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  • UK arms sales to Sri Lanka match tsunami aid

    UK's junior Foreign Minister, Kim Howells, seen with Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse, first raised the idea of British involvement in resolving the conflict during a visit to the island in early 2007

    Britain licensed £7 million worth of weapons and military equipment for export to Sri Lanka this year alone, it was revealed during a debate in Parliament last Wednesday. The sum matches the amount of British aid provided in the wake of December 2004 tsunami.
     
    Also Thursday the UK government said it was holding back half its £3 million annual aid allocation for this year citing British concerns over human rights in Sri Lanka.
     
    “Inquiries that I have made reveal that £7 million-worth of [UK] arms were licensed for delivery to Sri Lanka in the last quarter for which figures are available,” Joan Ruddock, a ruling Labour party MP, told the House Wednesday during a landmark debate on Sri Lanka.
     
    “Licenses were for armoured all-wheel drive vehicles, components for heavy machine guns, components for military distress signalling equipment, and many other types of equipment, including military aircraft ground equipment and communications equipment, and small arms ammunition,” she said.
     
    “All of that is military equipment that could conceivably be used in the conflict,” she said.
     
    “I know that our Government have obeyed the rules—the EU and the national criteria by which we agree export licences. There is no question of wrongdoing. However, … I ask the Minister to consider whether those export licences and similar licences should continue when a live conflict is clearly under way in the country.”
     
    However, government ministers did not respond to Ms. Ruddock’s question.
     
    Earlier in the debate, junior foreign minister Kim Howells said British Foreign Minister Margaret Beckett had met with Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister and “reiterated Britain’s commitment to peace and our willingness to get involved in that whole process.”
     
    “She spoke of the terrible humanitarian impact of the conflict on the civilian population and the need for both sides to do more to protect that population. She repeated the message that there can be no military solution to conflict,” Dr. Howells said.
     
    Later in the debate, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development Gareth Thomas said in the wake of the December 2004 tsunami, Britain “committed aid of about £7 million immediately after [it] struck.”
     
    Of this sum, about £500,000 is outstanding, Mr. Thomas said. It had been allocated to “to develop the capacity of the North-East Provincial Council to lead the recovery process,” he added.
     
    The council has since been disbanded when the North-East Province itself was demerged by the Sri Lankan government last year.
     
    Meanwhile the British government said Thursday it will withhold £1.5 million of aid this year.
     
    Britain agreed in 2005 to provide Sri Lanka £41 m ($81.6 million) in debt relief until 2015, in yearly instalments of 3-6 million pounds, as long as Colombo met a series conditions, Reuters reported.
     
    Britain was due to make a payment of 3 million pounds this year, or around $6 million, and has paid just half.
     
    "What we have said for this year is we are making half of the agreed payment because there is an ongoing consultation process about progress towards meeting the conditions agreed between the two governments," the spokesman for the British High Commission in Colombo said.
     
    During Wednesday’s debate British ministers told Parliament the government had a coordinated approach to Sri Lanka’s conflict.
     
    “We complement our high-level engagement with more practical assistance through a joint Department for International Development, Ministry of Defence and Foreign and Commonwealth Office peace-building strategy for Sri Lanka,” Dr. Howells said.
     
    “[These departments] combine our operations in the country, and we are using funds from [our] global conflict prevention pool to support a series of programmes that will help to bring the sides together, slowly to try to create the conditions for a sustainable peace,” Mr. Thomas said.
     
    “We want a peaceful solution to the conflict. … We will continue to be engaged in the search for peace in Sri Lanka.”
  • UK lawmakers urge LTTE de-proscription

    UK Tamils at a rally in support of the LTTE. The bans on the LTTEare silencing their views.


    Amid signs of greater British involvement in efforts to end Sri Lanka’s conflict, the UK government was this week urged by ruling and opposition lawmakers to lift the ban on the Liberation Tigers in the interests of a negotiated solution.
     
    At a landmark debate on Sri Lanka’s conflict in the British Parliament on Wednesday, leaders of a newly formed all party group representing the interests of the island’s Tamils urged the Blair government to lift the ban on the LTTE and also called for LTTE political leaders to be allowed to address the British parliament to better understand their views.
     
    Lawmakers from the ruling Labour party and opposition Liberal Democrats, Britain’s third largest party, argued that the ban on the LTTE was preventing dialogue towards a solution to Sri Lanka’s conflict by preventing engagement with the LTTE and with Tamils more generally as the latter feared speaking out for fear of falling foul of anti-terrorism laws.
     
    During the debate MPs from the main opposition Conservative Party supported the ban but endorsed dialogue with the Tigers regardless.
     
    A day before the debate, British lawmakers from all main parties formed Westminster’s first ever all-party group for Tamils with the stated aim of “promoting peace with justice and dignity for the Tamils in the island of Sri Lanka.”
     
    Mr. Keith Vaz MP of the Labour Party and Mr. Simon Hughes MP of the Liberal Democrats were elected Chair and Vice-Chair respectively of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG).
     
    According to press reports, amongst the group’s plans were: “(i) Arranging a summit in London between representatives of the Sri Lankan Government, the LTTE and the Norwegian Government, (ii) invite the Commonwealth Secretary-General, Donald C McKinnon, to meet with the group to discuss the situation on the island and (iii) visiting Sri Lanka; in particular the worst affected areas of the conflict.”
     
    On Wednesday, opening the three hour debate at Westminster on Sri Lanka’s conflict, junior Foreign Minister Kim Howells said the LTTE had to end its violence before the UK ban could be lifted.
     
    “We have repeatedly urged the LTTE to move away from the path of violence. In the absence of a full renunciation of terrorism in deed and word, there can be no question of reconsidering its proscribed status,” he said.
     
    Despite Dr. Howells comments, the call for the ban on the LTTE to be lifted was resumed later by Mr. Vaz and Mr. Hughes amongst others.
     
    Mr. Vaz put it to Dr. Howells: “One of the bars to a proper solution to this problem is the ban that remains on the LTTE. [Have you] had any further discussions with Home Secretary [John Reid] about whether the Government would be prepared to lift that ban, so ensuring that all parties could be part of a discussion to bring peace to the island?”
     
    Dr. Howells said he had not discussed the matter with Mr. Reid, “but if I thought that it was a good idea I would certainly do so.”
     
    He pointed out that regardless of the ban, UK officials continued to meet with LTTE representatives on an ad hoc basis. He cited visits last year to LTTE-controlled Vanni by Mr. Paul Murphy, MP.
     
    However John McDonnell, another Labour party MP, argued “although there can be informal dialogue, nothing can substitute for more formal dialogue and recognition. Removing the ban would undermine one of the elements of the sense of grievance that contributes towards the conflict.”
     
    In response, Dr. Howells said: “This [de-proscription] has to be considered very carefully. … there is no silver bullet that is going to sort everything out. If we thought that that recognition [of the LTTE] would take matters forward, we would certainly be prepared to consider it very seriously - I give [you] that undertaking.”
     
    Mr. Edward Davey, an MP from the Liberal Democrats called on the minister to set out the review process by which de-proscription might take place, saying “some people in communities throughout this country and around this House feel that a one sided approach is being taken and that a proper review process might ensure that a truly balanced approach is taken.”
     
    Saying “we have had quite a number of meetings with Tamil groups from around the country; as well as talking to the Sri Lankan Government, we have met all kinds of representatives,” Dr. Howells insisted Britain was taking a balanced approach to Sri Lanka’s conflict.
     
    “Our approach seeks not to take sides either with the Sinhalese Government or with the LTTE but to try to use our good offices and our experience in Northern Ireland, among other places, to try to find ways in which it might be possible to help the Norwegians to make the ceasefire work, and then to take that peace process forward, put the issues on the table, and get everyone around the table to try to resolve the issue.”
     
    The Minister was supported by the main opposition Conservative party. Tory MP Peter Luff argued: “I congratulate the Minister on his balanced approach to a sensitive and difficult subject. … As long as organisations practise such blatant violence and disruption of civil society, it is difficult to give them the recognition that they crave.”
     
    Responding later to this, Mr. Simon Hughes, a senior member of the Liberal Democrats argued past violence couldn’t be allowed to be a bar to future dialogue.
     
    “That [history] cannot be used now as a justification for not talking to people, because that will mean that no progress will be made,” Mr. Hughes argued. “I understand why the [LTTE] was proscribed, but I agree that it [the ban] has been more unhelpful than helpful.”
     
    “The proscription of organisations gives people a further cause to take up arms. I remember when Sinn Fein could not be heard to speak—its representatives were banned by the [then] Conservative Government. Did that reduce support for Sinn Fein? Of course it did not. Did it make it go quiet? No. In fact, it gained support.”
     
    “Banning people makes them go underground. I am sure that the UK and the EU as a whole would benefit from the unbanning of the LTTE if that were to be part of a package of movement towards peace on all sides,” Mr. Hughes argued.
     
    Elaborating to the House on the proposed activities of the APPG for Tamils, Mr. Vaz said “we were determined to take the issue [of peace] forward, and on that basis we agreed three things.”
     
    “First, at the end of September a delegation of all party members should visit Sri Lanka, particularly areas under the control of the Tamil Tigers, to engage in a dialogue in a positive and constructive way.
     
