In the mass of information on the killings of men and women in Sri Lanka by the Security forces , the fact that innocent children were massacred by the Army, in the name of maintaining the Security and integrity of Sri Lanka, whether it is the handling of the LTTE or the JVP, is overlooked.
Worse, it was condoned and abetted by the Government and ignored by the Judiciary!
The full implications of this horror came to light when a Mass grave was unearthed in Matale in Lanka.
It was obnoxious that the Magistrate refused to take even affidavits on this case!
“The Matale Magistrate yesterday (4 November 2013) refused to accept further affidavits from persons whose relatives have disappeared and were seeking to provide information to court on incidents relating to the mass graves discovered in Matale.”
India has been reluctant to take on Sri Lanka on the genocide issue.
Tamil Kills India Involved?
The reason touted is the geopolitical considerations, implying that China might get a foot hold in Sri Lanka.
Creation of Tamil Elam might result in Greater Tamil Elam facilitating the secession of Tamil Nadu from India.
The third, in my view is the anger at the Tamils for the killing of Rajiv Gandhi.
All the political parties played the Tamil Card, for vote politics in Tamil Nadu, by alternately supporting and withdrawing support to the LTTE.
On the one hand, India will train LTTE, allow LTTE Chief Prabhakaran to stay in India excaping from Sri Lankan Authorities,
MGR will donate publicly to Prabhakaran and when Centre raised its eyebrows started condemning the Terrorists.
Karunanidhi can outclassed all, by speaking in all voices at the same time, for and against LTTE, for and against Tamil Elam!
Relatively Jayalalithaa is consistent in terming LTTE as Terrorists and wanted them banned in India and whenever she was/in power terrorist activities will wane.
Now onto India’s complicity.
Indi has contributed immensely by way of Intelligence to Sri Lanka in the final stages of the last war.
In fact India knew of the massacre.
PPT speaks of UK and US in being silent spectators, India has been said to be involved in the Killing of the tamils and India’s Role will be probed.
“While the judges held the USA and the UK to be complicit in the genocidal process, they were of the opinion that more evidence was needed as regards India’s role.”
Terming India its “closest ally”, Sri Lanka has said its support during the war with the LTTE helped “reduce the pressure” mounted by the world community and allowed it to proceed with humanitarian operations in the war-ravaged north unhindered.
“The relationship developed over the past four years with our closest ally, India helped us in many ways in our war against terrorism,” the powerful Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa said.
India’s support greatly helped “reduce the pressure mounted by other nations,” which allowed us to proceed with our humanitarian operations unhindered, Rajapaksa the brother of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa said in Colombo on Sunday in Colombo.
“It is very important that we strengthen this key relationship even further in the years to come,” he said while speaking at a function in Colombo.
Persuading western countries that they must help Sri Lanka more meaningfully to combat this threat requires us to unite as a nation and speak with one voice, instead of being weakened and divided by petty considerations, he said.
He said significant support was also received from other key allies that helped withstand the pressure being “directed by the international community to leave the war unfinished.”
“These countries also provided us vital material assistance towards the war effort, when barriers were put in place that prevented our obtaining military hardware from our western allies,” Rajapaksa said in his address.
He said even though the Tiger rebels will not be able to resurface in Sri Lanka, their financial network was a matter of concern.”
3.2 Eelam War IV
The so‐called Fourth Eelam War resulted from a gradual breakdown of the 2002 ceasefire.
Specifically, in April 2003 the LTTE announced its unilateral withdrawal from peace negotia‐
tions after it was excluded from a preparatory meeting of a donor conference taking place in
the U.S., where the LTTE was categorized as a terrorist organization.4 At least formally, the
ceasefire survived for nearly five more years, but in 2004 an undeclared war between LTTE
and government forces flared up again (HRW 2005). By July 2006, the ceasefire had de facto
collapsed.
At the same time, the election of Mahinda Rajapaksa as Sri Lanka’s executive president in
November 2005 in a coalition with hard‐line Sinhalese parties constituted the precondition
for a much tougher stance against the LTTE. Rajapaksa strengthened Sri Lanka’s military ca‐
pabilities and established a “highly personalized, authoritarian regime, in which extreme na‐
tionalist views [were] widely accepted” (ICG 2007: 21). Not only the LTTE displayed a will‐
ingness to provoke the government and to resume the war, but also the government seemed
to be keen on a “fight to the finish” (Reddy 2006): “[w]hat was new in the Rajapaksa admini‐
stration’s approach was the goal of defeating, as opposed to weakening, the LTTE militarily
and then making the LTTE irrelevant to any political solution to the ethnic conflict” (Uyan‐
goda 2009).
