Bowing down to International Pressure the Sri Lankan Government is set to start counting the casualties of its Civil War.
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/november032013/tamil-reporter-video-tk.php
One does not know whether it will include the those killed in Mullivaikkal And elsewhere as a part of Tamil ‘Final Solution’
Even then the count is likely to be misleading.
I make this observation based on the Media frenzy in Sri Lanka where every death in the Civil War is being attributed to LTTE
LTTE has to share the blame for its terrorist activities and its indiscriminate killing of civilians, Tamil Leaders.
Lanka web has been spewing venom on Tamils and on the international community and I am producing excerpts below.
On The Human Rights Issue in Sri Lanka.
”
But why and who is responsible for this wild accusation by the West ?
There had not been any violation of human rights for which Sri Lanka could correctly be singled out as the only country in the world committing violations against the rights of its people.
If we examine the number of innocent people who have been killed and continued to be killed by other wealthy Nations in the world, not in their own countries but in other developing countries outside their own, using their NATO or American Armed Forces chasing after terrorists, what human right violations Sri Lanka is accused of having committed cannot be regarded as such.
These accusations against Sri Lanka are being made without taking into consideration that Sri Lanka suffered from terrorism for nearly thirty years and carried out military operations against the terrorists without going outside its own territorial boundaries, as the West is doing. Sri Lanka cannot therefore be accused for violation of human rights as it carried out its military operations strictly within the country avoiding damage as far as possible to its own civilian population.
A war against terrorism is different from a declared war against a country. In Sri Lanka it was just a group of Tamil youth within the country who had taken up arms against the Government. They were taken by the Indian Secret Service and trained as terrorists and released into the country to accomplish their aim of dividing the country to form a separate State for the Tamil Community. Those Tamil terrorists who eventually turned out to be a considerable force had to be eliminated as they were causing considerable suffering to the people of the whole country for nearly three decades.
The civilians no doubt may have got killed in the course of military operations to eliminate that destructive terrorism despite the care taken by the Government Air Forces for precise bombing, and others may have got killed being caught in the cross fire between the terrorists and armed forces.
But vast destruction to the country and lot of murders of civilians in large scale massacres in unimaginable ways and means employing claymore bombs, in buses , trains, market places, and using kidnapped Tamil women trained as suicide bombers exploding themselves to eliminate selected human targets, had been carried out by the terrorists through out the 30 years of their ruthless, atrocious existence.
In that situation of utter horror the country faced for thirty years the civilian deaths in the course of the elimination of terrorists by the Armed Forces of Sri Lanka cannot by any imagination be called violation of human rights, and least of all war crimes…
Britain is guilty of war Crimes.
”
Dear Editor,
I was amazed at the number of examples given by the contributors to this publication about the instances of Britain’s human rights abuses. If you wish to read about all of Britain’s abuses of human rights since 1944 then please refer to or purchase the following book: –
Curtis, M (2004). Unpeople, Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses. London, England. Vintage.
ISBN: 9780099469728
Mark Curtis is a former Research Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House). He has written extensively on Britain’s and USA’s foreign policies. Two of his more famous books are:
- The Ambiguities of Power, British Foreign Policy since 1945, and
- Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World.
Curtis’s seminal publication, Unpeople, Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses contains 323 easy-to-read pages with 39 pages of references and notes. I purchased this book in 2011.
At the very end of ‘Unpeople’, Curtis provides a table of figures giving the number of deaths since 1944 for which Britain has significant responsibility. He has divided the table in to 4 categories: –
- Direct responsibility.
- Indirect responsibility.
- Active inaction.
- Others.
Curtis concludes that Britain has significant direct responsibility for between 4 and 6 million deaths.
One dimension we tend to have forgotten is Britain’s role in the slave trade! The Portuguese and Spanish had the lead in this lucrative trade but British businessmen became involved in the trade in the 16th century, and the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) gave them the right to sell slaves in the Spanish Empire.
In the 18th century, perhaps 6 million Africans were taken in atrocious conditions to the Americas as slaves, at least a third of them in British ships based mainly in Liverpool. The trade in human beings was termed “The triangular trade”. Slavery was a legal institution in all of the 13 American colonies and Canada (acquired by Britain in 1763). The profits of the slave trade and of Caribbean plantations amounted to 5% of the British economy at the time of the Industrial revolution.
The first part of “The triangular trade” was to take items such as guns and brandy to Africa to exchange for slaves. The second side of the triangle was to take the slaves on the ‘Middle Passage’ across the Atlantic to sell in the West Indies and North America. To complete the triangle the traders took a cargo of rum, cotton, gold and sugar back to sell in England.
Mr. Cameron, wake up! As our President Mahinda Rajapakse rightly said “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”.
Killing people in Hospital was by LTTE not Airstrike,look how the video is interpolated.
There is a series of Videos on this subject.
Sri Lanka War Dead counting,
Sri Lanka began counting the dead from its 26-year civil war on Thursday, less than two weeks after the island nation came under intense international pressure to investigate allegations of war crimes during the climax of the conflict.
Some 16,000 officials will spread out across the country in a major operation that the government said would take six months to complete.
More than 100,000 people are believed to have died during the 1983-2009 war between Tamil Tiger separatists concentrated in the north and government forces.
In the most contentious, bloody phase, some 300,000 civilians, mostly ethnic minority Tamils, were trapped on a narrow beach during the army’s final onslaught on rebels, and a U.N. panel estimates 40,000 non-combatants died in a few days.
Both sides committed atrocities, but army shelling killed most victims, the panel concluded.
D.C.A. Gunawardena, director general of the Department of Census and Statistics, said the country-wide survey would assess the death toll and damage to property since 1982.
But he conceded that the census could not give a full picture of the scale of losses.
“There is a limitation,” Gunawardena told Reuters. “If somebody’s whole family died or fled the country, then nobody will be there to give their details.”
http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/sri-lanka-counts-war-dead-after-pressure-from-abroad-452197
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