International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC) which was involved in evacuating injured civilians, announced on Wednesday May 27 that it was suspending its aid operations due to difficulties caused by “additional restrictions” placed upon it by the Sri Lanka government.

"Since last weekend there have been additional restrictions imposed on aid organisations, including the ICRC," Paul Castella, the head of the group's Sri Lanka operations, told Al Jazeera.

"The authorities have said that because of security they had to restrict access to certain areas,” he said. “What is the take of these civilians and what the conditions are we don't know because we are not granted access to the area."

“Restrictions have led to a temporary standstill in the distribution of aid” to the main camp holding 130,000 people, Monica Zanarelli, deputy head of operations in South Asia for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said on the ICRC’s Web site.

Until last weekend, the ICRC had delivered water, food, personal hygiene kits, baby-care parcels, emergency household items and kitchen utensils to the camp, known as Menik Farm, in the country's north, which housed more than 130,000 refugees, Zanarelli said on the Red Cross website.

“The ICRC is not in a position to provide figures or even to know whether all casualties are receiving the care they require,” Zanarelli said.

Restrictions on access are “having a severe effect on the thousands of newly arrived displaced people. The ICRC and other humanitarian aid agencies deplore this unacceptable situation,” she said.

Some of the liberals in Western policy establishments and the Sinhala chauvinists running Sri Lanka’s state have for several years had more than a little in common. Both have long laid the blame for the island’s crisis wholly on the LTTE and the broader Tamil national movement. And both have advocated a military solution to the conflict, irrespective of the catastrophic cost to the Tamil people.

For many years, many in the liberal policy establishments of the West have argued that the LTTE and Tamil nationalists are the single biggest obstacle to realizing a fully democratic, pluralist Sri Lanka. At the same time, they indulged Sri Lanka’s many and obvious failings and chauvinism, characterized this ethnocracy as a fledgling democracy heroically struggling to cope with a multitude of problems such as poverty and unemployment amidst a Tamil terrorist problem.

These liberals had almost fanatical belief that once the LTTE had been crushed and the insolent Tamil nationalists put in their place, Sri Lanka would be well on its way to becoming an inclusive, democratic and peaceful polity.

Amid this unshakeable conviction, many liberals were eager to resume the war against the LTTE and when President Rajapakse did just that in 2006, fell enthusiastically in line. Indeed, only the Tamils and the LTTE protested the collapse of the Norwegian-facilitated peace process.

So now that the implacable liberals have finally got what they wanted, the military defeat of the LTTE, shouldn’t they be pleased? Apparently not. It seems Rajapakse’s military victory has not brought the island any close to a liberal peace. Indeed, Sri Lanka is further from a liberal peace than at any point in its bloody sixty year history.

Having “slaughtered” – in Human Rights Watch’s terms – 20,000 Tamil civilians in just five months, the Sri Lankan state has now interned the 300,000 people of the Vanni behind barded wire and machineguns. In brazen sight of the international community, Tamils are subject, at the state’s will, to murder, abduction and rape. Separated from loved ones, starved, suffering grievous wounds, they are clinging to their humanity amid the state’s deliberate and calculated violence. So much for liberal peace.

Meanwhile, in the north, Jaffna is still an open prison where paramilitaries and soldiers maraud at will. The island’s east, ‘liberated’ in 2007 to international acclaim, is a seething cauldron of ethnic tension, chronic insecurity and Sinhala colonisation. In the south, Tamils are harassed by Sinhalese on the streets and in their homes, whilst the police look on nonchalantly. So much for liberal peace.

Ironically, only the liberals are surprised. Everyone on the island – including even critics and opponents of the LTTE – have long well understood these are the dynamics that make up Sri Lanka.

So how did Western liberals, espousing peace and inclusivity, end up promoting a racist war that has wrought such destruction on the Tamils and fuelled a virulent Sinhala chauvinism?

It began with a persistent misreading and misinterpretation of the Sri Lankan conflict.

Liberals have long sought to characterize Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict as one that began when the LTTE attacked the Sri Lankan military in the early 1980’s. Until that point, liberals claim, Sri Lanka was a thriving if somewhat flawed liberal democracy. All of Sri Lanka’s subsequent ills, including below potential economic growth, societal tensions and political instability have thus been conveniently blamed on the Tigers - and Tamils for supporting it.

If only there was no LTTE, the liberals have argued (the literature is awash with this), then not only would Sri Lanka see rapid economic growth and development, but these would almost inevitably be followed by a liberal and inclusive political settlement and a thriving plural and civic culture.

This simplistic and reductive reading of Sri Lanka’s conflict is problematic, chiefly not least as it fails to take seriously at all the Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism deeply embedded in the state and Sinhala polity.

It thereby mistakes the LTTE, a symptom of Sri Lanka’s problems, for the cause. At the same time, it mistakes state chauvinism, the cause, for a symptom.

Tamils, of course, recall the three decades of violence, exclusion and persecution by the Sinhala-dominated state, thirty years of deepening alienation that resulted in a resounding mandate for an independent Tamil Eelam by 1976.

The LTTE and Tamil militancy more widely (there were at least five major armed movements in the eighties) are a consequence of the state’s structural and violent oppression of the Tamils, rather than an exogenous factor that arrived from nowhere and triggered ethnic conflict in an otherwise unproblematic polity.

Tamils confronting this Western liberal misreading of the conflict have tirelessly pointed out Sri Lanka’s history of oppression and repression that predated by many years the arrival of Tamil militancy. They have pointed to the disenfranchisement of Upcountry Tamils, the violent state-backed anti-Tamil pogroms, the state sponsored ethnic cleansing and Sinhala colonisation of traditional Tamil areas, the destruction of Tamil heritage (including the torching of Jaffna library with its irreplaceable and priceless manuscripts) and the deliberate economic neglect and strangulation of Tamil speakers and the Tamil speaking areas.

However, rather than engaging with the historic and structural forces that culminated in violent conflict in the early 1980’s – i.e. with the ‘roots’ of conflict – many liberals have preferred to take comfort in simplistic frameworks whereby ‘armed groups’ – i.e. the LTTE – are the fundamental problem. Whatever the factors that led up to armed conflict, they asserted, the problem now was armed conflict itself.