3 At the same time, India refused to take part in multilateral initiatives regarding Sri Lanka, for example in donor
conferences. As one interviewee put it, “at the donor conferences India was present as an observer but it would
not join a multilateral agreement in its own region!” Interview with expert, New Delhi, November 25, 2008.
4 See “Exclusion from donors conference undermines peace process”, TamilNet, April 4, 2003, at:
net.com/art.html?catid=13&artid=8673> (May 25, 2009). Destradi: India and the Civil Warin Sri Lanka: On the Failures ofRegional Conflict Management in SouthAsia 11
In an unprecedented military offensive, Sri Lankan government forces gradually re‐con‐
quered the territories under LTTE control—the East in 2007 and, step by step, also the North‐
ern province. When the Sri Lankan military crossed the border of the Kilinochchi district, the
displacement of a huge number of civilians—estimated to be as high as 200,000—began
(Fuller 2009). On January 2, 2009, the city of Kilinochchi, which had been the Tigers’ adminis‐
trative capital since 1995, fell into the hands of the government forces after a long siege.
Trapped between the advancing Sri Lankan armed forces and the retreating LTTE rebels, the
civilians were used by the LTTE as human shields and subjected to “intentional shelling” by
the government forces (ICG 2010: i). By mid‐January 2009, the LTTE had been confined to a
small jungle area in the Mullaithivu district, a space that continued to shrink up until the
LTTE’s military defeat and the death of its leadership in May 2009.
Not only was the final phase of the war characterized by massive violations of interna‐
tional humanitarian law on both sides,5 but according to UN estimates, as of May 22, 2009,
there were also at least 300,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Sri Lanka (UN 2009a).
The civilians who managed to escape from the conflict zone were subject to a “screening” by
the government, which feared that LTTE cadres might have mingled with the refugees. Ap‐
proximately 250,000 IDPs were put in militarily controlled refugee camps, to which interna‐
tional aid agencies were given only partial access. Even though many countries pressured
Colombo, they did not manage to induce a policy change on the part of the Sri Lankan gov‐
ernment. China and Japan, along with Russia and Vietnam, prevented the UN Security
Council from discussing the Sri Lankan issue, defined as an internal matter of Sri Lanka
(Nessman 2009). And even India, as is illustrated in the following sections, supported the Sri
Lankan government.
President Rajapaksa, strengthened by his military victory, quickly consolidated his power
position by winning the presidential election of January 2010 and, with his party, the general
election of April 2010. Rajapaksa repeatedly refused an international investigation of war
crimes and human rights violations, as he argued they impinged on Sri Lanka’s sovereignty
(ICG 2010: 31). The Sri Lankan regime, in the meantime, has been assuming increasingly au‐
thoritarian traits, exemplified by the power concentrated in Rajapaksa’s family’s hands, an
almost total lack of press freedom (Schlütter 2010: 1), about 10,000 Sri Lankan citizens being
held for over a year for assumed involvement in LTTE activities (ICG 2010: 31), an increasingly
militarized governance culture (Senanayake 2009: 824), and no signs of willingness to find a
political situation providing for a meaningful devolution of power to the Tamil minority.
During the CHOGM meet a group of Journalists from the Channel 4 were prevented from visiting the area where the Tamil Genocide by the Bureaucrats and a Sinhalese mob.David Cameron the Prime Minister of UK visited the area and tweeted.
Please read my post on this.
There is always a justification from the Sri Lanka Government that weighed against the terrorism and killing by the LTTE, the Action by the Government is nothing.
He examines this arguments and his views are worth the salt.
The justification by the Rajapaksha and Co can not explain away the killing of innocent Tamils who were not LTTE.
On the one hand they were being killed by the LTTE, on the other by their(?) Government.?
What a Plight?
“They haunt our every move, on their motorbikes in their silver hatchback and on their tuk tuks. Sri Lanka’s intelligence officers are a tenacious lot, but there’s another group perhaps even more tenacious in their pursuit of us: “spontaneous”, pro-government demonstrators…
So here’s the issue. There are two versions of the situation in the traumatised north-east of the island, where perhaps 40,000 or even more, innocent Tamil civilians died in the horrific last few months of Sri Lanka’s civil war that lasted a quarter of a century.
The government and its supporters say the place is transformed: there are new roads, they say, new schools, former fighters “rehabilitated”, hotels being built and elections held.
