too, contributed to the Sri Lankan bloodbath through its military aid, except that it has ended up, strangely, with its leverage undermined.

For years, India had pursued a hands-off approach toward Sri Lanka in response to two developments--a disastrous 1987-1990 peacekeeping operation there; and the 1991 assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by a member of the Tamil Tigers. But having been outmaneuvered by China's success in extending strategic reach to Sri Lanka in recent years, New Delhi got sucked into providing major assistance to Colombo, lest it lose further ground in Sri Lanka.

From opening an unlimited line of military credit for Sri Lanka to extending critical naval and intelligence assistance, India provided sustained war support despite a deteriorating humanitarian situation there. A "major turning point" in the war, as Sri Lankan navy chief Admiral Wasantha Karannagoda acknowledged, came when the rebels' supply ships were eliminated, one by one, with input from Indian naval intelligence, cutting off all supplies to the rebel-held areas. That in turn allowed the Sri Lankan ground forces to make rapid advances and unravel the de facto state the Tigers had established in the island nation's north and east.

Sri Lanka, for its part, practiced adroit but duplicitous diplomacy: It assured India it would approach other arms suppliers only if New Delhi couldn't provide a particular weapon system it needed. Yet it quietly began buying arms from China and Pakistan without even letting India know. In doing so, Colombo mocked Indian appeals that it rely for its legitimate defense needs on India, the main regional power. It was only by turning to India's adversaries for weapons, training and other aid that Colombo pulled off a startling military triumph. In any event, Colombo was emboldened by the fact that the more it chipped away at India's traditional role, the more New Delhi seemed willing to pander to its needs.

Indeed, Rajapaksa deftly played the China, India and Pakistan cards to maximize gains. After key Tamil Tiger leaders had been killed in the fighting, Rajapaksa--to New Delhi's mortification--thanked China, India and Pakistan in the same breath for Sri Lanka's victory.

Today, India stands more marginalized than ever in Sri Lanka. Its natural constituency--the Tamils--feels not only betrayed, but also looks at India as a colluder in the bloodbath. India already had alienated the Sinhalese majority in the 1980s, when it first armed the Tamil Tigers and then sought to disarm them through an ill-starred peacekeeping foray that left almost three times as many Indian troops dead as the 1999 Kargil War with Pakistan.

India's waning leverage over Sri Lanka is manifest from the way it now has to jostle for influence there with arch-rivals China and Pakistan. Hambantota--the billion-dollar port Beijing is building in Sri Lanka's southeast--symbolizes the Chinese strategic challenge to India from the oceans.

Even as some 280,000 displaced Tamils--equivalent to the population of Belfast--continue to be held incommunicado in barbed-wire camps, India has been unable to persuade Colombo to set them free, with incidents being reported of security forces opening fire on those seeking to escape from the appalling conditions. One of the few persons allowed to visit some of these camps was U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who said after his tour in May: "I have traveled around the world and visited similar places, but these are by far the most appalling scenes I have seen ..." Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said recently that India has conveyed its "concerns in no uncertain terms to Sri Lanka on various occasions, stressing the need for them to focus on resettling and rehabilitating the displaced Tamil population at the earliest." But India seems unable to make a difference even with messages delivered in "no uncertain terms."

The story of the loss of India's preeminent role in Sri Lanka actually begins in 1987, when New Delhi made an abrupt U-turn in policy and demanded that the Tigers lay down their arms. Their refusal to bow to the diktat was viewed as treachery, and the Indian army was ordered to rout them.

Since then, Sri Lanka has served as a reminder of how India's foreign policy is driven not by resolute, long-term goals, but by a meandering approach influenced by the personal caprice of those in power. The 1987 policy reversal occurred after then Sri Lankan President J.R. Jayewardene--a wily old fox--sold neophyte Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi the line that an "Eelam," or Tamil homeland, in Sri Lanka would be a dangerous precursor to a Greater Eelam uniting Tamils on both sides of the Palk Straits. In buying that myth, Gandhi did not consider a simple truth: If Bangladesh's 1971 creation did not provoke an Indian Bengali nationalist demand for a Greater Bangladesh, why would an Eelam lead to a Greater Eelam?

Actually, the Tamils in India and Sri Lanka have pursued divergent identities since the fall of the Pandyan kingdom in the 14th century. While the Eelam struggle is rooted in the treatment of Tamils as second-class citizens in Sri Lanka--where affirmative action has been instituted for the majority Sinhalese and a mono-ethnic national identity sought to be shaped--the Tamils in India face no discrimination and have been fully integrated into the national mainstream.

