Sri Lankan Puppets In The Hands Of
Emerging Superpowers
By Richard Dixon
04 June, 2009
Countercurrents.org
We all wept when the Asian Tsunami took the lives of thousands
When the Asian Tsunami struck the shores of Sri Lanka , more than thirty thousands died instantly. They stopped breathing in minutes after they were swept into the ocean. Their last chapters were very brief.
News channels from major broadcasting networks were showing the horrors of tsunami twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. Media and Sports personalities appealed for aid. We packed gifts and took it to our churches and schools. Nations of the free world gave billions as aid to a country that still treats its Tamil minorities as second class citizens.
But the world remained silent when thousands of women and children experienced painful slow death in the killing fields of Sri Lanka
Another disaster struck the Tamils of Sri Lanka recently and this was a war conducted with many hidden agendas. More than fifty thousand innocent Tamil civilians were killed and thirty thousands were maimed in one of the most brutal wars in the history of the mankind. This war has cost more lives than the Asian Tsunami in this tear drop island.
Men, women and children were forced to live inside bunkers without food and medicine for months. Innocent civilians were bombed and killed by Chinese F7s and Russian MIGs in schools, hospitals and public places. Heavy artilleries and banned weapons were used against the helpless and vulnerable.
Many had to experience slow and painful death. Wounded civilians were bombed even when they were being treated in makeshift hospitals. Food and medicine were denied deliberately to the sick and to the needy. Women and children had to witness horrors after horrors.
News channels in the west didn't give much importance to this man made tsunami that was orchestrated by some world powers. Media and Sports personalities who regularly talk about poverty elimination in Asia and Africa didn't even lift a single finger to save the innocent lives.
Corrupt leaders in the UN failed in their duties. Instead of protecting the vulnerable, they danced to the wrong tunes that were played by the wrong people
UN and other international organisations who are supposed to protect the vulnerable, acted like they were also part of a mysterious game that took the lives of thousands. Many had the powers to stop the destruction but they didn't do it because they didn't want to.
The way how the diplomats and the leaders of some Nations spoke and acted during the war, made many to doubt that they were all acting out a script, written by some aliens from space.
Many leaders including the UN Secretary General kept their mouths shut and spoke only a little when they had to. Vijay Nambiar, the Head of Staffs at UN and other UN representatives went to Sri Lanka few times to negotiate a ceasefire but they failed because they had their own agendas.
They had miserably failed in their roles and had provided their full support to a regime that had committed crimes against humanity.
Some Indian leaders who were orchestrating the war in Sri Lanka visited Colombo few times not to arrange a ceasefire, not to stop the war, not to talk about the civilian causalities but to monitor the progress of the war and to congratulate the Sri Lankan authorities.
They always talked about receiving the head of the rebel leader on a platter and a piece of document with the proof of his death. This was to deceive the world that they were only after the rebel leader and the war was not about military strategies in the region and India having access to the oil reserves found in the Seas of Sri Lanka .
Only person who came across as a genuine defender of human rights was Hon. David Miliband. He confronted the Sri Lankan authorities about the deaths caused by the usage of heavy and banned weapons against civilians. As usual David Miliband or anybody who talks about human rights violations in Sri Lanka are called white tigers, brown tigers or yellow tigers depending on the colour of their skin.
War on Terror is over but the Killings haven't stopped
Sri Lankan authorities had declared that they had killed the rebel leader and decimated his group. According to them, terrorism has now been wiped out from Sri Lanka .
But the ground realities are telling us a different story. War is over but the killings haven't stopped yet. Sri Lankan government hasn't finished with the Tamils. Every Tamil man, woman and child is considered as a suspect. Under the emergency rules, Sri Lankan forces have the right to arrest or kill anybody they consider as a suspect. Living as a Tamil in Sri Lanka is like walking on a thin rope above a deep valley that is filled with deadly snakes.
So called war on terror and humanitarian operations are now over. But the killings are still continuing. One should now question whether the objectives of the war were genuine. No government on earth would bomb and kill fifty thousands people and make thirty thousands maimed and destroy an area twice the size of Singapore just to chop the head of just one rebel leader.