    “We also agreed to invite the chief negotiator for the Tamil Tigers [Mr. S. P. Tamilselvan, also head of the LTTE Political Wing] to visit the United Kingdom and to come to Parliament so that we could hear his views on what is happening.
     
    “The third thing that we agreed was to hold a summit meeting here in July at which all the various parties could participate as a means of exploring how to take the issue forward.”
     
    Referring to the extensive contributions Britain’s Tamil community was making to the country and their efforts to lobby the government, Mr. Vaz said: I firmly believe that the ban on the Tamil Tigers—certainly as regards the way in which they operate in this country—should be lifted as soon as possible.”
     
    “The proscription by the Government of various organisations in 2001 happened because of certain events that were occurring worldwide at the time, and we reacted by imposing that ban on a number of organizations,” he said.
     
    “I know that Governments sometimes have to react in a knee-jerk manner, but six years have now passed and it is time to reconsider the ban and to look at ways in which we can help to ensure that the dialogue proceeds.”
     
    Referring to Northern Ireland, Mr. Vaz said: “It is possible to move on [from violent conflict], but we cannot move on unless we have a dialogue, and we cannot have a dialogue if we proscribe and ban the groups involved.”
     
    Susan Kramer, a Liberal Democrat MP, supported Mr. Vaz, saying: “many members of the Tamil community who have absolutely no interest in terrorism and who do not even consider themselves to be members of the LTTE are inhibited from speaking out because they are afraid of being tagged with the terrorist label.”
     
    “It is wrong for such people to be treated in that way and to feel that fear. Whoever is spinning that fear—whether it be the Sri Lankan Government or others—should stop. Participating in the British political process is the right of every British citizen,” Mr. Vaz said.
     
    Joan Ruddock, Labour MP, later added: “My constituents make a plea to us and the rest of the European Community not to curb the peaceful and democratic activities of Tamils living in the Diaspora.”
     
    Edward Davey, Liberal Democrat MP, said that the Sri Lankan government was labeling those who spoke in support of Tamils or human rights as LTTE sympathizers.
     
    “I believe that the Sri Lankan authorities, possibly through their representatives in this country, are trying to prevent people from speaking out—to prevent freedom of speech. We must convey a message that we will debate such issues in this country, that that is our democratic right, and that the Sri Lankan authorities should accept it and not try to intimidate people who speak out by trying to label them LTTE sympathisers or terrorists.”
     
    Mr. Davey said that when the LTTE was banned in 2001, the British Parliament had not been given a chance to discuss the case of individual organizations but on a ‘catch-all’ bill listing 20 organizations from around the world.
     
    “There was no single debate about the LTTE, just one debate on the whole statutory instrument. We did not have 20-odd separate votes after 20-odd separate debates—just one. Of course those regulations included a number of organisations that really needed to be proscribed, as the whole House agreed, but I believe that there is a debate—a legitimate debate—about whether the LTTE should be proscribed, and it ought to be heard.”
     
    “The process that proscribed the LTTE in the first place was inadequate. That, in itself, is an argument in favour of a review at the very least.”
  • SLFP ‘power-sharing’ proposals shock

    President Rajapakse’s proposals for ending Sri Lanka’s war take more power away from the ethnic minorities.

    Photo Sudath Silva
    Sri Lanka’s ruling party unveiled its long awaited constitutional reform proposals this week, setting out a vision of centralized power that startled even those skeptical of the hardline government’s preparedness to share power with the Tamils.
     
    Constitutional experts, Sri Lanka’s main opposition and Tamil political parties were taken aback by the proposals put forward by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) to a standing all party conference on constitutional reform, the APRC.
     
    Even the anti-LTTE Tamil paramilitary groups allied with the SLFP government of President Mahinda Rajapakse were compelled to denounce the proposals.
     
    As ever, however, the ultra-Sinhala nationalist parties were quick to condemn the proposals as going too far towards sharing power.
     
    Amid the criticism from several political parties including the Sinhala hardline JVP and JHU, the SLFP said the proposals would be ‘slightly adjusted’ before being submitted to the APRC.
     
    The SLFP’s ultra-conservative proposals are likely to disappoint members of the international community who are backing President Rajapakse’s efforts to militarily destroy the Tamil Tigers.
     
    The international community has repeatedly urged the government to put forward a credible power sharing proposal in a bid to tempt the Tamils and create a split between the LTTE and the community, which is enduring considerable suffering as a result of Sri Lanka’s military onslaught against the Tigers.
     
    There have been no formal international reactions to the SLFP’s proposals.
     
    Indeed, with leading SLFP figures stating a few weeks ago that the proposals would be in line with President Rajapakse’s hardline election manifesto of 2005 – ‘Mahinda Chinthanaya’ (Mahinda’s Thoughts) – expectations were low.
     
    But the SLFP’s vision didn’t meet even these.
     
    The LTTE has not officially commented on the SLFP package and the Tigers’ military spokesman, Rasiah Ilanthiraiyan, told Reuters: “As long as the Colombo masters push ahead with their military agenda, we will not even consider moves such as these.”
     
    Analysts said the proposals would likely only widen the chasm between the foes because they fell far short of wider ethnic Tamil demands.
     
    And the Hindustan Times quoted a top source at the LTTE's political headquarters as saying: "The proposal devolves power to the districts and not to the provinces.   We cannot accept any proposal which does not envisage devolution to a unified north-eastern Province."
     
    "This is going to be a total disaster," said Rohan Edrisinha of independent think-tank the Centre for Policy Alternatives.
     
    "Psychologically this is going to be a huge blow to the peace process, because it would suggest that the SLFP is going back to the early 1980s if not 1970s."
     
    "The SLFP is offering less than what is already in place in the form of the 13th amendment to the constitution (which set up provincial governments)," he added.
     
    "Viewed from the point of view of conflict resolution, it's really quite astounding."
     
    The proposals were swiftly criticized by the opposition United Nationl Party (UNP) as well as the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) and the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) – the latter are Sri Lanka’s largest Tamil and Muslim parties respectively.
     
    Indeed, Tamils across the political spectrum rejected President Rajapksa's devolution package because it does not envisage a federal set up, a meaningful sharing of power, and the re-unification of the Tamil-speaking north-eastern Province, the Hindustan Times reported.
     
    These parties are for the continuance of the Province as the unit of devolution. The UNP instituted the Provincial Councils system in 1988 as part of the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord.
     
    The Accord also decreed the merger of the Northern and Eastern Province into a single entity, in recognition this region is the ‘historical habitation of the Tamil speaking people of the island.’
     
    And the Tamils have been demanding a substantial amount of provincial autonomy - such as substantive federalism - in lieu of full independence from Sri Lanka.
     
    The Muslims are eager not to counter the Tamil demand for provincial autonomy because a good number of them live in the Tamil-speaking north and east, the Hindustan Times noted.
     
    Even pro-government Tamil parties like the TULF, EPRLF (P) and PLOTE said in a statement that the Tamils rejected the proposal "totally" as it did not envisage a federal set up.
     
    The powers to be devolved to the regions had been reduced from what was already nominally in place, they said.
     
    “Fifty years of agitation by the Tamil speaking people to win their rights, has brought them back to square one,” the statement said.
     
    “After so much of loss of life and destruction to properties and having failed to find a solution under a unitary system, the Tamils will not accept any solution less than one under a federal constitution.”
     
    The SLFP's proposals make it clear that Sri Lanka will be a decidedly unitary state (though it avoids using the term) and not a federation.
     
    The unit of devolution will be the district and not the province, as is the case now.
     
    The number of districts can go up from the present 25 to 30. Each district council (DC) will have a ‘chief minister.’ He or she will be appointed by the president from among DC members.
     
    In devolving power, the current supremacy of parliament, the executive powers of the President (including those relating to public security), and the powers of the judiciary will not be compromised.
     
    The all-powerful executive presidency may be pruned or replaced by the Westminster system, if there is a consensus on this issue.
     
    There will be a second chamber at the Centre, the Senate. All district chief ministers will be members of the senate, which will also have members nominated by political parties. The Senate can review, suggest and delay legislation, but not legislate or veto any legislation.
     
    And before power is devolved to a district, all armed groups operating there (i.e. the LTTE), will have to surrender their arms.
     
    In other words, the LTTE must disarm before any power-sharing can begin.
     
    The APRC, meanwhile, is moribund with the JVP having pulled out, saying it will not be party to any efforts to divide the country and the UNP refusing to fully commit to it.
     
    After Rajapakse won the 2005 Presidential elections, the international community put pressure on him to forge a southern consensus with the UNP on a proposal to of the LTTE in the North and East of Sri Lanka.
     
    In response to this, President Rajapakse setup the All Party Representative Committee (APRC) in early 2006.
     
    The APRC consisted of all the Sinhala parties including the centre-right UNP and the ultra-nationalist JVP as well as anti-LTTE paramilitary parties.
     
    The TNA, which swept the 2004 elections in the Northeast, were not invited.
     
  • A thriving industry of Tamil extortion

    A Sri Lankan special forces trooper on patrol in Colombo. Wealthy Tamils or their relatives are being abducted by suspected Army-backed paramilitaries with impunity in Sri Lanka’s capital.