Another personality driven shift in India's Sri Lanka policy came after the 2004 change of government in New Delhi, when the desire to avenge Gandhi's assassination trumped strategic considerations, with the hands-off approach being abandoned. That handily meshed with the hawkish agenda of Rajapaksa, who began chasing the military option soon after coming to power in 2005. "It is their duty to help us in this stage," Rajapaksa said about India. And Indian help came liberally.

In fact, such has been the unstinting Indian support that even after the crushing of the Tamil Tigers, India went out of the way to castigate the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, in June for shining a spotlight on the deplorable human-rights situation in Sri Lanka, including the continuing internment of internally displaced Tamils. India accused Pillay--a distinguished South African judge of Indian descent who has sought an independent international investigation into alleged war crimes committed by all sides in Sri Lanka--of going beyond her brief, saying "the independence of the high commissioner cannot be presumed to exceed that of the U.N. secretary-general."

The costs of lending such support have been high. New Delhi today is groping to bring direction to its Sri Lanka policy by defining its objectives more coherently, even as it struggles to respond to the Chinese strategy to build maritime choke points in the Indian Ocean region. Indeed, India has ceded strategic space in its regional backyard in such a manner that Bhutan now remains its sole pocket of influence. In Sri Lanka, India has allowed itself to become a marginal player despite its geostrategic advantage and trade and investment clout.

More fundamentally, the pernicious myth Jayewardene planted in Gandhi's mind triggered a chain of events still exacting costs on Indian security and interests. In fact, nothing better illustrates the fallacy Jayewardene sold Gandhi than the absence of a Tamil backlash in India to the killings of thousands of countless Tamil civilians in Sri Lanka this year, and to the continued incarceration in tent camps of 280,000 Tamil refugees, including 80,000 children. In fact, even as the Sri Lankan war reached a gory culmination, India's Tamil Nadu state voted in national elections for the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) led by Gandhi's widow, Sonia Gandhi, although that governing coalition had shied away from raising its voice over the Sri Lankan slaughter.

Today, the upsurge of Sinhalese chauvinism flows from the fact that the Sri Lankan military accomplished a task whose pursuit forced the mightier Indian army to make an ignominious exit 19 years ago. Consequently, Colombo is going to be even less inclined than before to listen to New Delhi. Indeed, the manner in which Colombo played the China and Pakistan cards in recent years to outsmart India is likely to remain an enduring feature of Sri Lankan diplomacy, making Sri Lanka a potential springboard for anti-India maneuvers.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Thamilvany Gnanakumar's eye witness story on Guardian Today about what happened in final days of war in Wanni

Here it is the link

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Lanka’s barbed wire

Indian Express

It is now three months since Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa declared the country “liberated” from Tamil Tiger (LTTE) rebels after a 26-year war. He said then that he wanted to settle most of the displaced Tamil civilians within 180 days — but today, with more than half that time elapsed, nearly 300,000 are still being held in “internment camps”, to which the media and humanitarian organisations have virtually no access. One person who was able to visit some of them in May was UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon. He said:

“I have travelled round the world and visited similar places, but these are by far the most appalling scenes I have seen...”

In mid-August these camps were flooded by downpours which, according to The New York Times, “sent rivers of muck cascading between tightly packed rows of flimsy shelters, overflowed latrines and sent hundreds of families scurrying for higher ground”. “We all knew that the monsoon rain would come,” says Nimalka Fernando, a Sri Lankan human rights activist and lawyer. “Many alerted the authorities. The government should have evacuated the displaced people earlier.”

Further, there is no public list of those being held in the camps, and many families do not know whether their loved ones are alive or dead.

The brutal and violent methods used by the LTTE during the conflict are beyond dispute. But while it was going on the government claimed to draw a distinction between LTTE fighters and the law-abiding Tamil population, whose genuine political grievances it would address later. So far, nothing like that has happened. Although it has screened out those it believes were LTTE cadres and sent them to separate camps, the government repeatedly extends its own deadline for releasing civilians in the main camps.

People who question this inside Sri Lanka, like Ms Fernando, are accused of being traitors in the pay of “the LTTE diaspora”, while outsiders are accused of using humanitarian concerns as an excuse for neo-imperialist intervention. Sri Lankan journalists who criticised the government have been arrested, beaten and in some cases murdered in broad daylight, while many more have fled the country.

In the last weeks of fighting an estimated 20,000 civilians lost their lives. Government forces are accused of shelling Tamil civilians and killing people who tried to surrender; the LTTE are charged with using civilians as human-shields, forcibly recruiting them as fighters and shooting those who tried to flee. There are rumours of mass graves but no independent observer has been allowed into the war zones to investigate.

