“To be internationalist is to pay our debt to humanity” says Fidel Castro and this can be read on many billboards in Cuba.

What is internationalism?—cooperation among people and nations, states my dictionary. The book of definitions maintains that internationalism is a principle of communism and socialism. It is the belief of ideological leaders such as Lenin, Fidel and Che.

Che wrote in his essay, “Socialism and Man”, that proletarian internationalism isn’t just a duty but a necessity. If revolutionary leaders forget this, Che wrote, the revolution will lose its inspiration and imperialism will benefit.

Che was also known for having severely criticized Soviet Union leadership for having lost its internationalism with the world’s proletariat and the Third World. Following up on Che’s critique, I find it important to criticize communist and socialist parties, and governments led by these parties, which let down people who are oppressed by, or invaded by, national or foreign powers.

Internationalism in action

1. Internationalists must support resistance fighters against invasions. Therefore, one must chastise political parties and groups that give political or moral support to those who call themselves the Iraq Communist Party as it is part of the Quisling government the USA terrorist state set in. ICP leaders live side by side the invaders in the Green Zone. That there are organizations in the United States, UK, Denmark and elsewhere, which call themselves communist or socialist parties and that cooperate with the world’s greatest terrorist state is incomprehensible, shameful, immoral and anti-internationalist.

2. The same applies to people who still support the Zionist state of Israel, which commits genocide against the Palestinian people. Millions of decent people have gotten together to support Palestinians in many ways, including Ships to Gaza. In Denmark, four groups of people have challenged the state’s terrorist laws by donating solidarity aid to the secular leftist PFLP which is part of the Palestinian resistance. Rebellion (Denmark), Fighters and Lovers, Horserød-Stuthoff Association (veterans of WWII resistance fighters imprisoned in Horserød and Stuthoff prisons), and TIB’s club (local carpenters near Copenhagen) have aided both PFLP and FARC, Colombian armed liberation movement.

3. Internationalist can not cooperate with US-NATO aggressive wars, which always have the goal of controlling that country’s economy and politics for capitalist profits. It is shameful that many experienced socialists and communists, as well as naïve progressive people, have backed up West’s big capitalist plans to take over Libya, and thus have bombed Libya back to the stone age. Denmark was one of only six countries that dropped tens of thousands of bombs on Libya, destroying much of it infrastructure, schools, hospitals…In fact, Denmark dropped more bombs on Libya than it has on any other country in its history, Afghanistan included. And the pilots were cowards as there was no resistance by Libya’s air force, already decimated.

This conflict has little to do with the Arab Spring movement. It is a conflict between internal war lords, with ordinary people involved who wished to increase democracy but who were misled by US-NATO whose forces seek to control Libya’s oil and avoid a gold-based currency that Gaddafi was promoting amongst all African countries. Now, US-NATO has placed a lackey government in Tripoli just as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq.

4. Internationalists must also criticize comrade governments, such as Cuba and ALBA governments in Latin America, when they make big mistakes regarding internationalism. We can’t be true comrades-solidarity activists by keeping our mouths shut when this occurs. Such is the case with their support of the brutal government of Sri Lanka, which practices genocide against the minority Tamil population. Ever since independence from Great Britain, in 1947, the majority Sinhalese governments and chauvinist Buddhist monk system has discriminated against Tamils. They have constantly been treated as second class citizens, their language and religions relegated to secondary status without national recognition. Even pogroms have been employed with the brutal murder of many thousands on various occasions. And since May 2009, following the end of a 26-year civil war, ethnic cleansing in the traditional Tamil homeland in the north and eastern areas is the rule of the day.

Cuba and ALBA have spoken only positively of their historic ties with the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), to which Sri Lanka is a member, but so are 130 other nations. One cannot, in the name of protecting each nation’s sovereignty, avoid critique when one or more of these nations oppresses or conducts pogroms and genocide against part of the population. Nor can we accept as an excuse the immoral geo-political game that nearly all governments of whatever color play.

We shall also criticize Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil and other Latin American progressive governments for helping the US and France in their ouster of the only decent and only democratically elected people’s president in Haiti’s history, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. These Latin American governments actually assist the US’s 2004 coup d´état against Aristide by placing occupying troops in the small country, seeking to dampen the people’s anger. These progressive governments should, instead, back up the people’s desire to bring their president back to state power, just as they sought to do for President Zelaya in Honduras where national capitalists and generals kicked him out of office, with background support once again by the United States government.

5. On the personal and organizational plain, internationalism operates when workers of a major firm ask people to boycott a product because of the mistreatment of the workers by the firm. This is the case with Coca-Cola whose workers in Colombia asked us to stop buying the “drink of the death squad” (David Rovics song), because it hires mercenaries to murder workers who seek to organize a union and struggle for collective bargaining. Workers in other countries, such as Guatemala, and farmers in India have asked the same.

It is with joy that I can state that here where we gather (carpenters’ hall in Valby, Denmark), this union is one of the few local unions and political or grass roots groups in Denmark that has boycotted Coca-Cola. This is something any and all individuals can do. It is just a soda drink. So drink something else. Boycotting Coca-Cola is just like boycotting all products from Israel and Sri Lanka. It is a simple act of solidarity, of internationalism.

Charlotte and I have just returned from a six week trip in India where two of my books (“Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka” and “Sounds of Venezuela”) were published by New Century Book House, Tamil Nadu. The Tamil book concerns the history and contemporary life of the Tamil people in that island-nation, and the need to act in solidarity with them. The Venezuela short book concerns this people’s efforts to create a better world for themselves and solidarity with all peoples. When people asked us where we are from we often replied that we are “internationalists”. Interestingly, many Indians understood our meaning and were pleased to think in terms of being brothers and sisters in the world.

This concept, and feeling, of brotherly love, of internationalism has taken off in a bigger way, in 2011, than in many decades. It started in Tunisia, and has expanded to the indignados in Spain, to the anti-capitalists in Wall Street and in hundreds of cities throughout the US and the West.

We have much to criticize and yet much to be glad for as 2012 opens. We must remember and appreciate those who set us off on this new anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist, non-violent and democratic revolution—from the martyr in Tunisia (street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi) and his Iraqi spiritual brother a bit earlier, shoe-thrower Muntazar al-Zaidi, to Occupy Wall Street protestors to Bradley Manning and Julian Assange and co-workers at Wikileaks, who helped spark it all by blowing the whistle on the war criminals. These modern-day Paris Commune resisters without arms—OWS and Occupy the World—are growing and they are presenting a vision and with it a program-in-discussion that must be studied and supported.

Internationalism is an endless struggle, an endless challenge. It does not end even when one or more of our political parties take over the governing reigns. We activists from the streets must always keep our wary eyes pinned on the leaders, regardless of their names, just as our clear eyes cast light upon humanity’s future.

Europeans invaded the Americans and stole the lands and wealth held by native peoples for thousands of years. They enslaved black Africans who they held as slaves and even after slavery ended they kept them as second-class citizens.

Black people developed various forms of struggle including civil disobedience, sit-ins, pickets, mass rallies, propaganda, and voting for equality where possible. Another form of struggle was the Black Panther Party’s armed self-defence when attacked by Ku Klux Klan and the ruling class’ police. Another form was the Gravey Movement that called for separation from the United States, demanding territory in the south. Very much like the Tamils after the 1976 Vattukottai resolution.

In the United States millions of blacks and whites fought this racist discrimination for over a century and eventually won most basic rights but not before millions were arrested, imprisoned for long times, and many murdered. Many thousands of black people were lynched, burned alive, mutilated, tortured to death until the 1980s.

Fidel Castro: “Those who are exploited are our compatriots all over the world; and the exploiters all over the world are out enemies…Our country is really the whole world, and all the revolutionaries of the world are our brothers.” “To be internationalist is to settle our debt with humanity.”

Che Guevara from Socialism and Man: “The revolutionary is the ideological motor force of the revolution. If he forgets his proletarian internationalism, the revolution, which he heads will cease to be an inspiring force and he will sink into a comfortable lethargy, which imperialism, our irreconcilable enemy, will utilize well. Proletarian internationalism is a duty, but it is also a revolutionary necessity. So we educate our people.”

I believe that these principles apply to the Tamils of Sri Lanka. I believe Che would agree with your struggle for equality and when not possible to achieve within the Sri Lankan chauvinist context, he would understand your fight for your own nationhood.

I think this is also what Lenin meant in his 1916 thesis, “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination”:

“Victorious socialism must necessarily establish a full democracy and, consequently, not only introduce full equality of nations but also realize the right of the oppressed nations to self-determination, that is, the right to free political separation.”

I am hurt and deeply disappointed that the government of Cuba—where I have lived and worked side by side with the people and government for eight years—as well as the socialist-progressive governments of Venezuela, Bolivia and other Latin American governments have not understood that those principles must apply to the Tamil people of Sri Lanka. I got involved in solidarity with your people’s struggle because you have been so brutally treated, and because of these righteous principles expressed by Lenin, Fidel and Che. I have written critically about these governments siding with the Sinhalese governments of Sri Lanka while it denies the Tamil people those basic principles and rights, and commits genocide.

Perhaps Cuba+ have not understood the history of struggle that Tamils have undergone to win full equal rights before taking up arms. For 30 years you fought peacefully but you were met with brutal force, with pogroms/massacres of hundreds and thousands of people—even worse than that used against blacks in the US, and against Palestinians by Israelis. And, unfortunately, it was not only the governments that have done this against Tamils but also misguided Buddhist monks who betray the peaceful, coexistence values of Buddhism.

Your people’s organizations must meet and discuss these realities with the communist and socialist parties and with people’s grass roots and indigenous organizations in Latin America and elsewhere. You must explain to them your history, why you had to take up arms and fight for separation, for an independent nation. They have to hear of your suffering, of your struggles, why Tamil Eelam is a NECESSITY. You must remind them what they say about international solidarity, about what Lenin meant about political separation when the ruling powers will not grant a people their basic democratic and equal rights.

The progressive governments have won majority votes for new constitutions in Bolivia, in Ecuador, in Venezuela that grant equal rights to their indigenous peoples. In Bolivia, for instance, under the new constitution there are four official national languages, three of them are indigenous ones as well as Spanish. The same equalitarian development is happening in several progressive, pro-socialist governments in Latin America. If these people could know you simply want these same rights, they would listen to you and stop backing Sri Lanka. But they have been misguided because when they hear the worst terrorist in the world—the United States of America government—raise a little finger of possible criticism that maybe the Sri Lanka government should investigate itself to find some official scapegoat for violating human rights, Cuba should react against this hypocrisy. But they must know that in this case the Sri Lanka government is a terrible violator of human rights, and not just against the Tamils, but also against Muslims, the indigenous tribes, and it also exploits Sinhalese workers and the poor, and castes.

We must understand that Cuba, and so many governments and peoples, has been victimized by the United States false accusation that it commits “human rights abuse”. Cuba has been blockaded by the US since its victory in 1959. The US tried to overthrow the new revolution in April 1961. It brought the entire world to the brink of a nuclear war in October 1962. The US has sabotaged Cuba, murdered and handicapped thousands of its citizens; it even infiltrated bacteriological diseases in its livestock, its grains and sugar cane.

What has Cuba done to “deserve” this murderous aggression? It has done what Big Capital does not do, what imperialists will not do. It has introduced full and free education and health care. It has assured every citizen food and shelter. No one starves. 80% of its people own their own homes after paying the state simply what it actually costs to build them.

It has organized an excellent system of disaster management in which people and their animals are evacuated before hurricanes hit the island nation. And more often than not no one is killed, and their livestock is saved. That is not what happens in the United States especially in the areas where blacks and poor people live and are struck by natural disasters.

Cuba came to the aid of Angola when attacked by apartheid South Africa. Cuba, alongside with the new Venezuela, comes to the aid of tens of millions of people in scores of land around the world with their medical care, curing even blindness, and educating people to read and write, offering sports and technical assistance. Cuba has more doctors serving the international arena than is offered by all the governments in the United Nations. Cuba does not export war and torture, disease and starvation. It exports “human capital”.

Tamils in Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka Tamil refugees here and in the Diaspora should not rely on the greatest terrorist in the world to help them. The Yankees offer no help without humiliating costs. We must be aware that since World War 11, the US has invaded/intervened militarily 160 times in 66 countries. We must understand that now with a black-faced puppet president of Big Capital, the imperialists are at war in seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia and now Uganda. They kill tens of millions; they torture hundreds of thousands; they starve hundreds of millions.

US’s staunch ally, Zionist Israel commits genocide against the Palestinian people. It offered Mossad intelligence, great amounts of weaponry, killer aircraft and even pilots to Sri Lanka, in order to murder the Tamils. After the end of the war, May 2009, Sri Lanka sent its military chief-of-staff, Donald Perera, to Israel as its ambassador, a reward for Zionist assistance. He told the largest Zionist daily, Yedioth Abornoth: “I consider your country a partner in the war against terror,” thus coupling terrorism with the Palestinians’ struggle for their homeland and the Tamils’ simple right to exist in peace and equality.

Perera spoke proudly of having “a great relationship with your military industries and with Israel Aerospace industries.”

Perera spoke about the murder, on May 31, 2010, of nine Turkish solidarity activists bound for Gaza with survival supplies: “I can understand that Israel had to protect itself.”

Perhaps because of the complexity of geo-politics, the history of standing for sovereignty of the member nations of the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM), the leaders of Cuba and ALBA lands (Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Latin America) cannot support the goal of a separate nation within Sri Lanka. But they could be convinced to chastise the Sri Lankan government for its atrocities against the Tamil people, and the other oppressed people under the chauvinist Sinhalese leadership. They could see within the context of their moral ideology that it is only right that Tamils must have equality and the basic right to exist without fear of murder and takeovers of their homes and lands. Your peoples’ organizations should remind these pro-Palestinian governments that it is only Israel that supports the US blockade against Cuba; that it is the US and Israel that lead the tiny opposition to Palestine’s right to be a member of the United Nations.

Regardless of whether Cuba has achieved socialism—it is a long process after all and there is so much destruction and subversion coming from the Yankee imperialists—the Cuban people and the government are still worthy of our love and support. They have conducted no wars or torture against any people and they have helped many millions. It is now time that they are approached by all your organizations and become convinced to come to the aid of their natural brothers and sisters in Sri Lanka—the oppressed Tamil people.

We have wandered over the deserts and the seas. We have been hungry and thirsty. We have been murdered and tortured. We are of the working class, of the castes; we are many races and nationalities. We share a common vision: freedom and equality; bread and water on the table; a shelter over our heads. We must fight together to live in peace and harmony.

We must unite around the world and struggle for an independent international investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity against Sri Lanka government leaders.

We must call for a worldwide Boycott of Sri Lanka. Che Guevara would be on our side today!

A positive sign of recognition for Tamil rights is the dramatic Channel 4 UK documentary, Sri Lanka Killing Fields, shown first at a June Human Rights Council session and then worldwide.

Rudrakumaran is Prime Minister of the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam (TGTE), and a prominent activist in the Diaspora. He earned law degrees from the University of Colombo and Southern Methodist University. He later studied and wrote articles about self-determination at Harvard Law School

Upon the end of the long civil war in Sri Lanka, May 2009, Rudrakumaran saw the need for international representation of Tamils’ right to sovereignty. He and other Tamil professionals held meetings in Malaysia and Switzerland to initiate the TGTE on the basis of nationhood, a homeland and the right to self-determination.

As these Tamil leaders in exile were gathering forces, they were surprised and disconcerted that Cuba and other new progressive governments in Latin America sided with Sri Lanka at the May 2009 sessions of the Human Rights Council, and not only against the guerrilla movement but also against the Tamil population interests

“Tamils always looked upon Fidel and Che as heroes,” the PM said. “Our people are shocked by Cuba’s position since May 2009. Perhaps it is due to poor communication. We want to send a delegation to Cuba, to Venezuela and other ALBA [Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Latin America] governments to explain our position and to engage in dialogue.”

PM Rudrakumaran maintains that his Transnational Government is not tied to any government or international power. “We are not at the mercy of any power, but will accept support for our cause from whoever cooperates with us.”
The TGTE stresses democratic forms of decision making. In the spring of 2010, elections for delegates to the TGTE were held in 12 countries. In some cases, the proposed candidate met no competition and so there was no election. Tens of thousands participated.

Fifty-six elected delegates gathered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (USA) to officially form the Transnational Constituent Assembly on May 17-19, 2010. Thirty more delegates participated via video conference from London and Geneva. On November 3, the TGTE announced its first cabinet. Of the 10 ministers and 10 deputy ministers, five are women.
The TGTE is not to be confused with a “government in exile”, as there had been no independent state with a government that later sought relocation. It is a transnational government in transition and campaigns for nationhood through diplomacy and education. The real government will be established in the homeland when that is physically possible.
TGTE strategy is to work with all existing local, national and international Tamil organizations in the Diaspora, and to create a power centre for diplomacy with all governments possible. It also seeks to work in partnership with Tamil leadership inside Sri Lanka but has not been able to establish ties, at least not officially, given the belligerent nature of the S.L. government.
Getting to this point started following independence from Britain, in 1947-8. “Our people were conservative in many ways,” PM Rudrakumaran explained.
“We were nationalistic, not revolutionary. We had castes and women were not treated equally. We sought equal rights with the majority Sinhalese by using peaceful, non-violent means. But the Sinhalese governments and racist monks and other extremists beat and killed us. They conducted several pogroms in which thousands of Tamils were killed in terrible ways.
“Finally, in 1976, all the Tamil political parties in and out of parliament, from conservative to the most radical and revolutionary decided to struggle for an independent nation in the North East homeland,” Rudra, as he is known, continued.
“When the liberation struggle took up arms, all the barriers were broken. In fact, women played an important role in the armed struggle.

“The Tigers [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam] gave us the dignity and strength to fight. Today, however, the struggle is on the diplomatic plane. We look forward. We are not mired in the past or in speculation about whether the Tigers committed terrorism.”

TGTE Guiding Principles

1. Commitment to achieve Eelam, an independent, sovereign State—nationhood, homeland and right to self-determination.
2. Tamil Eelam will be a secular state.
3. TGTE shall assist in establishing health facilities in the homeland, homes and refuges for those affected by the war; promote cultural activities stressing Eelam Tamil distinctiveness. Much of this work will have to be done indirectly as the TGTE cannot be in Sri Lanka.
4. Promote education in the homeland.
5. Promote economic welfare.
6. Conduct foreign relations through lobbying.
7. Seek prosecution of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
8. Protect the equality of women and all Tamils.
9. Provide welfare of families of martyrs, former combatants and families affected by the war. One practical project is to establish monuments for martyrs in the Diaspora since their memorials and graves have been destroyed by the Sri Lankan government.

PM Rudrakumaran said that the TGTE has good relations with the two other international organizations fighting for Tamil sovereignty: Global Tamil Eelam and the Council of Eelam Tamil in Europe.

“We all agree to the same goals and our means are the same—not armed struggle but peaceful protests and diplomacy. We are different in that the TGTE has elected representation in the form of a transnational government, a rather special breed of government,” Rudra said.

“We are encouraged about our future prospects. We see it favorable for us that a referendum was held for South Sudan [in 2005], in which 98.3% voted for secession. The TGTE attended the inauguration ceremony in Juba, July 10, as government guests of the new nation.”

TGTE deputy foreign minister Kanaganthram Manickavasagar and PM spokesperson Jeyaprakash Jeyalingam were among the guests when Salva Kiir signed the new constitution and was sworn in as president.

World leaders were present, including Sudan President Omar al-Bashir and UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon. Sri Lanka sent a minor envoy, Tissa Vitharana, senior minister of scientific affairs.

Prime Minister Rudrakumaran’s message to the newest nation, number 193 recognized by the UN, read: “We salute [you] for [your] sacrifices to become free and admire [your] courage and determination.”