    Photo SANKA VIDANAGAMA/AFP/Getty Images
    Sixty-year-old Egamabaram Palaniraja, the owner of Mythili Jewellers in the heart of Colombo, went missing on 12 September last year, along with his 23-year-old son Balasaravanan and employee, Ganesan Muhundan.
     
    All three were abducted while returning home at around nine in the evening, just metres away from the Sri Lankan prime minister’s office.
     
    Two days later, Palaniraja was released 250 km from Colombo, in Polonnaruwa in the North Central Province, and ordered to arrange an “undisclosed” amount of ransom money to secure the release of his son and employee.
     
    After extracting millions of rupees, the abductors released both of the youths but retained the vehicle.
     
    For a citizenry that slid into a virtual war last July despite the existence of a truce to which both the government and the LTTE rebels continue to pay lip service, the past few months have been a nightmare.
     
    Beyond the stepped-up military engagements, there have been dramatically increased levels of forced disappearances, extortions, extrajudicial killings, general harassment and intimidation.
     
    Amidst widespread human-rights violations in Sri Lanka today, one of the most significant, and most under-reported is the ongoing intimidation, extortion and abduction of affluent Colombo-area Tamil businessmen.
     
    This phenomenon was recently referred to as a “thriving industry”.
     
    Palaniraja is among the lucky few. Many abducted Tamils never return home, even after paying multi-million-rupee ransoms.
     
    S Srikandarajah, a leading sugar merchant, and his driver were abducted in July 2006. But they failed to secure their freedom even after SLR 30 million was paid for their release.
     
    While Thirunavakurusu Puvaneshwaran, a successful Tamil businessperson, was released after SLR 1.5 million was extracted as ransom money, trader Maxie Bolton has still not been let go although the requested money was deposited.
     
     
    With the phenomenon of disappearances prevailing in Colombo, its sizeable and economically powerful Tamil population is seized by fear.
     
    Not only is it susceptible to forced disappearances by the Sri Lankan Army, the LTTE breakaway Karuna group and occasionally the Eelam Peoples’ Democratic Party (EPDP) for alleged connections with the LTTE, its commercial success also puts it at risk.
     
    Some of the abducted have been released after severe warnings, while the mutilated bodies of other victims have been recovered near culverts, waterways, paddy fields and roadsides, transmitting a potent message to the living.
     
    Since the resumption of virtual wartime conditions in July 2006, the Civil Monitoring Committee (CMC), a multi-party human-rights group that works in Colombo and its suburbs, has recorded over 80 disappearances.
     
    Although there has recently been something of a lull in the numbers of abductions reported, the trend in extortion is on the up and up.
     
    A likely indicator of the excessive intimidation has been the increase in the number of Sri Lankan Tamil business families fleeing the island. According to CMC records, over 30 Tamil businessmen have left the island during the past two months, to shift their base of operations to India, Singapore, Malaysia, Europe or West Asia.
     
    These victims tended to lay the blame on the Karuna group and, to a lesser degree, army deserters as well as activists with the EPDP. In Colombo today, Karuna activists far overshadow any other outfit in carrying out extortions, with occasional collaboration from government security forces.
     
    While analysts point out that the disappearances do not necessarily have a political element to them – with victims being not just Tamils with origins in northeastern Sri Lanka, but also those of Indian origin and the occasional wealthy Moor – others note that government complicity is aiding the culture of impunity.
     
    Either way, says CMC chairman Sirithunga Jayasooriya, the evidence is incontrovertible as to who is being targeted: “Many victims are from two predominantly Tamil areas, Colombo 6 and Colombo 13. They are also business hubs.”
     
    Many of the victims have only returned to the island following the 2002 Ceasefire Agreement (CFA), with an eye to investing in their homeland.
     
    One Sri Lankan Tamil who keeps houses in Britain and Sri Lanka, who did not want to be named, says that a white van has recently been seen repeatedly near his Colombo residence. The passengers of the vehicle had questioned the man’s neighbours about his return from the UK, and also about his Sri Lankan businesses.
     
    “I took a couple of years to formulate a business plan,” he explained. “The business climate created by the truce is what inspired me to return after decades in the UK. Now I have returned here only to be hounded by white vans wanting to find out details about my investments.”
     
    He is now contemplating returning to the UK, and abandoning his Sri Lankan venture.
     
    Many others have, of course, already thrown in the towel.
     
    A reputed Colombo jeweller, who has received several threatening telephone calls demanding millions of rupees, says that it is not possible to continue his business in Sri Lanka anymore.
     
    “I have already selected a location in Chennai to relocate my business,” he said. “It is sad because I ran two jewellery shops for 30 years in Colombo without any problem, and even survived the 1983 communal riots.”
     
    Not only do Tamil businesspeople in Colombo feel physically and commercially threatened, says CMC convenor and Colombo District legislator Mano Ganesan, but matters have been compounded by significant police inaction.
     
    “There is a complete breakdown in the law-and-order situation,” he says.
     
    “We have provided telephone numbers, some bank-account numbers of extortionists, and eyewitness accounts in certain instances to assist the authorities. They have done absolutely nothing to bring the culprits to book.”
     
    As the pressure mounts, Ministry of Defence spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella admits to “some problems”.
     
    But while he adds that a presidential inquiry into the matter “could be appointed”, he refuses to discuss when this will happen. He also denies widespread charges that the government has failed to take action.
     
    “It is easy to blame the government,” he said. “Civil society can help the authorities by providing vital information.”
     
    Even while the CMC has been attempting to provide just those details, the allegations of government complicity have received added momentum from within the government itself, particularly from Deputy Vocational and Technical Training Minister P Radhakrishnan, himself a Tamil.
     
    Upon receiving complaints from other Tamils who had recorded their own interactions with extortionists, Radhakrishnan took the matter up with President Mahinda Rajapakse, providing the telephone numbers of several extortionists, along with an appeal for immediate intervention.
     
    The only outcome: Radhakrishnan was summoned by the police to explain how he got the telephone numbers.
     
    With the Sri Lankan government failing to control the situation, the opposition is getting vocal, as is the demand for international intervention.
     
    The possibility of international involvement in highlighting the disappearances has brought some hope to even victims’ families, says Ganesan. “Given the gravity if the issue, what we ask is so little,” he says.
     
    “But for a government that is hell-bent on abetting the crimes by sheer non-action, this may prove impossible.”
     
    (Edited)
  • Britain must support the principle of Tamil self-rule
    The debate on Sri Lanka in Britain’s Parliament on May 2 resulted from two impulses: firstly, the UK government’s increasing interest in playing a role in ending Sri Lanka’s conflict and, secondly, the persistent lobbying and activism of the Tamil Diaspora.
     
    The wide ranging debate saw parliamentarians from the ruling Labour party and the Liberal Democrats, the third largest party in Britain taking strong pro-Tamil positions. They were several calls for the ban on the LTTE to be lifted. The main opposition Conservative party and the UK government itself condemned the LTTE as terrorists.
     
    All sides condemned the worsening human rights situation in Sri Lanka.
     
    It was argued that the Sri Lankan state had failed to meet Tamil aspirations. Some MPs outlined the decades of repression and oppression of the Tamils by successive Sri Lankan governments.
     
    But there was a key omission from the debate: that the Tamil people’s right to self-rule must be supported.
     
    This cardinal issue must be dealt with squarely if Sri Lanka’s bitter conflict is to be ended.
     
    Firstly, it is the inalienable right of the Tamil people to determine our own political destiny, to govern ourselves, to be free.
     
    Secondly, the ground reality in Sri Lanka is that of two states – the Sinhala dominated, recognised state and the de-facto LTTE run administration in Vanni. The avoidable reality of two separate armies, navies and, now, air forces cannot simply be wished away.
     
    The international community’s unqualified commitment to the territorial integrity of Sri Lanka, irrespective of the conduct of the state towards the Tamils simply ignores these two aspects.
     
    This very point was raised in the fourth report of the British Parliamentary Foreign Affairs committee published two days after the debate on Sri Lanka (and independently of it).
     
    The report includes British experts’ opinion that a key problem in resolving Sri Lanka’s conflict is that the bargaining power of the LTTE had not been recognised by the Sri Lankan government and the international community.
     
    According to a British security expert cited by the report, “all the negotiating pitches and all the encouragement from the international community - from India and so on - have been in relation to returning Sri Lanka to, or maintaining, the territorial or nation state status of the country.”
     
    “This effectively means that the LTTE's bargaining position is very strong, but the level at which it is being asked to negotiate is actually much lower.”
     
    “Effectively what [the LTTE] is being asked to do is go back to the situation before [the war began in] 1983 and the status quo ante, which of course the LTTE is never going to do. It is never going to do it when it also knows that it has broken the monopoly of force once controlled by the Sri Lankan Government.”
     
    Experts from a leading British security think tank, Chatham House, went on to tell the foreign affairs committee that “practical political issues on the ground” had simply been “overlooked or ignored by the international community.”
     
    Tellingly, they pointed out: “we know the international community has problems when it comes to looking at partition, confederation and so on. Of course it does.”
     
    Indeed, for decades, the Tamils have listened with dismay as leading countries including the United States, Britain and others have repeatedly reaffirmed their commitment to Sri Lanka’s territorial integrity (while also asserting commitment to the principles of democracy and freedom).
     