As one of the five “Colombo Powers” which organised the historic Bandung Conference in 1955, Sri Lanka was, for many decades, a model member of the international community. Surely, the people of Sri Lanka do not want to compromise that enviable status, and with it their good standing in the groups, like NAM, that represent the developing world.

Friends of Sri Lanka worldwide, especially in the developing world, do not understand why President Rajapaksa chose Burma/Myanmar as the first country to visit after winning the war. They were concerned to read, on his own website, that one reason for this choice was that “the [Burmese] generals are increasingly finding it difficult to contain insurgent groups in the country’s northern frontier and are willing to learn some fresh lessons from President Mahindra Rajapaksa on how to defeat the enemy.”

That is not what the international community in general, and the developing world in particular, wishes to learn from Sri Lanka. Rather, friends of Sri Lanka were — and still are — expecting the country to be faithful to its democratic tradition and act on President Rajapaksa’s promises that the rights of minorities would be respected, that the displaced would be helped to return home, that prisoners would be treated humanely.

We do not believe that most in Sri Lanka agree with what some are saying in Colombo that developing-country governments can best deal with internal opposition by crushing it ruthlessly and treating any advice to respect universal principles of human rights and humanitarian law (which Sri Lanka agreed to uphold when it signed and ratified many treaties and conventions) as hypocritical.

This puts a heavy responsibility on all who are close to Sri Lanka’s ruling elite and on Asia’s key powers — India, Japan and China — which have been staunch supporters of the Rajapaksa Government and have channelled large sums of money in its direction (much of it, recently, for humanitarian purposes). It is time for the people of these countries to insist on a full account of how their money is being spent, and for their governments to say clearly that further economic and political support will depend on the following conditions being fulfilled:

First, the UN, Red Cross and voluntary agencies must be given full and unhindered access to care for and protect the civilians in the camps, and then help them return to wherever in their own country they choose to live.

Second, a list of all those still alive and in custody should be published, so that families can stop searching for loved ones who are dead.

Third, any who continue to be detained as alleged LTTE combatants must be treated in accordance with the provisions of international law, and urgently given access to legal representation.

Fourth, accountability processes must be established to ensure that international aid is not diverted.

Fifth, the Sri Lankan government should invite regional and international specialists in conflict reconciliation to help rebuild lives and communities.

Sixth, Sri Lanka should request or accept a full UN investigation into war crimes committed by all parties during the war.

The government has won the war, and the world shares the feeling of relief visible among Sri Lanka’s people. It remains for them to win the peace, and the rest of the world must help. That is the purpose of the demands listed above. World leaders as well as public opinion must insist on them, not only for the benefit of Tamils in general and the detainees in particular, but also for the hopes of democracy and human rights throughout Sri Lanka, and beyond. Peace won by the brutal humiliation of a people is rarely secure.

The writer is a former foreign minister of Algeria and UN special envoy.

This article was co-written by Edward Mortimer, senior vice-president of the Salzburg Global Seminar.




Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Sri Lanka: Access denied

The Guardian

The Sri Lankan government is hugely dependent on outside aid in its efforts to deal with the human consequences of the war which the island had to endure for more than a quarter of a century. High military spending, collapsed tourism revenues, disrupted agriculture, reduced trade, and, to make matters worse, natural disaster in the shape of the tsunami have all undermined the economy.

The government simply does not have the resources to undertake, without international help, the work of repairing infrastructure, restoring economic life, feeding and temporarily housing large numbers of displaced people, and then returning them to their old homes in conditions approaching normality. Long before the war reached its end earlier this year, United Nations agencies, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and scores of voluntary organisations were all present in Sri Lanka ready and anxious to mitigate the impact of the fighting on ordinary people. They were kept at arm's length by the Sri Lankan authorities, who brooked no interference with, or oversight of, their military campaign. There was reason to hope that, with victory, this attitude would change. Unhappily, it has not. Colombo is still severely restricting access to the north, particularly to the area of the final battles, and to the camps where an estimated 280,000 people displaced by the fighting are detained.

The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, came to Colombo a week after the war ended to ask for "unhindered access" to those camps. UN agencies have instead found themselves hampered in their attempts to bring in the materials to make life in the camps bearable, particularly vital as the monsoon breaks. Voluntary agencies have similarly found themselves blocked by regulations which seem to change weekly, if not daily, while some ICRC offices have been closed down on government orders. Independent travel by journalists is banned. In addition, the government reacts with fury to any criticism, from whatever source, of its slowness in getting the refugees out of the camps and back to their homes.