“Our strategy is similar to that of the Republic of South Sudan,” the PM said. “We want the international community to press for and supervise a referendum on Eelam as occurred in South Sudan. Our peoples have undergone similar fates: genocide, followed by struggles for independence met by war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Tamil guerrillas had called for ceasefires and a peace deal leading to a referendum for independence. Finally, in 2001, a ceasefire was achieved but only after the guerrillas had decimated much of Sri Lanka’s military might. However, when Mahinda Rajapaksa won the presidency, in 2004, he established a family fiefdom bent on annihilating all Tamil opposition. He smashed the ceasefire and took warring advice and technical-surveillance aid from the US Bush regime; massive weapons, communication infrastructure, boats and fighter aircraft from China; fighter aircraft, intelligence agents and technology from Israel; boats, missiles and moneys from India; moneys for oil and weapons from Iran; weapons from Pakistan; arms and patrol boats from UK and France; and technology and loans from Japan.

Rudrakumaran has no illusions about the interests of major governments representing former and current colonialists and empires. “How does one play the game and not allow a big power to decide? Our skills and our dedication to our united goal of sovereignty determine how we act. We won’t compromise sovereignty. Ours is a struggle for nationality and not one based on ideological or economic grounds.”

Rudrakumaran hopes that India will change its pro-Sri Lanka attitude towards one of support for Tamils. He sees the geo-political wind turning toward both China and India’s interests. As China’s influence grows in Sri Lanka, India is confused about how to act. He does not believe that India is currently acting in its long term interests by sidling up to the Rajapaksa government and thinks that India will soon realize that.

The Tamil leader is also encouraged by recent developments in the 18th session of the Human Rights Council just completed (September 12-30). It appears that the report by an expert panel appointed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on “accountability in Sri Lanka” now has a chance to be discussed by the HRC at its 19th session. At least that is proposed by Ki-moon and the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay.

The report was delivered last March and is quite critical of the Sri Lanka government for possible human rights abuse of Tamil civilians and combatants in the last months of the war, which ended May 2009. The report calls for an independent investigation into credible allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In this HRC session, unlike in that of other sessions, neither India nor any of the Latin American countries expressed verbal approval of the Sri Lanka government when it denied any wrong doing.

See TGTE’s website: http://govtamileelam.org/gov/.

The main cause for failure was a missing vehicle with their heavy weaponry. Nevertheless they were able to cause three times the numbers of casualties that they suffered. Nearly one-half of the rebels were killed but most of them died under or following torture.

After being held for 76 days in isolation without access to reading material, Fidel Castro, the 26-year old leader, came into a courtroom filled with 100 soldiers. He gave a rousing defense of the need for revolution to topple the dictator and change the corrupt and brutal socio-economic system so that all could be fed, obtain education and health care, so that farmers could own land and all have a voice.

In his five-hour speech, Fidel said, “The right of rebellion against tyranny, Honorable Judges, has been recognized from the most ancient times to the present day by men of all creeds, ideas and doctrines.”

Instead of asking for acquittal, he demanded to be with his brother and sister rebels in prison. “Condemn me, it does not matter, history will absolve me!”

Fidel Castro considers ethics and morality to be essential for revolutions. In My Life: Fidel Castro, the 2006 interview book with Ignacio Ramonet, Fidel speaks of these highest principles on numerous occasions. He asserts that “especially ethics” is what he learned most from the national liberation hero, José Martí.

After following liberated Cuba for half-a-century, having lived and worked there for eight years, I find that during its guerrilla struggle, from December 2, 1956 to January 1, 1959 the revolutionaries acted in a moral manner. Cuba’s revolutionary armed struggle was exceptional in this way. As Fidel told Ramonet, “We did not kill any prisoners,” “not even one blow” was dealt. That is “our principle.” “All revolutionary thought begins with a bit of ethics.”

I think that is also the key reason why so many millions of people the world over love and respect Che Guevara: his moral stance, his example as a just revolutionary leader. This from Socialism and Man:

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love…Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize this love of the people, the most sacred cause, and make it one and indivisible…one must have a great deal of humanity and a strong sense of justice and truth in order not to fall into extreme dogmatism and cold scholasticism, into an isolation from the masses. We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.

I agree with Fidel and Che. Revolutionaries must be ethical in vision and use morality in practice, both at home and in solidarity with the oppressed everywhere. As Fidel told Lee Lockwood in Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel:

Those who are exploited are our compatriots all over the world; and the exploiters all over the world are our enemies… Our country is really the whole world, and all the revolutionaries of the world are our brothers.

I define ethics in this way: Life shall not be abused or destroyed by our conscious hand—without being attacked or oppressed beyond limits of toleration. A moral person, organization, political party or government acts in daily life and in the struggle for justice with that ethic in mind. These are my thoughts on morality:

1. We act so that no one person, race or ethnic group is either over or under another.
2. In combat against oppressors and invaders, we do not kill non-combatant civilians nor forcefully recruit them, or use them as hostages.
3. We struggle to create equality for all.
4. We abolish all profit-making based upon the exploitation of labor or the oppression of any person, group of people, class or caste. Instead, we build an economy based upon principles of justice and equality, one in which no one goes hungry, sharing equitably our resources and production.
5. We struggle to create a political system based upon participation where all have a voice in decision-making about vital matters with relation to local, national and international policies.
6. We struggle to eliminate alienation in each of us.

Ethics and Sri Lanka Tamils

True solidarity activists have no choice. We must support a people under attack by aggressors wherever in the world. That is what I see as our task as anti-war activists concerning Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine…just as we did in the wars against Vietnam-Laos-Cambodia and the South Africans…

For us solidarity activists, and governments viewing themselves as progressive-socialist-communist-revolutionary, I believe our task must be to press for the very lives and rights of the Tamil people in Sri Lanka where governments have systematically oppressed and repressed them for half-a-century.

As a solidarity activist—who advocates the right to resist and the necessity to conduct armed struggle once peaceful means fail to change oppressive governments from terrorizing us—I denounce all perpetrators of terrorism, no matter the party or cause, and demand they change tactics to ones that are morally in accordance with our ideology embracing fellowship with justice and equality.

I find that most armed movements commit acts of atrocities, even acts of terror in the long course of warfare. This has sometimes been the case with the Colombian FARC and Palestinian PFLP, for instance. But I support them in their righteous struggle. They are up against much greater military and economic forces that practice state terror endemically. The ANC in South Africa’s war for liberation also committed horrendous acts of terrorism.

Most of the dozens of Tamil groups that took up arms, at one time or another, considered themselves Marxists, and many looked up to Che Guevara and Cuba’s revolution as an ideal. But they nearly all became terrorists in much of their actions. Hear what Che Guevara meant about the use of violence.

There are always laggards who remain behind but our function is not to liquidate them, to crush them and force them to bow to an armed vanguard, but to educate them by leading them forward and getting them to follow us because of our example, or as Fidel called it ‘moral compulsion.’ (Speech “From somewhere in the world”)

This Sri Lanka Tamil ‘story’ is a tragedy especially for the Tamils; also for the world of humanity. Most people not directly involved, however, do not react because they don’t know what they can do. There are so many tragedies going on at the same time. Cynical brutality is constantly unleashed by major capitalist enterprises and their governments in the ‘first’ world, much of the former ‘second’ world as well as by national capitalists in the ‘third’ world. We live in what I call the Permanent War Age. Brutality—surveillance—suffering is the norm.

In those countries where there is little brutality, in comparison, and no aggressive war-making (I speak here of the governments of Cuba and other ALBA—Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Our America—countries) the leaders see the necessity of having political ties  with some war criminal governments, such as Sri Lanka. I gather that this leads them to ignore their moral solidarity principles and abandon the oppressed Tamils.

On this July 26 day of celebration, I call upon the Cuban government, as well as all members of the ALBA alliance, to return to the moral principles expressed by Fidel and Che and do the right thing by the Tamil people. Call for an independent international investigation into the war crimes committed by the Sri Lankan government, and use your moral clout, your revolutionary record to demand an end to the genocide against this people.

If morality does not become integral to our struggles, I’m afraid we are headed for a worldwide moral collapse, which is already underway due to the intrinsic immorality of capitalism and its imperialism; the foundering of contemporary socialism; and the rise of fascism throughout much of the world.

The “Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka” was delivered to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on March 31 concerning: 1) alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the last phases of the 26-year old civil war, September 2008 to May 19, 2009; 2) consequences for approximately 300,000 Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) and, by extension, for 2.7 million Sri Lankan Tamils, 13% of the 21 million population.

After receiving the report, which calls for investigations into these allegations, Ban Ki-moon stated that he did not have the power alone but one of three UN bodies had to request such action, either the General Assembly or the Security Council or the Human Rights Council.

The panel—chairman Marzuki Darusman (Indonesia), Steven Ratner (US), and Yasmin Sooka (South Africa)—was commissioned by the Secretary General, June 22, 2010, after Sri Lanka’s government had failed to rehabilitate or reconcile with the Tamils affected by the brutal war, which, according to the Panel, caused up to 40,000 civilian deaths in those eight months, plus several thousand combatants of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and government soldiers.

The Panel began work in September 2010 but had to conduct its research outside Sri Lanka as the government refused this United Nations body permission to enter its country. The Panel could interview many eye witnesses, however, who were eventually released from military camps after months of detention—many of whom bribed their way out—or who were able to escape the war zone towards the end on boats provided by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Several ICRC workers and other humanitarian employees were killed by government military shelling.

Of the dozens of recommendations proposed by the panel, the last two concern the United Nations.

“A. The Human Rights Council should be invited to reconsider its May 2009 Special Session Resolution (A/HRC/8-11/L. 1/Rev. 2) regarding Sri Lanka, in light of this report.”

The above cited resolution had been proposed by the Sri Lankan government to praise its behavior in the war and condemn only the LTTE for war crimes and terrorism. Not a member of the HRC, Sri Lanka got Cuba, then the Non-Aligned Movement president, to introduce it. It passed with 29 voting in favor and 12 against with six abstentions.

The Panel determined that, “the Human Rights Council may have been acting on incomplete information”.

“B. The Secretary-General should conduct a comprehensive review of actions by the United Nations system during the war in Sri Lanka and the aftermath, regarding the implementation of its humanitarian and protection mandates.”

The Panel criticized the UN’s role in this conflict. “During the final stages of the war, the United Nations political organs and bodies failed to take actions that might have protected civilians.”

The Panel recommended that the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) should “commence genuine investigations”, and an independent international mechanism established by the UN Secretary-General should also investigate what did occur.

The Panel recommended that GOSL should also “issue a public, formal acknowledgement of its role in and responsibility for extensive civilian casualties.”

In its summary, the Panel wrote:

The Panel’s determination of credible allegations reveals a very different version of the final stages of the war than that maintained to this day by the Government of Sri Lanka. The Government says it pursued a ‘humanitarian rescue operation’ with a policy of ‘zero civilian casualties’. In stark contrast, the Panel found credible allegations, which if proven, indicate that a wide range of serious violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law were committed both by the Government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE, some of which would amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity (author emphasis). Indeed, the conduct of the war represented a grave assault on the entire regime of international law designed to protect individual dignity during both war and peace.

Especially the Panel found credible allegations associated with the final stages of the war. Between September 2008 and 19 May 2009, the Sri Lanka Army advanced its military campaign into the Vanni using large-scale and widespread shelling causing large numbers of civilian deaths. This campaign constituted persecution of the population of the Vanni. Around 330,000 civilians were trapped into an ever decreasing area, fleeing the shelling but kept hostage by the LTTE. The Government sought to intimidate and silence the media and other critics of the war through a variety of threats and actions, including the use of white vans to abduct and to make people disappear.

The Government shelled on a large scale in three consecutive No Fire Zones, where it had encouraged the civilian population to concentrate, even after indicating that it would cease the use of heavy weapons. It shelled the United Nations hub, food distribution lines and near the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) ships that were coming to pick up the wounded and their relatives from the beaches. It shelled in spite of its knowledge of the impact, provided by its own intelligence systems and through notification by the United Nations, the ICRC and others. Most civilian casualties in the final phases of the war were caused by Government shelling.

The Government systematically shelled hospitals on the frontlines. All hospitals in the Vanni were hit by mortars and artillery, some of them were hit repeatedly, despite the fact that their locations were well-known to the Government. The Government also systematically deprived people in the conflict zone of humanitarian aid, in the form of food and medical supplies, particularly surgical supplies, adding to their suffering.

The Panel’s full text of 214 pages lists details of possible war crimes and crimes against humanity on both sides in paragraphs 246-252:
The government is accused of: murder, extermination, mutilation, arbitrary imprisonment, rape, torture, persecution founded on race, religion or politics, and disappearances.

The LTTE is accused of: violence to life and person, torture, mutilation, forced labor and forced recruitment of children, and shooting civilians trying to flee the war zone.

The IDP Tamils were brutally confined and treated. Tamils in their traditional Northern and Eastern “High Security Zones” are militarized, denied normal rights, intimidated and made victims of violence.
The Panel therefore recommended that GOSL end all state violence, release all displaced persons and facilitate their return to their homes or provide for resettlement. [Thousands of Tamil homes have been taken over by soldiers and other Sinhalese.] It should also repeal the Emergency Laws that deny democratic and civil rights.

The Mahinda Rajapaksa family regime continues to deny any wrong-doing, contending that NO civilians were killed and were later well treated in IDP camps. It claims it only attacked the LTTE. If there were civilians killed, according to government logic, it is their own fault for being there. The Panel cites international law that “an attack remains unlawful if it is conducted simultaneously at a lawful military object and an unlawfully-targeted civilian population” (paragraph 199).

The GOSL says it has established a transparency process to address the past from the 2002 ceasefire agreement to the end of the conflict, the so-called Lessens Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC).

While the Panel views this as a “potentially useful opportunity to begin a national dialogue”, the “LLRC fails to satisfy key international standards of independence and impartiality, as it is compromised by its composition and deep-seated conflicts of interests of some of its members.”— Three were government officials; one an Attorney-General.

The Panel also points to the history of conflict between the government and Tamils seeking full rights. For decades the Tamils used Gandhian civil disobedience, non-violent tactics before many took up arms in several groups. The Tamils have suffered half-a-dozen pogroms, with government backing, in which thousands were brutally murdered, including mutilation and being burned alive.

In the few instances in which governments have set up commissions of inquiry to examine human rights abuses, they have “failed to produce a public report and recommendations have rarely been implemented”.

The fact is, states the report (paragraph 28):

After independence [from Great Britain in 1948], political elites tended to prioritize short-term political gains, appealing to communal and ethnic sentiments, over long-term policies, which could have built an inclusive state that adequately represented the multicultural nature of the citizenry. Because of these dynamics and divisions, the formation of a unifying national identity has been greatly hampered. Meanwhile, Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism gained traction, asserting a privileged place for the Sinhalese as protectors of Sri Lanka, as the sacred home of Buddhism. These factors resulted in devastating and enduring consequences for the nature of the state, governance and inter-ethnic relations in Sri Lanka.

The first pogrom took place in June 1956 as the new Prime Minister SWRD Bandaranaike (Sri Lanka Freedom Party/SLFP—the same party to which the Rajapaksas belong) backed the “Sinhala Only” bill, one of several discriminatory measures against the Tamil people. Because some Tamils conducted sit-ins, Buddhist monk-led mobs rampaged for ten days, murdering 150 Tamils and burning their homes and businesses. Ironically, because Bandaranaike was willing to engage in dialogue with Tamil leaders he was murdered by a “pacifist” Buddhist monk, September 29, 1959.

Bandaranaike’s widow, Sirimavo, became PM in July 1960 and continued discriminatory policies against Tamils. She sat as PM or President four terms spread over 40 years, for a total of 13 years. She was the world’s first female PM and brought Sri Lanka into the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) as a founding member, in 1961. NAM, now with118 state member, stands against imperialism, interference from foreign nations, bloc politics, and against racism. Cuba and other progressive governments, as well as reactionary ones in the “Third World”- based NAM have, therefore, backed Sri Lanka in international issues.

In 2004, Cuba and Venezuela launched ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America) as an alternative to capitalist economic and political coalitions. Today there are eight Latin American government members, including Ecuador, which is now on the HRC along with Cuba. In 2009, Bolivia and Nicaragua, both in ALBA, were members of the HRW supporting Sri Lanka.

These socialist leaning governments have better human rights records than the previous capitalist governments of their countries, which were for many decades under the dictates of US imperialism and before that under European colonialism. ALBA partners now have a chance whether on the Council or not to help the Tamil people in some way, also by calling for an investigation.

This is the challenge that the countries of NAM on the HRC now face with the Panel’s recommendations for an international investigation into alleged war crimes. Will they resist criticizing a member for its racist and terrorist actions against an entire people, or will they take sides with a clearly oppressed people? The latter choice might place them voting alongside the rich, Western nations that will probably call for some sort of an investigation. (See my piece on this dilemma.)

As I view the possible thinking of socialist Cuba and other NAM countries, the dilemma is between supporting sovereignty for Third World countries confronted with interference from imperialist and former colonialist states, a legitimate issue, and conducting national policies in such a way that no section of the population is systematically discriminated against or subject to genocide.

Since the 2009 HRC resolution, there are 15 new countries on it, among them the US. One must ask: just what is the game plan of the US and its European allies, who make sounds of protest against Sri Lanka’s abuse of human rights while they are the worst offenders, constantly engaging in aggressive wars against NAM members and others: now warring against the sovereign government of Libya, the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Palestine.

One can also ask why one of the Panel members, Ratner, participated in such an elaborate, comprehensive and just report. As a legal expert of international law he advised the US State Department (1998-2008), which is the major political aggressor in the world and has backed Sinhalese nationalist governments against Tamil’s liberation efforts, providing armaments, intelligence, finances, military training, propaganda. (See my article.)

But then most governments of both “blocs” have done the same: China, Russia, India, the UK and other European states, even Iran and also and especially Israel.

Clearly victims of US permanent war aggression, such as Cuba, react against its hypocritical “support” for “human rights”, and side with the “victim” Sri Lanka. Not in all cases, however, is the “victim” innocent. There are more offenders of human lives and civil rights than the imperialists. And the Sinhalese majority has been whipped up by Buddhist supremacist clergy and Sinhalese nationalist chauvinism by all the governments in Sri Lanka since 1948. Unfortunately, and without comprehension from my viewpoint, most of the Sinhalese-led Communist, Trotskyist, and Maoist parties have immorally allied themselves with the two major parties to keep the Tamils down.
The United Nations is comprised of 192 nations, only three in the world are not in it: Kosovo—a separatist state creation of the US-EU; Taiwan, a separated part of China; and 771 people in the state of the Vatican City. The member states of the HRC, with China and Russia and other large countries represent more than one-half the world’s citizens.

Third World countries comprise the majority on the HRC. They have many ethnic peoples long oppressed and brutalized by others. Let us remember Rwanda and how the UN failed to intervene and prevent genocide of one million people. The UN again failed in a similar debacle in Sri Lanka. Let us hope that the Human Rights Council will redeem these tragedies regardless of motives.

The revolutionary [is] the ideological motor force of the revolution…if he forgets his proletarian internationalism, the revolution which he leads will cease to be an inspiring force and he will sink into a comfortable lethargy, which imperialism, our irreconcilable enemy, will utilize well. Proletarian internationalism is a duty, but it is also a revolutionary necessity. So we educate our people.

– Che Guevara in Socialism and Man

“Castillo de MORAL” read the label. Wine named Moral, that’s what Carsten gave me.

That was big of him, a strident Marxist-Leninist who sides 100% with the victims of invasions by imperialists. For him that means no criticisms of those who resist these invasions, such as the current ones in the Middle East and Libya. No admonishment of Taliban, al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein and his Baath party and Iraqi soldiers combating the invaders and their Iraqi collaborators.

Incidentally, among the first collaborators was the Iraqi Communist Party, followers of the old Moscow line. They returned from exile to support the US occupiers in its lackey government. They live in its “green zone”. This contradiction has not swayed the Moscow-oriented Communist parties of several countries from backing them—that includes, the Communist Party In Denmark, the US and UK communist parties and others. One cannot be opposed to imperialism and its invasion in Iraq and support one of the main culprits.