    This is especially so, because, firstly, this entails the LTTE must simply – irrespective of the Sri Lankan state’s preparedness to address Tamil grievances - surrender the bargaining power it has acquired;
     
     And secondly because a state’s territorial integrity is not an inviolable principle of international politics - as is amply demonstrated by US and UK policy in other international contexts (Kosovo, Eritrea, etc).
     
    Although the Tamils in Britain have repeatedly come in for praise as model citizens by various establishment figures, UK foreign policy has never taken into account the deeply held political convictions of the local Tamils.
     
    Instead British foreign policy has been driven by Western geopolitical and economic interests.
     
    For example, despite repeated protests by the Tamil Diaspora - and international human rights groups - of widespread rights abuses by the Sri Lankan state, Britain this year alone sold more the £7 million of arms to Colombo (and that despite a policy that weapons should not be sold to countries where they could be used for internal repression).
     
    At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Tamil languish in refugee camps in the government-controlled east and the half-million residents of Jaffna struggle to obtain essential supplies. Amid deafening international silence.
     
    If Britain wishes to play a role in producing a just and lasting peace in Sri Lanka, the Tamils must now ask for this one-sided and selfish policy to change.
     
    True, there were calls in the Parliamentary debate for the ban on the LTTE to be lifted in order to facilitate efforts towards peace.That this matter is raised so forthrightly in the British Parliament is welcome and testament to the efforts of Diaspora lobbyists.
     
    But it is a basic step for an honest peace broker.
     
    To begin with, international proscription has hardly been a resounding success. In the past few years, despite bans and several other ‘unofficial’ restrictions, the LTTE has raised money abroad and built up its military and civil administration.
     
    And the bans have encouraged the Sri Lankan state to violence anew. Colombo is now aggressively and unabashedly prosecuting a major war against the LTTE, inflicting widespread misery on the Tamils in the process.
     
    As ever, there is a large gap between the rhetoric of the international community and its actions.
     
    While criticising the human rights abuses by the Sri Lankan government, Britain along with the US and India, have been providing Colombo with military, financial and political backing.
     
    In short, the pro-Tamil opinions expressed in the UK Parliament must be measured against tangible British action.
     
    Going forward, the key issue for the Tamils must be the unqualified international support for Sri Lanka’s territorial integrity.
     
    Whilst adamantly insisting that the Sinhala-dominated state’s territorial integrity be maintained, the international community simultaneously insists that the political solution to the conflict is an ‘internal matter.’ It can’t have it both ways.
     
    Last year Britain’s High Commissioner to Sri Lanka, Dominic Shilcott, admitted that the constitutional safeguards Britain left behind to protect the minorities proved woefully adequate against the Sinhala chauvinism which captured the post-independence state early on.
     
    And that was long before the LTTE was formed.
     
    Last week Conservative Member of Parliament Mr Clifton Brown, lambasted the LTTE before noting, with characteristic British understatement: “political representation for the Tamil minority in Sri Lankan politics is another issue. If Sri Lanka is to be capable of creating a long-term and peaceful solution to its problems, engagement in an inclusive political process is essential.”
     
    Today it is blatantly obvious that the Sri Lankan military violates Tamils’ rights with absolute impunity, that the state bureaucracy is racist, that the politicised judiciary and corrupt police are no recourse for the minorities.
     
    It follows that the Sri Lankan state has forfeited its right to the allegiance of the Tamil people and that the latter, exercising their right to self-rule, must decide what form of governance, including independence, they now want.
     
    And this is the only position that is consistent with the lofty ideals extolled in Britain’s Parliament.
     
    Shirking from commenting on a solution to Sri Lanka’s war, Mr. Brown however maintained: “I do not want to get into the internal politics of Sri Lanka—that is not our business.”
     
    It is however the business of the Tamil Diaspora. As Mr Simon Hughes, speaking on behalf of the Liberal Democrats party, told Parliament: “the Tamils told me that they wanted to make their own decisions, too, and that is a laudable and honourable objective.”
     
    He went on to say: “there should be a suitable degree of autonomy within a peaceful, secure and stable Sri Lanka. If later the Tamil people voted for independence in a free election - unharassed and without any pressure - that would be a separate issue.”
     
    The world, he said, “would have to accommodate that [wish] through proper international recognition processes.”
     
    “It is absolutely not for me, from here, to prescribe whether there should be a federal state or a confederal state, but I am absolutely clear that a unitary state with no proper devolution beyond what has been offered so far will not work.”
     
    The point Mr. Hughes was making is that the Tamils must negotiate an interim solution within a united Sri Lanka – with international support.
     
    But the Tamils cannot have faith in any internationally backed peace process unless it begins with parity of negotiating power between the Tamil and Sinhala peoples.
     
    It is not a question of relative military power or not, but one of mutual ethnic respect.
     
    Ergo, if there cannot be international support for an independent state, there shouldn’t be backing for a united one either: both must be possible outcomes even if the Tamils are encouraged to opt for something short of independence.
     
    A balanced framework for negotiation involves accepting every outcome including partition as a possibility.
     
    If Britain is to play any honest part in resolving Sri Lanka’s conflict resolution, London needs to explicitly accept that the territorial integrity of Sri Lanka cannot be a pre-condition for the Tamils.
     
    This is not only because such a position is consistent with the principle of an ‘internally’ forged agreement, but because it is the premise for a just solution.
  • Archbishop of Canterbury accepts ‘military action against terrorism’
    The Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Anglican Church Rt. Rev. Dr. Rowan Williams met with President Mahinda Rajapakse during his 3 day visit to Sri Lanka.

    The head of the Anglican Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said Friday it was “inevitable” that Sri Lanka was launching “surgical military action against terrorism.”
     
     Archbishop Rowan Williams told the BBC Sinhala service, Sandeshaya, he hoped this action would lead to an opening of communication between the government and the Liberation Tigers.
     
    The Archbishop concluded a 3-day visit to Sri Lanka earlier this week.
     
    "It is undoubtedly inevitable that what you might call surgical military action against terrorism should take place", Archbishop Williams said.
     
    The Archbishop said that he hoped and prayed that military action would lead to an opening of communication between the government and the Tamil Tigers.
     
    "But we all hope and pray that that will lead not to ...victory for one, defeat for another, but to an opening of communication, a re-establishment of the possibilities for civil society to develop", he said.
     
    The Archbishop told journalists in Colombo, the government’s military solution to the problems of the country "increasingly appears to be no solution".
     
    In a press release before leaving for Sri Lanka, the Archbishop said: “Sri Lanka is a place in which conflict and violence has become a reflexive response to political difficulty.”
     
    Meanwhile, the Mahanayaka of the Asgiriya Chapter of Sri Lanka’s Buddhist clergy, told the Archbishop that religious leaders should keep away from interfering into state affairs in war situations.
     
    The Most Ven.Udugama Sri Buddharakkhita Thero told the Archbishop it is a section of the people in north and east that had launched a rebellion against the government demanding a part of the country.
     
    “The Sri Lankan government is engaged in a war to control this situation. We are neutral in that respect and our hopes are for peace”, the Mahanayaka Thero said in comments reported on Sandeshaya.
     
     
  • Tiger planes change war dynamics

    The new capability of the Tamil Tigers to carry out airborne attacks has not only made them a rarity among the world's guerrilla outfits but has also badly shaken an entire country.

    Sri Lanka's defence ministry has acknowledged that the Tigers may be operating at least five light aircraft, used in three headline-grabbing raids against military and civilian targets over the past month.

    The Tigers already possess an effective naval unit known as the Sea Tigers.

    The Tiger air force may be minuscule compared with Sri Lanka's fleet -- which comprises supersonic jets, spy planes and helicopter gunships -- but so far government forces have failed miserably in countering the flying Tigers.

    "You can understand that the Tigers will use a light aircraft once, but there is something wrong when the air force is not able to take it out after three attacks," said retired brigadier general Vipul Boteju.

    The authorities switched off power to the capital of one million people when the Tigers carried out their third bombing raid here on Sunday, targeting two oil depots. The city was thrown into a state of panic.

    In the wake of the attack, several international airlines announced they were cancelling or altering their flights to the island's only international airport, whose runway is also used by Sri Lankan air force jets -- a prime target for the LTTE.

    The Sri Lankan military, however, is insisting that the Tiger air threat is a "joke."

    "These light planes can't do much damage," said army chief Sarath Fonseka, who appeared on national television shortly after the LTTE bombed the main military complex in the north of the island last week.

    "It is a joke. You can drop a bomb from any flying thing. Even tossing a grenade while riding a swing is an 'air attack,'" Fonseka said.

    "The maximum damage that the Tiger planes can do is equivalent to two mortar bombs hitting a bunker," Fonseka added, asserting that the armed forces were capable of taking care of the LTTE's new air wing.

    Pictures released by the Tigers indicate they operate Czech-built Zlin Z-143 single engine, four-seater light aircraft modified to carry four bombs mounted on the undercarriage.

    According to Morovan Aeroplanes, which manufactures the Zlin, the Z-143 is a versatile airplane designed "for the pilots who want more than straight flying from point A to point B."

