The Latest Exercise in Tamil Genocide

Eelam Nation editorial, August 22, 2008

More than 120,000 people are literally on the run for their lives moving away from bombardments by the Sri Lankan army deliberately aimed at civilian targets killing and maiming the innocents. The civilian hospital in Mullaitivu is one of the major casualties in the list of civilian institutions recently destroyed, denying even the last remnants of medical help. The plight of the destitute people now living in the jungles and under trees has been exacerbated by the complete breakdown of the state apparatus meant to assist them, engineered by the Sri Lankan State itself, and the forbidding cost of transport. The position will get worse with the onset of the monsoons. An army that should assist in providing relief to the displaced people has turned hostile towards them.

They are left with postal services denied and even without the rudimentary state services hitherto rendered by the central government agencies of Mullaitivu and Killinochi, with services now having been transferred to the district secretariat in Vavuniya [on the other side of the front line], which is as good as no service. This is another phase of genocide in the anticipated 'final solution' to the Tamil question. The State is unwilling to protect its citizens, whom it calls its own, from the atrocities of its own armed forces.

This is another stage in the continuing programme of wanton extra-judicial murders of Tamil civilians, Members of Parliament, Christian priests, human rights activists; abductions, disappearances, unlawful arrests, detentions and assaults of Tamil journalists, torture, embargos, blockades of trunk routes essential for the transport of food and basic items, designed to starve the people. Now it is the turn of the rural Tamil masses to participate in the programme of the decimation of the Tamil people. If the percentage of the Tamil population is reduced, then the Sinhala polity has a greater majoritarian claim to deny equality to the Tamil people in the typical Sri Lankan style.

In a display of absolute callousness and cynical disregard for the suffering humanity and their dire plight, the defence spokesperson, Minister Rambukwella has the audacity to say that those displaced families should bear their adversity with a grin because it is sacrifice worthwhile making in return for an elusive liberation on the horizon. The only final liberation that these displaced people could hope for is a state of Nirvana.

The greater the sufferings heaped on the Tamil people, the more popular President Rajapakse becomes within the Sinhala constituency. Keeping the plight of the Tamil people intact as a convenient subject for his experiment, Rajapakse wants to use the coming Sabaragamuva Provincial Council elections to assess his popularity among the Sinhalese people in order to test the waters of his eventual chances in the Presidential elections with the spiralling cost of living and escalating inflation vis-a-vis his Tamil genocidal expeditions.

Abandoning the State’s responsibility of protecting and providing relief to its suffering people whom they are purporting to liberate, they make a ridiculous request to the international community to get the LTTE to allow these displaced families to go over to the government controlled areas--a classic example of the mournful crocodile pleading for the lamb to be sent over to its side to save the lamb from drowning.

The perception cultivated in the south is that all Tamils are terrorists and therefore should be treated so. Killing a Tamil therefore is killing a terrorist. Acts of the Sri Lankan army under the command of one who perfectly fits and lives up to the English dictionary meaning of a racist, sincerely believing that the country should be “ruled by the Sinhalese community which is the majority representing 74 percent of the population”, apparently signifying that the ethnic minorities, without question, should endure all the atrocities heaped upon them done with impunity with the patronage of the state.

The muted response to the current Tamil calamity from the mainstream media and the Tamil Godfathers in the Tamil Mafia is all part of the “Southern Consensus.”

Thank you.

In solidarity,

Eelam Nation Team!