“Killings of Tamils” started after Sri Lanka gained independence in 1948 and this will continue till the government of Sri Lanka come up with a constructive plan to address the grievances of the Tamil community in this island.
How is the world responding to the massacre of Tamils?
Forty seven nations came together to vote on Sri Lanka . Majority voted in favour of Sri Lanka and they all took a stand that what had been happening in Sri Lanka was an internal issue. They voted to congratulate Sri Lankan Government on its victory over the Tamil Tigers and to ignore calls for an inquiry into possible war crimes.
United Nations Human Rights Council has now lost its credibility. This body has totally lost its purpose for which it exists.
According to the majority who voted in favour of Sri Lanka , their message was very clear. “No matter what Sri Lanka does to the Tamils, we will stand shoulder to shoulder with the Sri Lankan government because we also have skeletons in our closets. Let them bomb and kill innocent women and children. Let them starve them to death. Let them deny medicine to the wounded. Even if they kill all the Tamils and dump them in mass graves, we will still support this terror island because we have our own interests and hidden agendas in the region”
This is the state of the world now. Many of these countries no longer care about human rights but are only interested in satisfying their own greed.
I often wonder if voting is a great idea in emergency situations where the majority is not at all interested in saving lives but having their focus on destructive policies in order to look after their own interests.
If a building is on fire, it is not sensible to have voting and then decide not to go and save lives when the majority is not interested. We don't have voting to rescue the passengers from a sinking ship. Even if we have one, the focus will not be on whether to save the people or not but on how to save the lives.
Human Rights Council should now be discussing about helping the innocent civilians who are abused in the Nazi Style concentration camps in Sri Lanka . It is a disgrace to the whole humanity that a green light has now been given to any country that wants to wipe out its minority.
Could we have avoided this bloodshed?
The answer is “Yes ”, but there were many beneficiaries in this war. Therefore many had decided not to stop the war but to let it to continue till the end, despite thousands of civilian causalities. Countries like India , China and Pakistan , who have traditionally not been in good terms, surprisingly became friends. They acted like vultures that came to an agreement to share a piece of meat, which they were desperately looking for.
Everybody knew what was happening. World leaders were listening to the casualty figures as a slow cricket commentary. Some of them made statements here and there, just for the sake of making it. Nobody had the boldness to stand up and say “STOP THE KILLINGS”. They had the power but they didn't do it.
UN was updating its score boards with the number of deaths taking place. Even when the score went up by thousands a day, they kept quite. They didn't open their mouths and speak about it.
US satellites were taking pictures of the killings but no attempts were made to stop the bloodbath. H earts of the nations became stones and the helpless perished so that the greedy could be satisfied.
Defenders of human rights and highly paid diplomats were hearing about the horrors in Sri Lanka while having their big breakfasts. They found these stories very boring. Experts and researchers in human rights were looking forward to publish their latest journal papers instead of doing something about saving lives.
Many western countries, although some had raised their voices, their statements were not strong enough to stop a regime that was determined to carry on with its destructive agenda.
Relatives of those who were dying in Vanni went to the streets of great cities of the world. They knelt down and cried before the kings and queens. They protested through various means. We didn't hear their cry but we found them very annoying because they blocked our streets. They did all that was possible to get the message across. But their cries fell on our deaf ears. If we did listen and acted, we would have saved thousands of lives.
Our radio shows were not about the reasons for the protests but we talked about how to get these protesters out of our streets. We are now happy because there are no more Tamil protests and many of the people who they were trying to protect are now dead.
It is very clear that this war was conducted with the full support of many countries .They could have persuaded the Sri Lankan government to stop the bloodshed especially after the rebels had announced their surrender.
Bloodbath could have been avoided but nobody was interested because all went according to their plans. Partners of this war had started to reap their benefits even before it had come to an end.
Who benefited from this war?
Sri Lankan government was used as a puppet in the hands of India and China for these countries to secure their interests in the region. Everybody is happy now, apart from an innocent Tamil community that is slowly being wiped out from Sri Lanka .