    "Night and IFR (instrument flight rules) training and flying and great flight characteristics and additional instruments make the ZLIN easy to fly at night or (in) low visibility conditions," according to Morovan.

    It is not clear whether the Tigers have extensively modified the aircraft, which military sources believe may have been bought from a source in South Africa, but the standard version has a wing span of just over 10 metres (33 feet) and an endurance of up to five hours and 10 minutes.

    It has a maximum level cruising speed of 260 kilometres (162 miles) an hour and cannot be intercepted by the supersonic jets of the Sri Lankan air force, which are too fast and do not have air-to-air attack capability.

    The two passenger seats can be removed to give room for extra fuel and a bigger payload. It can take off and land from unprepared surfaces, needing only 640 metres to take off and 765 metres to land.

    Shortly after the first Tiger attack on its main airbase, which shares a runway with the international airport, the air force said it failed to bring down the Tiger aircraft because it did not have night flying capability.

    A week later the government announced it was carrying out night time air raids against suspected Tamil Tiger positions to demonstrate it was by then able to fly at night. But the Tigers have flown two more night sorties unchallenged.

    The only time a Mi-24 helicopter gunship was scrambled to intercept the flying Tigers, the chopper developed engine trouble and crash landed.

    Sri Lanka's military was aware of an air strip built by the Tigers for several years and in 2005 the government lodged a formal complaint with Nordic truce monitors who are observing a now moribund ceasefire.

    It is not clear if the Tigers use the clearing in Iranamadu, which can be clearly seen on satellite images, as the base for their Zlin aircraft. The clearing has been bombed by the air force several times.

    Military sources believe that the Tigers smuggled in the aircraft in knocked-down form two years ago and assembled them in territory held by them.

    The lax supervision soon after the December 2004 tsunami may have helped the Tigers, according to defence sources.

    Speaking to Colombo-based diplomats, a top military officer on Monday admitted that security forces were "still learning" how to deal with the new threat from the Tigers.

    (Edited)

  • Tiger planes bomb Palaly base
    Tamil Tiger aircraft bombed Sri Lanka's main military complex in the Jaffna peninsula Tuesday, inflicting heavy damage and casualties.
     
    In their second air strike in as many months, the LTTE said two light aircraft flew over the Palaly air field just after midnight and bombed military locations.
     
    The Tamileelam Air Force (TAF) bombers had hit an Engineering Unit of the complex and a military storage at 1.20 am, the LTTE said.
     
    Continuous explosions were heard from inside the High Security Zone for five hours after the air raid, fuelling speculation that stored ammunition had been set ablaze.
     
    After the air raid, power supply was shut down for more than 3 hours and cell phone links were cut off, civilian sources told TamilNet.
     
    The Sri Lankan military initially denied the attack, then admitted the raid had taken place but there had been no losses, and finally said the bombs killed six soldiers and wounding 13.
     
    However residents along the road between the Colombo and Ratmalana airbase saw more than fifty trips by various ambulances shuttling between the military hospital in the city and the military airport.
     
    Tiger spokesman Rasiah Ilanthiriyan said their pilots saw flames after dropping bombs on the sprawling Palaly air field.
     
    "We have carried out our second air attack... on the Palaly air field and their military stores," he said.
     
    The government flew a group of photographers to the area and showed them three out of 22 places said to have been hit by Tiger shelling as well as the pre-dawn air strike.
     
    But the ammunition dump at Myliddy said to have been destroyed by the LTTE air raid was not on the tour.
     
    "Six of the soldiers who were killed are those who fired at the Tiger aircraft which flew at 100 metres (330 feet)," the region's top military commander Major General G. A. Chandrasiri told reporters.
     
    The latest Tiger air raid was an embarrassment to the air force, which announced last week it had acquired night-attack capability of knocking out LTTE aircraft.
     
    The Tigers staged their first air strike on Sri Lankan forces on March 26 using what were believed to be two single-engined, Czech-made Zlin Z-143 training planes.
     
    Sri Lanka's military operate a fleet of supersonic jets as well as Mi-24 helicopter gunships in addition to spy planes.
     
    The first Tiger air attack saw the guerrillas drop six bombs on the island's main military air base - which shares a runway with Sri Lanka's only international airport - and get away unchallenged.
     
    The government said the second Tiger air attack inflicted little damage.
     
    "The security forces acted promptly, alerted through the air defence systems, and launched a counter air offensive at a suspected aircraft... forcing it to change course immediately," the defence ministry said.
     
    Sri Lanka Army chief Lieutenant General Sarath Fonseka, however, said the LTTE aircraft changed course to bomb a nearby army detachment from where the military casualties were reported.
     
    Fonseka said the military switched off lights, rolled out heavy guns and opened fire. However, the guerrilla aircraft managed to escape.
     
    The defence ministry said the Tigers were believed to have five light aircraft which they had smuggled in since a Norwegian-arranged truce went into effect in February 2002.
     
    The LTTE, outlawed in the United States and EU, is believed to be the only armed group possessing both naval and air capability.
     
    Palaly is the main military complex in Jaffna, a former Tiger bastion captured by government troops in December 1995.
     
    The military depends on air and sea transport to ferry supplies to 40,000 security personnel and more than 350,000 civilians living in government-held parts of the peninsula.
     
    "I spoke to the pilots after the attack and they said they did not come under any kind of fire," Ilanthiriyan said, denying government claims that ground fire forced the low-flying aircraft to change their target.
     
    "They had a cool flight," he added, but stressed an immediate repeat of the air strike was unlikely as the Tigers would be watching Sri Lanka play New Zealand in the semi-finals of the World Cup cricket tournament in Jamaica.
     
    "There may not be any attacks tonight (Tuesday) because we are also watching the match," Ilanthiriyan told AFP.
  • Sri Lanka peace process, truce in tatters
    Sri Lanka's peace process is in tatters with both the government and Tamil Tigers once again pushing for a military solution, according to diplomats close to efforts to end the conflict.
     
    International sponsors of the peace process are also resigned to Asia's longest-running civil war dragging on for years to come, saying the two sides are only likely to return to talks once they are exhausted by more bloodshed.
     
    “Neither the government nor the Tigers are interested in paying anything more than lip service to the peace process and the 2002 ceasefire,” said one official involved in the Norwegian-led peace effort.
     
    “The Norwegians are only acting as facilitators, not to impose anything. But at the present time, they are not being asked to facilitate anything,” said the diplomat, who asked not to be named.
     
    The ceasefire, along with the peace negotiations, broke down last year -- leaving both sides squaring up for another round in the 35-year-old ethnic conflict.
     
    Last November, Tamil Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran declared his people would pursue their own independent state.
     
    Recent months have seen a sharp escalation in the fighting, with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) losing ground in the east in January and the armed forces vowing to clear the entire area of Tigers once and for all before turning their attention to the Tigers' mini-state in the north.
     
    The LTTE's political wing leader S. P. Thamilselvan vowed the Tigers would hit back soon, describing the loss of territory for them as a simple change in their tactics.
     
    “We have not withdrawn from the east,” Thamilselvan told AFP in an e-mail interview.
     
    “I believe only our actions in the coming period will answer (government) propaganda whether the Sri Lankan military has won a stable victory.”
     
    The government has jacked up the defence budget by 45 percent to 1.29 billion dollars this year. The talk in Colombo is of war, albeit packaged as a “humanitarian defensive operation”.
     
    “Within the next two to three years we should be able to eliminate them,” a senior government defence official told reporters in Colombo last month.
     
    Although Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapakse has stopped short of fulfilling his election campaign pledge of expelling the Norwegians, Sri Lankan officials are displaying a thinly-disguised loathing of Nordic truce monitors, international organisations and NGOs -- accused of pro-LTTE leanings and restricted in their scope of operations as a result.
     
    Journalists attempting to cover the conflict are also barred by the government from entering Tiger territory.
     
    Diplomats say their patience has run out, and the peace process has been put on ice.
     
    Even the United States - seen as more sympathetic to Sri Lanka's fight against the LTTE, a designated terrorist organisation - is said to be frustrated that its pleas for a negotiated settlement have been ignored.
     
    Fighting is now expected to intensify in the east while the Tigers will be under pressure to show their reach - something they displayed earlier this month with their first-ever air strike.
     
    “What we can expect over the coming months is more tit-for-tat violence: government forces pushing into LTTE territory and the Tigers carrying out more high-profile attacks,” said the diplomat.
     
    “The feeling now (among international players) is: let the government and the Tigers clobber each other some more, and when they are tired out we can help nudge them back to the table,” said another international official.
     
    At the Colombo office of the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM), caretakers of the truce, the mood is gloomy, but realistic.
     
    According to SLMM spokesman Thorfinnur Omarsson, the 2002 ceasefire still exists on paper and is still being monitored.
     
    “Unfortunately it has been violated constantly, in fact every day in recent months,” he said, adding the SLMM at least continued to provide a “tool to independently document what is going on on the ground.”
     
    “We still hope that this calms down and the parties start talking again, then our work will be of use.”
     
    Defence analyst Namal Perera said the Tigers retained the ability to carry out spectacular attacks despite added military pressure in recent months.
     
    “Their ability to stage attacks and take troops by surprise was also demonstrated with the air attacks last month,” Perera said.
     