Thus, the LTTE was pilloried and the state celebrated. The former was deemed unremittingly violent, incapable of reform and fanatically committed to a crude ethno nationalist ideology. (This, of course, is what the Tamils were saying about the Sri Lankan state and today’s Sri Lanka speaks for itself.)

When in 2001 the LTTE’s hard fought military stalemate with the Sri Lankan state created the conditions for a political process, the liberals seized the opportunity. Not to examine and address the structural causes of the conflict, however, but to crush once and for all the LTTE and the Tamil nationalist project.

The liberal hawks’ will to war was undisguised. Before and throughout the peace process, they repeatedly cast aspersions on the LTTE’s commitment and belittled its efforts to govern the areas under its control. Conversely, they papered over the state’s chauvinism with bureaucratic and technocratic excuses. They poured scorn on the LTTE’s attempts to reconcile international demands with its real and substantive security concerns, whilst ignoring the LTTE’s concessions at the negotiation table.

Within months of the 2002 ceasefire, the liberals had completely forgotten that it was the LTTE that had called for international mediation and, from a position of military strength, first offered a unilateral ceasefire. Instead they began to assert that the ‘reluctant’ LTTE had been ‘forced’ into a ceasefire because of the ‘war on terror’ and that it could only be kept on the straight and narrow by more or less open political and military coercion.

Despite Tamils’ pleas that a military balance was the only way to maintain stability in Sri Lanka, the hawkish liberals rushed to rearm the Sri Lankan state. Whilst actively working to militarily constrain the LTTE, they massively increased the Sri Lankan military’s conventional capability and provided the state with unqualified diplomatic support as it brazenly violated key aspects of the Ceasefire Agreement (all of Article 2 on normalisation, especially).

Having rebuilt and massively expanded the state’s economic base and conventional military capability, the liberals heaped blame on the LTTE for the failure of the peace process when it began to unravel amid the state’s new-found confidence.

Why compromise when you can fight and win?

Thus, the eventual resumption of war in 2006 should be seen as nothing but the logical consequence of the simplistic but dangerous frameworks through which liberals pursued peace in Sri Lanka.

This is also why the possibilities for a meaningful and sustained political process in Sri Lanka are the bleakest ever: Sinhala chauvinism is now untrammelled on the island.

As Tamils have long argued, without a credible military threat the Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism that led to the conflict and served to escalate it to this catastrophic point will unfurl in all its supremacist glory. In particular, the Sri Lankan state will not voluntarily move an inch towards a credible political solution to the Tamil question.

Indeed, arguing that because it has vanquished the LTTE, the Sri Lankan leadership now tells the world that it wants a solution based on the philosophy of Buddhism. Nothing here about a political solution compatible with the norms of liberalism and democracy for which the West backed a murderous military campaign.

Instead, the entire Tamil population is subject to militarised domination, internment and depredation (in the Northeast) or arbitrary racial violence (in the South). The Sinhala military is to be expanded by another 100,000 - even though victory has been declared. The 300,000 military is the basis for state-society relationship. Hardly liberal peace, then.

Sri Lanka’s future is not one of “ethnic reconciliation”, “peace-building”, “development” and “unity”, but one of deepening communal antagonisms, wholesale marginalisation of Tamil speakers (not just Tamils), as well as systemic abuse and violence by the state.

What is clear is that the belligerent liberals who enthusiastically advocated this war have little by way of a coherent policy response to this unfolding crisis.

Up to now, the usual response was to blame the LTTE for any and every problem in Sri Lanka and thus prescribe further violence and coercion against the Tigers and the wider Tamil liberation movement.

This has been the only liberal policy response. The LTTE has been proscribed by several Western liberal democracies, its members subjected to travel bans and its leaders have been openly targeted for assassination with international sanction. Meanwhile the wider Tamil liberation movement, both within Sri Lanka and in the Diaspora, has been subject to sustained assault using anti terror legislation, sanction and even direct violence.

Tamil civil society – when it holds the wrong political beliefs (i.e. an independent Eelam) – has been criminalised, its leaders and representatives imprisoned or murdered (the faceless killers could never be found, but no one, not even the Western liberals, cared).

The Sri Lankan state fully expects more of the same from the liberal West. Whilst subjecting 300,000 Tamils to hellish conditions of existence, it trots out the LTTE as justification: ‘infiltrators’. Meantime, it calls on the West to attack the Diaspora.

But what should be starkly apparent now is that none of this is going to produce liberal peace on the island.

Those who thought the LTTE could be brought to a hurting stalemate and a negotiated solution thereafter pursued, seriously misjudged the uncompromising Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism that has driven Sri Lanka for the past sixty years. The fiction the Sri Lankan state wanted meaningful political engagement with the Tamils has been destroyed, along with 20,000 more Tamil bodies.

For years, LTTE leaders such as Anton Balasingham, S.P Thamilchelvan and P. Nadesan attempted to engage seriously with Western liberals. Whilst the Sinhala chauvinists ridiculed the liberal peace or mockingly adopted its rhetoric whilst spending Western aid and drawing on liberal political support, these LTTE figures attempted repeatedly to explain that Tamil liberation is not illiberal.

Whilst the Tamils will mourn them and their comrades as heroes and martyrs, the international community will come to acutely feel their absence. Sri Lanka’s crisis will not stand still and it will not improve. The international project to secure a stable and lasting solution to Sri Lanka’s conflict thus stands at a crossroads. Will the liberals support further repression of the Tamils or will they finally confront the Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism that has brought the island to its present misery? Whatever course is chosen, any credible attempt to ensure a stable and lasting peace in the island will require not just a radical break from the past but also a critical rethinking of past policies. This is a liberal quagmire.

UN Humanitarian chief, John Holmes, rejected accusation by a British newspaper that UN had colluded with Sri Lanka in hiding the war crimes the government committed during the final phase of its war against the LTTE.

In an editorial, The Times wrote that "the U.N. has no right to collude in suppressing the appalling evidence" of a government-executed massacre.

This clearly annoyed Holmes.

