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.
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".
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.
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