    Retired army brigadier general Vipul Boteju lamented the fact that neither side is likely to return to the negotiating table anytime soon.
     
    “This is not something that can be tackled only through military means,” Boteju said.
     
    “There must be a political (devolution) package and the longer we delay it, the more people will get killed.”
  • Truth elusive as Sri Lanka slides into war
    Near dusk, men with guns enter the village of Awaranthalawa in northern Sri Lanka, shoot and kill six women and a boy, and withdraw to the jungle.
     
    After that April 12 incident Sri Lanka's military blamed the killings on Tamil Tigers, fighting for an independent homeland for the Tamils along the north and east of the teardrop-shaped island known as the "Pearl of the Indian Ocean."
     
    The Tigers denied involvement, saying the government engineered the attack on non-combatants to make it look like the rebels did it and tarnish their reputation.
     
    Proof may never emerge either way about the tragedy and many others like it, as they are drowned by a growing tide of bad news in a two-decade war that has intensified over the past 16 months.
     
    Violence like the killings in remote Awaranthalawa highlights a worrying axiom of the worsening conflict.
     
    "The more violent it is, the less likely you are to get a true account," said Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, director of the Centre for Policy Alternatives, an independent think-tank based in the capital, Colombo.
     
    Alongside almost daily land and sea battles, propaganda from both sides has proliferated.
     
    "What we really see are two wars. One is the press release war in Colombo and the other is the military war with the [Tigers] in the north and east," said defense analyst Iqbal Athas.
     
    The escalation of violence and an official "state of emergency" have made it harder for journalists seeking independent verification to travel to conflict zones.
     
    After a suicide bomber tried to kill the president's brother in late 2006 the government further tightened restrictions.
     
    Even Nordic monitors of the tattered 2002 ceasefire, who enjoy unparalleled access to the war zones, say it is getting more difficult to determine the truth.
     
    "Increasingly, they are blaming each other for the most significant incidents. In many of the cases we can, from our side, pinpoint who is the most likely perpetrator, but it is getting more and more difficult," said Thorfinnur Omarsson, of the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM).
     
    The execution-style killing of 17 tsunami aid workers last year was another case where the truth has remained elusive.
     
    The SLMM blamed security forces, but the government has stringently denied that and promised a transparent investigation into the worst attack on humanitarian workers since the 2003 suicide bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad.
     
    Yet little has come to light in the ensuing months and rights groups have said the probe was beset with shortcomings. No arrests have been made.
     
    In the ethnic Sinhalese-dominated south and west, analysts say, the government is winning the information war.
     
    A poll released this month by the Centre for Policy Initiatives found about 60 percent of Sinhalese backed a military solution to the conflict, while support for peace talks fell to 46 percent from 57 percent in November.
     
    "The vast majority of people are fed government propaganda," Saravanamuttu said. "They have been fed on a diet of victory."
     
    Sunanda Deshapriya, convener of the Free Media Movement, said: "The public is thinking that the government is winning. They think: 'We can win this war'."
     
    That has worrying implications, some say.
     
    Many analysts see no end in sight for the conflict and no clear advantage for ether side in the war, which has dragged on for decades.
     
    The Tigers for their part run a well-oiled propaganda machine too. The group is savvy in the workings of the international media, and pro-Tiger Web sites like Tamilnet are quick to post reports rebutting military claims.
     
    After the attack in Awaranthalawa a spokesman for the LTTE was prompt to call Reuters with their denial.
     
    In areas under Tiger control, analysts say the Tigers keep a tight grip on information through a mix of intimidation and propaganda.
     
    The government has also been accused of threatening journalists.
     
    "I don't think that in general people get the real picture," said Deshapriya.
  • Sri Lanka says ‘final push’ on in East
    Tensions are running high in Sri Lanka's east as government troops fight what they insist is the “climax” of a battle to clear vast jungle areas of Tamil Tigers.
     
    Still trying to recover from the 2004 Asian tsunami, the eastern coastal town of Batticaloa and surrounding areas have become a stalking ground for shadowy death squads and private armies engaged in daily murders, kidnappings and extortion, local officials and aid workers say.
     
    Tens of thousands of people have been displaced, and most expect the situation to get worse before it gets better.
     Sri Lankan soldiers studying the map of the East.
     “It's miserable for the civilian population. There is a climate of absolute impunity. Everyone seems to have thrown aside the rule book,” said a western aid worker based in the Tamil-majority area.
     
    “There's a dirty war being fought here, and there seems to be no end in sight,” said the relief worker, who asked not to be named citing the fear of being targetted.
     
    Since a 2002 Norwegian-brokered ceasefire agreement fell apart a year ago, government forces have focussed their efforts on wresting full control of the island's east and eliminating pockets of intensive Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) activity.
     
    The Sri Lankan military says success would mean confining the Tigers, who are battling to set up an independent state across swathes of the north and east, to a single area in the north of the island.
     
    While some officials assert that they merely want to bring the LTTE back to the negotiating table, others talk openly of “eliminating” them once and for all.
     
    In January, government forces “liberated” the small coastal town of Vakarai, just to the north of Batticaloa and the last of the Tigers' formalised bastions in the east.
     
    Vakarai is now a ghost town, with many of its buildings flattened by government shelling and strewn with landmines left behind by the Tigers.
     
    Daya Ratnayake, a gung-ho army brigadier in charge of much of the eastern front, prefers to call it a “defensive humanitarian operation.”
     
    “This is the climax. The LTTE are desperate. It's a matter of time,” he told AFP in Welikanda, a leafy garrison town inland from Batticaloa.
     
    “We will not take more than two months to get the east clear of these terrorists. Now the only major concentration of Tigers in the east is just outside Batticaloa, and we know how to get rid of them now,” he told AFP.
     
    The guerrillas who used to run Vakarai as a separate fiefdom, however, appear to have simply melted away into the jungles and rocky outcrops that line the otherwise idyllic east coast.
     
    Formal battle lines have been replaced by a massive security blanket designed to stifle the activities of Tigers who could be anywhere and everywhere.
     
    The entire mobile telephone network has even been shut down to stop the Tigers using phones for communications or detonating one of their favoured weapons -- huge roadside bombs packed with ball bearings.
     
    Checkpoints and machine gun bunkers dot the landscape, although several roads are controlled by the Tigers by night. Even in daylight, senior officials prefer to move around in disguise and in unmarked vehicles.
     
    “The trouble is you don't know who is who. You push the Tigers from one place and they move somewhere else. You push them from somewhere else and they move back here. They could be anywhere,” said a police official, who also preferred not to be named.
     
    A further complication is the presence of the Karuna faction, a group of breakaway Tamil Tigers now allied with central government and -- despite official denials -- widely viewed as guns for government hire.
     
    Human rights groups and even local police -- speaking privately at least -- say both the LTTE and Karuna faction are actively preying on local business for cash and on displaced persons camps for recruits including child soldiers.
     
    Officials also live in constant fear of so-called 'pistol squads', or Tamil Tigers in civvies who can pull out a 9mm pistol and assassinate whenever the ideal opportunity arises -- on a street corner, in a temple, in a restaurant.
     
    The senior police officer in the newly-captured town of Vakarai, U.S.I. Perera, said he cannot even take a morning dip at the beach just a stone's throw away from his heavily fortified police station.
     
    “I don't want to get shot by a pistol squad coming out of the sea,” he said while providing a tour of the town along with several well-armed guards.
     
    Brigadier Ratnayake, however, is optimistic the government finally has the upper hand in Asia's longest running civil war, citing their “hearts and minds” campaign including compensation for people whose houses have been blown up.
     
    “It is all about hearts and minds. We are adopting better methods, and getting the local population on our side.
     
    “When you are fighting guerrillas, terrorists, you can never be sure,” he said. “But we have them on the defensive. We are not working to a timescale, but we don't want it to drag on.”
  • Rights abuses unsettle Sri Lanka’s allies
    As widespread human rights abuses by the Sri Lankan security forces continue, even staunch supporters of the state are unable to disguise their disquiet with many governments now echoing recent protests by international human right groups against the relentless killings and abductions.
     
    However the brazen abuses and ensuing protests right groups have so far not resulted in any significant action against Sri Lanka by the United States or other leading states.
     
    And rather than be deterred, the Sri Lankan government has reacted angrily to protests about its human rights record, refusing permission for international rights groups and threatening to expel foreign organization and diplomats who criticize it.
     
    The international concerns were raised most prominently last week by Pope Benedict XVI when President Mahinda Rajapakse visited him in the Vatican.
     
    They were repeated by the Vatican Cardinal Secretary of State, Tarcisio Cardinal Bertone, who met with President Rajapaksa afterwards.
     
    “In the course of the talks - and in the light of the current situation in Sri Lanka - the need was reiterated to respect human rights and resume the path of dialogue and negotiation as the only way to put an end to the violence that is bloodying the island,” a statement issued by the Vatican afterwards said.
     
    Even the United States, a strong ally of Sri Lanka in the war against the Tamil Tigers is also openly expressing its concerns at the daily atrocities in government controlled areas.
     
    Last week US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher, whilst backing Sri Lanka’s ongoing military campaign, raised his concerns publicly.
     
    “We are very much aware of the fact that this is a democratically elected government that is trying to fight a terrorist organisation,” he told journalists.
     