Yet we anti-imperialists cannot remain silent about brutal crimes committed by some of the resistance groups against innocent, unarmed civilians who are nearby when a suicide bomber lets go; or those women and girls who are raped and then punished for being raped; or, with some groups, the denial of women to enjoy sex by removing part or the entire clitoris; and, in the case of some, the denial of women to have the same rights as men, or…

This attitude of covering eyes is common among many hard-core leftists. So was it also for most Communists and anti-imperialists when Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe Communist parties were jailing and killing their own critics, many of whom were true communists and anti-imperialists.

Most of the readers of these pieces know this history. Some of us remember the hateful words and wrongful deeds committed by one group against another within our own camps: the Stalinists, the Maoists, the varying shades of red purer than the next. Today, there is less of that but at the same time there is less activity, less passion in support for those the imperialists attack.

We don’t see a Ho Chi Minh, a Fidel, or Che in the Middle East struggles to regain their sovereignty; and we are all too few who are motivated to fight for them, and when fighting do so quite mildly, not like when we fought alongside the Vietnamese.

I contend that this difference is not only because capitalism has won the battle (for now) over most bodies and minds, especially in the rich capitalist countries and not only in the “Christian” West. I contend that the Cuban revolution, and the Vietnamese revolution and their fight for sovereignty against the French and Usamericans were conducted on moral principles.

They fought without torturing the enemy, without killing and manhandling prisoners, and after victory, down to this day, the Cuban government and police authorities do not murder people on the streets or torture criminals in jail, nor torture the political “dissidents” who, more than not, have been paid with US government funds to join its side against Cuba’s government.

Some US soldiers in Vietnam, who later came over to our side, have said that some torture did occur at the hands of Vietnamese communists. If this is true, it was the exception to the rule—don’t believe for a minute that John McCain was actually tortured. Whereas with the Yankees and their European allies, and their allies in the Middle East today, or in nearly all of Latin America yesterday and today in Colombia and Honduras, or in Indonesia yesterday, or the African dictators and Zionist Israelis (the list is long) torture, rape, and wanton murder was and is normal.

Look, if we are to fight this immoral system of profit-making motivated brutality, this disregard for human worth, then we must be different. We must be moral! We must offer a hopeful future for people else why should they join us. We have lost millions of supporters and millions more potential ones because of immoral Soviet-Comecon state leaderships, the wanton slaughter and crimes of humanity committed by Cambodia’s Pol Pot “communists”, the forced recruitments and murder of civilians by the “Maoist-Guevarist” Shining Path guerrillas…

Few leftists place morality on their struggle agenda. I believe it may be so, partially, because Marx and Lenin, certainly Stalin and Mao, did not make “the ethical question” a priority. No, the working class, the masses will fight because they must, in order to survive the dictates of exploitative capitalism. It is an objective, dialectical matter not one of morality, they meant.

Yet these leaders did speak of the subjective need for consciousness, that is: objective conditions may be ready for revolution but if the individual and working class do not see it, do not feel it then revolution does not happen automatically. I contend that the lack of consciousness is a major problem in today’s world—especially among the video war game fanatic youth and their consumer hungry parents (workers) in this era of individualism, in this age of permanent war.

What is ethics and morality?

Morality is rules we apply to live by, in order to be ethical: that is, to care for one another, to live in harmony, in fellowship and peace. Ethics is necessary for our collective survival and that of our surroundings, the earth and the elements. To accomplish this universal ethic, we must share what we make, share natural resources, assure that the planet breathes life and not chemical death. It is immoral to take from others—don’t we parents tell our children that when we send them to nursery school—to make systems that favor some and exploit and destroy others, that require war-making, that destroy other life forms.

Moral rules are necessary for people to cooperate so that we can achieve goals, which we would not be able to dream of if each of us were left on our own. And morals prevent groups’ needs and goals from colliding. If there were no enforced moral rules to decide disputes, we would end in chaos, and no one would be able to achieve any goal.

So what do we put in place of gripper capitalism and its individualism “morality”? I think George Orwell said it well in his essay, “Can Socialists Be Happy?”

The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood… Men [and women] use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars [Spain, for instance], or tortured in secret prisons of the Gestapo [or Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, or a myriad other secret torture chambers in many countries not the least of which are prisons in the US], not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another.

“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love,” is the way that Che put it.

Many Christians, who read what the Bible says anyway, should identify with these views. Isn’t that what Jesus Christ is supposed to have stood for?

We must know by now that that is not the philosophy of the self-styled “democracies” of the West. We can’t really call it loving people when, for instance, the nation I was born in has invaded/intervened/conducted humanitarian operations 160 times in 66 nations since World War II.

We must act against our governments’ terrorist wars, “humanitarian operations”, else accept the consequences of shared blame. If we don’t stop the madness it will soon lead to world destruction.

Is it “humanitarian” to arm and aid some Libyan clans who want Gaddafi to go so that they can put in other powerful men, some of whom were Gaddafi’s sidekicks all these “successful” years of cooperation with the rich oil-thirsty governments? Unfortunately, the original massive uproar movement there has been taken over by these power hungry men. We should support the people’s uproar without being beguiled into backing the erstwhile leftist Gaddafi. The distinction is admittedly not easy to act upon.

Nevertheless, we must fight against the aggressive wars wherever they are. We must fight on the public streets and before their offices and bases, and we must support the invaded resistance fighters. Yes, I want the resistance to win over “us”. Some of them may not be the best people or have the best ways of relating to one another or the best laws—I refer to bin Ladin types here—but it is their world that “we” invade to take from them what they have. “We” don’t invade them to bring about “democracy”. No serious person can possibly believe that today.

Beyond condemning the US and its allies’ crimes against humanity, we must be even-handed if we are to be revolutionaries, or just decent people. I do not believe it to be “foolish consistency”, as Abraham Lincoln is so often cited for saying, to look all evil in the eye and call it by its name: evil. And not all the evil is deposited at the Pentagon, White House, Langley, or at Downing Street.

If we want a socially just economy and equality in human relationships (socialism, communism, anarchy…) then we must place love/solidarity/morality in the center.

There was a time following World War II when the Nuremberg Tribunal’s conclusion was widely accepted as a moral principle: “Individuals have international duties, which transcend the national obligations of obedience… Therefore [individual citizens] have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring.”

That is what Bradley Manning did when he leaked internal cables to the world showing war crimes committed systematically by his government. He should get the Medal of Humanitarian Honor for that not life in a chamber submitted to daily psychological torture. And so must we also back another hero, Julian Assange, and Wikileaks for making available to us the secret information about US+ war crimes, on-going torture, and US diplomats’ take on the world. I have added my solidarity, this time in the form of half my pension fund for Wikileaks defense and existence.

The moral concept of responsibility, the Nuremberg code, is what the “guilty innocent” citizens of the United States need to understand about their governments’ constant wars, and what caused September 11, 2001. Too many American Dreamers have been “good Germans” for too long. Whoever it was who conducted those wrongful acts of terror—and I do not doubt that some elements in the Bush regime were accomplices—they should not be applauded as heroes. But the world that was threatened by those acts has to understand WHY they unleashed their terror, if Arab foreigners were, in fact, the perpetrators or co-perpetrators. They acted as they did because they, and millions and millions more across the Third World, have been and are being subjected to terror and Big Time thievery by all United States governments. Unfortunately, the governments are aided by most of their working class citizens, those who join in the murder and torture as soldiers and secret agents, and mercenaries, and those who turn their heads in the hope of living the life of “ignorance is bliss.”¹

They didn’t stop with Afghanistan, purportedly seeking bin Ladin and gang—I knew from the first cry for his blood that they would never find him because they need him wherever he is or isn’t—no they went on to the main target, Iraq, then extended to Pakistan and now Libya.

While writing this series, I have been interrupted to join in small and mild demonstrations in support of the Arabic peoples’ struggles in Tunisia and Egypt, and against the empire’s bombings in Libya. Wikileaks played an important part in this popular movement beginning in Tunisia. The leaks showing how corrupted Tunisia’s Ben Ali government had been was not news to the citizenry, but when it became world known it did encourage people to rebel. They saw the opportunity, sparked by one of their own—Mohammad Bouazizi—in his suicide protest, and felt that they could pull it off with the world’s sympathy. And they were right.

Arabic despots and dynasties and Western imperialists are frightened of the contagious wave of authentic democratic rebellion throughout the Arabic world. The people want an end to their lack of power, and end to the elite’s thievery of their wealth, an end to their endemic corruption and their repression. The West was caught off guard by the rebellion, but now sees the chance to make a populist score by bombing one of the despots, a lesser one than their strongest allies in Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Bahraini where the US Navy is entrenched. The West demands stability=passivity; it must stop the rebellion from becoming successful, which could lead to anti-capitalist movements, too. We must act in solidarity with these people and not the new governments that still back the exploitative system.

Act as we speak

Our world is ruled by one economy, capitalism. We know that capitalism is avaricious by nature; to grow it must become imperialist. That logic fits the good guys too. It is fitting the shoe of the Chinese Communist party and, to a lesser extent, our former Vietnamese comrades—our brothers and sisters victimized by U.S. crimes against their humanity. Both systems’ leaders are today exploiting their own workers. This process also has too good a start in Cuba.

It was wrong politically/morally of the governments of Cuba, Bolivia and Nicaragua to let down the Tamil population in the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka by extending unconditional political support to the Mahinda Rajapaksa government that had just massacred tens of thousands of Tamil civilians in its efforts to destroy the Tiger army (LTTE-Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam).

The long civil war ended in May 2009, and the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) voted, 29 to 12 with 6 abstentions, to applaud Sri Lanka for its victory against the terrorism of the Tigers. The majority resolution was proposed by Sri Lanka itself and introduced by Cuba, at that time the rotating leader of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) of which Sri Lanka is a member.

OK, what is wrong with this scenario? First, Sri Lanka is neither democratic nor socialist. The economy is capitalist based with a good deal of multinational corporation enterprises.

The government murders journalists (at least 34 in seven years) who expose government crimes and discrimination against the minority Tamil population. Discrimination is codified by law and in practice in a variety of ways: language, religion, lack of equal rights to education and jobs. The majority Sinhalese have, on several occasions, conducted murderous pogroms against Tamils, usually led by Buddhist monks and with self-proclaimed leftist parties’ backing. Several thousands of unarmed Tamils have been so slaughtered. Some of the murdering political parties have claimed to follow the paths of Che, Mao, or Moscow’s CP. Today, they partake in the coalition government—United People’s Freedom Alliance—alongside the Rajapaksa family of corrupted mass murderers in the largest party, Sri Lanka Freedom Party.

This murderous racism cannot be tolerated by true internationalists. The betrayers of Che and internationalism in Sri Lanka include: Janatha Vimukthi Peramana (JVP), which ironically lost about 20,000 of its rebelling young members in attacks against them by Sri Lanka governments, in the 1970-80s; the Communist Party of Sri Lanka; the Trotskyist Lanka Sama Samaja Party.

The Tigers started off in the late 1970s as Marxists, shouting Che’s name to the heavens. They later murderously eliminated other Tamils in the struggle for independence and sovereignty because of differences over tactics or personalities. They bombed areas and vehicles where Sinhalese civilians were without regard to innocent lives. And they abandoned any Marxist program. They righteously fought for a homeland with sovereignty, which most Tamils wanted, but they forgot all about socialism, people’s democracy, Che’s principles.

The big capitalists on the HRC wanted a resolution that, while applauding Sri Lanka and only condemning the Tigers just like the Cuba-led resolution, asked the Sri Lanka government to look into the possibility that some war crimes might have been committed by some of its own. If so, then the government should deal with it. Rather mild, I’d say.

There was no voice inside the HRC condemning the terrorist Sri Lankan government or the greatest terrorists: the United States and Israel, with China, Pakistan, Iran, Japan, India and many more tagging along. China, though, does more than tag along. It is after big influence and is getting it.²

Then there is the moral contradiction of the Bolivian government of Evo Morales—an indigenous person whose people have long been oppressed by the same forces which have suppressed and oppressed the Haiti black people—backing the 2004 US-France-led coup against the only decent, democratically elected president in Haiti’s history, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Both Aristide and Venezuela’s socialist firebrand Hugo Chavez called his ouster for what it was: a rich-backed local rebellion supported by the superpower-led coup.

After Aristide’s ouster, the US got UN support to occupy the country with 7000 troops, officially led by Lula’s Brazilian government, another contradiction in morality and history. US, France, and Canada had their troops there, too. But when enough Latin American governments sent in collaborating soldiers, the big powers mostly moved out. Since 2007, Bolivia has had 300 soldiers there. They—along with troops from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and, guess who? Sri Lanka—are paid by the UN. In Bolivia’s case, the government receives $1,028 for each soldier but only spends about $300 per solider. Is it money that takes priority over solidarity amongst continental brethren?

It is positive that fellow ALBA governments in Venezuela and Cuba send real aid to the hungry people, who are the poorest in that hemisphere, and all the more so since the last earthquake with over 300,000 killed, a like number injured and over one million homeless.

Praising Cuba for its systematic “human capital export” solidarity should not keep us from real concern about its future now decided by the Communist party leadership at its 6th congress. The new economic package does not deepen socialism and people’s democracy (one in the same), rather it deepens petty-bourgeois production relations and individualistic mentality—worker-capitalists in the making. This so-called “market socialism” will lead to more market capitalism, in reality, with big foreign investors, and tourism, still getting priority.

Communist leaders still lack trust in the working class to run the economy and set political policy.

Workers power should include oversight committees staffed on a rotating basis by actual workers across the country. I firmly support what James Petras wrote:

What especially requires reform is a new system of public accountability based on independent accounting authorities, consumers’ and workers’ oversight commissions with the power to ‘open the books’. Workers and professional control will not eliminate corruption altogether but it will challenge the authorities through independent periodic reviews…Greater accountability within the leadership is necessary but not sufficient. There must be control and vigilance by authorized commissions from below and by a parallel independent general accounting office…a new system of elected representatives to oversee the allocation of the budget to the various ministries and the power to summon responsible officials to televised hearings for a strict public accounting.³

When revolutionary, communist, anarchist organizers are engaged in workers struggles under capitalism, one of their best arguments when confronted by management that their demands are not economically possible is the demand: “Open the books.” So when they are told they now have their own economy, their own Marxist state why can they not see the books?

It is difficult to know why Communist governments in this past century never rely on their citizenry to run things. Even the best of them apparently do not truly trust their own ideology. Maybe they know more than I; maybe they know that if workers held the reigns of real power they would not go the collective way of socialism. If that is so, then what are we fighting for?

Live Well vs. Live Better

I, too, say let us be like Che. For example, when his wife called to ask for use of his government car to take their sick daughter to the hospital, his morality led him to reply that she should take the bus like every other Cuban mother with a sick child.

On a world scale when Che realized that the Soviet CP leadership did not commit itself to a forceful policy of solidarity with the Third World, he criticized them publicly as foreign policy opportunists. I am certain that he would have qualms with his comrade leaders in today’s world for similar opportunism, for lack of fulfilling the promises put forth by communist ideology.

In my opinion, what is worth fighting for is what Evo Morales and the indigenous peoples’ movement stands for in Bolivia: live well, not live better. We discussed this at length during the People’s world climate conference in Cochabamba. I excerpt here from what the Bolivian delegation to the UN presented during that time.

Faced with so much disproportion and wealth concentration in the world, so many wars and famine, Bolivia proposes Living Well, not as a way to live better at the expense of others, but an idea of Living Well based on the experience of our peoples. In the words of the President of the Republic of Bolivia, Evo Morales Ayma, Living Well means living within a community, a brotherhood, and particularly completing each other, without exploiters or exploited, without people being excluded or people who exclude, without people being segregated or people who segregate.

Living Well is not the same as living better, living better than others, because in order to live better than others, it is necessary to exploit, to embark upon serious competition, concentrating wealth in few hands. Trying to live better is selfish, and shows apathy, individualism. Some want to live better, whilst others, the majority, continue living poorly. Not taking an interest in other people’s lives, means caring only for the individual’s own life, at most in the life of their family.”
“The construction of a Living Well vision to counteract Global Crisis in this era of climate chaos and diminished resources in our finite planet, means ending consumerism, waste and luxury; consuming only what is necessary, achieving a global economic ‘power down’ to levels of production, consumption and energy use that stay well within the environmental capacities of the Earth.

In order to adapt ourselves to the true reality of a post carbon era, we will have to satisfy our fundamental needs such as food, housing, energy, production, and means of support from local systems and resources. This means encouraging regional and local self-sufficiency, sustainability and control; economic localization and community sovereignty, local production for local consumption, local ownership using local labor and materials.

Furthermore, Living Well means reallocating the trillions of millions destined for war in order to heal Mother Earth who is injured by the environment issue.

Waking up the ethical and moral values of our peoples and cultures, we can make this new millennium, a millennium of life and not of war, a millennium for Living Well, for balance and complementarity. Together we can build a culture of patience, the culture of dialogue and fundamentally the Culture of Life, a way of life that is not dependent on excessive consumption of non-renewable energy that emits greenhouse gases but is based on the harmonious relationship between man and nature.

“Hagamos lo imposible!” We’ll do the impossible! Che predicted.

Notes and an acknowledgement: I thank the daughter of a preacher for inebriated brainstorming, and more thanks for the most thoughtful of gifts: a bronze sculpture of a fist gripping an angry pen.

1. See my piece, “The Guilty Innocent.”
2. See my November 2009 series on the Sri Lanka-Tamil conflict. Part 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
3. “Cuba: Continuing Revolution and Contemporary Contradictions”, August 12, 2007.

Many other Tamils, especially in Tamil Nadu, India, join hands in this humanitarian struggle. Together, they have achieved a great deal of real assistance and some recognition for their kinsmen and cousins albeit no government has yet to respond with consequent solidarity for this maligned people. The potential potency of a true humanitarian, internationalist United Nations yet once again has been left unfulfilled in the interests of monetary and territorial profits.

Tamils began fleeing Sri Lanka in large numbers following the second pogrom, in 1977. Led by Buddhist monks, Sinhalese mobs destroyed many of their homes and shops and murdered up to 300. This was the second of four pogroms Tamils suffered between 1956 and 1983, in which as many as 5000 Tamils were murdered; some were set aflame alive.

The first Tamils fled to nearby Tamil Nadu where 60 million Indian Tamils live. These Sri Lanka Tamils have been poorly treated by Indian authorities. Activism led by Tamil Nadu Tamils has been based on emotional connections they have to the Sri Lankan Tamils. It peaked in May 2009 but has been sporadic since then. There are signs of revival of support for the Tamils generally among the educated class based on rational evaluation of the situation for Tamils in the island.

Most Tamils migrated beyond Asia, spreading throughout the British Commonwealth, non-English speaking European countries, and the United States. Today, there are about one million S.L. Tamils living in 20 countries or more. Their relatives back home number around 2.5 million.

Migrants and refugees did not abandon their kinsmen. Most send remittances and many helped finance liberation movements, including the armed forces of the LTTE (Tigers). They established grass roots support committees in the countries where they migrated.

One of the oldest Tamil associations in the Diaspora in the United States is Ilankai Tamil Sangam. It has a continuous history of support activities since its founding in 1977, and is now conducting a boycott campaign of Sri Lanka garments, which accounts for a quarter of foreign currency earnings. As it writes, “We know that by linking employment of Sinhalese to the human rights of Tamils we can help secure a just future for our people.”

Another U.S. group, Tamils Against Genocide (TAG), formed in 2008, hired US attorney Bruce Fein, a conservative Ronald Reagan government official, to file human rights violation charges against Sri Lanka’s defense minister, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, also a U.S. citizen, and General Sarath Fonseca, former head of the government’s war machine and also holder of United States residency.

TAG has also filed a lawsuit in US District Court in Washington for $30 million in damages on behalf of three Tamil plaintiffs, who had family members killed by the S.L. Army.

A separate legal attempt was made in the Supreme Court to annul part of the Patriotic Act that forbids offering assistance to terrorist groups, so defined by the US government. A Sri Lankan Tamil, US citizen, and lawyer, Visuvanathan Rudrakumaran, argued that supplying a liberation force, the Tigers, with “material support” is in keeping with First Amendment rights of free speech. He so contends because of perpetual discrimination by the Sinhalese governments against the Tamil population allows them no alternative but to take up arms, in order to win their rights.