"I resent this allegation that we've been colluding with the government in some way or not taking sufficient notice," Holmes said.

"We have been the ones drawing attention to this problem when the media weren't very interested several months ago."

He also disputed a death toll reported in The Times of London that cited a "U.N. source" to support an estimate that at least 20,000 people were killed during the months-long final siege.

"That figure has no status as far as we're concerned," Holmes said.

"It may be right, it may be wrong, it may be far too high, it may even be too low. But we honestly don't know. We've always said an investigation would be a good idea."

He said it was based on an unofficial and unverified U.N. estimate of around 7,000 civilian deaths through the end of April and added on roughly 1,000 more per day after that.

The UN humanitarian coordination office (OCHA), headed by Holmes, responding to Times said civilian deaths were "unacceptably high," but denied a cover-up.

"The UN has publicly and repeatedly said that the number of people killed in recent months has been unacceptably high and it has shared its estimates with the government as well as others concerned," OCHA spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs told AFP in Geneva.

"The point is the UN has not been shy about the scale of human suffering and civilian casualties. It has been ringing the alarm bells for a long time."

Holmes further said the world will probably never find out how many innocent civilians died during the bloody final phase of Sri Lanka's war against LTTE.

"I fear we may (never know), because I don't know that the government would be prepared to cooperate with any inquiry," Holmes said. But there was no doubt "several thousand" civilians had died during the siege, he added.

During that siege, the UN had repeatedly criticized the government for shelling areas where civilians were trapped, warning that it could lead to a "bloodbath".

There are “very large” numbers of civilians who are injured and “doubtless many of those civilians may die in the coming days because we cannot reach them with medical care,” UN’s Sri Lanka spokesman Gordon Weiss told reporters on May 10.

John Holmes, who on April 30 visited refugee camps in northern Sri Lanka, had warned of a “bloodbath scenario,” Weiss said, adding: “This is exactly the sort of scenario he was warning against.”

Pointing to a report in the French paper Le Monde, which quoted Vijay Nambiar, chief of Staff of UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, as telling UN representatives in Sri Lanka that the UN should “keep a low profile” and play a “sustaining role" that was "compatible with the government," Francis Boyle, professor of International Law at the University of Illinois College of Law said Saturday that both the United Nations Organization itself and its highest level officials are guilty of aiding and abetting Nazi-type crimes against the Tamils by the Government of Sri Lanka, in violation of international law.

"Unless this Momentum is reversed and all these U.N. Officials fired, the United Nations Organization shall follow the League of Nations into the "ashcan" of History," Boyle said.

Nambiar's statement made while the GOSL inflicted genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing upon the Tamils in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention, the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Two Additional Protocols of 1977, as well as the principles of Customary International Criminal Law set forth in the Nuremberg Charter (1945), the Nuremberg Judgment (1946) and the United Nation's own codification of the Nuremberg Principles (1950) for the trial and prosecution of the Nazis--all of which are now incorporated into the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court, Boyle said.

"In other words, both the United Nations Organization itself and its highest level officials are guilty of aiding and abetting Nazi-type crimes against the Tamils by the GOSL."

"The United Nations Organization and its Highest Level Officials did the exact same thing to the Bosnians at Srebrenica in July of 1995--Days that have lived in Infamy and Shame for the United Nations ever since then.

"By comparison, today the GOSL's genocidal massacre of the Tamils in Vanni could be about four times Serbia's genocidal massacre of the Bosnians at Srebrenica."

Further, The Times of UK revealed Saturday, that the top aide to the United Nations Secretary-General Nambiar was told more than a week earlier that at least 20,000 Tamil civilians were killed in the Sri Lankan Government’s final offensive against the Tamil Tigers.

"History is repeating itself with a vengeance for the United Nations. Unless this Momentum is reversed and all these U.N. Officials fired, the United Nations Organization shall follow the League of Nations into the "ashcan" of History!" Boyle said.

Adding further complicity to Vijay Nambiar's role as a special UN envoy to Sri Lanka is the involvement of his brother Satish Nambiar, a former Indian general as a consultant to the Sri Lankan government.

Satish Nambiar "was quoted on the Sri Lankan military's web page praising the Army's and its commander's conduct of the war in the north, despite all the civilians killed. It is, the [unnamed Security Council] diplomat said bitterly, all a family affair," a report of 11th May in the Inner City Press, said.

Desperation is rife among the 280,000 Tamil civilians imprisoned in internment camps in northern Sri Lanka with countless civilians unable to locate or contact relatives missing or separated during the bloody chaos that ensued during the final weeks of the Sri Lankan military onslaught.

Many clutched a razor wire fence, desperately searching the crowds on the other side for a familiar face as they tried to discover whether their loved ones were still alive and at liberty, or in another of the camps, a British newspaper reporter describing the plight of the civilians in one of the camps wrote.

Some are still hoping to find relatives amid the rows of tents that provide a temporary home.

But others say relatives were separated out by the military, suspected of being Tamil Tigers.

One refugee said that thousands of fleeing civilians were separated from their families when they reached the army check-point, where they were pushed onto buses and taken to different hospitals and camps.

Navamani, 43, from Vattuvagal in Mullaitivu district, said she had lost her three children, aged 16, 18 and 21, in the chaos.

The task of tracking down lost relatives is complicated by the fact that inmates are not allowed to leave the camp because of the risk, the Government says, that LTTE fighters inside may escape.

The tactics of herding civilians into internment camps indefinitely has been widely criticised.

Sri Lanka has offered up contradictory explanations.

Officials and military officers at the camps variously claimed that the civilians were there for their own safety, for the safety of the rest of the population and because most "have been involved in some sort of activity for the LTTE".

Some officials said that screening of the civilians was taking place inside the camps.

However, other officials admitted that no such screening was taking place, raising questions over the purpose of the continued detentions.

“No formal screening at the camps, no,” Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara, the military spokesman, said.

International journalists who managed to speak to some of the Tamils held in the Menik Farm internment camp reported of heartbreaking stories of mothers searching for their children, elders unable to contact relatives and children, including infants lost without parents.

Bhuvaneswari, whose son and two daughters are missing, held photographs through the wire.