The secretary general's reward for the low-key approach he has taken to the Sri Lankan crisis since he assumed office has been to be ignored. Now the Sri Lankans have served an expulsion order on the Unicef spokesman, James Elder, after he warned that the monsoon would cause chaos and suffering in the camps. The Colombo government wants aid but it also wants to micromanage the way it is deployed and to bully those who have the job of delivering it. It is time that the donor nations and the agencies formed a united front to resist this unreasonable and ungrateful attitude.

Monday, June 8, 2009

Bodies of female Tamils molested and desecrated by Sri Lanka's Sinhalese army

Everyone please read the following article and see what barbarians the Sinhalese soldiers are. There is no solution other than Eelam. Even if it takes 100 years and a million martyrs, Eelam should be the aim of all Tamils.

பெண்கள் மேலான பாரிய பாலியல் போர் குற்றங்கள் (படங்கள் இணைப்பு)

http://www.tamilcircle.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5836:2009-06-07-07-28-46&catid=277:2009

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Sri Lanka doctors 'to be tried'

By Charles Haviland

A group of doctors who worked in Sri Lanka's rebel-held war zone are being held on suspicion of collaborating with Tamil rebels, the government says.

The doctors could be in detention for a year or more before being tried.

With journalists banned from the conflict zone, they became an important source of news about the fighting during the final bloody months of war.

Last month the Sri Lankan government defeated Tamil Tiger rebels fighting for a separate homeland.

Government infuriated

During the final phase of the war, the group of doctors treated wounded and ill patients admitted to the makeshift health posts in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eeelam (LTTE)-held zone encircled by government forces.

Two of them had been senior local health directors and the United States said they had "helped save many lives" while the UN called them "heroic".

But the Sri Lankan government was infuriated by the doctors' media interviews from the zone, in which they said some of the shelling there came from the government side and had killed civilians.

Human Rights Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe told the BBC they are being detained at the Criminal Investigation Department on "reasonable suspicion of collaboration with the LTTE".

"I don't know what the investigations would reveal but maybe they were even part of that whole conspiracy to put forward this notion that government forces were shelling and targeting hospitals and indiscriminately targeting civilians as a result of the shelling," he said.

The government says not a single civilian died as a result of its final offensive, despite international allegations to the contrary.

The minister says the doctors must be produced in court every month while investigations proceed pending possible charges.

He said the investigation could last up to a year, but there might be extensions to that.

Separately, Sri Lanka's foreign secretary, Palitha Kohona, has been speaking of the government-run camps where more than 250,000 Tamils from the war zone are detained.

He said everyone there had to be carefully screened, adding that it was "quite likely" that even many elderly people were "with the LTTE, at least mentally".

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

13,130 Tamil civilians missing from IDP camps



By Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press

UNITED NATIONS, June 2 -- With the UN already under fire for withholding and downplaying the number of civilian casualties in Sri Lanka, another ongoing controversy has opened up concerning the number of internally displaced persons detained in the IDP camps in northern Sri Lanka. Between May 27 and May 30 reports from the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs state that over 13,000 IDPs simply disappeared from the camps.

OCHA's May 30 report states that "276,785 persons crossed to the Government controlled areas from the conflict zone. This represents a decrease of 13,130 IDPs since the last report (Sitrep No.18) on 27 May 2009. The decrease is associated with double counting. Additional verification is required."

But earlier, OCHA had praised the "improved, systematic registration being undertaken in the camps."

UN sources in Colombo tell Inner City Press that senior UN officials above them, Sri Lankan nationals who are Sinhalese, are downplaying the 13,000 "missing" IDPs, which would otherwise be of much concern given the reports of disappearances from the camps, the seizing of teenage males for detention and females for other purposes, as UK Channel 4 asserted with on camera interviews.

These UN sources are surprised, since even Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is under fire for downplaying what has happened to the Tamils, that the UN would be so seemingly cavalier about 13,000 "missing" persons from almost entirely Tamil interment camps.

Meanwhile, in further fall out, journalist Poddala Jayantha, secretary of the Sri Lanka Working Journalists' Association, was kidnapped near his home and severely beaten with sticks before being dumped in a suburb of Colombo. The government had accused him of being too sympathetic to the Tamil Tigers -- or just to the Tamils. The UN, too, has its different way of trying to crack down on journalists.




Thursday, May 28, 2009

Over 30,000 Tamil civilians massacred by Sri Lanka army


Thousands of shallow graves are visible from the air.

By Catherine Philp in Colombo

More than 20,000 Tamil civilians were killed in the final throes of the Sri Lankan civil war, most as a result of government shelling, an investigation by The Times has revealed.

The number of casualties is three times the official figure.

The Sri Lankan authorities have insisted that their forces stopped using heavy weapons on April 27 and observed the no-fire zone where 100,000 Tamil men, women and children were sheltering. They have blamed all civilian casualties on Tamil Tiger rebels concealed among the civilians.