Sinhala extremists who have been killing Tamils for more than sixty years in this country have a lot to rejoice for.
China has been fishing in the trouble spots of this world. It has once again achieved its goal by giving deadly weapons to the one it saw as the “strong man”. China has started many construction projects in the South of Sri Lanka including a port that will mainly be used by its Navy.
India has already started to draft project plans for oil explorations in the seas of Sri Lanka and now sending its experts to start many construction projects in the North and East of the country.
Although China and Pakistan had supplied most of the deadly weapons, they were neither involved in writing the script nor executing the script for the War.
Sri Lankan President had recently acknowledged that he fought India 's war in Sri Lanka . One of the former Indian High Commissioners has confessed that India has blood in its hands but India doesn't care about the plight of the Tamils in Sri Lanka .
War in Sri Lanka was not to do with the head of the rebel leader. Making a big deal out of the body of the rebel leader and all these victory speeches were not foolish acts but they were deliberately done by parties who want to hide all the deadly snakes under their carpets.
War Crimes in Sri Lanka
Number of war crimes that had been committed by the Sri Lankan forces is more than what Saddam Hussein did to the Kurdish people.
Surrendered rebels with white flags were executed and thousands of wounded civilians were killed without mercy. Serious war crimes have been committed and the culprits are not just Sri Lankan forces but some Indian security experts, Sri Lankan and Indian politicians and UN officers.
Banned weapons (cluster and phosphorus bombs) were used against innocent men, women and children. Red Cross workers were killed. The same hospitals were repeatedly bombed. Buildings and properties were destroyed by very powerful bombs.
Innocent civilians were forced to live inside the bunkers for months. Food and medicine were denied to them.
Sri Lanka is still hiding the evidences
Killing more than fifty thousands, wounding thirty thousands and forcing three hundred thousands in concentration camps will not convince anybody as a genuine humanitarian or rescue operation. These people never lived as hostages in the first place.
Sri Lanka knows that serious war crimes had been committed and they are now working to hide their atrocities.
Witnesses of these war crimes are mainly the people who came out of the war zone. They saw all that happened to them and to their loved ones. One of the main reasons why the Sri Lankan forces are not allowing journalists and aid workers into the IDP (Internally Displaced People) camps is because they want to hide their crimes.
Three doctors who served the wounded people in Vanni are considered as real heroes by the international community. Instead of appreciating their efforts, Sri Lankan government has locked them up in jail in order to hide the evidences of war crimes.
War came to an end two weeks ago but the journalists and aid workers are still not allowed to the war zone. When Sri Lanka declared that the war was over and all the civilians had been rescued, there were still thousands of wounded lying in the killing fields and many frightened civilians were hiding inside the bunkers.
Mass graves have become an outdated technique for the Sri Lankan forces. Sri Lankan authorities are still not allowing any journalists or aid workers to the war zone. It is taking quite a long time for the military to dispose thousands of dead bodies.
Recent announcement by the Head of Sri Lankan armed forces about how they cremated the rebel leader's body and threw the ashes into the sea is an indication that they are using the same technique on all the dead bodies. Sri Lankan forces might probably using mobile cremation furnaces to cremate the bodies in order to wipe out evidences.
It is obviously going to take sometime for them to finish this process considering the number of people died in the conflict. When everything is over, our BBC reporters will be taken to that area and they would tell us about a beautiful blue sky and golden flat sandy beaches in Vanni.
War crime evidences have already been collected
This is one of the controversial wars in the history. Although the Sri Lankan forces had barred all the reporters and journalists into the war zone, images and videos of the dying civilians were regularly sent out to individuals and organisations all over the world.
Communication systems were functioning in Vanni till the last minute. High resolution satellite images are available to prove the use of heavy weapons against the civilians. Last moments of the war had been captured by various technical devices.
It is a complete waste of time that Sri Lankan authorities are shutting the mouths of those in the IDP camps because many civilians who were stuck in the war zone till the last day were able to cross the waters and many had already reached the foreign shores.