"Nine members of my family are missing, please help me find them," she asked Britain’s The Telegraph reporter.

"They've been missing since the mass exodus on April 20th. When the army entered the safe zone and cut the area in two, we were separated. We don't know if they've been killed by the army or what."

Thangarajah, 59, a carpenter, told telegraph that his family had moved 14 times since January as the Tigers retreated into the "no-fire zone" on the north-east coast.

"My son and daughter-in-law, my brother-in-law, my cousin, all died in shelling attacks. We built bunkers and kept moving from one place to another. Shells were falling everywhere. Four people died in my family while I was there. We just left their bodies in the bunker and filled them in," he added.

33-year-old Yogisuran’s, three children – Thuyamthini, Kuwanthini and Thusiyanthini - have not seen their mother for weeks, ever since a shell exploded next to the bunker where they had taken cover, ripping a hole in her stomach, reported the Guardian newspaper.

Medics rushed 29-year-old Sandi to a makeshift hospital, where doctors operated to save her life. All that Sandi's family know is that she was later evacuated on a ship by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

They have not seen her since, and trapped with tens of thousands of others in the Menik Farm camp they are powerless to do anything about it.

Another camp refugee, Threekanden, 27, is similarly distraught at the disappearance of a loved one. He produces a picture of himself and his wife, Pokonai, on their wedding day. They were split up last month, he said, when the army advanced on the last Tamil Tiger redoubt in northern Sri Lanka.

"Now I cannot find my wife or our daughter. The girl is only four and my wife was nine months pregnant. I don't know where they are. We need help to find them." He told the Guardian.

Navaratnam Rasapalen, 31, said he arrived at Menik Farm on 18 May. He lost contact with his wife, Jagadah, and three children, aged seven, five and three, on 18 April when the army advanced.

"The army cut off the civilians in a box and I could not find them," he told the Guardian.

"I just want to find them. I don't know what to do. Please help me to find them."

Several others in the same part of the camp had similar stories reported the Guardian and added that evidence of the brutality of civil war was everywhere.

One young woman, who gave her name as Banji, was carrying her 18-month-old daughter, Umarani. The child's head was wrapped in a tattered bandage and her right hand was bound up. She had been hit by shrapnel from a shell, her mother said, which had gashed her head and broken some of her fingers.

"The problem is that the government thinks we are all LTTE. There is nothing we can do," said Sivalingam, 63, a medical officer from Kilinochchi, who had recently arrived at the camp.

At Vavuniya's Zone Two, a few miles down the road, a mother and daughter who had been separated for five months had finally found one another, but were not allowed to embrace, according to the Telegraph.

Kandaswamy, 73, was weeping on one side of the razor-wire, and reaching out to her daughter, Laxmi, 45, who has been in detention since fleeing the final battle earlier this month. She needed all the comfort she could get – four of her five children had been killed in shelling – reported the Telegraph.

An army spokesman said that up to 6,000 families had been reunited to date, and that they were working to bring separated families together.

But he added: "At the moment we don't know how many families are separated or how many disappeared." 

This is really a disaster. I don't know really how to explain it. At the moment, it is like hell.

Most of the time we live in the shelter. There is not enough medical equipment, so it is really difficult to treat people. Food is a problem as well. There is no food at all here, there are no vegetables and no rice, they just eat whatever they can find, that's all. The hospital is located in a primary school so there is only one room. We just try our best to achieve what we can.

I was in the office working [when the shell hit]. It was definitely a shell, there is no doubt about that. I was about 20 metres away, and I was sure that it landed inside the hospital, so I went to the shelter. I got the news from the doctors that there were people injured and dead. There was constant shelling so I couldn't leave the shelter.

For us, shell bombing is just a normal thing now. It is like an everyday routine. We have reached a point where it's like death is not a problem at all. No one has any feeling here now, it's like everyone says, "Whatever happens, it happens." That's it, that's the mentality every single person has here.

The most terrible thing that I have seen was when a mother had a bullet go through her breast and she was dead and the baby was still on the other side of the breast and the baby was drinking her milk, and that really affected me. I was at that place where it happened.

There is just too much to take. Children have lost parents, parents have lost children, it's just a common thing now.

[The shelling] is definitely coming from the government side, that can be sure, because it is only a small area on the LTTE side and from the sound and from the distance I can surely say it is from the government side.

I don't care about the government, I don't care about the LTTE, my concern is the civilians because through all these problems they are the people affected.

The government or the LTTE, they have got to do something, and if not, I can't imagine what will happen next. Both parties have got to have a ceasefire. I think the international [community] has to either come into the country or get both parties to stop the fighting and start thinking about the civilians living here. Every single person living here asks why the international [community] is not doing anything.

I really want to come to the UK but I don't know. I'm talking to you now, but maybe tomorrow I'll be dead.

A New York based rights group has accused the Sri Lankan military of repeatedly attacking hospitals in the northern Vanni region in their attempt to wipe out the Liberation tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a statement on Friday, May 8, that Sri Lankan armed forces “have repeatedly struck hospitals in the northern Vanni region in indiscriminate artillery and aerial attacks”, warning that commanders responsible for such attacks may be prosecuted for war crimes.

"While doctors and nurses struggle to save lives in overcrowded and underequipped facilities, Sri Lankan army attacks have hit one hospital after another," said Brad Adams, Asia director at HRW.

"Repeated Sri Lankan artillery attacks striking known hospitals is evidence of war crimes," said Adams.

"The government cannot hide behind LTTE atrocities to justify their own unlawful acts."

HRW again called for the situation in Sri Lanka to be urgently taken up by a formal meeting of the UN Security Council and by a special session of the UN Human Rights Council.

One of the deadliest took place on Saturday, May 2, when artillery shells struck Mullivaaykkaal hospital in the government-declared "No Fire Zone," killing 68 persons and wounding 87.

Two artillery shells fired by the SLA hit the hospital at Mullivaaykkaal around 9:00 a.m. killing 23 and maiming 34 and later several shells were fired at 10:30 a.m., killing 41 and maiming 53.