Aerial photographs, official documents, witness accounts and expert testimony tell a different story. With the world’s media and aid organisations kept well away from the fighting, the army launched a fierce barrage that began at the end of April and lasted about three weeks. The offensive ended Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war with the Tamil Tigers, but innocent civilians paid the price.

Confidential United Nations documents acquired by The Times record nearly 7,000 civilian deaths in the no-fire zone up to the end of April. UN sources said that the toll then surged, with an average of 1,000 civilians killed each day until May 19, the day after Velupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the Tamil Tigers, was killed. That figure concurs with the estimate made to The Times by Father Amalraj, a Roman Catholic priest who fled the no-fire zone on May 16 and is now interned with 200,000 other survivors in Manik Farm refugee camp. It would take the final toll above 20,000. “Higher,” a UN source told The Times. “Keep going.”

Some of the victims can be seen in the photograph above, which shows the destruction of the flimsy refugee camp. In the bottom right-hand corner, sand mounds show makeshift burial grounds. Other pictures show a more orderly military cemetery, believed to be for hundreds of rebel fighters. One photograph shows rebel gun emplacements next to the refugee camp.

Independent defence experts who analysed dozens of aerial photographs taken by The Times said that the arrangement of the army and rebel firing positions and the narrowness of the no-fire zone made it unlikely that Tiger mortar fire or artillery caused a significant number of deaths. “It looks more likely that the firing position has been located by the Sri Lankan Army and it has then been targeted with air-burst and ground-impact mortars,” said Charles Heyman, editor of the magazine Armed Forces of the UK.

On Wednesday, Sri Lanka was cleared of any wrongdoing by the UN Human Rights Council after winning the backing of countries including China, Egypt, India and Cuba.

A spokesman for the Sri Lankan High Commission in London said: “We reject all these allegations. Civilians have not been killed by government shelling at all. If civilians have been killed, then that is because of the actions of the LTTE [rebels] who were shooting and killing people when they tried to escape.”

Saturday, May 23, 2009

First pictures of the devastated war zone in Sri Lanka

The following are photographs taken by reporters as they flew over the final war zone in Sri Lanka in a helicopter. No one has been allowed into this area since the final battle. There are reports that tens of thousands of wounded civilians were killed on the final three days of fighting. The Sri Lankan government has since cremated all bodies, and dumped the ashes into the sea.

























Thursday, May 21, 2009

11 Tamil women found brutally murdered in Sri Lanka concentration camps



By Gethin Chamberlain in Colombo

Reports are emerging from inside Sri Lanka's internment camps of brutal revenge being taken against Tamil Tiger fighters and the abduction of young children by paramilitary groups.

Detainees in one of the camps told the Guardian that a number of female Tamil Tigers have been murdered after giving themselves up to the authorities.

The bodies of 11 young women were allegedly found with their throats slashed outside the Menic Farm camp near the town of Vavuniya, according to people being held behind the razor wire perimeter. The women's short haircuts are understood to have made them easily identifiable as former members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The bodies are said to have been discovered in the last two weeks, but there is no way of confirming the allegations because access to the camps is heavily restricted.

On Wednesday the defence ministry said many of the estimated 250,000 people now inside the camps might have to stay for up to two years. Today the government changed tack and insisted it planned to return most of the civilians to their homes this year.

The allegations came as a coalition of humanitarian agencies claimed that paramilitary groups had gained access to the camps and were abducting children.

But aid workers say there is also a growing resentment among inmates in the camps against the LTTE over its treatment of the civilian population in the final months of the fighting and that many of the female cadres now shut inside are living in fear of reprisals. The government has categorically denied the allegations.

An official who has visited the camps recently – whose identity is known to the Guardian – said the women's bodies had apparently been found close to zone II of the camp, where about 70,000 of the more recent arrivals are living under canvas.

"A couple of weeks ago, 11 bodies were discovered. All these women had short hair. This is a tell tale sign of women newly recruited to the LTTE. According to unconfirmed reports, these women had their throats slashed," the official said. "According to my sources, there are about 1,000 cadres currently in zone III and II of Menic Farm."

The official said no one was sure who was responsible, but other female residents now feared for their safety. "They have heard reports of women being killed … so now women have told me they feel afraid."

Speaking to the Guardian through a third party with access to the camps, a number of those detained said they had heard about the discovery of the bodies outside the perimeter.

One man pleaded with the government to let them leave. "I don't know how much longer we can live like this. There are too many people. I don't know why the government won't start releasing us," he said. "There so many people who very clearly have no connections to the LTTE, that can be cleared of any wrong doing so easily".