Millions of evidences are already available to prove that Sri Lankan forces had committed war crimes and those who are responsible for these crimes should be brought to justice.
Horror camps for the Tamil civilians
Sri Lankan forces bombed and killed more than fifty thousands. Now they have locked three hundred thousands up in Nazi style concentration camps.
Ten to fourteen deaths are taking place daily in these notorious camps mostly among the children and elderly. Detainees are not allowed to meet their relatives and are not allowed to receive foods or cloths from their loved ones.
Sky news had recently reported about rapes and torture taking place inside these camps. Young people are disappearing daily. Dead bodies are thrown outside these camps.
Wounded and the sick and not given proper medical care. Sri Lankan government is still not allowing any international aid workers to these camps. Family members are purposely kept in separate camps in order to destroy the foundations of the entire Tamil race in Sri Lanka .
Can this happen again?
This will be repeated again in Sri Lanka or in some other parts of the world unless we bring the culprits to justice and restructure UN with the powers to deal with such wars in the future
War in Sri Lanka was orchestrated by India . Deadly weapons were given by China and Pakistan . UN and many Western Nations knew what was happening but they remained silent.
Are we going to allow something similar to happen in the future? Do these innocents have to die to satisfy the greed of some countries?
UN with its corrupt staffs has failed in their duties. They deliberately remained silent and didn't do anything constructive to stop the bloodshed although they had the ability to do so.
Sri Lankan leaders became puppets in the hands of some of these sleeping giants. Masters of this war should be brought to justice.
Role of UN in resolving any conflicts in the future is now in doubt. We desperately need an International body that can stand on its own and stop such crimes. There is no use in having an organisation that is completely powerless to stop the killings of the innocents.
Sri Lanka is now on radar
As far as Sri Lanka is concerned, Rebel leader is dead. LTTE is gone. More than fifty thousand civilians have been killed.
If everybody is happy with what they have achieved, the question is why the killings are still taking place? Tamils are still intimidated and their properties are burned throughout the country. Tamil women on the streets are harassed by Sinhala mobs.
This island might even witness another riot just like it experienced in the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties.
Those times, they sent the Tamils to the North and East. As the whole island is now filled with uniformed Sinhala men and women with arms, Tamils will have nowhere to run for their safety.
Danger of another Tamil rebellion
The Tamil Diaspora is not an alien to Sri Lanka . More than ninety percent of the Tamils among the Diaspora had witnessed what happened to their friends and relatives in Vanni. They saw their brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers dying helplessly. They communicated with their loved ones till the last days of the war and they all knew what was happening. Many of them have their relatives locked up in these notorious IDP camps.
Prabhakarans are not born but they are made. He did all that he did after witnessing many horrors. He saw Tamils being burned alive in the south of Sri Lanka . He saw properties of the Tamils being destroyed by Sinhala mobs.
If the oppression against the Tamils continues, Sri Lanka and even India might one day regret creating more Prabhakarans out of the Tamils from the Diaspora.
Minority indigenous Tamils who live mainly in the north and east of the country are one of the most oppressed communities on this planet.
Future of Sri Lanka completely depends on the steps taken by the Sri Lankan government. Policies based on racial and religious supremacy, attempts to continue with Sinhalasisation of the country through systematic Sinhala settlements in the Northern and Eastern provinces will escalate the conflict further and hit deadly levels.
This may not just destabilise Sri Lanka but will even have global repercussions.
Conclusion
Sri Lankan President and his ministers have recently acknowledged that they fought India 's war in Sri Lanka with the help of the weapons from China and Pakistan . Half of their crimes have now been confessed verbally by the Sri Lankan authorities.
Sri Lankan leaders have now become puppets in the hands of two emerging superpowers that are competing with each other. A conflict that was once confined within the boundaries of Sri Lanka has now become an international issue. Sri Lankan military muscles have now been artificially strengthened by their new masters. A country that once spoke to the West with a humble voice has now started to challenge many countries.