The attack took place, after the Sri Lankan military was provided with the exact coordinates of the hospital premises three days back through the ICRC, and as Sri Lanka Air Force Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) was monitoring the hospital area.

The massacre is calculated to coerce the civilians said a rescue worker citing leaflets air dropped the previous day with Mahinda Rajapakse's message asking civilians to come to the SLA side.

A female volunteer doctor was killed on the spot. Three medical staff sustained injuries, one of them paralysed.

The main Out Patients Department of the makeshift hospital was attacked at 9:00 a.m. when the hospital was very busy with outpatients. There were more than 400 wounded patients accommodated in and around the building.

The second attack came as the medical staff and volunteers were engaged in clearing the attacked area of the hospital.

HRW said it had documented at least 30 artillery and air attacks on permanent and makeshift hospitals in the combat area since December 2008.

“Patients, medical staff, aid workers, and other witnesses have provided Human Rights Watch with information about at least 30 attacks on permanent and makeshift hospitals in the combat area since December 2008.”, the statement said

“Witness accounts suggest that in some cases the Sri Lankan military attacks may have been targeted at LTTE forces present in the vicinity of the hospitals, yet in other cases witnesses said there were no LTTE forces anywhere near the hospitals.”

“Hospitals, whether permanent or temporary, are specially protected under international humanitarian law. Like other civilian structures, they may not be targeted. Under the Geneva Conventions, hospitals remain protected unless they are "used to commit hostile acts" that are outside their humanitarian function. Even then, they are only subject to attack after a warning has been given setting a reasonable time limit, and after such warning has gone unheeded. The presence of LTTE medical workers or injured combatants does not affect the civilian character of medical facilities.”, the statement further said

“Since mid-February, the International Committee of the Red Cross has evacuated more than 13,000 wounded and their caregivers from the war zone by sea. Permanent and makeshift hospitals within LTTE-controlled territory continue to receive hundreds of patients daily. Many arrive wounded from the fighting, while others are sick due to inadequate sanitation, and acute shortages of food and clean water.”, the statement said.

These closing climactic weeks of the conventional war have been accompanied by tremendous external pressure on the Sri Lankan state. This has its upside because it illuminates. It reveals to us the world as it is and how it might be. It tells us who our friends are. It tells us also who our enemy's friends are. It educates us as to what we must and must not do, including in the coming weeks and days.

Here is the rude reality. There is a three pronged campaign to save the Tiger. One is mounted from within the overseas Tamil community, the dominant pro-Tiger/pro-Tamil Eelam stream having developed into a global movement. The second prong is the West, with some functioning as the spear-point of that prong, while others are less committed. Some Western quarters are clearly protectors and potential patrons of the Tigers and the Tamil Eelam cause. The third prong is located in neighboring Tamil Nadu, with some parties now committing themselves to the cause of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka.

Luckily, this external pressure comes at a time when it cannot really affect our conduct on the ground; cannot deflect our military action. Such is the resolve of public opinion, the national leadership and the armed forces. 2009 is not 1987. For the moment we can absorb this pressure while spotting and noting where it comes from and extrapolating future trend lines from these pressures and agitations.

What is the first and most basic lesson that the mounting wave of external pressure should teach us? It is this: we are seeing a number of sources, Western and sub-regional, which would easily afford patronage and succor to the surviving LTTE and the Tamil separatist project. Furthermore it cannot be ruled out that the strength of anti-Sri Lanka /pro-Tamil Eelam elements in Tamil Nadu would have a stronger position in a ruling coalition in Delhi by early June. Therefore, it is imperative that we act decisively within the narrowing window of opportunity open to us, to eliminate the LTTE as a military force, destroying its leadership and hard core cadres who have been trapped in the Zone, after which we must wheel around and hunt down the residual terrorists who may have escaped into the jungles.

It is precisely because we are relatively weak and our enemy is relatively strong externally, while they are relatively weak and we are relatively strong domestically, that we must maximize that advantage. If we eliminate the LTTE as an army on Sri Lankan soil, we can minimize the effects upon us, of present and future patronage being offered by offshore sources. If on the other hand, we allow the Tigers to survive and escape, they will quickly regroup and be redeployed, with all the external spaces that they have access to. In short the Tigers must cease to function within Sri Lanka, and to cease to function they must cease to exist. The Tiger is a globalized creature but its head is still on Sri Lankan soil. That head must be cut off, now.

Thus the mounting external pressures on Sri Lanka must not only NOT lead to an easing of the final military campaign, but must result in its exact opposite, the determination to inflict the most complete and decisive defeat and destruction possible on the Tigers, while taking maximum precautions to safeguard the civilians.

The second lesson is that the Tamil Eelam movement is more globalized than ever; the struggle between Sri Lanka and the Tamil separatist project will continue in the global arena, on an international scale, and that the country's future in the next stage will be greatly influenced if not decisively determined in the international theatre. This includes the preservation of the military gains on the ground.

The third lesson is that there must be a shift of national emphasis and priority, to the international front. Just as the country and state matured to the point where it shifted to the correct policy stance on the war, overhauled its military machine and placed the right personnel in the right places, the same or a similar task will have to be undertaken in the domain of Sri Lanka's external relations.

The fourth lesson is that we must clearly identify and build up our "natural" international defense lines. These are the Non Aligned Movement and the countries of the global South. Within and outside the developing world, Sri Lanka's most reliable strategic friendships will have to be with those, mainly but not only Eurasian, who place high value on strong states, state sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity, and within this group of states, those which have no significant Tamil populations. The ties with such states must be upgraded and solidified into a structure or system. We should for example, apply for observer status with the Shanghai Organization for Security Cooperation, a structure which includes Russia and China, and focuses on counter-terrorism.

The fifth lesson is no one, even among our friends, will countenance either an insensitive or slow alleviation of the problems of IDPs and related humanitarian questions or an absence of an immediately postwar political solution based on autonomy and equality, for the Tamil people. (We have until a new administration is sworn in, in New Delhi, to get our act together on both issues, simultaneously not sequentially).