    “At the same time, we of course continue to be concerned about the killings in government areas and urge the law enforcement authorities to adhere to codes of conduct in carrying out their duties,” he said.
     
    “We are equally concerned about violations occurring in areas under LTTE control,” Boucher, who heads the Bureau for South and Central Asian Affairs at US Department of State, said.
     
    He said that US would continue to assist the Sri Lankan state and push for independent inquiries to be held into human rights violations.
     
    International human rights groups, which were largely silent as the Sri Lankan security forces stepped up a terror campaign amongst Tamil civilians a year ago have become increasingly critical.
     
    International organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and Western governments are frustrated by the Colombo government’s refusal to allow independent human rights monitoring in Sri Lanka.
     
    And recently, Freedom House, an influential US-based organization that advocates democracy and freedom around the world, citing Sri Lanka’s human rights abuses, urged the US government to withhold US$590 million assistance through the Millennium Challenge Account.
     
    “The serious human rights abuses and excessive restrictions on freedom of speech and association by the government of Sri Lanka merit the country’s removal from a list of eligible recipients for Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) assistance,” Freedom House said in a statement.
     
    “These abuses by the Sri Lankan government merit a suspension of MCA eligibility status,” Freedom House’s Executive Director, Jennifer Windsor said.
     
    “The government’s involvement in extrajudicial killings and disappearances, as well as the crackdown on speech and association, are simply not compatible with the MCA’s underlying criteria of ‘ruling justly,’ and until these deficiencies are repaired, the country should not be considered,” she said.
     
    “Democratic governments have a responsibility - even in the midst of conflict - to respect and protect fundamental individual freedoms.”
     
    Members of US senate and congress have also taken up the human rights abuses by Sri Lanka’s security forces, press reports say.
     
    On March 30, Senator Richard G. Lugar, who sits in Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, conveyed to President Rajapakse in writing that many in the Senate were troubled by reports of a deteriorating human rights situation in Sri Lanka.
     
    The senator had urged President Rajapakse to take “appropriate action to ensure that neither the government of Sri Lanka, nor any group allied to it, is a perpetrator of human rights abuses.”
     
    Last month Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos from California, who is the co-chair of the human rights caucus and chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, criticised the growing number of disappearances in Sri Lanka.
     
    In the strongly worded statement Lantos called for the resumption of talks under the 2002 Ceasefire Agreement (CFA).
     
    “Further escalation will only worsen the already gross human rights abuses. I call upon the international community, including Diaspora groups, to push all parties towards dialogue rather than destruction,” Lantos wrote.
     
    Earlier this year, a group 38 US lawmakers led by New Jersey Democratic Representative Rush Holt requested President George W. Bush to appoint a special envoy to help bring about peace in conflict-ridden Sri Lanka.
     
    “We are writing to urge you to appoint a special envoy for Sri Lanka because we are deeply troubled by the ever-worsening situation on the ground there,” they said.
     
    “The renewed violence and rising death toll in Sri Lanka have overtaken the fragile peace process and threaten a return to open civil war,” they said. “Further, we are troubled by the large increase in kidnappings across Sri Lanka, most of which remain unsolved.”
     
    However calls by the Senate and Congress members and international human right organizations have so far not resulted in any significant action against Sri Lanka by the United States or other leading states.
     
    The Sri Lankan government has reacted angrily to criticism of its human rights record.
     
    Colombo was infuriated by Amnesty International’s campaign, using the theme of cricket and the World Cup, to promote independent human rights monitoring mission.
     
    Amnesty international has been refused permission to send a delegation to investigate rights abuses.
     
    In addition according to Sri Lankan press reports the government is planning to throw the German Ambassador for overstepping his mandate.
     
    According to local media the envoy had been a key in garnering international support to target Sri Lanka’s human rights record and pushing for an EU resolution against the country.
     
    Sri Lanka’s Defence Spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella warned envoys against interfering in Sri Lanka’s internal affairs, saying: “We don’t want to be pushed around.”
     
    Also according to local reports UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) may also be asked to leave Sri Lanka supposedly for “overstaying its mandate.”
     
    According to the Sunday Times the government was angered as OCHA reportedly wanted to play the role of a human rights monitor.
     
    However Stephanie Bunker, a spokeswoman in New York, said OCHA originally went to deal with coordinating the response to the tsunami and is now involved in helping coordinate humanitarian assistance to people in need as a result of the internal conflict.
     
    In addition to human rights abuses, harassment of the media has become another source of international disquiet.
     
    Last week Sri Lanka’s Defence Secretary Gothabaya Rajapakse reportedly threatened the editor of Daily Mirror news paper over an article alleging government collusion with paramilitaries terrorizing Muslims in military-controlled parts of the east.
     
    The British High Commissioner to Sri Lanka Dominic Chilcott became the target of Gothabaya’s ire when he visited the threatened editor Champika Liyanararchi to express his solidarity.
     
    The British envoy was immediately summoned by the Defence Secretary.
     
    “They talked about the role of the media,” a High Commission spokesman told AFP.
     
    “The high commissioner and the defence secretary agreed to preserve the confidentiality of the meeting.”
  • Politics, Not Morals
    Every international actor involved in Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict consistently asserts their unalloyed support for ‘peace’ and a negotiated solution. They also invariably insist that it is up to the protagonists themselves to resolve what is termed ‘their’ dispute. But this pious commitment to the abstract notion of ‘peace’ does not disguise their cynical pursuit of their own substantial interests both through the course of the conflict and shaping of its ultimate outcome. Interests in themselves cannot be faulted. However the preparedness of many international actors to sacrifice the aspirations and the well being of the Tamil people in pursuit of their own interests has served to deepen Sinhala oppression and escalate Sri Lanka’s conflict. These dynamics have been brought into particularly stark focus since President Mahinda Rajapakse came to power in Nov. 2005.
     
    The international condemnation of the Liberation Tigers’ armed struggle as ‘terrorism’ is a political act, not moral truth. When civilians die, what is the moral difference between a bomb delivered by truck and one dropped by a jet? And a cursory survey of happenings in war zones around the world raises the question as to who is entitled to be custodian of such ‘universal’ morality? It is international conduct in relation to the contemporary dynamics of Sri Lanka’s conflict that most underlines the ethereality of international humanitarian norms.
     
    Almost all international observers of Sri Lanka’s conflict are agreed that, from a human rights and humanitarian perspective, this is one of the most repressive periods in the island’s post-independence history. And it is the Tamils who are bearing the brunt of the state’s onslaught. On the one hand, Tamils are being abducted and executed or ‘disappeared’ by the state’s military and paramilitary forces. On the other hand, the Tamils are, as a community, being brutalized through deliberate mass displacement and indiscriminate military violence. True, civilians have died in LTTE attacks too. But even a cursory comparison of the scale of the violence reveals that the Sri Lankan state is responsible for the overwhelming majority of civilian deaths. And it is the collective sufferings inflicted on the Tamils such as the manifest deprivations of the displaced people and the food and essentials embargoes on Tamil areas that underlines the racism of the Sri Lankan state. President Rajapakse’s administration might be particularly crude in its persecution of the Tamils, but the machinery of state has been oriented thus for decades.
     
    But it is the conduct of international actors during this phase of the conflict that is truly despicable. President Rajapakse’s government may be more chauvinist than any before, but no government has received as much international support as this one. All international action regarding Sri Lanka since Nov 2005 has been directed at undermining and weakening the LTTE and bolstering the state. In the past eighteen months the LTTE was banned by Canada and European Union (Australia is reportedly preparing its own ban) while the US and French authorities have arrested alleged LTTE agents and known pro-LTTE activists. Even Tamil humanitarian organizations are being harassed. The argument is that the LTTE is hardline and intransigent and needs to be forced to the negotiating table and, in any case, has committed acts of ‘terror.’ Even that intransigence – i.e. a insistence on Tamil independence – is a political label. The international community, led by the United States, stridently asserts Sri Lanka’s territorial integrity is sacrosanct. Yet the same actors insist that Kosovo deserves independence. Politics, not principles.
     
    In the meantime, the Sri Lankan state – a ‘vibrant democracy’ lest we forget - is free to brutalise the Tamils without any restraint. Indiscriminate bombardment has killed hundreds and driven hundreds of thousands of our people from their homes. They languish in refugee camps a few hours drive from Colombo where international diplomats discuss trade and economic cooperation with Sri Lankan officials. Whilst the majority of Batticaloa’s Tamils suffer abuse and deprivation in military-controlled camps, it is the development of Arumugam Bay as a future tourist resort that draws most international attention. As civilians in Mannar cower under military bombardment, the United States’ anxiety is that Sri Lanka does not have the institutional capacity to exploit the oil deposits off that coast.
     
    The Tamil political struggle emerged from state oppression. The armed struggle emerged from the futility of political agitation against a state and political leadership beholden to majoritarian supremacy. But it also emerged as a consequence of international governments’ refusal to demand the same governance standards of Sri Lanka as their own citizens are entitled to. It sufficed that Sri Lanka was a docile client. Even in the early eighties, it was Sri Lanka’s economic liberalization, not the undisguised persecution of the Tamils that mattered most to the West. The Tamil struggle was merely ‘communist terrorism.’
     