China 's opposition in the Security Council for the Sri Lankan conflict to be discussed in the formal meetings is an obvious evidence for China 's role in Sri Lanka 's war.
India , China and Pakistan found themselves on the same side with Sri Lanka in the United Nations Human Rights council. They all voted against war crime probes over alleged war crimes committed by Sri Lankan forces. This clearly shows that they all have blood in their hands.
Defendants of human rights and the world powers who fought many wars to restore freedom for their own citizens have now seen the faces of the master magicians who orchestrated the war in Sri Lanka .
Although India gave the strategic directions and China provided with the weapons for the war, it was the Sri Lankan armed forces that carried out the massacre of Tamil civilians. A country that is well known for slowly wiping out its minorities found a perfect opportunity to cause maximum damage to the innocent Tamils with the blessing of their new masters.
Now it is time for the civilized to world to decide whether to allow the Sri Lankan government and its friends who had caused so many thousands of deaths, to run these controversial Nazi style concentration camps.
We have all failed to save many lives in this war but it is still not too late to save the innocents that are still being abused, raped, tortured and killed in the barbed wired concentration camps.
Sixty years of State Terrorism in Sri Lanka
BBC journalist with the jubilant crowd in Colombo was telling us, how terrorism has now been defeated in Sri Lanka . It is a clear indication that the world still hasn't grasped the fundamental root cause behind the civil unrest in this country.
State terrorism has always been the major problem in this tiny island. It is an ugly and arrogant monster that always keeps his head above the seas and mountains of Sri Lanka .
For more than sixty years, successive Sri Lankan governments backed by racist Sinhala extremists have been oppressing the Tamil minorities. They brutally killed thousands of innocent Tamils, burnt their properties and sent the rest in ships as refugees to the North of the country in the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties .
When Tamils asked for their rights, Sinhala extremists always responded with violence.
Pearl of the Indian ocean has now become a land of the demons
They have now killed thousands of innocent Tamils in one of the most cruel wars in the history of the mankind. They used internationally banned weapons on innocent women and children and murdered them without showing any mercy.
They kept on using the buzz words “War on Terror” and “Humanitarian Operation” to justify their atrocities. They made the people to starve for months, denied medicine from the sick the elderly and let the wounded to die in the open fields.
They brutally killed the rebels who surrendered with white flags and violated all the norms of a conventional war.
They are now busy burning and dumping the bodies of innocent Tamils.
Media and aid workers are not allowed to the war zone because the Sri Lankan forces are working day and night to hide all the evidences.
Those who did manage to leave the war zone were sent to barbed wired concentration camps. Sri Lankan forces are regularly filtering out young people from the concentration camps and taking them for questioning. Many of these children don't return.
Young Tamil women are raped and tortured in these notorious camps. Dead bodies of the innocent Tamils are thrown outside the camps with deep wounds on their heads and necks.
Forced disappearances, random killings, rape, torture and the list goes on. Sri Lanka has become one of the worst countries in the world that telling the truth is considered as a crime and those who tell the truth are punished.
Pearl of the Indian ocean has now become a land of blood thirsty demons.
Experts of the free world have failed to see the bigger picture
Many military strategists, political analysts and terror experts in the free world have either failed to recognise the deeper issues in Sri Lanka or they have deliberately applied a methodology to cause one of the greatest humanitarian tragedies of the century.
In any conflict resolution or problem solving exercise, one of the most important parts is to see a bigger picture and define the problem accurately. What goes wrong very often is that the parties who come forward to solve an issue tend to focus on just part of the problem or they try to deal with the symptoms instead of the root cause.
It will be worse, when a party deliberately implement a wrong solution to a problem with hidden agendas.
When they do that, they don't just fail to solve the main issue but they even end up making the real problem much bigger.
Complexities in the Sri Lankan civil war very often make even the so called wise to misinterpret the truths and make decisions against the vulnerable in the society.
A complete jigsaw puzzle that shows a crying baby can be made into a monster if half of the pieces are removed.
Instead of becoming sympathetic towards the crying baby, the jigsaw player is now confronted with a monster that is made up of half of the pieces.