The sixth lesson is that the Sri Lankan state has to catch up, get with the new calendar and new times, and learn to speak a new language. "Bush-speak" has no acceptance outside the USA even during his administration and now it is rejected within the USA itself and has no resonance anywhere in the world. Sri Lanka's dominant discourse has to change or it will lose the global struggle by simple default. Macho nationalism, religious majoritarianism, unilateralism and "anything goes in the struggle against terrorism" are out; the attempt to combine ethics and power, ("ethical realism") is in.

The seventh lesson is that if we are to compete with and beat the globalized Tamil secessionist project with its western patrons - better exemplified by MIA making TIME's 100, rather than by Velupillai Prabhakaran the least articulate and most corpulent guerrilla leader in the world - we have to rebuild our soft power and smart power, just as we did our hard power. This requires that we undergo a collective transformation, amounting to a revolution, in education, culture and mentality. If anyone wants to understand shifts in US policy towards Sri Lanka, they must factor in the 80-100 young US educated Tamils working on Capitol Hill as aides, researchers and staffers of Congressmen and Senators, and then contrast that with the output of our educational system as we have debased it.

It is not that Sri Lanka had no MIAs. We had better MIAs than MIA, way before MIA. Remember Yolande Bawan at the Newport jazz festival? Right now we've got DeLon who I think has a far better singing voice than MIA, but who is backing him in the USA to make a breakthrough? When a collective mentality looks to the past rather than the future, it has lost the capacity to envision and produce future excellence or achievement. As Dr Martin Luther King said in 1967, minting a phrase picked up and popularized by Barack Obama, "we are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now".

In a shop in Colombo's Bambalapitiya neighbourhood, the man stretched out on a sofa suddenly woke with a start. "They're not terrorists," he declared, correcting his friend's use of the word. "They're freedom fighters – 99.99 per cent of Tamil people support them but they are not in a position to show it."

As Sri Lanka's army squeezes the last remnants of the once potent Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), such sentiments voiced within the Tamil community represent one crucial reason why this operation might not mark the end of the insurgency.

Analysts say that even if the Tamil Tigers in the country's north-east are neutralised in the coming days, the movement will retain the capacity – and perhaps the public support – to launch terror strikes and suicide attacks.

"As a viable insurgency they are finished but they will still be able to operate as a terrorist organisation," said Bahukutumbi Raman, a former security advisor to the Indian government.

Despite international calls for a ceasefire, a bloody end appears the most likely outcome for the fewer than 1,000 Tamil Tigers cornered in a two-square mile patch with up to 50,000 civilians.

A day after the British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, and his French counterpart, Bernard Kouchner, called for a humanitarian ceasefire, the Sri Lankan President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, rejected their calls.

"The government is not ready to enter into any kind of ceasefire," he said. "It is my duty to protect the people of this country. I don't need lectures from Western representatives." The LTTE and its leader, Velupillai Pirapaharan, said they would never surrender but called for international help to enforce a ceasefire.

"If any country really cares... I ask that country to go beyond its diplomatic boundaries for the sake of saving human lives and make Sri Lanka stop this genocidal war," the LTTE's political leader, Balasingam Nadesan, told the Associated Press.

It is impossible to accurately gauge the level of support for the LTTE. Fearful of the government and equally fearful of speaking out, most Tamils talk about suffering routine discrimination. They talk of their fear when passing through the ubiquitous check-points and how the troops might arbitrarily decide to detain them.

One university lecturer, who agreed only to speak on the telephone, said: "The police are always asking us what we are doing here. Why we are in Colombo. We are scared. In public places we have to speak Sinhalese. If you speak Tamil in a bus or market, people will stare."

This, of course, does not equate to support for the Tamil Tigers' violent tactics. But on a walk through Bambalapitiya, replete with Hindu temples and flower sellers, practically everyone who agreed to speak voiced some degree of sympathy for the LTTE.

"The police... always assume we are the LTTE. Perhaps 75 per cent support the cause. There are also people who support the actions," said one Tamil shop-owner, who asked not to be named. Asked about Mr Pirapaharan, the 29-year-old replied: "Perhaps 75 per cent of people like him."

The man who had been asleep, a 60-year-old former government worker, said that a series of administrations had passed measures that discriminated against the Tamils. "My own son and daughter have gone to the UK," he said. "The government plans to kill or destroy the Tamil people."

The Sri Lankan authorities say they are seeking to avoid civilian casualties and that the ongoing operation is to rescue civilians. While the UN has estimated that at least 4,500 civilians have been killed since January, the government has rejected reports that it has fired artillery into the area, or fired at a makeshift hospital.

The  relentless massacres of Tamil civilians by the Sri Lanka state over the past few months had resulted in almost 7,000 deaths and twice that many seriously wounded by May 1. But the slaughter over last weekend is unparalleled in the brutality unleashed by the Sinhalese since independence; over two thousand Tamil lives were snuffed out in a hail of artillery shells. The makeshift hospital – blood-splattered room in a shattered house in the Mullaitivu enclave – has been blasted time and again, the accuracy of the Sri Lankan shells guaranteed by the GPS coordinates passed on by the ICRC.

All this in plain sight of the international community. Even the Western states which have – along with China, Russia and India - stood solidly behind the Sinhala state for the past three years were shaken. As the edition goes to print, US President Barack Obama has also stated the oft- repeated urging of the Sinhala state to cease its “indiscriminate” shelling. We doubt Sri Lanka, secure that China and Russia will thwart any repercussions at the UN Security Council, will pay any heed this time either.

What the Western states, operating with theories of ‘internal conflict’ and ‘terrorism’, can’t comprehend is why the Sinhala state insists on using heavy weapons on the civilians packed into a sliver of land. They also don’t understand why Sri Lanka is blocking international assistance from reaching the 190,000 recently displaced people concentrated in militarized camps. The Tamil people, of course, understand: this is genocide.

For several years the Tamils have been appealing to the international community that there is a ‘slow’ genocide underway in Sri Lanka since independence. These arguments were dismissed – laughed off, actually – as hysteria or propaganda. Yet, quite apart from the pogroms against Tamils up to 1983, in the period since, a hundred thousand Tamils have died in massacres, indiscriminate shelling and bombing, and by starvation due to government embargoes on the Tamil homeland. However, since January ‘genocide’ has not been some abstract concept. The world has witnessed it every single day since as first dozens, then scores, then hundreds of Tamils were killed and wounded. Even by Sri Lanka’s horrific standards, the rate at which our people have been slaughtered is stunning.