On June 22, 2010, the Supreme Court denied Rudrakumaran’s case. It found, instead, that laws against “terrorism” have priority over free speech, which, for the first time, the Supreme Court has now partially criminalized.

Tamil groups in many other countries are active in boycotting Sri Lanka products—such as Act Now in Britain—and in filing lawsuits against Sri Lankan diplomats for war crimes.

Since April 2004 when the present president Mahinda Rajapaksa became prime minister, at least 34 journalists have been murdered: three Sinhalese, 29 Tamils.

Fifty-five media workers have fled into exile in that time span. Towards the end of the war, some started Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka (JDS), an action group of journalists, writers, artists and human rights defenders campaigning for democracy, human rights and media freedom in Sri Lanka.

Organizing Internationally

Three international organizations have started up since the end of the war with the common goal of offering hope for Sri Lanka Tamils back at home and in the Diaspora by struggling abroad for sovereignty in Sri Lanka—Global Tamil Forum (GTF), Council of Eelam Tamil in Europe (CETE), Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam (TGTE). Although they all started after the defeat and collapse of the LTTE, the Sri Lanka government considers them all to be Tiger “terrorist” followers.

The GTF has committees in 14 countries. The first ones started in Britain and Canada in the summer of 2009. The GTF held its inauguration in London’s House of Commons, February 24, 2010. Several British government officials and parliamentarians were present. Foreign Secretary David Milliband spoke. He suggested that Sri Lanka embark on a “genuinely inclusive political process. Other Establishment politicians from Europe, the US, and South Africa attended as well. This event followed the EU decision to suspend preferential trade benefits (GSP) for the Sri Lankan government in protest to its brutal abuses against Tamils.

The Forum’s leader is SJ Emmanuel, a Catholic priest and follower of Gandhi. The Forum’s vision is to seek self-determination for S.L. Tamils using principles of democracy and non-violence.

Global Tamil Forum projects include boycotts of Sri Lanka products, and aiding Internally Displaced Persons (IDP). They estimate that there are at least 80,000 Tamil widows, and many thousands of orphans. It is endeavoring to sponsor at least 1000 war orphans and provide general relief for those most affected by the war. The GTF also seeks justice for the perpetrators of genocide and war crimes. They work with the Center for War Victims and Human Rights.

In an interview with a leading participant at the inauguration, a Tamil scholar and political activist, he acknowledged that by obtaining tentative political backing by Western government officials and parliamentarians can be tricky. None of these governments have forthrightly aided the Tamil cause for self-determination or its people in any material way. Since the end of the war, U.S., EU and UN leaders have made noises about protecting Tamils’ “human rights” but have not condemned Sri Lanka or brought anyone before the International Criminal Court, as they often do to leaders of governments that they oppose. No, as I have shown in other writings herein, these Western regimes have been involved with the Sri Lankan Sinhalese governments’ genocide since the beginning in the 1950s. So, what is to be gained?
“Believe me no Tamil activist thinks of supporting US or British imperialism, just as we did not support British colonialism,” he said. “But we have to present out case wherever we can, and hope that by bringing as much pressure as we can we will one day bear fruit. In politics, there are always contradictions. Most of us are more inclined toward the liberation struggles of other peoples, such as those countries in Latin America struggling free of the United States’ `backyard´ dominance. Ironically, some of these countries have sided politically with the Sri Lankan government. I think this is misguided, but they probably have done so because they see US-EU pointing a ‘human rights’ finger hypocritically at Sri Lanka leaders. And then there is China interests over there, too.”

(The United States has invaded 66 countries 159 times since the end of World War Two. All these military operations have been aggressive—some minor, some major: Vietnam, Latin America, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The US has directly murdered several millions of people in military operations. Through wars and sanctions, such as that against Iraq following its first military intervention, millions more have starved to death.)

Shortly after the GFT was launched, Tamil activists in Norway and Switzerland began the Council of Eelam Tamil in Europe. They were soon joined by activists in Germany, France and Italy. They see themselves as activists, first and foremost. Many are second generation Tamils in the Diaspora.

In Switzerland, Tamil CETE activists ran for election in a national assembly to form Canton based councils. They see this as a way of uniting and strengthening the Eezham Tamil Diaspora, and putting a separate state in northern-eastern Sri Lanka on the agenda. Sixteen thousand eligible Tamil voters in Switzerland, 70% of the total number, held a referendum in January 2010. Ninety-nine percent voted yes for an independent Tamil Eelam.

Four European CETE councils, joined by Tamils Against Genocide, are filing war crimes charges against Sri Lanka diplomats sent to European countries.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) agreed to take up the case against the appointment of ex-SLA commander Jagath Dias as a diplomat to the Sri Lanka embassy in Germany. “SCET, the Norwegian Council of Eelam Tamils (NCET) and the US based NGO, Tamils Against Genocide (TAG), had filed an application to the ECHR in July 2010 charging the German government for violating EU Rights conventions by accepting a Sri Lankan military commander, Major General Jagath Dias, an accused in the war crimes,” wrote Tamil Net.

One representative of the Swiss CETE, Lathan Suntharalingam, a young activist and member of the Swiss Parliament for the Socialist Party, told me, “We Tamils have to work hard to bring our cause before the world. We are very sad and confused after the defeat in 2009. We need to combine all our forces and struggles: Tamils, Arabs, Latin Americans…We need to help each other, because we have common problems and goals.”

A prominent activist in the Diaspora, Visuvanathan Rudrakumaran, who earned a law degree in immigration rights and constitutional law from Harvard University, saw the need for international representation of Tamil rights to sovereignty. He took the most ambitious initiative to begin the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam in the United States and throughout the Diaspora. Rudra, as he is known, called together Tamils living in many countries, mainly scholars, to a conference in Switzerland, in August 2009. Two more international meetings were held before the TGTE was officially inaugurated. Consensus was reached: a) armed struggle was defeated and is not now possible; b) the fight for sovereignty must continue.

An advisory committee of 11 persons was selected to draw up a strategy for the formation of a “Provisional Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam”. “This Government will lobby for the support of the international community and people to find a political solution to the Tamil national question on the basis of nationhood, a homeland and the right to self-determination.”

The TGTE is not to be confused with a “government in exile”, as there had been no independent state with a government that later sought relocation. It will be formed like a transnational corporation or NGO, and will campaign through political and diplomatic channels. The real government will be established in the homeland when that is physically possible.

The traditional homeland of Tamils is swarming with military personnel and camps, effectively an occupied territory. Systematic gerrymandering of electoral districts occurs. Four Tamil members of parliament, representing Tamil political parties, have been murdered under Rajapakse’s regime. Murderers of Tamils whether military personnel or police or civilians enjoy full impunity. The state prohibits equal rights for Tamils with the Sinhalese. In such circumstances, international law recognizes a right to self-determination and a right to secession. And when powerful nations back a people’s demand for sovereignty, such as in Kosovo, they get it.

TGTE strategy is to work with all existing local, national and international Tamil organizations in the Diaspora, and to create a power centre for diplomacy with all governments possible. It also seeks to work in partnership with Tamil leadership inside Sri Lanka but has not been able to establish ties, at least not officially, given the belligerent nature of the S.L. government.

The advisors’ reported on January 2010. They said that a transnational government is “rationalized on the lack of political space for the Tamils in the island of Sri Lanka to articulate their political aspirations and realize their right to self-determination and exercise their sovereignty.”

They devised an elaborate democratic procedure to elect delegates where Tamils live in the Diaspora, in order to shape a Transnational Constitutional Assembly, appoint a cabinet, and draft a constitution. One of the main provisions in a constitution will assure the special rights of Muslim Tamils, “who seek their identity based on Islamic religious faith” and are Tamil-speaking people.

The report also recommended a monitoring body to protect the guiding principles and ensure that the Transnational Government “does not act in a manner contrary to the Guiding Principles”: 

 

1. Commitment to achieve Eelam, an independent, sovereign State—nationhood, homeland and right to self-determination.
2. Tamil Eelam will be a secular state.
3. TGTE shall assist in establishing health facilities in the homeland, homes and refuges for those affected by the war; promote cultural activities stressing Eelam Tamil distinctiveness. Much of this work will have to be done indirectly as the TGTE cannot be in Sri Lanka.
4. Promote education in the homeland.
5. Promote economic welfare.
6. Conduct foreign relations through lobbying.
7. Seek prosecution of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
8. Protect the equality of women and all Tamils.
9. Provide welfare of families of martyrs, former combatants and families affected by the war. One practical project is to establish monuments for martyrs in the Diaspora since their memorials and graves have been destroyed by the Sri Lankan government.

The advisors established procedures to elect 115 Elected Representatives (ER) by direct ballot where there are contests—otherwise the sole candidate for an area automatically became an ER—in the main population centers (16 countries), and 20 Delegates to represent countries or regions where conducting elections is not feasible because of small or diffuse Tamil populations, or there exists difficulty of access. Some Delegates could be non-Eelam Tamils coming from India, primarily.

The numbers of ER and Delegates is proportional to the numbers of Tamils. For instance, Canada has the largest number, 25, to represent about a quarter million Tamils, followed by the UK with 20, for some 200,000 Tamils.

Those wishing to vote in the TGTE Constituent Assembly must be 17 years old or older and connected to Eelam Tamil culture by descent, marriage or adoption.

In the spring of 2010, elections were held in 12 countries. In some cases, the proposed candidate met no competition and so there was no election. The fact that only about 5% of the Diaspora, around 35-40,000, voted does not indicate a lack of enthusiasm since in some cases there was no need for an election. Nevertheless, participation was lower than hoped for.

Fifty-six of the 89 ER and Delegates elected gathered, in Philadelphia, to officially form the Transnational Constituent Assembly, on May 17-19, 2010. Not all countries or regions had held elections. Their spots will be filled in time.

On June 17, following the first sitting of the Assembly of the TGTE, Rudrakumaran wrote the following in a news release.
“The fact that the first session took place in Philadelphia at the same site where the US Declaration of Independence was promulgated and the US Constitution was drafted symbolized, to the world, our passion for freedom. While the Government of Sri Lanka proclaimed that [it] crushed the Tamils’ struggle for freedom…we demonstrated our thirst for freedom to the world through the setting up of the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam. The manner in which we linked elected members of TGTE situated at venues in London and Geneva…portends the transnational character of the struggle we intend to take further.

The first session of the Assembly saw the election of an interim executive committee along with several action committees in order to address the immediate concerns until the time a formal constitution of the TGTE is drafted and ratified.”

The TGTE Assembly met again between September 20 and October 1, in the United Nations Plaza Hotel, New York City. Representatives in N.Y. were joined via teleconference by others from London and Paris. They ratified its Constitution.

“The opening plenary was addressed by former U.S. Attorney General Mr. Ramsey Clark, Deputy Chief Minister of Penang (Malaysia) Professor Ramasamy, Professor David L. Philips from Columbia University and who also served as UN and U.S. State Department adviser, and Mr. Ali Beydoun, Executive Director of UNROW Human Rights Impact Litigation Clinic of the American University’s Washington College of Law. UNROW recently published a report on Sri Lanka War Crimes which was submitted to the UN.

After the opening session the Assembly turned to the challenging task of discussing the draft constitution. They debated and settled on a parliamentary model. The Parliament decided that the head of the government would be the Prime Minister. They also chose to create three Deputy Prime Minister posts. The Deputy Prime Ministers will be joined in the cabinet by seven other ministers.

The TGTE Parliament will have a bicameral legislature. It will consist of the Parliament of elected representatives and the Senate. The Senate will serve as an advisory body as well as provide expertise. The Parliament also codified the recall mechanism of the elected members.

After the Assembly ratified the constitution, and unanimously elected Mr. Pon Balarajan from Canada as the Speaker of the Parliament, and Ms. Suganya Puthirasigamany from Switzerland as the Deputy Speaker. The Parliament unanimously elected Mr. Visvanathan Rudrakumaran as the first Prime Minister of the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam.

On November 3, the TGTE announced its first cabinet. Of the 10 ministers and 10 deputy ministers, five are women. The Secretariat is in Geneva. The ministries are: finance; welfare; education-culture-health; internal affairs; information; political & foreign affairs; welfare of women, children & elders; economic affairs-environment & development; investigation of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes; and IDPs, Refugees and POWs.

The cabinet meets every 14 days. It will be issuing national membership cards and a quarterly journal, plus an international website.

On the foreign relations front, the TGTE feel a victory for its recognition by being sent an invitation from the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement (SPLM) leadership to be official guests of the new nation-in-formation, the Republic of Southern Sudan, in the July 2011 inaugurating ceremony.

In another area of rebellion and repression, the TGTE called upon the United Nations to protect Libyan civilians, as well as their own people. On February 25, 2011, this statement was issued:

Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam (TGTE) today urged the United Nations not to fail in protecting Libyan civilians like it failed to protect Sri Lankan civilians in 2009, when around 60,000 Tamil civilians were killed. The failure of the international community to take concrete actions to protect civilians in Sri Lanka has given the green light to regimes around the world that they can also massacre civilians without any fear of consequences.

What we are witnessing today in Libya is the result of indifference the international community exhibited during the massacre in Sri Lanka and not brining Sri Lankan leaders to face war crimes charges”, said Political and Foreign Minister of Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam, Mr. Thanikasalam Thayaparan.

UN should take immediate steps to bring Sri Lanka leaders to Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, and War Crimes to show its resolve to hold those committing mass killings.

Conclusion

Among the TGTE challenges and weaknesses, which I see and have discussed somewhat with key participants, are:

1) The need to raise a treasury while avoiding the historic problem of Diaspora contributions being associated with the armed struggle of the Tigers, seen by many Tamils as having succumbed to acts of terrorism and, of course, being condemned as terrorists by many of the governments that TGTE is trying to persuade to assist it. So, it is the most active members who are paying for travel and other expenses. For now, they will not ask Tamils for money, in general. Perhaps some NGOs and grass roots groups might raise money. They must be careful about choosing their NGOs, as many are paid for by governments with special political interests—NGO imperialists, some call them.

2) TGTE must be careful about how it conducts its lobbying with governments of the “international community”, a common reference to the US and its big capitalist allies. This is a reference to what I raised earlier regarding the Global Tamil Forum. In this context, it is noted that while the SPLM has a legitimate demand for a separate state, it allowed itself to be supported economically, militarily and politically by the United States.

3) While practically every Tamil in the Diaspora still wants a sovereign nation inside the Sri Lanka island, there are strategic and tactical differences. The TGTE takes up where the LTTE ended but by using non-violent tactics. Not all in the Diaspora have yet admitted that the LTTE will not return, or that another armed struggle is impossible or unnecessary. Most GTF members support the TGTE, as do many in the CETE. But some activists wait in the background before deciding to cooperate with the TGTE; a few are against it.

While Lathan Suntharalingam is skeptical, he did help organize a Country Working Group and an election for the TGTE in Switzerland.

“We supported the election, in April 2010, for delegates to the Constitutional Assembly. I am a bit confused about it, though. I wish more action. The TGTE needs more time. I see us getting well together in two to three years.”

4) Finally, how can the TGTE become a true representative for the Tamils in Sri Lanka? How can it get feedback and backing from this frightened and suffering population? I see a related problem. All ministers are scholars or businessmen while most Tamils at home and in the Diaspora are workers. This too has to be adjusted as the credibility and trust people hold towards the government improves over time.

Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) introduced the new policy on Tamils who seek political asylum in Canada on the grounds that although the refugee board adjudicators are not forced to follow the new guidelines, for the IRB such notes “are offered to members as models of sound reasoning that may be adopted in appropriate circumstances.”  This is really a frightening decision of the IRB as it demonstrates that the Canadian government led by Stephen Harper has made such a hasty decision without knowing what is really happening on the ground in the Tamils areas in Sri Lanka.

The new policy, no doubt, could affect refugee claimants who arrived in Vancouver in 2009 and 2010 aboard the Ocean Lady and MV Sun Sea.  The 76 Tamils who arrived in 2009 applied for refugee status, but the refugee board has not taken any action on their files.  The 492 Tamil refugees who arrived last year have applied for political asylum, but their cases are also pending.  It is worth mentioning that one-fourth of the refugees who arrived last year have been detained in detention centres in British Columbia and two of the asylum seekers have been branded as being affiliated to the militant LTTE.

Canada wants precedence to reject Tamils’ claims for refugee status

In this context, the case cited in the new IRB policy involved a 25-year-old Tamil male from Sri Lanka. It is worth mentioning that this youth arrived in Canada by air.  This particular claimant had told the refugee board that he had been, and would be, persecuted by the Sri Lankan army, government officials, and paramilitary agents associated with the Sri Lankan government if he returned to Sri Lanka.

The claimant also told the board that he was arrested by Sri Lankan forces in 2006, interrogated, hit in the stomach and pushed against a wall. He moved to a different location with a friend soon afterwards, but was detected by government forces the next year. He said his friend was eventually executed. The claimant fled to Malaysia in 2007 before arriving in Canada in 2009.

The IRB tribunal rejected his refugee claim in November. It was cited in the persuasive decision four weeks later on December 17, 2010.  The ruling said: “The claimant is not a person in need of protection in that his removal to Sri Lanka would not subject him personally to a risk to his life.”

The IRB said: “The reasons cite the documentary evidence which relates to changes that took place in Sri Lanka recently and conclude with a finding that the changes are meaningful and durable and that the claimant’s fear of persecution based on his particular social group, perceived political opinion and nationality is not well founded.”

How does Canada not know what is happening?

It is unfortunate that Canada employs dozens of diplomats in Sri Lanka at the Canadian High Commission in Colombo who do not know the ground reality in the North and East of Sri Lanka, which are the traditional homeland of Tamils where over 150,000 Sri Lankan armed forces have been deployed despite that the government claiming that it has crushed the Tamil Tigers in May 2009.  The situation worsens by the day. The Sri Lankan government has been deploying more and more armed forces into Tamil villages to build new military residences with China’s assistance.

Another shocking story is that the Sri Lankan army is going to be deployed on the islets off the shores of Jaffna where already the Sri Lankan naval bases and the paramilitaries supporting the government have been put up.  The Canadian High Commissioner, along with senior officials, paid several visits to the Tamil areas after the LTTE silenced their guns in 2009.  It is shocking evidence that the Canadian High Commissioner and senior officials who are being paid from Canadian tax-payers money have not updated the ground reality in the North and East of Sri Lanka where human rights abuses are on the rise daily.

Kidnapping for ransom, murder, rape, robbery, and disappearances are increasing in various places in the North and East, especially Jaffna, in spite of it being a military garrison. There is not a day that passes without a report on crime. Many events can be cited to demonstrate the current situation in Tamil areas.  There are many untold stories taking place despite the fact that many people fail to report to the police or any other officials due to the fear that they will be prosecuted by the armed forces who are wandering around the streets of Tamil villages, towns, and cities with military uniform and arms. Even President Rajapaksa, whose agents commit these crimes, has stated publicly, while in Jaffna, that these criminals underground would not show their heads anymore.

A few of the shocking events are: A Hindu priest was shot dead, using a gun owned by the military, for performing rites for tsunami victims. A government education officer was shot dead because he objected to the national anthem being sung in Sinhala only in Jaffna. An environmentalist was murdered for exposing a Sri Lankan minister and India’s favourite, Douglas Devananda, for making millions of rupees by removing sand and causing environmental damage. So the list goes on.  It is indeed frustrating that Canada falls victim to the Sri Lankan government’s false propaganda.

Senior government officials acknowledge law and order worsen

The Government Agent of Jaffna, Ms Imelda Sukumar, the principal civil representative of the government in Jaffna, spoke to media personnel when they raised questions about the law and order in Jaffna, suggesting the police should be replaced by the military, as if Jaffna is not militarized enough.  It is surprising that over 150,000 Sri Lankan armed forces are wandering in the streets of North and East, but the irresponsible statement of Sukumar demonstrates that the law and order cannot be returned soon.  She claims that more armed forces should be deployed to return the areas to normalcy.

Sukumar, for reasons well known to her, shifted the blame on to another government agency instead of holding the government wholly responsible for the complete breakdown of the justice system and the collapse of law and order in Jaffna.  Jaffna is a veritable jungle, a mini police State where State terrorism remains.