"For example, I have no LTTE connection. I am an honest man. I only want to do what is best for my family. Why can't they let me and my family go?"

But Sri Lanka's disaster management and human rights minister, Mahinda Samarasinghe, cast doubt on the reports.

"I don't think it is happening because we would have heard about it," he said. "If something like that was happening the UNHCR would be the first to come to me and say they were angry about it, but they have not done that."

Some residents also complained about the disappearance of children from the camps and yesterday the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers said it had verified reports that children as young as 12 were abducted from the camps and the nearby town of Vavuniya.

The "[Some] have been taken away for ransom and their release has been subsequently negotiated by the parents, either by offering jewellery or cash," said Charu Hogg, Asia manager for the coalition, which includes Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Others had been abducted by paramilitaries and taken to army camps, presumably for questioning over ties to the rebel group, which frequently recruited child soldiers, she said.

The UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, is expected to arrive in Sri Lanka tomorrow to urge the government to ease access to the camps for the UN and other aid organisations.

Today a British Euro MP called for a ban on sporting and tourist ties with Sri Lanka. Robert Evans, chair of the European parliament delegation for relations with South Asia, said the England and Wales Cricket Board should suspend bilateral arrangement with Sri Lanka in the same way that it had done with Zimbabwe.

Sri Lanka minister admits army killed civilians





A former LTTE leader who defected to become a Sri Lankan government minister has given the first official admission that significant numbers of civilians were killed during the final offensive against the rebels.

In an exclusive interview with the Daily Telegraph, Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan, alias Colonel Karuna, said president Mahinda Rajapaksa had made a mistake when he claimed no-one died at the hands of the army.

His comments undermine the government's previous claims and will alert western diplomats gathering evidence on civilian deaths for a future war crimes case.

During his victory speech in the Sri Lankan Parliament on Tuesday, Mr Rajapaksa said his army had achieved a 'miracle' in winning the battle "without shedding the blood of civilians".

But according to Mr Muralitharan, the president was aware of what he called the "damage" and not accepting it had been a "mistake".

He said Tamil Tigers claims of 20,000 deaths were an overestimate but added: "There are casualties, and we have to appreciate the casualties because without them you can't rescue the people. They made a mistake. The president knows the damage."

He said he did not know the exact numbers, but according to the United Nations between 8,000 and 10,000 civilians died in the Sri Lankan army advance across the north of the island between January and May.

Some are believed to have been shot by Tamil Tiger fighters as they tried to flee the battle zone, while many died in army mortar attacks.

"I feel very sad for the people of the north. They are Tamil people and [the Tamil Tigers] did very bad things to them. When civilians tried to escape, including children, they were shot," he said.

Mr Muralitharan, now minister for constitutional affairs and national integration and vice-president of the ruling Sri Lankan Freedom Party, also challenged officials who earlier this week said more than a quarter of a million displaced civilians could be held in overcrowded camps for up to two years.

He called for them to be resettled quickly and said the wasted north of the island must be swiftly redeveloped to unify the country and help Tamils forget the past.

"There are a lot of landmines there, but after clearing, we can resettle. There's no need for two years, after one we can resettle," he said.

Mr Muralitharan said the north of the country had been destroyed by the war and now needed billions in international aid for redevelopment.

He said 95 per cent of buildings in three districts were destroyed and new schools, hospitals, roads, were needed while water, electricity and communications services would have to be restored. "The whole infrastructure needs completely rebuilding," he said.

His comments on the need to draw Tamils into a Sri Lankan future came amid new allegations that paramilitaries linked to the army were being used to pick out Tamil Tiger child soldiers in refugee camps. Some had been then been kidnapped for ransom, said the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers.

Mr Muralitharan was speaking shortly after he returned from identifying the dead body of his former leader, the once-feared Velupillai Prabhakaran.

Television footage had shown his corpse but there were questions over whether the body really was the rebel leader. Mr Muralitharan, who had served Prabhakaran for 20 years as his eastern commander, was sent to the battle scene to dispel doubts. "There is no doubt, it is his body. He was shot by the army," he said.

He said the Tamil Tiger leader was killed by a single shot to the head – the bullet had entered through the left side of his forehead and blown out the back of his skull.

He claimed they had been trying to escape with 18 fighters when the were confronted by Sri Lankan troops.

"They tried to escape into the jungle and crossed an army defence line. They scattered and they [the army] found him. They did not arrest him. He was with four people. They fired at the army and the army shot him. He was a coward leader," he said.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Sri Lanka bans ICRC from IDP camps; let the executions begin



By Robert Bosleigh in Colombo

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has been forced to suspend the distribution of emergency supplies to as many as 300,000 people displaced by the Sri Lankan Army’s victory over the Tamil Tigers after the Government blocked access to aid camps.