What has also become clear is that the international community has knowingly and deliberately allowed this slaughter to proceed. The ideological fixation with ‘fighting terrorism’ and ‘ending armed conflict’ has meant that in the interests of destroying the Liberation Tigers, any number of Tamil civilians are expendable. Notice that even though it is the Sinhala state that is pounding the civilians, blocking food and medicine and repeatedly blasting the hospital, it is the LTTE that has drawn  the focus of the UN’s condemnation?

Notice that even though the Sinhala state launched major offensive operations in April 2006 (displacing over 40,000 Tamil civilians in three days), ordered international NGOs and UN agencies out of Vanni in mid-2007, tore up the Norwegian-brokered Ceasefire Agreement in January 2008, and, even before this year’s slaughter began, had killed several thousand people in LTTE-controlled areas while abducting, murdering or disappearing over 5,000 Tamils in its own controlled areas, it is the LTTE that international actors in all this time have cursed and blamed?

Notice that even though the LTTE called for ceasefire and peace talks in 2006, 2007 and 2008 and that all these calls were dismissed out of hand by Colombo, the international community continued to look to the Sinhala state for a solution? The paradox of asking a state starving, bombing and disappearing a people to put forward political solution to meet the political aspirations of that people has completely escaped the international community.

There is only one solution for us now: the independent, sovereign state of Tamil Eelam. The rationale for that is etched out in the bloody sands of Mullaitivu. If the Tamils accept any thing short of independence, if we allow ourselves to be placed under Sinhala dominion as part of a ‘solution’, they will simply wipe us out at some point in the future. It is self-evident that the close scrutiny of the international community, the pleas and pointed warnings by powerful states and the disgust of the world has not impressed a Sinhala state, polity and people drunk with racism. Not one Sinhala political actor – not even the UNP, the darling of the liberal West – has condemned the slaughter. It is inescapable that whatever the international community does, the Sinhala state will continue to pose an existential threat to the Tamil people unless we are protected by our own borders  and security forces.

The sixty-year old struggle for Tamil liberation is entering a new phase. On the one hand the Tamil nation, going through a Holocaust of its own, is no longer under any illusions about the Sinhala state and people. The international community will never be able to reason with or restrain them. On the other hand, contrary to Sinhala expectations, Tamil militancy will remain central to Sri Lanka’s future. As the LTTE, which has transformed itself – yet again – for a new kind of war, bluntly put it last month: as long as the Tamils are oppressed, “Sri Lanka will never be able to live in peace”. 

Sri Lankan authorities arrested and deported a British news team that produced a report exposing the abuse and ill-treatment of Tamil refugees in military controlled internment camps.

Three journalists from Channel 4, Asia Correspondent Nick Paton-Walsh, producer Bessie Du and cameraman Matt Jasper, were seized and handed over to Sri Lanka's Criminal Investigation Department for interrogation, police spokesman Ranjih Gunasekera told reporters.

They were deported from Sri Lanka on Sunday, May 10.

The report, aired Tuesday, May 5 on Channel 4, chronicled the alleged abuse of Tamils in internment camps in the city of Vavuniya in northern Sri Lanka.

Officials discovered that Paton-Walsh consistently filed fabricated stories and has tarnished the country's image, according to a government Web site. Paton-Walsh's visa was canceled, the Web report said.

Channel 4 said the team -- which had been in the country with valid visas and had been reporting there independently for a couple of weeks -- has been told to leave the country.

"We will be seeking an explanation from the Sri Lankan government for this decision," an ITN official said.

Writing about his team’s deportation, in his blog, Nick Paton Walsh described a call he received from Sri Lankan defence secretary Gothabaya Rajapakse.

"Who is this? You rang me earlier? Is this Channel 4? You have been accusing my soldiers of raping civilians? Your visa is cancelled, you will be deported. You can report what you like about this country, but from your own country, not from here".

I'm missing out my interjections, but that's pretty much how you get deported in Sri Lanka, wrote Walsh.

British condemnation

The Foreign Office in London said it was "deeply disappointing" that a UK television news team had been expelled from Sri Lanka after reporting on alleged poor treatment of Tamils in camps there.

In a statement released on Sunday May 10, the Foreign Office said: "This is a deeply disappointing decision when the case for more transparency, not less, is overwhelming." 

THE Government of Sri Lanka has blacklisted an official of Human Rights Watch (HRW) citing violation of the immigration and emigration laws.

Anna Neistat, a senior researcher of the emergencies division at HRW was accused Immigration and Emigration controller P.B. Abeykoon of entering the country using forged documents last February.

Tamil analysts, say Neistat is being targeted for speaking against the government’s human rights abuses.

Neistat recently testified before the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing on Sri Lanka. She described the welfare centers set up for the civilians reaching government controlled Vavuniya as 'internment camps with barbed wires and machine guns'.

Neistat also admitted that she managed to collect credible information about 'egregious violations by the parties to the conflict' and also that the the HRW visited the Vavuniya hospital on February 11 and interviewed patients.

Tamil refugees who fled Sri Lanka's war zone by boat have given harrowing first eye-witness accounts of how they were shelled by the army in a "No Fire" civilian safe zone.

The refugees were speaking from India's Andhra Pradesh coast where they landed nine days after fleeing the town of Mullaitivu in the war zone by boat. Ten of the 21 refugees, including a four year old child, died on the voyage, according to the campaign group Human Rights Watch, which interviewed them while they were recovering in hospital.

In a series of interviews, they revealed how friends and relatives had been killed in heavy army shelling of the so-called "no-fire zone" that the government had designated as a safe area for civilians.

S. Indra Kumar, one of the refugees, said his family had travelled to Puthumatalan inside the zone on the north-east coast but they soon came under heavy artillery fire.

"We were living in such fear. There was constant shelling. On April 5 or 6, our neighbours were injured in the shelling. A shell landed inside the bunker. Ten people were injured, and of them, five died. There was no anaesthesia. The doctors had to cut off a girl's hand without any anaesthesia. My small daughter was crying and scared. I decided then that we had to leave," he said.