Those who considered that LTTE was the only problem had failed to understand that they were missing half of the pieces in the puzzle.
Implementing solutions without understanding a problem can cost innocent lives and what has happened in Sri Lanka in the last few months is a proof for this.
Lessons from Medicine
A fever is considered as one of the body's immune mechanisms to attempt a neutralization of a perceived threat inside the body, be it bacterial or viral. Carl Wunderlich discovered that fever is not a disease, but the body's response to a disease.
Any sensible Physician would try to find out the root cause of the disease instead of wasting time dealing with the symptoms.
Disease in Sri Lanka is State Terrorism that has been going on for more than 60 years.
Unless the root cause is dealt with, Sri Lanka will continue to hear the voice of the oppressed louder and louder.
Mankind has already lost its sanity
When BBC and other channels in the UK gave importance to the celebrations in Colombo but failed to mention about the thousands of wounded and dying Tamils in the war zone, one has to question if the mankind has already lost its sanity.
We can't bring peace to the trouble spots in the world with people who have heads but no hearts.
We desperately need diplomats who have the hearts for the oppressed and suffering people
Story of the Tamils
Tamils in Sri Lanka had their own nation before but it was merged with the Sinhala kingdoms during the British rule
When they left this beautiful island in 1948, it was left to function as one country. Democracy failed in Sri Lanka because the successive governments that came to power were always chosen by the majority Sinhalese.
Sinhala governments backed by the Sinhala Buddhist extremists, always tried to please the majority in order to remain in power. They came up with policies to discriminate Tamils in education, employment and other arenas. Sinhala was made the only official language and Tamils were made as second class citizens.
Tamils can be compared to the Jewish people who lived under the Nazi regimes. Even under persecution, they worked hard to make their lives better.
Sinhala governments had many times ordered their agents to kill Tamils and destroy their properties. More than two thousand Tamils lost their lives in 1983.All of them were murdered by the Sinhalese in the south of Sri Lanka . They were murdered in prisons, schools, hospitals and even in churches.
Successive Sinhala governments had implemented several state sponsored colonisation schemes that Tamil villages and towns were turned into Sinhala settlements. Many homes and farms in the eastern and north eastern provinces were forcefully taken from the Tamils and were given to the Sinhalese. Names of roads and towns in Tamil areas were changed from Tamil to Sinhala.
Tamil Libraries and cultural buildings were burned to dust in order to wipe out the history of Tamils from Sri Lanka . Highly intelligent Tamil youth were denied University places.
In 1981, Sinhala politicians ordered a Sinhala mob to burn and destroy the Jaffna public library. At that time it was South Asia 's biggest library . The 95,000 volumes of the Public Library destroyed by the fire included numerous culturally important and irreplaceable manuscripts .
After years of oppression under murderous Sinhala regimes, frustrated Tamil youth took arms to fight for the survival of Tamils and to reclaim the Tamil Kingdom that they had lost during the British rule.
Sri Lanka is no longer a safe place for the Vulnerable
Sadly, one of the greatest humanitarian tragedies of the century is taking place in front of our eyes.
Intervention of India and China has made the Sri Lankan ethnic issue much more complex . While the dogs are fighting for a bone, innocent Tamil civilians are dying like flies.
Response from the individuals, politicians, international organisations and heads of the states have shown to us that Sri Lanka is no longer a safe place for the victims but the wicked has a lot to rejoice for.
Justice has failed in this tear drop terror island. Killing fields of Sri Lanka are flowing with the blood of innocent men, women and children.
Tamils are persecuted in concentration camps. Young men and women are disappearing daily from these torture chambers.
Saving innocent lives is one of the greatest things we can do to show to the world that we obey our conscience and we are still humans.
If we are going to wait till we get the permission from Sri Lanka , that is never going to happen. A killer who is busy dumping the bodies of the innocents is not going to invite us and show us how cruel he is.
Urgent steps should be taken to save the dying Tamils from the hands of the brutal Sri Lankan regime.