Fears have been growing over the welfare of those forced to flee the conflict zone – many of whom are sick or suffering from battlefield injuries – after tight restrictions were placed on the UN and other agencies trying to administer aid.

Urgently needed supplies of food and clothing had been suspended after access to the camps was restricted by the Government, an ICRC spokesperson told The Times this morning.

The ICRC had been the only neutral aid organisation allowed inside the conflict zone. It had between 20 and 25 staff on the ground in the northeastern region where the Tigers made their last stand over the weekend but has not heard from them since last week.

The blocking of access to the battle zone has raised fears for the fate of those civilians too sick or injured to flee the area by foot.

Those who escaped had to wade through a mine-strewn lagoon, journeying several days to reach camps that are struggling to cope.

Accounts of conditions inside the camps — gained from testimony recorded covertly by aid workers — and the journey to them are horrifying.

Preema, a Tamil woman, arrived at the 400-hectare (990-acre) Menic farm camp on Sunday. She had left Mullaivaikal, the centre of the fighting where the Tigers made their final stand, after being shelled heavily.

She set out with her husband, mother and two children, to wade through the Nandikadal lagoon — a waterway strewn with mines — in a desperate attempt to reach safety.

There were deep craters where the lagoon had been bombed and people often drowned, she said. Her mother died in the lagoon. A man offered to carry her ten-year-old daughter. Preema never saw them again. Her husband was taken away by government troops after admitting that he had worked for the Tigers. He was stopped at a checkpoint in Oomanthai where refugees are being forced to strip before being allowed to pass.

“Everything is lost,” said Preema, holding her son, seven. “Please help me find my daughter. Not knowing anything is making me crazy.”

Inside one camp, Nandani, 76, described being forced to stand for up to five hours a day queueing for food.

Kala, a middle-aged woman, spoke about the constant indignities of her new life. “I do not have underwear. I am unable to use the Kotex that the Red Cross handed out,” she said, holding a packet of sanitary towels she had been given before the organisation’s access to the camp was restricted.

Kothai, another woman, said: “There is a bad distribution system within the camp. Every time it is the same people that get. Men crowd around and push the women and children aside.”

Government officials did not answer requests for comment. Access for aid agencies to another 200,000 refugees already in the internment camps — which the Government call “welfare villages” — has been severely restricted since Sunday, preventing the administration of basic care.

Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General, is due to travel in Sri Lanka on Friday to offer help to rebuild the ravaged northeast of the country and urge the Government to reach out to the Tamil population.

“These people have endured one of the cruellest military sieges of modern times — daily shelling over several months,” an international aid worker said. “They need urgent help.”

There are fears that the camp populations — especially children — will be hit by contagious diseases. Chickenpox, hepatitis A and dysentery outbreaks have been reported. Medical facilities are said to be woefully inadequate.

There are also concerns that the suffering will radicalise previously moderate Tamils, especially amongst the community’s international diaspora, which had been a key source of funding for the Tigers.

Most Sri Lankans are delighted by the defeat of the Tigers, a terrorist force that fought for 26 years for an independent Tamil homeland, propagating a war that left at least 70,000 dead. Many Tamils were against the rebels after they recruited child soldiers and terrorised their own people.

There were doubts over the sincerity of President Rajapakse’s pledge to build bridges between the Sinhalese and Tamil minority. He has seldom brooked dissent, his opponents say.

The Government is worried over the security situation, and is urgently trying to screen any escaped Tamil Tiger fighters from innocent civilians.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

LTTE leadership likely executed after being tricked into surrender

It appears Prabhakaran and senior leaders were betrayed, possibly by an unknown senior leader, and tricked into surrendering to the Sri Lankan army, after which they were all executed with a shot to the head. It is impossible that both Charles Anthony and Prabhakaran could have been shot directly between the eyes in combat. Several Sri Lankan soldiers have been bragging about events surrounding the execution of the LTTE leadership, including members from the non-combatant civil services wing and even family members of LTTE leaders. We will not go into details of what they say, but it seems to confirm that LTTE leaders were all tricked into surrendering and then cruelly executed.

Prabhakaran was never the person communicating with the Sri Lankan army and the IC. So he had no way of knowing what the real position was, except from what he was told. It would have been very easy for a traitor to convince him that the Sri Lankan army had agreed under IC pressure to a laying down of arms and then negotiations.