The refugees said they had been trapped in small bunkers below houses for up to four houses during heavy shelling, and that many of the raids had followed firing from Tamil Tigers from within civilian areas.

One of the men whose wife and four year old son died during their hazardous sea voyage, said they had left because of a shortage of medicine. "In the beginning, before we came to the safe zone, the government hospital was still there. My wife just had a baby, so she needed medicine. But there was no medicine at the hospital. I waited a whole day for medicines.

"The ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] was giving tents, but they could not cope with the demand. We built a shelter with coconut thatch. And when it rained or there was shelling, we ran to the bunker. "There was shortage of food. One day, I was waiting in queue for food and there was suddenly shelling. I ran away, but later heard that 40 people had died," said Sivadasa Jagdeshwaran.

He said his wife's father had died, her two brothers had jumped overboard and she herself died after drinking sea water while weak with dehydration.

Meenakshi Ganguly of Human Rights Watch, who interviewed the survivors, said the Sri Lankan government had tried to stop stories like theirs from being heard. "These accounts must be multiplied tens of thousands of times to capture the full horror of those who remain trapped by the Tamil Tigers and shelled by government forces," she said.

The Sri Lankan government has consistently denied shelling civilians in the no-fire zone, though several Western governments and the United Nations believe they are continuing to attack the area with artillery and aerial bombing.

Rescue workers within the Mullaiththeevu Safety Zone have counted more than 1200 bodies after the large scale slaughter over the night of Saturday 9 May and Sunday 10 May morning by the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) with the use of cluster ammunition, multi-barrel rocket launchers and cannons.

The workers fear that there may be additional bodies yet to be uncovered, and the numbers killed will likely rise.

The United States said last Monday it was deeply concerned about an "unacceptably high" level of civilian casualties in Sri Lanka and called on both the government and the Tamil Tigers to prevent civilian deaths.

Meanwhile, the United Nations condemned the civilian "bloodbath" in Sri Lanka.

"We're deeply concerned. We think that there's an unacceptably high level of civilian casualties," US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told a news briefing, reacting to reports that hundreds of civilians had died on Sunday and Monday in an assault by the Sri Lankan government on the war zone.

"We've repeatedly urged the Tamil Tigers to lay down its arms and allow the civilians to leave," Kelly said.

"The government of Sri Lanka should abide by its April 27th statement that combat operations have concluded and security forces should end the use of heavy weapons which of course could cause civilian casualties."

"The large scale killing of civilians, including the death of over 100 children, over the weekend shows that the bloodbath scenario has become a reality," Gordon Weiss, the UN spokesman in Colombo, told AFP.

The Sri Lankan government blamed the Liberation Tigers, saying that they were bombing the civilian population in the war zone.

It said doctor, V. Shanmugarajah, who has been sending out most of the reports of the dead and injured, has been either indoctrinated or intimidated by the Tigers.

However, UN officials said that the doctor’s testimony had been reliable in the past and that their information also indicated that there had been a massive artillery raid on Saturday and Sunday on the “no-fire zone” where the civilians are sheltering, reported the Times newspaper.

Channel 4 Asia correspondent Nick Patten-Walsh, who was deported from Sri Lanka, said that the government’s claim of the Tamils Tigers killing their own was ‘hard to believe’. “

Stating that two weeks ago the Sri Lanka Army had claimed the Tamil Tigers had 2 artillery pieces left, before claiming there was no use of heavy weapons in the area, “today they claim the Tamil Tigers are shelling themselves,” he said.

Indiscriminate barrage of shelling by the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) on the 'safety zone' is believed to have slaughtered more than 2,000 civilians including large number of women and children.

Every kind of lethal weapon such as the internationally banned cluster shells and shells fired from Multi Barrel Rocket Launchers and Cannons were used turning the so-called safety zone into a killing field.

Rescue workers said several hundreds were very seriously injured, and the critical shortage of medicine at the makeshift hospital in Mullivaaykkaal will lead to many more deaths.

Meanwhile, Mullivaaykkaal Hospital staff said, until 3:00 p.m. the number of bodies brought to the hospital was 378, injured totalled 1122. The staffers added that 106 of the dead, and 251 of the injured were children.

The entire family of a devoted nursing officer, Gracian Tharmarasa, has been wiped out in the shelling.

Dead bodies were found in bunkers and inside the tarpaulin tents.

The casualties and the seriously injured include many elderly, women and children.

The bombing which subsided until noon Sunday increased after 12:00 noon when Sri Lanka Air Force (SLAF) fighter jets carried out two bombing raids at 12:45 p.m. Sunday, reports from inside the safety zone said.

Rescue workers said the counting of the dead is continuing and the actual number killed in the worst-ever man inflicted carnage by Sri Lanka state will not be known for a few days.

The makeshift hospital which is now running in junior school in Mullivaaykkaal is struggling beyond words to cope with the situation, medical sources said.

"This is the first time in history where the International Community and the UN have politically experimented such a mass killing of civilians in a single day by giving an almost open consent to a government," described a human rights professional in Colombo upon hearing the news.

The large scale slaughter is believed to be a result of India prodding Colombo to finish the war before the change of government, political circles in Colombo told TamilNet.

Sri Lankan leaders have refused all international calls for a ceasefire, despite reports from the UN last month saying up to 6,500 civilians may have been killed and 14,000 wounded in fighting since January.

Human rights and conflict prevention groups on Monday urged Japan, which is Sri Lanka's largest aid donor, to "shoulder its responsibilities" and confront the worsening humanitarian crisis in the country.

The appeal was made in a joint letter to Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso from the heads of Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, Amnesty International and the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect.

“We believe that Japan, a powerful player on the humanitarian stage and the largest international donor to Sri Lanka, has an important role to play in saving countless civilian lives,” the agencies said.

“It is time for Japan to show that it is prepared to shoulder its responsibilities.”

"If the world continues to look away from the suffering of civilians in Sri Lanka, as it has largely done until now, it will be a failure of historic proportions," the letter said.