    Nothing has changed. There was a brief period of Norwegian-led surrealism when the Tamils’ problem of racial persecution by the Sinhala-dominated state become transformed into one of ‘conflict resolution’ and ‘human rights protection.’ But when the LTTE refused to do the right thing – i.e. disarm and disband – that project was abandoned and the international gloves came off. The objective remains the same as ever: to force the LTTE to accept the terms Sri Lanka sees fit to offer. The international proscriptions, the highly publicized arrests of suspected LTTE members and activists, the smear campaigns to associate the LTTE with organized criminality are intended to coerce the LTTE to this end.
     
    The LTTE is undoubtedly sensitive to international opinion, but not absolutely so. As much as international analysis may conveniently blame the intractability of Sri Lanka’s conflict on the LTTE leadership’s mindset, there are inescapable realities concerning ethnic relations in this country. And it is the unalloyed international support for the Sri Lankan state that has done most to undermine the moral force on which proscription and other forms of international censure rely. The Tamil struggle emerged and expanded as a direct consequence of rising state oppression. That oppression has continued for decades as a direct consequence of unqualified international support for successive Sinhala governments. The ongoing international actions against the LTTE are not going to promote negotiations, let alone peace. It will spur the state to greater brutality against the Tamils, who will increasingly come to see the LTTE – as even some international actors privately now acknowledge – as the only means of checking the state’s violence. The dynamic of oppression and resistance ensures that it is only when the fundamental crisis at the heart of the chauvinist Sri Lankan state is ended, will the island see peace.
  • Sinhala fury at Tamileelam flag
     A cricket fan waving the Tamil Eelam flag at the world cup.
    The spirited pitch invasion Monday by a Tamil youth carrying the Tamileelam flag during the Cricket World Cup match between Australia and Sri Lanka at the Grenada National Stadium, provoked a furious reaction from Sinhala ultra-nationalists.
     
    The text of The Island editorial titled ‘Pitch invasion: Desecration of cricket and hidden danger’ follows:
     
    The dastardly act of pitch invasion by the LTTE on Monday, while the Sri Lanka-Australia match was on in Grenada, must be condemned by the civilised world unreservedly. The LTTE has once again demonstrated its capability to gain access anywhere at will. Luckily, the protester was armed with only a flag. Even if he had been a suicide bomber or a gunman on a mission to create a ‘Munich’ type situation, there would have been very little that the security personnel on duty could do. He would have accomplished his mission with ease.
     
    The Sri Lankan player in the picture of the incident we carry today looks amused but that was no laughing matter, given the macabre mindset of the LTTE. For an outfit that has assassinated an incumbent President of Sri Lanka, made an attempt on the life of another President, killed a foreign minister and blown a former Prime Minister of India to bits, harming a team of cricketers is only child’s play. After all, creating a backlash is its very objective. Even if the Earth were to spin out of its orbit, Prabhakaran would do anything to achieve his objective. Else, would he ever have targeted a chopper ferrying a group of envoys of some powerful nations a few weeks ago in Batticaloa?
     
    The Amnesty International (AI) attempt to make use of the on-going World Cup cricket series to stage a protest against Sri Lanka with dummy cricket balls with the slogan, Sri Lanka play by the rules, may have inspired the LTTE to go a step further and invade the pitch. The LTTE and its sympathisers not only supported the AI campaign but went to the extent of publicly defending it.
     
    In a media release, the AI has sought to justify its ball campaign by claiming that human rights are more important than cricket. How true! Any nitwit knows that. No one can fault the AI for protesting against the human rights violations in this country, as we pointed out the other day in these columns. However, it is not over campaigning for human rights that the AI has drawn heavy flak. It has got into hot water over the timing of its protest and its modus operandi. No one would have minded any number of balls being signed after the World Cup series.
     
    Pitch invasions may be common but this particular incident should jolt the ICC and all the cricketing nations into calling for better security for their players. Terrorists, they should realise, don’t give a tinker’s damn about the consequences of their action as was said earlier. It is only wishful thinking that the England team is safe from Al Quaeda, which is ramming civilian targets with fuel laden jets with thousands of passengers on board and blasting tube stations full of commuters. Remember in the aftermath of the 9/11 incidents, Australia cancelled a meeting of Commonwealth Heads of States fearing terror attacks. An organisation all out to eliminate heads of state, won’t baulk at attacking cricketers. The pitch invader concerned could have been anyone and his mission could have been anything. There lies the real danger! Simply because he happened to be a supporter of Sri Lanka’s terrorism, it shouldn’t mean that the other cricketing nations should turn a blind eye to the incident and get lulled into complacency.
     
    What would have been the reaction of a powerful nation to such an interruption by its terrorists? How would Britain have taken such an invasion by an Al Quaeda activist? And what would have been the reaction of the US to an Al Quaeda operative interrupting a baseball match at home or abroad? The protester would have been reduced to pulp or he would have got his brains blown out in the middle of the ground with no questions asked just like that Brazilian youth who was shot in the head in public following the London attacks.
     
    It is ironical that the LTTE happened to invade the pitch, while Australia were playing Sri Lanka in the West Indies. Australia and the West Indies, it may be recalled, refused to visit Sri Lanka in 1996 on the grounds of LTTE-instigated violence. India and Pakistan pledged solidarity with Sri Lanka by sending their precious cricketers here for an exhibition match, which was played without any untoward incident. Now that the LTTE has demonstrated its potential to do anything in the West Indies, the question is whether Australia is going to run away? And what has the West Indies got to say about the incident, which has exposed a glaring security lapse on its part?
     
    The Sri Lanka Cricket must take up the issue with the ICC and the West Indies Cricket without taking it lying down in typical Sri Lankan style. It must demand that the West Indies ensure the safety of its players by providing them with enhanced security and keeping the LTTE activists at bay.
     
    Let no lame excuses be trotted out!
  • Sri Lanka’s probe of aid workers’ massacre is ‘flawed’ - Jurists
    Seventeen tsunami aid workers were shot dead by Sri Lankan forces in Muttur.
    Investigation by Sri Lanka authorities into the massacre, blamed on government of troops, of 17 aid workers in Muttur last year was seriously flawed, a group of international lawyers said last week.
     
    The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), a collection of international legal experts based in Switzerland, accused the Sri Lanka state of a lack of impartiality, transparency and effectiveness in its investigation and warned the rule of law in island was under threat.
     
    "We are very disappointed," ICJ Secretary General Nicholas Howen told Reuters.
     
    "These are grave concerns that are being echoed not only in Sri Lanka but internationally. Clearly this is a great test of the ability of the criminal justice system in Sri Lanka to deliver justice."
     
    Seventeen tsunami aid workers, 16 Tamils and 1 Muslim, from French aid group Action Contre la Faim (Action Against Famine) were found dead with close range gun shot wounds in the northeastern town of Muttur, south of port town of Trincomalee, last August after fighting between the Sri Lankan army and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
     
    Following the discovery massacre, Sri Lankan military forces blocked off the area and prevented ACF officials and international ceasefire monitors from retrieving the bodies of the victims.
     
    The Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) later investigated the murders and said the evidence pointed to government troops being responsible.
     
    “When NGO employees are targeted, the whole humanitarian community is directly affected. If the independence and neutrality of humanitarian workers is not respected, then their activities are undermined,” the SLMM said at the time.
     
    The massacre was the worst attack on humanitarian workers since a suicide bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003 killed 22 UN staff.
     
    Later, under intense international pressure the government invited Australian forensic experts to carry out investigations. After two visits to the island the forensic experts complained of unnecessary hurdles by authorities and returned without concluding their investigations.
     
    The French aid agency at the time lamented the delays and hurdles in the investigation and warned that if a thorough investigation is not conducted it would pull out of Sri Lanka.
     
    In a final attempt to see an end to the ongoing case, ACF have requested another “ballistic investigation” be carried out, but this time around though with the presence of the Australian observers, The Nation newspaper reported.
     
    “We have discussed pulling out of the country, and halting the work of our mission here, which is definitely a possibility, if nothing comes out of these investigations,” said Lucile Grosjean, ACF’s Communication Officer.
     
    According to an agreement signed between the governments of Sri Lanka and Australia, Sri Lankan experts should have conducted a ballistic examination in the presence of Australian observers, however the investigation had been carried out without the latters’ involvement.
     
    “The Australian observers were in the country during the previous investigation but were not allowed to participate [in the tests] and so left the country,” Ms. Grosjean added
     
    ACF also expressed strong concerns that the Sri Lankan CID did not always follow the orders given by the investigating judge and appealed for a closer adherence to the court requests in the future to pave way for an open and proper proceedings.
     
    The ICJ report, compiled by senior British barrister Michael Birnbaum QC, was highly critical of the authorities.
     
    "Collection of evidence has been incomplete and inadequate. In particular, the CID has not interviewed any member of the Sri Lankan security forces, nor any Tamil, apart from the family members of those killed," the report said.
     
    "The observer made a detailed analysis of the relevant documents and reports and found many apparent inconsistencies,"
     
    In his report Mr. Birnbaum urged the authorities to seriously consider reforms to the criminal justice system "to ensure impartial and effective investigations and independent decisions as to prosecution".
     
     
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