The residents in northern Jaffna and Vavuniya were advised by two senior Police superintendents in leaflets, widely distributed, to wear only imitation jewellery and take extra steps to protect their homes. They were advised not to leave their door keys hidden under door rugs or flower pots, but to have a spare key if another family member needed one. When leaving home, lock the doors properly and inform the neighbours about their departure. They were told not to travel alone when wearing gold jewellery, as criminals may trick and rob their jewellery.

The people were told to beware of strangers or strange vehicles coming to their areas and to note down the numbers and other details. This is just a usual story to hoodwink them to show that robbery is the motive for such crimes and to sidetrack the issue from the real situation and the political and racist undertones.

Unnumbered white van kidnapping is a common occurrence. Once they come in a group armed with guns, there is nothing anyone can do about it.  No unnumbered vehicle is permitted to move around in any civilized country, let alone a militarized area, such as Jaffna. So it is the security forces that have to do the prevention and not unarmed civilians.

Parents were advised not to send children out of their homes alone. The question is how do the parents go about their work if they have to follow their children to school?

The police also advised people to number the valuable goods at home or label them and to do the same for electric equipment, motor bikes, and so forth.

The police have also advised the residents to keep their doors and windows closed, even during the day time if there is only one person in the house. At night, they are advised to make sure the doors and windows are closed and to keep a bulb switched on.

The public was told that if any member of the defence force comes for inspection, they should ask for their official identity cards before opening the door and ensure they are accompanied by a police officer from the area. This is a guaranteed recipe for violence and death, as most of the uniformed personal are thugs and they themselves commit the robbery. Moreover they carry false identity cards with government patronage.

Shop owners have been advised to leave a light on outside their shops after their closure and to keep someone inside the shop. The police say the people have a right to protect their lives and property in such instances. If the criminals attempt to flee, they have a right to take them into custody and then inform the village officer or the police.

What logic!  How do unarmed civilians arrest fully-armed criminals? All the above recommendations can be carried out only by the police as they are the only ones empowered by the law to do so. They are also paid to do their job.

This is Sri Lanka’s version of maintaining ‘law and order’.  One of Wikileak’s revelations was that the American Ambassador, Patricia A. Butenis, was of the view that the para-military groups were given the liberty to raise their own funds by whatever means — kidnapping, robbery, prostitution, and child-trafficking — as the government was no longer able to finance their maintenance. The military has also joined in this multi-million rupee business, so how could the police act?

Crime is a money making business for the armed forces. Moreover, the best means of silencing people who oppose government policies is to eliminate them. Only the international community can get the Tamils of Sri Lanka out of this culture of impunity by imposing sanctions.  The US and EU, who have awoken to the realities of the situation, may be willing to do so, but India and China will continue to support Rajapaksa and Company of brothers and close relatives.

The current situation in the Tamil homeland shows that there is no protection for the Tamils whatsoever. They are exposed to the worst of crimes. The human rights situation has gotten worse.  When the LTTE was in action militarily, the enemies thought a second before conducting any violation against the Tamils, but after the LTTE entered into ceasefire agreement with the Sri Lankan government in 2002 with the facilitation of Norwegian government, the atrocities of Sri Lankan armed forces ran rampant against Tamils.  With the complete silence of the LTTE guns, human rights abuses have worsened.

Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board’s (IRB) new policy is dangerous and violates its own Charter and the international convention.  Unless the Tamil Canadians wake up and rise to the level where they can exert pressure upon the Canadian government to intervene in altering the new policy introduced by the IRB, many other countries will follow suit with the Canadian policy not to acknowledge the Tamils who are lacking protection in Sri Lanka and will help to deteriorate the efforts of countries which are taking steps to bring the perpetrators of the war crimes to book.

It has contributed to a Sinhalese Buddhist ultra-nationalism that is now fully embedded and institutionalised as state policy. A policy which justifies dehumanising non-Sinhalese; i.e., Tamils, should doing so be necessary to preserve and propagate the dharma-Buddhist doctrine. Furthermore, it legitimises ethnocentrism and militarism as a means to enforce that ethos.

An underlying tenet of the Mahavamsa ideology is the belief that Sri Lanka is an island exclusive to the Sinhalese majority. It insists that only a Sinhalese Buddhist culture exists (or ought to exist) in Sri Lanka, which suggests that the only valid ethnic identity is a Sinhalese Buddhist identity. This has served as a mandate for a litany of injustice, cultural annihilation and human rights atrocities against the Tamil nation.

The Noble Eightfold Path is one of the principal teachings of the Buddha. It is described as the way leading to the end of suffering. It is often represented by means of the dharma wheel, with the eight elements of the path.

Meena Kandasamy’s poem, the second in the Victims Without A Voice campaign, brings to conscience the stark contrast of Sinhalese Buddhist extremism, vis-à-vis ‘the middle way’. It exposes the façade of its ideology, and adds voice to crimes of genocide against Eelam Tamils.

– 1Voice

The Noble Eightfold Path

This is the middle way, this is the eightfold path
This is the way to the end of suffering.

Right view

Right view is the forerunner of the entire path.
Right view provides the right practice.
Right view leads to a virtuous life.
Right view comes at the end of the path.
Right view requires you to know
that the dying always look up to the sky
and therefore get ready to shell hospitals.

Right intention

Birth is suffering, aging is suffering,
Sickness is suffering, death is suffering,
Sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief
and despair are suffering,
Association with the unpleasant is suffering,
Separation from the pleasant is suffering,
Not to get what one wants is suffering.
For the instant cessation of their suffering
Right intention requires the carpet bombing
Of the fleeing masses.

Right speech

Right speech is about the absence of wrong speech.
Abstain from falsehood, abstain from slander,
Abstain from harsh speech, abstain from idle chatter.
Speech can break lives and start wars,
so it is best to pull out of the peace talks.

Right action

Right action means refraining from unwholesome deeds
that occur with the body as their main means
of expression. Do not take life,
Do not take what is not given,
Do not indulge in sexual misconduct.
The celibate Buddha and his monks
never spilled any semen and it is our bounden duty
to make up for that by raping every woman in sight.

Right livelihood

The Buddha mentions five kinds of livelihood
which bring harm to others that must be avoided.
The first tells one to avoid dealing in weapons
so please get India and China to gift those toys.

Right effort

Right effort requires a wholesome form of energy.
Dispelling dullness calls for a special effort
to arouse energy through the visualization
of a brilliant ball of light or reflection on death.
For desire, a remedy of general application
is meditation on impermanence to knock away
the underlying property of clinging.
To get rid of dullness let light into the lives
of your enemies through luminous bombs
and to get rid of their desire for one another
bulldoze their bunkers and this will be the last time
they cling to each other.

Right mindfulness

The first step in right mindfulness involves
the contemplation of the body and the last step
in the mindfulness of the body involves a series
of cemetery meditations which necessitates dreaming
of death and decomposition of the human body.
Meditate on the mass graves in Mullivaaikaal and Chemmani.

Right concentration

Right concentration implies seclusion
from sensual pleasures and reining in the unruly mind.
Right concentration is achieved through training
so work hard to estimate the exact amount of napalm
Or white phosphorous for sky-showers
To grant nirvana to the Tamil people,
For blessed are they who get to breathe
The Laughing Buddha’s Laughing Gas.

Background

The constitution of 1978, enacted by a government headed by J.R.Jayawardene of the United National Party (UNP), created an Executive President who wielded almost absolute power. As Jayawardene (who became the first occupant of the post) boasted, he had the power to do anything other than change a man into a woman or vice versa. The dire consequences of this enormous concentration of power became evident very soon, with assaults and murders of trade unionists and the sacking of tens of thousands of striking workers, a rigged and violent referendum in 1982, and escalating attacks on Tamils, culminating in the massacres of 1983. Like the 1972 Constitution, the 1978 Constitution affirmed Sinhala as the only official language and the special place of Buddhism.

The systematic violation of human rights and destruction of democratic space resulted in a civil war waged by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the North and East, and a Sinhalese insurgency of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) in the rest of the country. Under Jayawardene and his successor, Ranasinghe Premadasa, tens of thousands of both Tamils and Sinhalese were tortured and killed by the state. Presidential immunity meant that they could not be prosecuted for any of the ghastly crimes committed during their regimes so long as they were in power. The only provision that saved this dispensation from being an out-and-out dictatorship was the limitation of the presidency to two six-year terms. In other words, at the end of twelve years, the president would be out of power and susceptible to prosecution for crimes committed while in power.

The Indo-Lanka Accord of 1987 was followed by the enactment of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, under pressure from India. This declared that Tamil ‘shall also be an official language’ of Sri Lanka, with English being a link language. It established Provincial Councils in all the provinces, and provided for the merger of two or three adjoining provinces to form a single administrative unit. This provided constitutional validity to the merger of the Northern and Eastern Provinces which had been agreed in the Indo-Lanka Accord, with the proviso that a referendum in the Eastern Province would be held within a year. Various powers were devolved to the provincial councils in the Provincial Council List, and a parliamentary bill on any subject in the list had to be referred to all the provincial councils for their agreement before it could be passed.

The Thirteenth Amendment fell between two stools. It hardly needs to be said that it failed to satisfy the demand of the LTTE for a separate state. But both Tamil and Sinhalese moderates noted that the exact division of powers between the centre and provinces was not made clear, there was no subject over which the provincial councils could exercise exclusive jurisdiction, and even the devolved powers could arbitrarily be controlled, reduced or abolished by the centre acting at the behest of the president. For Sinhala nationalists, on the contrary, the amendment gave too much power to the merged Northeastern Province, aiding and abetting Tamil separatists.

The UNP was ousted from power in the parliamentary elections of August 1994, with a narrow victory for the People’s Alliance, which included the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), Communist Party of Sri Lanka (CPSL) and a few others. This was followed by the landslide victory of Chandrika Kumaratunga in the presidential election in November. Kumaratunga’s platform was one of peace with justice for Tamils and a restoration of democracy. In pursuance of the first objective, a ceasefire with the LTTE was declared in January 1995, and peace talks were begun. In pursuance of both, various democratic rights and liberties like freedom of expression and trade union rights were restored in the parts of the country under government rule, and a process aimed at enacting a new constitution inaugurating greater devolution to the provincial councils was initiated.

The peace process ended and war resumed in April 1995, when the LTTE broke the ceasefire by attacking the Sri Lanka Navy. However, efforts to bring about constitutional change continued. The 1995 proposals were unprecedented in their recognition of Tamil grievances and aspirations, and were welcomed by both Tamil moderates and Sinhalese progressives. For example, they deleted articles in the constitution that entrenched the unitary character of the state, abolished the concurrent list that created ambiguity in the division of powers between the centre and provinces, and emphasised the plural character of Sri Lanka. Sinhala nationalists were predictably unhappy with the draft. Under pressure from them, some of the progressive features were left out, while regressive features were either introduced or taken over from the 1978 constitution by the time the proposals were introduced in parliament in 1997. The LTTE rejected the proposals out of hand, and in 1999 murdered Tamil politician and lawyer Neelan Tiruchelvam, who had worked on drafting it. In 2005, it succeeded in killing Lakshman Kadirgamar, the other Tamil politician and lawyer who had backed the draft constitution.

Discussions continued, and by 2000, after Kumaratunga had survived an LTTE assassination attempt with the loss of an eye and had begun her second term as president in 1999, the proposals included abolition of the executive presidency. A problem faced by the Kumaratunga administration was that the proposals, being a substantive change in the constitution, were required by the 1978 Constitution to be passed by a two-thirds majority in parliament as well as a majority in a referendum, which meant that the support of the largest opposition party, the UNP, was critical. The promise of such support was held out, but it never materialised. When the draft was presented to parliament in 2000, shortly before parliamentary elections were due, the UNP led by Ranil Wickremesinghe howled it down rather than presenting any coherent amendments or arguments against it. Thus an attempt to abolish the executive presidency came to nothing despite strong popular support for it.

However, in a rare moment of consensus the Seventeenth Amendment, which curtailed the powers of the executive president substantially, was passed unanimously in 2001. This amendment, drafted by the Organisation of Professional Associations (OPA) and championed by the JVP which had abandoned armed struggle and entered parliament, provided for the appointment of an independent Constitutional Council of ten people, in which the majority of members would be ‘persons of eminence and integrity who have distinguished themselves in public life and who are not members of any political party’ and would include at least three persons representing the interests of minority communities. No person could be appointed to or removed from the following Commissions except on a recommendation of the Council: the Election Commission, Public Services Commission, National Police Commission, Human Rights Commission, Finance Commission, Delimitation Commission, and Permanent Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption. Further, no person could be appointed to the following offices without the approval of the Council: the Chief Justice and judges of the Supreme Court, President and judges of the Court of Appeal, members of the Judicial Services Commission other than the chairman, Attorney-General, Auditor-General, Inspector-General of Police, Ombudsman and Secretary-General of Parliament. The powers, functions and duties of the Election Commission included prohibiting the use of state property to promote or prevent the elction of any candidate, party or independent group, and the power to appoint a Competent Authority to take over the management of the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Authority and Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corporation (state TV) should they contravene its guidelines. Thus the president’s sweeping powers to control all these posts and functions was withdrawn during Kumaratunga’s presidency, although she proved incapable of abolishing the executive presidency itself as she had promised in her 1999 manifesto.

Mahinda Rajapaksa’s First Term

Mahinda Rajapaksa’s manifesto for the presidential elections of November 2005, ‘Mahinda Chinthanaya’, also promised to abolish the executive presidency. Thus his election as president can be understood as a mandate from the electorate to carry out this constitutional change. In May 2006, an All-Party Representative Committee (APRC) was constituted with the task of preparing proposals for a new constitution, and a panel of sixteen experts was appointed to assist it. The Tamil National Alliance (TNA), at that time seen as the parliamentary voice of the LTTE, was not included. The proposals were supposed to constitute a political solution to the ethnic conflict as well as strengthen democracy in a more general sense. The panel was unable to come to a consensus, but by December a multi-ethnic majority of eleven members presented a report that was widely hailed by progressives of all communities as being a major step forward.

Subsequently, Chairman of the APRC Tissa Vitharana of the LSSP produced an amalgam of the two reports which relied heavily on the Majority Report, and each chapter of the proposals was discussed with a view to arriving at a consensus. It soon became evident, however, that President Rajapaksa and his party, the SLFP, were determined to sabotage the process, producing nonsensical and reactionary proposals that were guaranteed to be rejected by progressives of all communities. The UNP too failed to come up with any constructive suggestions, and instead dropped out of the committee. A final report prepared by the Chairman on the basis of discussions in 128 meetings was presented to the president in 2009. The draft included the abolition of the executive presidency and substantial devolution of power to provincial councils, but did not see the light of day until July 2010, when two members of the APRC, R.Yogarajan and M.Nizam Kariapper, released it to the public.

Rajapaksa’s lack of interest in proposals for a more democratic constitution was underscored by his attitude to the Seventeenth Amendment. The three-year terms of members of the Constitutional Council expired in 2005, but he failed to appoint people to fill the vacancies as required by the 17th Amendment. Consequently the Council ceased to function, and new appointments to the various posts and commissions that were supposed to be carried out with its recommendation or approval were carried out unilaterally by the president instead.

The OPA protested in the strongest possible terms, pointing out that one of the most obnoxious misuses of presidential power ‘is the practice of appointing or promoting relatives, friends, business associates and even those with strong criminal connections to positions of authority and fiscal responsibility. Another is the undervaluing and disposal of the Country’s assets to cronies and rogue businessmen. The third is the collection of enormous bribes connected with the award of major tenders of various kinds, including arms and other military purchases. Misemploying government resources, including the media, to distort electoral processes is a fourth substantial domain of malfeasance. The resulting lack of anything resembling good governance has had a destructive effect in every sphere of national life.’ They complained, ‘It is deplorable that the President prefers not to honour the very Constitution that he promised to uphold when he took his oath of office… The continued violation of the 17th Amendment has destroyed all semblance of democracy, good governance and respect for the Rule of Law. It is time that President Rajapakse reflects on his actions and those of his government, and their long-term effect on the national institutions of this country. He needs to pull us back forthwith from the brink over which we are poised to descend precipitously into lawless dictatorship.’

The regime’s failure to engage constructively with the APRC process helped to strengthen the LTTE, since its refusal to carry out or even contribute to a process of political reform would have convinced Tamils in LTTE-held territory that they had nothing to hope for and a great deal to fear if they fell into government hands. This allowed the LTTE to take around 300,000 Tamil civilians hostage in 2009, which, given the regime’s determination to wipe out the LTTE at any cost, resulted in massive civilian casualties at the end of the war. In a sense the Vanni Tamils were proved right in their distrust of the government, because they were detained en masse after the end of the war in internment camps, a procedure that could arguably be characterised as a crime against humanity according to the definition of the International Criminal Court, since it involved ‘severe deprivation of physical liberty’ and ‘severe deprivation of fundamental rights’ of a civilian population for months on end.

The end of the war two years before presidential elections were due allowed ample time for President Rajapaksa to withdraw war-time curbs on democratic rights, demilitarise, carry out a public debate on the APRC proposals, amend them as required, and abolish the executive presidency as he had promised. Instead, he plunged into preparations for a presidential election, in the expectation that post-war euphoria amongst the majority of Sinhalese would give him a huge majority over his main rival, Wickremesinghe. To his consternation, army general and war hero Sarath Fonseka announced his retirement from the army and candidacy in the presidential election, supported by most of the opposition parties as the common candidate of the Democratic National Alliance (DNA). The regime went into overdrive to defeat him, using state resources and media to campaign for the incumbent and circulate rumours that Fonseka was a tyrant, a traitor, and ineligible to stand for election, assaulting, killing or forcibly disappearing journalists who failed to fall in line, and attacking – in some cases with lethal force – opposition election rallies.

After the election was held on 26 January 2010, the Campaign for Free and Fair Elections (CaFFE), a civil society group, confirmed that many Internally Displaced Persons were deprived of their franchise while people who had died or left the country remained on the voting lists, and that counting agents of opposition candidates were chased away from the counting centres while unauthorised persons were allowed to enter. The results, instead of initially being announced at the counting centres as usual, were announced only after being centralised; demands by CaFFE that carbon copies of the results at each counting centre be submitted for inspection were refused, giving rise to suspicions of fraud in the counting process. In a despairing address to the public when announcing the election results, Election Commissioner Dayananda Dissanayake complained that his guidelines to the state media had been ignored, many state institutions had operated in a manner not befitting state organisations, his team of presiding officers and assistant election commissioners had been harassed in several areas, and under the circumstances he could not ensure the safety of even a single ballot box.

Despite these irregularities, Fonseka polled 4.17 million votes against Rajapaksa’s 6 million. Shortly afterwards, he was arrested and threatened with court martial and possible execution. While in remand, he won a seat in the parliamentary elections of April 2010 and was able to attend and participate in sittings. Although the serious charges meriting a death sentence were dropped for lack of evidence, a military court appointed by Rajapaksa convicted him of meddling in politics while in uniform and of relatively trivial corruption charges, stripped him of his rank, medals, pension and parliamentary seat, and sentenced him to three years in jail. According to Fonseka’s daughter Apsara, the defence lawyers were not allowed to present their statements, call their witnesses, or even be present at his trials, and the Asian Human Rights Commission compared them to Stalin’s Moscow trials. The irregularity of the proceedings and vindictiveness of the punishment, given both rampant corruption and political dabbling by many others in the armed forces, make it obvious that Fonseka’s real crime was standing for election against Rajapaksa. The coalition headed by Rajapaksa, the United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA), won the 2010 parliamentary elections, but fell short of the two-thirds majority required to carry out constitutional change.

Who is to Blame?

This is the context in which the Eighteenth Amendment was rushed through as an urgent bill. The bill sought to bring about two changes to the constitution: nullify the Seventeenth Amendment by replacing the Constitutional Council with a toothless Parliamentary Council, and abolish the two-term limit on the presidency. This would allow the president to appoint people to all the positions and posts mentioned in the 17th amendment constitutionally, and ensure that he could remain president for life (with lifelong immunity) by manipulating elections and making nonsense of the independence of the judiciary. Why was it so urgent? Owing to a convoluted constitutional amendment introduced by Jayawardene, Rajapaksa would not even begin his second term until November 2010, so what was the urgency to decide that he could stand for a third term?