Soosai's name seems to have been kept out of most defence.lk reports, making him look like a suspect. But if it was him, they would not have mentioned his wife and children being arrested. It would be better just to escort them away and keep everything a secret. Whatever the case, I am sure there is one or more traitors who are still living, but listed as killed by the Sri Lankan army to give them a new identity. There have been moles inside the LTTE for several years, and the many assassinations are proof of this.

Also note this shocking evidence. The two photographs of Charles Anthony released by the Sri Lankan government (one showing him dead, and one showing him alive) are wearing the exact same clothes. In the living photo he is wearing the same shirt that he was killed in. It appears they took this photo after he was arrested, just before executing him. Please see the photos below:





Please note that there has never been a recent photo available with the Sri Lankan government showing Charles Anthony until the day they recovered his dead body. What is the chance of this? In all of the other reports they released over the last several weeks they have been showing very old photos of him in LTTE uniform, which were clearly taken several years ago. But the day they find his dead body (with a bullet wound directly in the head), they also release a new photo of him which perfectly matches his present looks, and is wearing the exact same clothes as when he was killed. The hair and mustache is even cut to the exact same size and shape. It is clear this photo was taken just hours before he was cruelly executed by the Sri Lankan army with a shot to his head.

This is further proven by the fact that in videos of the body, there are pools of fresh wet blood pouring out of the wounds on his body. This is only possible if the video was taken immediately after he was killed. If he had been killed in combat, or if he had committed suicide, the blood would have already coagulated and would not create fresh puddles when they placed him on the tarpaulin.

Monday, May 18, 2009

Prabhakaran still alive and safe: KP

LTTE international spokesman K. Pathmanathan tells Channel 4 News in UK that LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran is alive and safe in an undisclosed location.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Latest Interview with LTTE head of international relations, Selvarajah Pathmanathan

A key Tamil Tiger leader has spoken exclusively to Channel 4 News, saying their chief is still alive and they want a political solution. Alex Thomson reports.




Alex Thomson (AT): What is the latest situation for LTTE in Sri Lanka?

Selvarajah Pathmanathan (SP): Our organisation is ready to lay down its arms and participate in the peace process.

AT: How many cadres or soldiers are involved here?

SP: Less than 2000 cadres. They are in the perimeter area. We prepared to stop the war. Our people are dying. Every hour more than a hundred dying. More than 3000 die from yesterday. 25,000 wounded.

AT: These are civilians, yes?

SP: Yes.

AT: What are you calling on the Sri Lankan government to do?

SP: From yesterday we are calling on talks to stop the fighting and immediate ceasefire. We are ready to lay down the arms and participate in the peace process.

AT: Is this end of the war after all these wars?

SP: Yes we'd like to end this war.

AT: What do you say that the LTTE will continue fighting by other means, guerrilla war?

SP: I believe that over the 38 years we fight and only the civilian and human life are every day dying. The...in another 30 years will continue we don't believe that - we believe in peaceful way for solution for Tamil people.

AT: What are the orders from the LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran ?

SP: Prabhakaran actually ordered that. For 4 hours I talked to him - he passed this message to Sri Lanka Government and international players...and we are waiting for their answer. Until now no one give their answer or no one stop the war.

AT: Is Mr Prabhakaran still in this area in Sri Lanka?

SP: Yes sir.

AT: And you spoke to him from this surrounded area, and he is ready to surrender?

SP: Not surrender. We are lay down the arms not surrender.

AT: Why not surrender?

SP: Actually its mainly a thing...about security...we take arms for freedom struggle - why surrender to them. We ready to work with them not surrender.

AT: Why did LTTE take so many human shields and not allow them to leave?

SP: We never take the civilian with us. The civilian they are relative our family or the related. Or they don't believe Sri Lankan army will give security to them. They don't like to go to camp. As you know they torture and harassment. They don't want to go to Sri Lanka forces. The government stop medicine and food. People are dying without. We asked - we sent 35,000 out ourselves. We don't take human shield. It's the wrong information. Wrong propaganda.

AT: So its not true then that LTTE cadres fired on civilians to prevent them leaving?

ST: Actually we never shoot them. Some crossfire happened. Why would we kill our own people?

AT: Can I ask about the two doctors who were giving interviews about the condition of the civilians. They have disappeared?

SP: Last night one doctor injured. We send them to the military side. And for the treatment. Actually now I heard one doctor in Colombo for treatment other in military camp.

AT: To summarise, the condition of the commander Pr...LTTE are willing to lay down weapons but not surrender?

SP: Yes not surrender - willing to lay down arms not surrender.

AT: So is the war over or changing?

SP: War maybe over or changing to political way. Depending on few hours to see what going on. We are saying...willing to lay down arms...willing to lay down arms and find political solution for our nation.