On a Beach in Sri Lanka

by Stephen Coll, The New Yorker blog, May 13, 2009

Today, as for a number of weeks, at least fifty thousand Sri Lankan Tamil civilians are stuck as refugees on a beach in the northeast corner of their country, trapped between two combatants—the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a banned terrorist and separatist guerrilla organization—that have repeatedly shown an appalling indifference to their fate. Exactly what is happening on this beach is difficult to determine because there are few independent witnesses. It is clear, however, that this is essentially a humanitarian crime scene of large proportion.

The Tigers have a long record of forcible recruitments and violent coercion; there is substantial testimony that in their desperate Alamo-like condition, they have used the civilians on the beach as shields and involuntary recruits. The Sri Lankan government has a long record of bombing and shelling its own civilians, particularly the Tamil minority population that has suffered greatly in the island’s three-decade, on-and-off war. The latest news was that Sri Lankan artillery shells on Tuesday bombarded the only functioning hospital accessible by the remaining beach dwellers.

The Sri Lankan government evidently believes that it is on the verge of a final military solution to the Tamil war—the defeat of the L.T.T.E. It is uncertain whether it can actually achieve such a defeat. Where is Prabhakaran, the L.T.T.E.’s longtime cult leader, and the rest of the Tigers’ senior leadership? Are they hiding behind the trapped civilians, or have they long since made their escapes? The government is so fixated on this manhunt that it is prepared to let civilians continue to die and to defy the international criticism that its indiscriminate shelling and bombardment has brought. The Obama Administration has not sat on its hands here, by the way, as Mark Goldberg of The New Republic has described. But on the beach, things are not getting better.

At our meeting with British Foreign Secretary David Miliband yesterday, I asked him about the crisis. Here was his answer:

Bernard Kouchner and I went to Sri Lanka two weeks ago because of our feeling, first, that the crisis is very important, and, second, because it was getting no attention. And we couldn’t get it onto the Security Council agenda because of the debate that remains very, very acute between, broadly speaking, between liberal internationalism/liberal interventionism that says humanitarian crisis belongs on the Security Council agenda and an argument that the Security Council is only for regional threats to peace and security and fifty thousand civilians in a conflict zone, and two hundred thousand civilians in IDP camps, that’s not a threat to peace and security.

And that’s why we went. I think that there is no question that the L.T.T.E., the Tamil Tigers, are a murderous organization, and have foisted twenty-six years of misery on the people of Sri Lanka. However, democratic governments are held to higher standards then terrorist organizations. Democratic governments aren’t allowed to say that the ends justify the means. Democratic governments aren’t allowed to say that the battle to defeat terrorism is a reason for us to compromise on our own values. I suggested earlier that there are serious and credible organizations who are reporting that the commitment of the government of Sri Lanka not to use heavy weaponry in and around the no-fire zone or conflict zone has been breached and that is extremely serious. There is no question that the five key humanitarian questions that Bernard Kouchner and I raised, in respect to access to IDP camps, access to so-called screening facilities, food and water and medical deliveries into the conflict zone where allegedly fifty thousand people, according to the U.N. are in a three square kilometer area. With a war going on, that is a definition of Hell in my view. Those humanitarian issues have not been addressed.