There seem to have been three compulsions. One, his waning popularity would mean that the longer he waited, the more difficult it would become to pass such an amendment. Two, rushing the amendment through parliament without a public debate would forestall objections. (It all took place within ten days; petitioners at the Supreme Court, who argued that as an amendment which affected both fundamental rights and powers devolved to the provincial councils it should have been subjected to a referendum and sent to the provincial councils for prior approval, were given the text of the amendment only after their plea began; the Supreme Court itself was given the text only the previous day, despite which it ruled (contrary to earlier rulings) that a two-thirds majority in parliament was sufficient; and MPs were given the text only after the debate began, one day before their votes were to be cast.) The third probable reason is that Jayawardene is reported to have contemplated such an amendment towards the end of his second term, but by then, Premadasa was waiting in the wings to replace him, and would not agree to it. So this could well be a move on Rajapaksa’s part to pre-empt bids by other members of his party – or even his family – to replace him. In the process, of course, his 2005 election pledge to abolish the executive presidency was thrown to the winds.

There is no doubt that the primary responsibility for this travesty of democracy lies with Rajapaksa and his party. But they lacked a two-thirds majority, and could not have pushed through the amendment without many accomplices. As a member of Jayawardene’s and Premadasa’s governments, opposition leader Ranil Wickremesinghe participated in the horrors they perpetrated, including the anti-Tamil pogroms of 1983 and the torture and extrajudicial killings of Sinhalese in the late 1980s. As leader of the opposition, he sabotaged the constitutional proposal of 2000 (which would have made the 18th Amendment impossible if it had gone through), and played a negative role in the APRC process. He has been criticised for being absent at the debate on the 18th Amendment instead of arguing and voting against it, but what could he possibly have said that would not have sounded hypocritical? The UNP’s failure to stand for anything but a desire for power has meant a steady haemorrhage of defectors to the ruling alliance where the real power lies, and they helped to push the amendment through.

Then there was the LTTE. Prabhakaran’s stubborn refusal to consider anything other than an exclusively Tamil totalitarian state in the areas it controlled detached the issue of justice for Tamils from the goal of democracy for all, where it rightfully belonged. This blocked attempts to push through a democratic solution to the civil war and abolish the executive presidency in the decade from 1994 onwards, when Sinhala nationalism was in abeyance. And the return to war and terrorist attacks helped to stoke Sinhala nationalist sentiments and legitimise the ruthless drive to exterminate the LTTE as well as the anti-democratic measures taken before and after the end of the war.

Other accomplices included the Supreme Court judges who allowed the amendment to be rushed through, politicians from minority parties who voted for it, and politicians from the Socialist Alliance who also voted for it, despite the fact that the Politburo and Central Committee of the LSSP (led by Tissa Vitharana) and Democratic Left Front (DLF, led by Vasudeva Nanayakkara) had decided to abstain. One is reminded of Stanley Kramer’s 1961 film ‘Judgment at Nuremberg’, which tells the story of the trial of four German judges guilty of complicity with the Nazi regime. One of them, Ernst Janning, was once a champion of justice, yet played a major role in turning the German legal system into an instrument of Nazism. How could these eminent and apparently decent men have been complicit in the ghastly atrocities committed by the Nazi regime? The mystery is solved only when Janning makes a statement, showing how actions which at first seemed trivial and innocuous – like swearing an oath of allegiance to the Nazis – led to deeper and deeper entanglement with the regime. Even when the full horror of Hitler’s agenda became clear to them, they justified staying at their posts with the argument that they were trying to prevent matters from getting even worse. Of course, that turned out to be a delusion. What really could have prevented matters from getting worse would have been clear opposition to the fascist transformation of the state and society, but that was the course they did not take.

Are the majority of Sinhalese people complicit in turning Sri Lanka into a dictatorship? Two days before the amendment was passed, liberal commentator and peace activist Jehan Perera asked community leaders in various parts of the country what they thought of it, and they replied that they did not know enough about it to have an opinion. He also got the impression that they were afraid of voicing opposition. This account rings true. If judges of the Supreme Court and parliamentarians did not get the text of the amendment until the last minute, how could ordinary people in the provinces know what it contained? And if they had seen war hero Sarath Fonseka incarcerated and threatened with death for opposing the regime, wouldn’t they fear that the same or worse could happen to them? In both 1999 and 2005, the Sinhalese majority voted massively for presidential candidates who promised to abolish the executive presidency. In 2010, a large part of the 4.17 million votes for Fonseka were cast in the fear that if Rajapaksa came to power, he would become a dictator: a fear that proved only too well-founded. Millions more did not vote for either of the main contenders, believing that Fonseka could turn out to be as bad as Rajapaksa. They either cast their votes for candidates who could not hope to win or abstained, resulting in an abnormally low voter turnout. If protest votes and abstentions are added up, they come to a substantial majority who were opposed to dictatorship.

Seeds of Hope

Sri Lanka may now be a dictatorship, but it does not follow that the aspiration for democracy among its people is dead. There was a chorus of protest against the 18th Amendment and the manner in which it was being passed from the Civil Rights Movement, Organisation of Professional Associations, Bar Association and law students, Centre for Policy Alternatives, National Peace Council, eminent academics and intellectuals, religious leaders, trade unionists, media persons, and many other concerned citizens. In parliament, it was opposed by the DNA (now reduced to the JVP, Sarath Fonseka and two others) and the TNA, despite the vulnerable position of both; thanks to first-time TNA MP M.A.Sumanthiran’s well-argued and eloquent speech in parliament, objections to the 18th Amendment were actually voiced in the debate and went on record. The leader of the New Left Front, Vikramabahu Karunaratne, called on people to wear black in protest against the amendment. Nineteen LSSP and DLF Poliburo and Central Committee members condemned the decision of the executive committee of the Socialist Alliance to vote in favour of the18th amendment ignoring their decision not to participate in the voting, and called upon all progressive forces to oppose the 18th Amendment and fight against the establishment of an authoritarian state by united action with all who stood against this menace.

Whether these protests die down or grow, making use of the remaining democratic space before it is shut down, depends on many things. It is an irony that the only parties defending democracy in parliament were the JVP and TNA, which have both espoused decidedly undemocratic politics in the past. In the circumstances, all freedom-loving people have good reason to be grateful to them. The JVP has distanced itself from armed struggle, which is a positive development, but unless its leaders and Sarath Fonseka abandon their Sinhala nationalism, they will not be able to carry forward the struggle for democracy. On the other side, the TNA has distanced itself from the goal of Tamil Eelam, which is a major step forward, but unless it also abandons its residual Tamil nationalism, its capacity to fight for democracy will be limited. Finally, the capacity of dissident leftists of the LSSP and DLF to act as a rallying point for all those opposing the descent into authoritarianism would depend on their ability to distance themselves from elements in their own parties who are wedded to the very forces that are driving the country into totalitarianism. There is potential for a powerful democracy movement. Only time will tell whether it will materialise.

The New Zealand Supreme Court decision came after a Tamil respondent, whose name is being kept confidential (born in 1956 in Velvettiturai of northern Sri Lanka), responded to the Attorney-General who was the appellant challenging the Appeal Court decision, which stated that the respondent had the right to seek refugee status in New Zealand, but the Crown was contending that the respondent was a member of the LTTE and he carried weapons and ammunition for the LTTE to fight against the Sri Lankan armed forces.

Earlier, two other cases were rejected and they were deported. However, the Tamil respondent challenged in the Appeal Court and later the Supreme Court, and in fact, this case is now seen as a test case where the New Zealand Supreme Court sees the LTTE as a political organization and that they had the right to fight for right of self-determination. In essence, the LTTE had the right to defend themselves from the majority as that majority launched genocidal war against Tamil minority on the island.

The respondent is an innocent Tamil

The respondent gave details as to how he left Sri Lanka in 1981 to go to sea. He was initially based in the Middle East, working in engine rooms first as an oiler and then as a third assistant engineer in the Persian Gulf. He spent brief periods in Sri Lanka in 1986 for personal reasons and returned in 1989 for his marriage where he remained for six months. At the end of 1989, he took up a position as fourth engineer on a container ship sailing between Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. He returned to Velvettiturai in April 1990 to be with his wife for the birth of their first child and remained in Sri Lanka for two years.

The respondent said that in June 1992, he was contacted by an employment agent about an opportunity to work as Chief Engineer on a vessel owned by a Thai company. He was not told its name. He travelled to Trang where he met the ship’s agent, and then to Phuket where, on 5 July 1992, he boarded the Yahata, a cargo vessel with a total crew of nine. For the next six months the vessel worked routes in South Asia travelling to ports in Thailand and Singapore.

The respondent told the Authority that he did not know the nature of the cargo during these voyages. He said he had little interaction with other crew members and knew nothing about them other than that most came from Velvettiturai, which is a fishing port, and at that time, a centre of commercial and maritime contacts for the LTTE. He also said he did not know that, as is established to have been the case, most of the vessel’s crew were members of or sympathetic to the LTTE.

On 4 January 1993, the Yahata departed Phuket with the respondent on board. He said he had no knowledge of the cargo, which he had observed, comprised of packets and barrels when it was loaded from a trawler. During loading, 10 extra people joined the ship. Soon afterwards, the respondent said, he was advised that the Yahata was an LTTE ship. He wanted to leave but was told he could not do so until the vessel reached Sri Lanka. He learned that the 10 persons who had boarded were from the LTTE, one of whom was Krishnakumar Sathasivam, alias Kittu, who had been the LTTE’s second-in-command until being injured during hostilities in Sri Lanka. The respondent acknowledged that at the time he knew who Kittu was.

India’s drama exposed

During the Yahata’s voyage to Sri Lanka, when the vessel was some 440 nautical miles off Chennai, the Master told the respondent that the vessel had reached its destination. The engines were stopped. The vessel drifted for about 10 hours without displaying its national flag and while displaying “not under command” lights. An Indian coastguard vessel approached and sought to board the Yahata for verification purposes. The Master warned the coastguard that the Yahata was carrying 110 tonnes of explosives and dire consequences would follow if any attempt were made to board her. The Yahata then tried to flee and was chased for two and a half hours, when the Master agreed to proceed to Chennai. Near that port, the Yahata was surrounded by vessels of the Indian navy and dropped its anchors.

The respondent said that Kittu informed the crew members that the Indian navy had agreed that they would be repatriated to Sri Lanka. On January 16, 1993, the LTTE members who were on board bombed the vessel, killing ten of them including Kittu. Nine crew jumped into the sea. The Indian navy captured and placed them in custody.

The case was heard for 37 days, and dragged on for three years. Thirty-four witnesses for the prosecution, mostly navy personnel, were interrogated. On the court’s directive, the navy salvaged the remains of the ship and claimed to have retrieved rocket-propelling guns and other arms, but the navy did not submit the gunnery records or communication tapes of the ship to the court, even during in camera sessions. Fearing that the case against the accused was not proceeding in favour of the prosecution, the Additional Solicitor General of India, T.S. Tulsi, was specially requisitioned to marshal additional points in defense of the prosecution in the case. The Indian government, having itself instituted proceedings under the TADA, invoked the jurisdiction of the court, then contended that the court had no jurisdiction to inquire into what happened on the high seas.

Tulsi submitted that, though the vessel was registered under the name MV Yahata, it was changed in the high seas, because the vessel was engaged in clandestine activities. He contended that the moment the vessel changed its name, it had lost its nationality. Also, the crew did not hoist the flag of its nationality and did not have necessary papers. When the Indian navy wanted to know its call-sign, the crew gave a wrong call-signal and it was clear that the vessel was stateless, he said. Such a vessel had no rights under the international law, he contended.

Quoting international law on piracy, Tulsi said the master of the vessel was not in control of the vessel, but it was Kittu and he was communicating with the other vessels in the vicinity. A pirate ship could be seized and the Indian navy had the right to seize this vessel, and contended that, if hostile boarding was resisted, they had the right to capture the vessel. But the Indian navy personnel did not board the vessel, because of humanitarian considerations and they feared that the men on board might consume cyanide capsules. But later, they had no alternative but to resort to hostile boarding as a logical conclusion, he submitted.

The TADA court judge, P. Lakshman Reddy, rejected the submissions of the Prosecution as well as the charge of carrying explosives against the crew, and held that the Navy and the investigating agencies, including the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Special Investigating Team, had failed to prove their charges against the crew of the MV Ahat (Yahata).

The Judge said there was no case under the TADA Act against the accused, as they were brought forcibly into the Indian waters and also, there was no evidence of any offence. He agreed with the defence argument that the Coast Guard ship was not justified in intercepting MV Ahat, when it was in international waters and when the accused had revealed that the ship was registered in Singapore and was flying the Honduran flag. Dissatisfied with the judgment of the Trial Court, the Prosecution appealed to the Indian Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court upheld the Trial Court’s finding and ordered the release of the accused.

The judge directed the Commissioner of Police of Visakhapatnam to hand all the nine crew, including its captain, Jayachandran. Other crew members– Satkunalingham, V. Krishnamoorthy, K Nayakam, S. Sivarasa, S. Indralingham, S. Balakrishnan and T. Mohan– were handed over to the appropriate government, and the crew managed to reach their South-east Asian destination.

New Zealand Supreme Court decision a historic one

After the respondent was released from custody and permitted to leave India for Singapore in August 2001, he obtained a New Zealand visitor’s visa and arrived in New Zealand on 13 September 2001, where he was issued with a visitor’s permit. His wife and children also secured visitors’ visas and arrived in New Zealand on 24 December 2001. On that day, the respondent filed his refugee status application. His wife also made an application on 18 January 2002.

The respondent application was rejected and the case went on for years. The hearing in front of the Supreme Court came in front of Elias C.J., Blanchard, Tipping, McGrath and JJ. Anderson on June 24, 2010, and the verdict was given on August 27 in favour of the respondent. The court delivered the judgment while dismissing the government’s appeal seeking rejection of the refugee status of the respondent.

The court said in its judgment: “At all relevant times the Tamil Tigers was an organisation having the goals of self-determination for Tamils and securing an independent Tamil state in northeast Sri Lanka. The principal objective was to induce the government of Sri Lanka to concede such political change. These characteristics made the Tamil Tigers a political organisation notwithstanding its use, at times, of proscribed methods of advancing its cause. That much is not in dispute.”

It further said: “The appeal is dismissed. The respondent’s application for recognition of refugee status is remitted to the Refugee Status Appeals Authority for consideration in accordance with the Court of Appeal’s order. Costs are reserved and counsel may submit memoranda if necessary.”

The Crown argued in the Supreme Court that the respondent’s involvement in the voyage made him complicit in the atrocities committed by the Tamil Tigers, so that he had committed crimes against humanity as an accomplice. As well, his involvement in the sinking of the vessel was a serious non-political crime. The Crown’s submission was that each aspect of his conduct disqualified him from being recognised as a refugee under the Refugee Convention and New Zealand law.

The Supreme Court has decided that it was not shown that the respondent’s supportive activities were actually linked to any atrocities committed by the LTTE. This was because the armaments which he helped transport did not reach the LTTE as they went down with the ship. Accordingly, it was not established that any crime against humanity had been committed to which the respondent was an accomplice. Furthermore, any crime committed in relation to the sinking of the vessel was of a political nature which did not disqualify the respondent from holding refugee status under the Convention.
The Supreme Court referred the respondent’s application for refugee status back to the Appeals Authority for consideration of whether he meets the general requirements of the Convention and New Zealand law to be recognised as a refugee.

The decision by the Court is really fascinating, and is a precedent for other countries to follow suit because many countries are unjustly concluding that all militants are together with citizens and bystanders or coworkers. There are some movements by minorities which are fighting to safeguard their peoples from genocide and crimes against humanity by oppressive regimes, so these movements should be considered freedom fighters. These fighters do not get any benefits, but they sacrifice their lives for the liberation of their nation, and these fighters should not be branded as terrorists. All sections that fight for self determination for their people and against oppression for liberation should not be regarded terrorists.

The New Zealand Supreme Court decision is a historic one, and it should be taken as a precedent in all countries practising Common Law. If the New Zealand Tamils, numbering less than 10,000 people, can educate the New Zealand judges about the sufferings of Tamils in Sri Lanka, then why not the hundreds of thousands living in other western countries such as in England, Canada, Australia and the U.S and others. The decision in New Zealand should be taken as a test case in all other countries which practice Common Law in order to seek justice for the Tamils in Sri Lanka.

A poetry campaign, Victims Without A Voice, is launched this week to raise global awareness and consciousness of this humanitarian tragedy.

More than fifty thousand ethnic Tamils were massacred to death in Northern Sri Lanka between January to May 2009. Over 300,000 have been imprisoned in detention camps. Thousands more are disappeared, displaced and exiled from their traditional homeland.

In its aftermath, after more than one year still mothers walk miles to look for their lost children, while mother-to-be walk post to post looking for their husbands, while in orphanages children without parents keep watching the gates for their parents’ arrival. While thousands kept behind barbed wires in detention centres, access to people’s ancestral homes are denied while the colonising army set up camps and check posts all over the territory.

A nation gets destroyed without any trace while good-will nations behave as though they need moral steroids to speak out. In the continued silence of the international community, gets silenced a nation’s call for justice, because they are victims without voices.

*****

Like the last cries of a herd of sheep,
Facing cruel cull amidst baying wolves,
Stood thousands of Tamils facing slaughter
Among murderous army with cynical laughter;
Gleeful of ensuing massacre of innocent lives.
Skyward, echoed around walls of power, yells
Of protest and plea for mercy of thousands.
No power on earth moved-so perished thousands.
Silenced by the very silence of flawed conscience
Of moral high landers and so born us -
The Victims without voices.

Beyond massacre, mass graves and genocide,
Beneath false surface of normalcy, besides ecocide,
Wombs of yesterday walk in search of off springs,
Mums-to-be reach post to post in search of husbands.
Barbed wires weep at those detained behind them.
Curbed villagers scorn at schemes which deny their homes.
Kids many that defied death in the murderous onslaught,
Sit in orphanages, a lot in shock, rest in mental drought.
Sky much our agony, so little known of this tragedy
Because, we are the – The Victims without voices.

A nation being decimated and destroyed,
While nations of goodwill seem to need steroid
To break their silence and speak for us – silent victims.
A community of people pushed to extinction
While people of conscience lack moral conviction
To break their silence and speak for us – silent victims
In these civil and morally defunct valleys perish we -
The Victims without voices.

Last week a human cargo ship, the MV Sun Sea, brought 492 Tamil refugee claimants to Vancouver Island.

In the first two-thirds of his article on the editorial page Times Colonist writer Lorne Gunter presented the history of oppression the Tamils have faced from the Sinhalese majority.¹ In the last one-third of the article Gunter wrote, “Against this backdrop, I might ordinarily argue for acceptance” of the Tamils to Canada.

He even conceded, “Many of the refugees might well have valid refugee claims.”

But Gunter would send all these oppressed Tamils back, including the valid refugees² among them.

Why?

Gunter states that Tamils resisted their oppression with violence. He claims Tamil Tigers extorted money to support their violent resistance to violent Sinhalese oppression. He worries that Tamil Tigers may be behind the human smuggling.

In the befuddling “logic” of Gunter, if members of your group have committed violence, then all members are tarnished by the violence. It does not matter if you used violence in self-defense against violence. This violates the fourth Geneva Convention which holds collective punishment to be a war crime. In other words, Gunter advocates a war crime against a people who suffered under an oppressive Sinhalese regime in Sri Lanka. This is what passes for editorials in the Times Colonist.

Valid Tamil refugees must be punished for alleged extortion by other Tamils.

Canada’s history is tarnished by rejecting boats of Jewish refugees escaping Nazi oppression during World War II.³ Does Gunter agree that Canada did right by rejecting these Jewish asylum seekers?