But the Tamils who live there tell another story. They speak of continuing misery, of military occupation, of a climate of fear. A place where thousands remain homeless while army land-grabs continue unabated. Where thousands are still missing – and many women who remain are subject to the systematic use of sexual violence as a weapon of repression.
Of course, the way for journalists to get to the truth is to go there and see for themselves. But despite assurances from the president himself that we would be free to travel, it was not to be; several hundred noisy government supporters made sure of that.
That’s the problem for those who would try to hide the truth. If you want to work out which side is telling lies, you just have to work out who is trying to stop you seeing things with your own eyes. Here’s a clue: it wasn’t the Tamils…
For Sri Lanka’s president, what he hoped would be the golden chalice of the Commonwealth summit is rapidly changing into a poisoned one – and the problem is that Colombo’s supporters blame that process almost entirely on Channel 4. In particular, Channel 4 News and – with extra, added venom – me.”
The LTTE was indicted for the attack, some of the alleged killers had died and some are in the death row in India.
There were questions galore.
The questions.
1.Why did Rajiv Gandhi agree to attend an Election Meeting in remote place a Sriperumbudur,Tamil Nadu, when the place was not even in his agenda?
He was busy in addressing meetings in Delhi and rushed to Sriperumbudur via Orissa and Andhra .
2.Why did Maragatham Chandrasekhar invite him when the top functionaries were reluctant to invite him and what made her take a special interest by traveling to Delhi, in the affair?
3.Why was the Security officer O.P Sagar missing at Chennai in Rajiv’s Security team while he was the shadow of Rajiv in Orissa and Andhra?
4.Why did Sagar miss the flight?
5.The substitute officer Gupta traveled with Rajiv Gandhi without pistol and remained so .
6. Why did the some Congress leaders clear the security cordon to enable the killers have access to Rajiv?
7.Congress leader Maragadham Chandrasekar was at Sriperumbudur. Her daughter Latha Priyakumar was also present at the venue with her husband Magendiran. Her son Lalith Chandrasekar had brought his wife Vinothini to the meeting. Given the fact that Vinothini is the daughter of a Sinhalese, why was she never interrogated? Isn’t it true that Rajiv had become unpopular among many Sinhalese for sending the IPKF?
8. A senior Congress leader, Vazhappadi Ramamurthy, who accompanied Rajiv to the stage in two other street-corner meetings just preceding the Sriperumbudur meeting, kept a safe distance from Rajiv in this meeting alone. Why was that so?
9. Many innocent civilians and security personnel died along Rajiv, but it is too strange to observe that not even a single Congress worker died or even had a minor injury in this incident. Doesn’t it arouse suspicion?
10.Why did the Congress leaders weaken the security protocol?
“The final report, submitted in June 1992, concluded that the security arrangements for the former PM were adequate but that the local Congress party leaders disrupted and broke these arrangements’ _Verma Commission Report.
11.Why was there no opposition to a woman MP from Tamil Nadu, at whose place one of main conspirator Sivarasan stayed before the assassination, when she was made a minister in the UPA government?
12.The interim report of Justice Milap Chand Jain, looking into the conspiracy angle to the assassination, indicted the DMK for colluding with the LTTE. The report concluded that DMK provided sanctuary to the LTTE, which made it easy for the rebels to assassinate Rajiv.
The Commission report stated that the year 1989 signified “the perpetuation of the general political trend of indulging the Tamil militants on Indian soil and tolerance of their wide-ranging criminal and anti-national activities.”
The report also alleged that LTTE leaders in Jaffna were in possession of sensitive coded messages exchanged between the Union government and the state government of DMK.
“There is evidence to show that, during this period, some of the most vital wireless messages were passed between the LTTE operatives based in Tamil Nadu and Jaffna. These messages, which were decoded later, are directly related to the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi,” the report stated.
The Congress subsequently brought down the United Front (UF) government of I K Gujral after the report was leaked in November 1998. The party also demanded the removal of DMK from the UF government, arguing that it had a hand in Rajiv’s killing.
13.In the letter dt.2.11.2011, the first question which he raises is as to why the Special investigating team has failed to enquire into the identity of the person who was apparently pushing Thanu forward from behind with his or her palm of hand over her back as could be seen from the last photographs among the photographs said to have been taken by Haribabu ?
The second question posed by the death convict Murugan is that why the scene of offence was not preserved and protected from being disturbed and the escape of real culprits was facilitated as the roll of colour film had been laid hold by a press reporter which was said to have been retrieved later by the Head of the Special Investigation Team Mr.D.R.Karthikeyan?