BC history is also blacken by the 1914 Komagata Maru “incident” with its hundreds of Sikhs seeking entry to Canada. The ship was forced back to India where the Sikhs were met with lethal violence. Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper apologized in 2008, but Sikhs were unsatisfied with the apology.⁴

Gunter would repeat all these historical instances of insouciance for the plight of Others.

As justification, Gunter ends his piece, “At the end of the day, it will be too hard to tell the good guys from the bad … And the risk of guessing wrong is too great for Canada.”

In other words, by default all the Tamils are considered guilty as terrorists in Gunter’s mind.⁵ There is no presumption of innocence until proven guilty as required under Canadian law. As for guessing wrong … there is again the bizarre “logic” of Gunter that sending back the Tamils, “valid refugees” or not, is presumably guessing right!? So why is it a “guess”?

Where would Gunter send them? To, what he writes, “deplorable Sri Lankan detention camps, where torture and summary executions are thought to be common.”

The immorality of the Gunter/Times Colonist position is stark.

How will Canadians display their humanity?

Canada has the unenviable history of being spawned through a genocide against the First Nations of the land. That a country might again turn its back on a people fleeing violence back in their home country does not do it proud. Gunter would send them back to face possible massacres that he acknowledges. Gunter either does not know his Canadian history, or he wishes nonetheless to repeat the grave errors.

Such a column is revelatory of the Times Colonist. Is it any wonder that readers are turning away from corporate media in droves?

It is important to be aware of what the various media outlets present as news and opinion, but I’ll try and resist any masochistic impulses to leaf through my parents’s local newspaper and stick with independent media.

1. Lorne Gunter, “Sadly, the boat Tamils should be sent back,” Times Colonist, 17 August 2010: A12.
2. I do not hold any humans — refugees or immigrants — to be “invalid” or “illegitimate,” although there is an argument for some exceptions; e.g., those who have been found guilty of major crimes in a demonstrably fair legal system. See NOII-Vancouver, “Canada: Stop Jailing and Deporting Refugees! Let Them Stay!” The Dominion Weblog, 17 August 2010.
3. See “Jews not welcome in wartime Canada,” CBC Digital Archives, 6 October 1982.
4. The Canadian Press, “Sikhs unhappy with PM’s Komagata Maru apology,” CTV, 3 August 2008.
5. Gunter does not distinguish between freedom fighters and terrorists.

Thousands of victims went abroad abandoning their homeland and their way of life, making up the critical mass of the Tamil Diasporas now scattered the world over. The atrocities upon them had a profound, lasting, and often a ripple effect on their lives, breaking up their family structures and their ethereal foundations. Very soon will come a time when a Tamil child in Denmark will not be able to communicate with their first cousin in England for Danish would be the only language that they could speak.

The term “reconciliation” used in calling the new commission; namely, the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission, designed to deflect the allegations of war crimes and genocide by sections of the international community, is a misnomer just as much as its motives are fraudulent. However, the commission affords an opportunity to apologists of Sri Lankan war crimes and the racist war, like Akashi from Japan and others who frequently enjoy the lavish hospitality of the Sri Lankan government, to hang on to it in defence of its war crimes and human rights abuses. Indeed, Akashi would be familiar with the manner that the Japanese treated their prisoners of war during the Second World War but certainly not the abhorrent massacres of non-combatant civilians who were citizens of his own country, if there were any, or, for that matter, in any other country. We are glad that the term “Truth” is not part of what the commission would be called as originally intended for the Sri Lankan State is incapable of the truth.

After Sri Lanka gained independence in 1948 no conciliatory measures were taken by the Sinhala leadership to treat the Tamils as an integral part of a Sri Lankan nation. Guided by xenophobic fears, considerations of racism, and unfounded mistrust, the Sinhala body politic, through its majoritarian politics offering the semblance of democracy, went on to alienate the Tamil people not only through discrimination but also by the use of periodic violence against them, emanating even from parliamentary debate inciting violence against them. Every effort of conciliation between responsible Sinhalese and Tamil leaderships was thwarted by violence engineered by the Sinhala polity unleashed on the Tamil people forcing them to abandon any hope of conciliation thus rendering the need in the minds of the Tamils by the 1970s that they should revert to being a separate nation distinguished by their culture, status quo ante 1833.

What is now happening in the north and the east in reality are a far cry from any reconciliation! The atrocities, the political, economic and cultural oppression of the Tamil people by the military — not permitting the Tamils to resettle in their homes on the pretext of the lack of water facilities and electricity and the need to de-mine their own homes are not without the blessings of the Rajapakse establishment.

The deliberate naming of streets and villages only in the Sinhalese language is not without Rajapakse’s knowledge. The increasing militarization of the north and the east ruled over as a police State by the military amounts only to adding insult to an already devastated and traumatized people claimed to have been “liberated”, trying to retrace their bearings and heal their own wounds. This does not in any way help in the reconciliation process.

Instances of rape by the military, abductions and disappearances keep mounting. Almost 10,000 suspected militants taken away from the IDP camps are said to have been summarily executed with no trace remaining. We are often told of youth being rehabilitated while they are, in fact, persons who have had nothing to do with the LTTE militancy arrested willy-nilly and released.

These are a recipe for the crystallisation of greater hatred for the Government and the Sinhala polity making the conviction for a separate Tamil State and self determination more resolute. The Tamil nation is a secular society as opposed to an ethno-religious entity, embracing all religions but for some strange reason no Tamil is a Buddhist unless one had had aspirations of being the prime minister. To create newly illuminated and glaring Buddhist temples and statues of Lord Buddha like those of Venus de Milo the Aphrodite of the Greek Milos to make a point of triumphalism in the midst of destruction and desolation of the homeless Tamil people and their meager habitation amounts not only to humiliating them but also prostituting the greatest philosopher, the noble Lord Buddha, and his teachings to make a point of Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism. Lord Buddha was neither a Sinhalese nor a Sri Lankan.

It is by an accident of history that Sri Lanka became predominantly Buddhist because the Mauryan king Asoka of India became a Buddhist with the view to expiating his sins of the killing of soldiers on both sides in a war and sending his emissaries to the Sri Lankan king, who was a Tamil, to spread the message of the Buddha. It is not anything like Sri Lanka becoming predominantly Sikh in the present context!

It is said that the Reconciliation commission is to inquire into the causes that led to terrorism, the lessons to be learnt from this, and the path to reconciliation. Even an eighth grade civics student will tell you that that the main cause that led to “Tamil terrorism” was reaction to the terrorism, periodically and systematically unleashed on the Tamil people by the Sri Lankan State, the inequalities, the disregard for their traditional homelands and discrimination. If one refuses to learn from this, then you are not anywhere near the path of reconciliation but only earning their mistrust if that is of any concern.

No mention anywhere is made of the role of the Sri Lankan State and the Sinhala body politic in progressively alienating the Tamil people, giving the impression that it it was all their doing.

The credentials of the commission are, itself, suspect. The Commission is to be headed by the former attorney general whose record in the area of administration of justice when it comes to Tamil issues is far too dubious for any credence to be attached to the commission. He was largely responsible for impeding the course of justice in the special Presidential commission, another sham, appointed to inquire into the wanton killing of 18 Tamils working for the French INGO by the Special Task Force of the military and the killing of the 5 Tamil university students by the security forces in the east of Sri Lanka, making a mockery also of the committee of internationally eminent persons appointed to oversee the working of this commission. They, it would be recalled, disbanded themselves in frustration.

Also, we are informed that as a state counsel he played a major role in preventing further action into the massacre of more than 50 Tamil remand prisoners suspected of being LTTE persons awaiting a judicial inquiry, tortured and bludgeoned to death by some “patriotic” Sinhalese prisoners, released for this purpose, who were also inmates of the Welikade prison the principal State prison in Sri Lanka, during the 1983 State sponsored Pogrom against the Tamils. Rajapakse could not have got a better chairperson.

The best that Mahinda Rajapakse can do to help in the reconciliation process is to abstain from shedding crocodile tears in public, internationally and locally, on the present plight and the misery of the Tamil people which only angers them, rendering any spirit of reconciliation increasingly impossible. It would be unwise to underestimate the intelligence of the Tamil people even in their present state of mind.

While many responses to Hirschberg’s slander have focused on the dimension of personal integrity, what is more important than truffle fries is Hirschberg’s attempt to discredit M.I.A.’s radical politics. M.I.A.’s upbringing as a Sri Lankan Tamil with personal connections to the Tamil national liberation struggle (her father was a leader of Eelam Revolutionary Organization of Students) has made speaking out against the Sri Lankan government’s persecution of the Tamil people central to her music and art. In the midst of the Sri Lankan government’s recent military campaign to crush the Tamil Tigers (after a civil war that has lasted 26 years), M.I.A. rightly used her public platform to speak out against the Sri Lankan government’s indiscriminate bombing of civilians that resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocents and forced 260,000 Tamils into government detention centers.

Hirschberg’s attempts to discredit M.I.A. relies on quotes from the biased Ahilan Kadirgamar (a liberal apologist for the Sri Lankan government) while ignoring reports from numerous prominent human rights organizations and journalists. Kadirgamar is quoted as saying “What happened in Sri Lanka was not a genocide. To not be honest about that or the Tigers does more damage than good. It doesn’t help the cause of justice.” Hirschberg places emphasis on atrocities committed by the Tamil Tigers and fails to roundly condemn the Sri Lankan government, let alone look into what caused the conflict in the first place.

The Tamil people have long been subjected to oppression by the Sri Lankan government and dominant Sinhalese nationality. The Tamil Tigers, despite their tactics, were one of the last secular groups fighting for national liberation. When Hirschberg writes that “Unity holds no allure for Maya – she thrives on conflict, real or imagined,” she is mocking what makes M.I.A.’s message radically different than most political music today. M.I.A.’s music embraces the antagonism between the world’s slum population and the dominant power structure. In the case of the Tamil people, the only answer to this is to struggle against the Sri Lankan government for national liberation. Moreover, to call this conflict “real or imagined” is a disgusting insult to the thousands who have lost their lives in it. In Hirschberg’s article, M.I.A. rightly criticizes Bono, saying “I’m tired of pop stars who say, ‘Give peace a chance.’ I’d rather say, ‘Give war a chance.’” For Hirschberg and the New York Times, the meaningless and ineffectual charity of Bono is acceptable, while the resistance embraced by M.I.A. is out of the acceptable bounds of public discourse.

Hirschberg also takes aim at M.I.A.’s recent video of her new song “Born Free”, directed by Romain Gavras. The video shows masked military men whose only insignia is an American flag on their uniforms barging into housing project apartments, beating residents, rounding up red-haired white youth, taking them into a desert, and shooting them. Hirschberg calls it “exploitative and hollow”, “designed to be banned on YouTube”, and “at best, politically naïve.” Given the recent passage of a law in Arizona legalizing racial profiling of Mexicans, Obama’s ordering of the National Guard to the US-Mexico border, and the recent US Border Patrol killing of a 15-year-old Mexican boy, one has to ask Hirschberg how the “Born Free” video is anything but a dramatic depiction of the present reality for immigrants in Western democracies?

Besides mocking M.I.A.’s politics as naïve and unintelligent, Hirschberg also calls them knowingly manipulative (this internal contradiction to her argument is, in itself, further evidence of Hirschberg’s brand of manipulative journalism). Hirschberg uses phrases such as “while you’re under the sway of the beat, she’s rapping ‘You wanna win a war / Like P.L.O. I don’t surrender.’” and “Like a trained politician, she stays on message.” to paint this picture of manipulation, as though M.I.A. were enticing listeners with her music and sneaking in her radical politics. Yet M.I.A. has always been upfront about her radical politics, from her album art depicting tigers (a symbol of the Tamil struggle) and third world guerrillas, to her transparent lyrics, to her statements in the media (when they are reported accurately). Far from a hidden agenda, M.I.A. has struggled to get people to listen, explaining in Hirschberg’s article, “The whole point of going to the Grammys was to say, ‘Hey, 50,000 people are gonna die next month, and here’s your opportunity to help.’ And no one did.”

Hirschberg takes these claims of manipulation further in painting M.I.A. as using radical statements and provocative actions for personal gain. Hirschberg treats all of M.I.A.’s bold acts, from performing at the Grammy’s while nine months pregnant, to a photo shoot in a housing project wearing Givenchy gold jewelry to point out the obscene differences in wealth, to her fashion style of using radical political imagery as mere publicity stunts to garner attention rather than substantive artistry. Hirschberg concludes that “It’s hard to know if she believes everything she says or if she knows that a loud noise will always attract a crowd.” This belittling of M.I.A.’s words and actions allows Hirschberg to make sweeping refutations of M.I.A.’s politics without any substantive argument.

While failing to substantively deal with M.I.A.’s radical politics, Hirschberg portrays her as hypocritical for having a “luxe lifestyle” while standing with the world’s oppressed. Hirschberg consistently juxtaposes M.I.A.’s serious statements with her own commentary about the expensive truffle fries, olive bread, and wine M.I.A. was having during the interview in Beverly Hills. M.I.A. has since released her own recording of the interview, in which Hirschberg can be clearly heard telling M.I.A. to get whatever she wants since the NY Times is paying, and even suggesting the fancy fries she criticizes M.I.A. for eating.

Besides this outright journalistic entrapment, Hirschberg also mocks M.I.A.’s claims of political repression (which include death threats against her baby because of her support for the Tamil struggle, government tapping of her phones, and her US visa being denied), and ridicules her move to a nice house in Brentwood, California. First, it must be pointed out that there is a lengthy history of government repression of artists in the United States for their political views, and Hirschberg completely ignores this history as well as the implications of speaking out on behalf of the Tamil people (many who have done so in Sri Lanka have disappeared). Second, what defines whether a radical artist has sold out is not their choice of where to live or their (necessary) functioning within the wealthy world of the entertainment industry, but whether they continue to speak out against injustice, including at personal risk.

M.I.A. has continued to espouse her radical politics after her success, with the consequences of public attacks, censorship, and government repression. Perhaps what is most hypocritical about Hirschberg’s personal attacks on M.I.A. is the fact that without her success and fame there would be no one speaking out about the Sri Lankan government’s massacre of Tamils in a way that reaches a mainstream audience. This is in large part due to the fact that media such as the New York Times have refused to run any substantive coverage of the Sri Lankan government’s actions or fulfilled their journalistic obligation to send reporters into the conflict zone. Without M.I.A., there are little avenues for the voices and stories of the Tamil people to reach outside of Sri Lankan government detention centers.

Hirschberg has written a manipulative slander against M.I.A. and has failed to address what has made M.I.A.’s music innovative and her politics truly radical in a postmodern culture that deflates antagonism and absorbs original creative efforts. M.I.A.’s music stands out as a successful fusion of various rhythms from different parts of the world into a coherent and distinct form of dance music with a raw energy derived from its do-it-yourself production process and the influence of rebellious American hip-hop. M.I.A.’s politics stand out as embracing the oppressed people residing in the shantytowns of the third world and ghettos of Western nations, their antagonism with the dominant power relations in the world, and the violent resistance this gives rise to, in contrast to the relativism, identity politics, and liberal multi-culturalism that dominate progressive politics today. It is this radical stand that Hirschberg and the New York Times find unacceptable.

Golinger is a name synonymous with solidarity and anti-imperialism. However, she recently inexplicably immersed herself into being a supporter for the brutal, racist, and genocidal government of Sri Lanka in a resoundingly irresponsible opinion piece printed in the Spanish daily version of Correo del Orinoco, May 15, and on May 21, published by the Caracas city government newspaper, Ciudad CCS. The piece was simply entitled, “Sri Lanka”. Printed in Spanish, I translate into English the major part of its content and analyze its errors with the goal of countering rumors she started, and in an effort to broaden support for a most maligned and oppressed ethnic group, the Tamils of Sri Lanka.

Golinger wrote that, in 2005, Sri Lanka “presidential elections occurred for the first time in nearly 30 years. Mahinda Rajapakse obtained victory with more than 58% of votes. He was reelected, January 2010 with more than 60%.”

Rajapakse, Buddhist leader, is supported by a coalition of leftist parties, among them the Communist Party. In May, 2009, Rajapaske finalized the civil war, defeating the armed organization, LTTE.

The LTTE had close ties with the CIA, and Washington negotiated an accord with them for establishing a military base in the country, if they obtained power. Upon its defeat, the LTTE had established numerous organizations—fronts in different countries around the world, seeking to create `a government in exile´ and hoping to isolate the current government of Sri Lanka. Last week, representatives of one of its fronts, Canadian Hart, passed through Venezuela; it met with government functionaries seeking support in its intent to weaken the relationship between the two governments.

Instead of relating to the illegitimate opposition in Sri Lanka, Venezuela should shake the hand of an ally that also suffers imperial aggressions.

Golinger is factually incorrect.

1. Mahinda Rajapaksa is not the first president elected. In 1982, J.R. Jayawardane won the first presidential election with 52.9% of the vote. The United National Party (UNP)—a pro-western party of the comprador bourgeoisie—introduced a new constitution after its 1977 landslide victory. Before then, the office of prime minister was the highest, and Jayawardane won that post and the UNP took 80% of the parliamentary seats. In 1978, the new constitution renamed the country, “Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka”, but this had nothing to do with socialism. The economy then, as now, was a capitalist one with a neo-liberal orientation much like Chile after the 1973 coup d´etat.

According to the Government Department of Census and Statistics’ own figures (2006/2007), 82% of the rural population lives under the national poverty line while 65% of the urban population is not able to meet the minimum level of per capita daily calorie and protein intake recommended by the government Medical Research Institute. See official figures on the government website.

There can be nothing “democratic socialist” about discriminating against one-fourth of its population, the Tamil ethnic group, making them unequal by legally restricting their rights and privileges. Such has been the case since independence from Britain in 1948. Even the U.S. Library of Congress studied Tamils as an “alienated” group. In 1988, it published, “Sri Lanka: a Country Study”:

”Moderate as well as militant Sri Lankan Tamils have regarded the policies of successive Sinhalese governments in Colombo with suspicion and resentment since at least the mid-1950s, when the `Sinhale Only´ language policy was adopted…”

2. Rajapaska won the fifth presidential elections and with the least majority of all presidents, 50.29%, not 58% as Golinger wrote.

Rajapaska is the current leader of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), founded in 1951 to represent the Sinhalese bourgeoisie. In 1960 elections, Sirimavo R.D. Bandaranayake became the world’s first woman prime minister. The Moscow-oriented Communist Party and the Trotskyist Lanka Sama Samja Party (LSSP) formed the “United Front” coalition with the SLFP, in 1970. Now with three minister posts, the “old left” betrayed the young. Many Sinhalese leftist youth became disillusioned with the “old left” and after the SLFP returned to government, they rebelled. The so-called “leftist” government, with the CP and LSSP, branded this upsurge a “Che Guevarist uprising” and crushed the rebellion by killing about 20,000 mainly rural Sinhala youth, in 1971. The next year, these “left” parties drafted the first republican constitution in which Sinhalese was codified as the only official language and Buddhism the only the official religion—Tamils are not Buddhists. This eroded whatever support the “old left” had among both leftist Sinhalese and all Tamils. Since then neither the CP nor the LSSP has managed to get a single seat in the parliament independently. They are always with the capitalist party, SLFP.

3. Rajapaska won the January 2010 elections with 57.88%, not 60%, over his former chief general, Sarath Fonsekla, in charge of liquidating the LTTE (Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam). Fonseka’s party, New Democratic Front, received 40.15% of the vote. In desperation, a few Tamils voted for General Fonseka knowing that he was the main army force in carrying out the president’s orders in liquidating the LTTE, and massacring tens of thousands of Tamil civilians. The one difference between the two war criminals was that Fonseka later promised that he would release the rest of the interned Tamils and return their possessions and land. Tamils are crushed for now and resort to seeking a bit of breathing space.