The third question is the mystery behind the absence of ‘Pottu’( thilak) mark on the forehead of Thanu in the photograph said to have been taken by Haribabu at the scene of blast and another photograph showing a woman said to be Thanu lying dead with Pottu’ mark on her forehead?
Fourth question is why the hand bag found hung on the shoulder of Thanu was not at all recovered from the scene of crime nor any enquiry was made after the missing hand bag ?
n the aftermath of the screening of the Killing Fields on Wednesday 14 March millions across the world will be stunned and horrified by the images of the bloody massacre of Tamil people in Sri Lanka. Most will draw the conclusion that what took place is nothing short of genocide. And, once the shock fades, every viewer will ask: what can be done now?
I am posting excerpts with my comments.
Th first assumption they make that Buddhism is inherent to Sri Lanka.
That implies that there were no living beings in Sr Lanka till then, which is not a fact.
In the same article it says Sri Lanka has been invaded from 2 BC.
True, equally true is that the original SriLanka dynasty, according to MahaVamsa, of Sri Lanka was established by the offspring of Kalinga Prince.(Orissa)
So Sri Lanka owes its existence to India and by the same logic, a part of India!
Ridiculous.
“(a) They deliberately refused to recognize Tamils in Sri Lanka as Sri Lankan citizens. Instead they identified them as Tamils based on their race. Thus racism is the basis of their strategy.”
Yes.
This phenomena is not noticed before the period of Bandarakaike and the sufferings of the Tamils’, nay the citizens of Sri Lanka,became Public.
India does not need an elaborate strategy to conqueror Sri Lanka.
”
(b) They bred, nurtured, trained and deployed terrorist outfit called LTTE with the direct involvement of Indian Central Government to fight against Sri Lankan government.
(c) They pressurized the Central Government of India to intervene in Sri Lanka and settle so called ethnic problem which was infact created by themselves in connivance with Central Government of India.
(d) They set T.N.A. as their proxy in Sri Lanka to carryout their mission.
(e) They also launched a massive campaign in pro-Eelam countries in the West in the pretext of campaigning to protect human rights of Tamil Community in Sri Lanka. They use Tamil diaspora for this purpose.”
LTTE was not brought about by India.
True, India did train LTTE.
When?
When The Tamils were being killed by Sri Lanka and after, despite, International communities to talk to the Tamils, Si Lanka refused to do so.
True India raised the issue at International Forum.
So are the other Nations,US,Canada, Australia.
”
It was a fact that the Peace Accord was imposed over Sri Lankan government under duress. Neither Parliament nor the people of this country demanded such an Accord. The LTTE also rejected the Peace Accord. Sri Lankan President J.R.J was compelled to accept and sign it due to intimidation caused and duress imposed by sending Indian Air Force Jets over Sri Lankan airspace. It was imposed so hastily, neither Parliament nor the general public of Sri Lanka were given an opportunity to raise their views on it. Obligations to be fulfilled on the part of the Indian government and the LTTE as set out in the Accord were never honoured.
There was a provision in the Accord that the LTTE should surrender arms kept in their possession within 72 hours after signing the Accord and all parties should cease hostilities within 48 hours. Sri Lankan Forces were ordered to be confirmed to the barracks. Moreover the Indian government has ensured that Peace will be definitely restored in Sri Lanka.
Those obligations were never honoured. Instead, the LTTE was continued to strengthen its armoury and intensified attacks immediately after the Accord against Sri Lankan Forces who were in contrast ordered to be confined to barracks. The IPKF which was brought in to combat had become a total failure. As a result, the Indian government was compelled to withdraw the IPKF and abandon the Peace Accord unilaterally. Accordingly, the Peace Accord become an Accord non-existent. So that how can they say repealing the 13A would cause a violation of the Peace Accord which is non-existent.
The next component of the Peace Package is the 13th Amendment to the Constitution imposed over Sri Lanka so hastily. This is also a unilateral proposal which was formulated and drafted without consulting the Sri Lankan government by Indian government ex-parte. Provincial Council Act No. 42 of 1987 is the outcome of 13th Amendment.’
Sri Lanka did not approve the Accord.
In the same breath, there is a complaint that the LTTE did not fulfill the terms of the accord!
Sri Lanka seems to deny any agreement by saying that it does not have the backing of the people.
What do you have there?
Government or some wayward signing papers which mean nothing?
If so, why did Sri Lanka accept aid from foreign Governments signed by the same Government?
The comments on 13th Amendment are laughable.
Finally if The Tamils are the citizens of Sri Lanka, why massacre them in lakhs?
Not to forget the fact that the LTTE was wiped out by the help in intelligence and hardware by India.
You must be logged in to post a comment.