The egomaniacal president was not satisfied with just defeating his former general in the ballot box, he had him arrested and beaten on February 7, shortly after the elections, and charged him with plotting a coup, which General Fonseka denies. A purge of scores of top military officers has occurred; a dozen or more Sinhalese and Tamil journalists have been arrested. In the four years of Rajapakse rule, at least 23 journalists critical of his regime have been murdered.¹

4. “The LTTE had close ties with the CIA, and Washington negotiated an accord with them for establishing a military base in the country…” That is an outrageous and unsubstantiated allegation. In my month-long research last autumn, I found nothing to indicate Golinger’s unsupported claim. Looking up “LTTE and CIA” in Google: nothing exists. When searching for LTTE and CIA and LTTE ties to CIA without quotation marks, nothing exists that binds them. I looked up some 200 hits and only found reference to the Golinger claim, and this was cited by a most skeptical Patrick J. O´Donoghue, news editor for the English-language website VHeadline.com, in a May 23 commentary. He said: “I couldn’t believe what I read in the Caracas CC blatt!” We have no way of knowing if the LTTE even met with the CIA, but in war most anything is possible. What we can know is that the US, and its CIA and Pentagon, have long supported the genocidal Sinhalese governments, and most certainly that of Rajapaske, and it placed the LTTE on its Foreign Terrorist Organization hit list in 1997. I will delve into this farther on.

5. Golinger’s claim that Canadian Hart is a front for the LTTE is denied by several solidarity groups in Canada who know that organization for its humanitarian work. See their perspective, “Venezuela: Eva Golinger’s misinformation endangers exiled Tamils’ fight for freedom.”

6. Golinger depicts the Sri Lankan capitalist and genocidal government as an “ally” of Venezuela, one that she recommends her revolutionary government to “shake the hand of an ally that also suffers imperial aggression.” This boggles the mind, or “beggars belief”, as O’Donoghue wrote. Instead of opposing the Yankee Empire, her position is allied with imperialist United States and its allies — Zionist Israel, the United Kingdom, and other former European colonialists, as well as the emerging superpower and worker-exploiter China.² There is no shred of evidence that the United States aggresses against Sri Lanka governments, on the contrary.

US Supports Sri Lanka Genocide

The Indian Ocean is a vital waterway where half the world’s containerized cargo passes through. Its waters carry heavy traffic of petroleum products. Sri Lankan cooperation is vital to the US Empire’s global interests. A separated Tamil state would complicate cooperation requirements.

The United States of America has been arming and financing Sri Lanka for most of the civil war period. From at least the 1990s, the US has provided military training, financing, logistic supplies and weapons sales worth millions annually. A Voice of America installation was set up in the northwestern part of the country.

The United States government praised Rajapaksa for restarting the war already in July 2006 and officially ending the ceasefire in 2008. The US embassy in Colombo issued this statement: “The United States does not advocate that the Government of Sri Lanka negotiate with the LTTE…”

On May 26, 2002, the Colombo English-language Sunday Times wrote about a joint military pact between Sri Lanka and the U.S., a development taken soon after the CSA was signed.

The Acquisition and Cross Servicing Agreement [ACSA]…will enable the United States to utilise Sri Lanka’s ports, airports and air space. As a prelude to the signing of the agreement scheduled for July, this year, United States Naval ships have been calling at the Colombo Port for bunkering as well as to enable sailors to go on shore leave.

In return for the facilities offered, Sri Lanka is to receive military assistance from the United States including increased training facilities and equipment. The training, which will encompass joint exercises with United States Armed Forces, will focus on counter terrorism and related activity. The agreement will be worked out on the basis of the use of Sri Lanka’s ports, airports, and air space to be considered hire-charges that will be converted for military hardware.

US Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca was the key liaison person with the Sri Lankan government. (Rocca had been a CIA officer before joining the state department.) The ACSA agreement was not finally signed until Rajapaksa came to power. It was U.S. citizen Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, Secretary Defense Minister, and brother to President Rajapaksa, who signed the agreement, on March 5, 2007. (Their younger brother, also a minister, is a US citizen as well.)

George W. Bush was especially glad for Sri Lanka’s state terrorism. In 2006, he encouraged the government to resume the civil war, which Bush financed with $2.9 million. The Pentagon provided counter-insurgency training, maritime radar, patrols of US warships and aircraft. This was a continuation of “Operation Balanced Style”, which uses U.S. Special Forces instructors since 1996.

At the end of Bush’s first term, the US was forced to cut back on aid given that it was bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq. That, coupled with critical public opinion, organized by the Diaspora, of state terrorism and systematic discrimination of Tamils, prompted congress to make noises about abuses of human rights by not only LTTE but possibly by paramilitary forces linked to the S.L. government. Thousands of Tamils blocked highways in Canada, camped outside British parliament for months, some committed suicide in front of government offices, while Indian Tamils conducted paralyzing strikes. Nevertheless, in 2008, the U.S. granted $1.45 million in military financing and training to the Sri Lanka government out of a total of $7.4 million in total aid. The US made noises about a ‘humanitarian crisis’ when the Sri Lankan army was about to finish the war but it never took affirmative action to bring the war to an end nor to condemn the army or government.

Even after leading international observers, and some of the mass media, especially in the U.K. and France, began to expose the Sri Lankan government and the army’s systematic atrocities against Tamil civilians, and captured LTTE soldiers, the US continued to back up the Sri Lankan government, in contradiction to Eva Golinger. In mid-April, 2010, the U.S. and Sri Lankan military forces conducted military exercises in Eastern Seas (Trincomalee) for the first time in 25 years.

Said Lt Col Larry Smith, the US defense attache: “The joint exercise helped members from our two militaries to exchange best practices on how to address complex humanitarian challenges.”

He added: “The US and Sri Lanka have a long tradition of cooperation. We hope this partnership can be expanded.”

Documentary film-maker, John Pilger, compares Sri Lanka’s genocide of Tamils to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians:

The Sri Lankan government has learned an old lesson from, I suspect, a modern master: Israel. In order to conduct a slaughter, you ensure the pornography is unseen, illicit at best. You ban foreigners and their cameras from Tamil towns like Mulliavaikal, which was bombarded recently by the Sri Lankan army, and you lie that the 75 people killed in the hospital were blown up quite willfully by a Tamil suicide bomber.³

When the U.S. does not want to be seen on the frontlines in a war, it sends in surrogates and Israel is its main partner in this war crime. Israel was officially re-awarded diplomatic relations in May 2000, after Sri Lanka had severed them in 1970, in protest at Israel’s continued illegal expansion into Palestinian territory. Nevertheless, Israel continued to operate inside S.L. out of a special interests office set up in the US embassy. Under the table, Sri Lanka’s successive regimes embraced Israel’s military advisors, a special commando unit in the police, and Mossad counter-intelligence agents—who sought to drive a wedge between Muslims and Tamils. Israel sent Sri Lanka 16 of its supersonic Kfir fighter jets, some Dvora fast naval attack craft, and electronic and imagery surveillance equipment, plus advisors and technicians. Israel personnel took part in military attacks on Tamil units, and its pilots flew attack aircraft. Tigers shot down one Kfir. Just before the end of the war, Prime Minister Wickremanayake was in Israel to make bigger deals with Israeli arms supplies.

Sri Lankan government war crimes

Golinger even ignores ample evidence of extreme war crimes committed by her choice for president, Mahinda Rajapakse, against the minority Tamils. They have a righteous claim for liberation because of being subject to systematic discrimination, oppression and genocide.⁴

Sri Lanka’s first president, J.R. Jayewardene, expressed the essence of this genocide to the Daily Telegraph, on July 11, 1983. “Really if I starve the Tamils out, the Sinhala people will be happy.”

In May 2009, Rajapakse had all the civilians who survived his gun fire placed into concentration camps, which he called “welfare villages”, much like those the Yankees concocted in Vietnam. In violation of United Nations international rules, as many as from 280,000 to one-half million people were forced interned. Today, one year later, 100,000 remain. Only two million S.L. Tamils remain in the country. Nearly one million have fled in the past three decades.

Even the U.S.’s choice for secretary-general of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, was displeased with these camps when he made a brief visit to one shortly after the war’s end:

I have traveled around the world and visited similar places, but this is by far the most appalling scenes I have seen…I sympathize fully with all of the displaced persons.

Several internationally respected organizations concerned about war crimes, and a few mass media journalists, have conducted interviews with IDPs, taken or viewed photographs, videos, satellite images—taken surreptitiously during the war—and have read electronic communications and documents from many sources. Some observers have been able to visit a camp or two.

On May 17, one of those organizations, the International Crisis Group, released its report, “War Crimes in Sri Lanka”. I cite from it:

The Sri Lanka security forces and the LTTE repeatedly violated international humanitarian law during the last five months of their 30-year civil war…from January 2009 to the government’s declaration of victory in May [violations worsened]. Evidence gathered by the International Crisis Group suggests that these months saw tens of thousands of Tamil civilian men, women, children and elderly killed, countless more wounded, and hundreds of thousands deprived of adequate food and medical care, resulting in more deaths.

This evidence also provides reasonable grounds to believe the Sri Lanka security forces committed war crimes with top government and military leaders potentially responsible.

Here is a revealing example of this evidence.

On August 25, 2009, Channel 4 News (UK) broadcast raw footage, one minute long, showing S.L. government soldiers casually executing eight bound and blindfolded, naked Tamil men, believed to be LTTE combatants. This is a war crime according to all international agreements. Rajapaska’s government denied the authenticity of the photos, apparently taken by a S.L. soldier and provided to Channel 4 through the exiled group of Sinhalese and Tamil journalists, Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka. But internationally renowned forensic experts have validated its authenticity.⁵

In a recent Channel 4 News broadcast by Jonathan Miller, two eyewitnesses spoke of systematic murder of all LTTE fighters caught or surrendered. One witness is a senior army commander: “Definitely, the order would have been to kill everybody and finish them off.” A frontline S.L. soldier told Miller: “Yes, our commander ordered us to kill everyone. We killed everyone.”⁶

Even the head general in charge of defeating the LTTE, General Fonseka, spoke of having orders from the Defense Secretary to kill leaders without taking prisoners—“all LTTE leaders must be killed”.

Returning to the International Crisis Group war crimes report:

Starting in late January [2009], the government and security forces encouraged hundreds of thousands of civilians to move into ever smaller government-declared No Fire Zones (NFZs) and then subjected them to repeated and increasingly intense artillery and mortar barrages and other fire. This continued through May despite the government and security forces knowing the size and location of the civilian population and scale of civilian casualties.

The security forces shelled hospitals and makeshift medical centres—many overflowing with the wounded and sick—on multiple occasions even though they knew of their precise locations and functions. During these incidents, medical staff, the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and others continually informed the government and security forces of the shelling, yet they continued to strike medical facilities through May…

Among the charges that must be investigated, wrote ICG, is “the recruitment of children by the LTTE and the execution by the security forces of those who had laid down their arms and were trying to surrender.”

Shortly after this report, Amnesty International released its report of torture in 111 countries. Among those A.I. condemns for the “politicization of justice” is Sri Lanka’s government. It also criticizes the UN “for its failure to intervene…By the end of the year, despite further evidence of war crimes and other abuses, no-one had been brought to justice,” A.I.’s Secretary General Claudio Cordone said. “One would be hard pressed to imagine a more complete failure to hold to account those who abuse human rights.”⁷

Some leaders of ALBA countries may be under the impression that when westerners (A.I., ICG, Channel 4) protest about human rights abuse that this reflects the double speak language of white imperialism, or NGO imperialists. This is sometimes the case. But it is definitely not so with Sri Lanka. None of the western governments on the HRC wished to condemn Sri Lanka. They only condemned the LTTE and simply asked Sri Lanka to look into its own behavior during the war.

Do not take my word or those of A.I and ICG for this assessment alone, but look at the conclusions drawn by internationally renowned figures with impeccable solidarity credentials, such as Francois Houtart, who, among other positions, is an honorary professor at the University of Havana. He chaired an 11-judge panel looking into war crimes charges against Sri Lanka’s government and army—the Permanent People’s Tribunal on Sri Lanka (PPT), held in Dublin in January. Among the many supporters of the panel and their conclusions is the senior advisor to President Daniel Ortega, Miguel D’Escoto. Ironically, Nicaragua is one of the ALBA countries that praised the Sri Lanka government and voted for their resolution at the HRC. The PPT’s conclusions approximate those allegations made by the above mentioned organizations: Sri Lanka committed “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity”. These conclusions are found on pages 14-15 of the 50-page verdict.

On the Qualifications of the Facts

Summing up the facts established before this Tribunal by reports from NGOs, victims’ testimony, eye-witnesses accounts, expert testimony and journalistic reports, we are able to distinguish three different kinds of human rights violations committed by the Sri Lankan Government from 2002 (the beginning of the CFA) to the present: 

• Forced “disappearances” of targeted individuals from the Tamil population.

Crimes committed in the re-starting of the war (2006-2009), particularly during the last months of the war:
• Bombing civilian objectives like hospitals, schools and other non-military targets;
• Bombing government-proclaimed ‘safety zones’ or ‘no fire zones’;
• Withholding of food, water, and health facilities in war zones;
• Use of heavy weaponry, banned weapons and air-raids;
• Using food and medicine as a weapon of war;
• The mistreatment, torture and execution of captured or surrendered LTTE combatants, officials and supporters;
• Torture;
• Rape and sexual violence against women;
• Deportations and forcible transfer of individuals and families;
• Desecrating the dead;

Human rights violations in the IDP camps during and after the end of the war:
• Shooting of Tamil citizens and LTTE supporters;
• Forced disappearances;
• Rape;
• Malnutrition; and
• Lack of medical supplies.⁸

Conclusion

I urge ALBA members of the Human Rights Council—Cuba, Bolivia and Nicaragua—along with their brothers and sisters in Venezuela to recognize an error made when they promulgated Sri Lanka’s own resolution laid before the HRC and adopted by the majority, on May 27, 2009–Resolution S-11/1, “assistance to Sri Lanka in the promotion and protection of human rights”.

The self-serving resolution only condemned the LTTE for acts of terror while praising the Sri Lankan government and supporting, naturally, its right to sovereignty. These ALBA countries, along with most members of the Non-Aligned Movement on the Council, let the entire Tamil people down, especially the Internally Displaced Persons. My assessment is shared by the people’s tribunal in paragraph 5.5:

The Tribunal stresses the responsibility of the Member States of the United Nations that have not complied with their moral obligation to seek justice for the violations of human rights committed during the last period of war. After repeated pleas, and in spite of the appalling conditions experienced by Tamils, the UN Human Rights Council and the UN Security Council failed to establish an independent commission of inquiry to investigate those responsible for the atrocities committed due to political pressure exerted by certain Members.

The PPT came to the opposite conclusion that Golinger does on all accounts. The US is not an actor of “aggression” against Sri Lanka’s government rather it is the case of one war criminal supporting another. The tribunal “highlights the conduct of the European Union in undermining the CFA of 2002. In spite of being aware of the detrimental consequences to a peace process in the making, the EU decided — under pressure from the United States and the United Kingdom — to list the TRM (Tamil Resistance Movement, which included the LTTE) as a terrorist organization in 2006. This decision allowed the Sri Lankan Government to breach the ceasefire agreement and re-start military operations leading to the massive violations listed above. It also points to the full responsibility of those governments, led by the United States, that are conducting the so-called “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) in providing political endorsement of the conduct of the Sri Lankan Government and armed forces in a war that is primarily targeted against the Tamil people.

As solidarity activists, we advocate the right to resist and the necessity to conduct armed struggle once peaceful means fail to induce oppressive governments to engage in a process aimed at justice and equality—such is the case in Sri Lanka with the Tamil people, just as surely as it is in Palestine.

I find that most armed movements commit acts of atrocities, even acts of terror. The struggle for liberation in Cuba was an exception to the rule. Fortunately, it lasted just over two years. The armed struggle for liberation from Sinhala oppression against another indigenous group lasted for quarter of a century and, at the end, the LTTE clearly did resort to acts of desperation and terror. Other brave and righteous groups fighting for liberation, for equality and justice, such as Colombia’s FARC and Palestine’s PFLP, have also committed acts of terror. The ANC in South Africa was brutal in its struggle for liberation.

I wonder how I would act in such circumstances!

True solidarity activists have no choice. We must support the Tamil people. Today, they are in disarray. Various tendencies are in formation. But dialogue with them all is what solidarity forces must engage in around the world. One tendency is the new Provisional Transitional Government of Tamil Eelam (TGTE), which just formerly constituted itself in Philadelphia. Their coordinator, Visuvanathan Rudrakumaran, is a resident of the United States and an attorney. In February, he filed a suit in the US Supreme Court that would negate parts of the U.S. Patriotic Act and allow people to provide “material support or resources” to armed groups fighting for their liberation. Tamil Eelam advocates in the US have associated with the civil rights organization, Humanitarian Law Project, and along with supporters of the crushed LTTE and the PKK (Kurdish rebels in Turkey) are seeking to legitimize the rights of oppressed minorities to fight for liberation, if necessary with arms when peaceful means are impossible.⁹

My main motivation for siding with people who fight against oppression and for liberation is a matter of basic solidarity and morality, and an understanding of this necessity for the suffering people. The basic reason why so many millions of people have respected and loved Che Guevara is because of this moral stance. To back any corrupt, capitalist, genocidal government—albeit in the name of support for “sovereignty”—is not consistent with Che’s and our collective moral stance.

1. See Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka.
2. See my pieces in Dissident Voice: “Cuba-ALBA Let Down Sri Lanka Tamils: Part 1,” November 16th, 2009; “Tamil Eelam: Historical Right to Nationhood: Part 2,” November 17th, 2009; “Equal Rights or Self-Determination: Part 3,” November 18th, 2009; “The Terrorists: International Support for Sri Lanka’s Racist Discrimination: Part 4,” November 19th, 2009; “Post-War Internment Hell: Part 5,” November 20th, 2009.
3. John Pilger, “Distant Voices, Desperate Lives,” Dissident Voice, 13-5-09.
4. Ron Ridenour, “Equal Rights or Self-Determination: Part 3,” Dissident Voice, November 18th, 2009.
5. See “SRI LANKAN EXECUTION VIDEO ‘NOT FAKE’: Forensic Video Expert Grant Fredricks,” JDS; “Experts strongly suggest that the video is authentic — UN Special Rapporteur,” JDS.
6. Jonathan Miller, “Sri Lanka Tamil killings ‘ordered from the top‘,” Channel 4 News, 18 May 2010.
7. See “Amnesty’s report condemns ‘politicisation of justice’,” JDS; Amnesty International report; “Grim scenes at Sri Lankan camps where Tamil refugees have been taken – Channel 4 News,” Youtube.
8. See “Full Text: Verdict of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on Sri Lanka,” “Permanent People’s Tribunal on Sri Lanka, 14-16 January 2010; “Gun waving diplomacy: War ships and war pacts,” PTSriLanka.
9. See TGTE’s website.

That was just the token message. Tamil civilians suffered and died in their thousands. In utter desperation, deaths of civilians were sadly used as propaganda tool to achieve political ends. As it transpired, the real problem was, in the heat of the battle and in the fog of war, how does one make a clear distinction between combatants and civilians?

Then the news trickled in. The demise of tiger leadership. ‘Talaivar’ Prabaharan’s death. There was gasping silence in the diaspora. The “invincible tigers” have fought to the last but lost. Total shock. Then the Tamil spin-doctors began to work over time. Complete denial. (Except the Tamil Nation website. It announced its closure on 25.01.10)

But, it was bleeding obvious that the game was over.

And the plight of the Tamil IDP’s became the ‘thorn in the flesh’ for the Same Song, Only the Change of Tune regime. However, signs of relative peace, and winning elation were beginning to appear in Sri Lanka. Investments and multi-million dollar contracts, development projects. All these were a great opportunity for the Western governments especially in the current credit crunched economic climate. But the West knew that Sri Lanka under President Mahinda Rajapaksha has gravitated towards China, Russia, Iran, Myanmar and other nations. China, the new super economic power, has a bigger slice of the pie, and that could potentially influence the balance of power in that region. Looking at the bigger picture, it is an obvious worry for the West.

Rajapaksha’s return to power both in the presidency and his party in the recent general elections began to ring alarm bells in many quarters.

For all intents and purposes, the strategy now for the West is to exert pressure from all angles on Sri Lanka. Acute pressure is currently applied through corporate media, human rights industry, and in a very subtle way through some diaspora channels. So now, with the plight of the Tamil IDP’s and the formation of the so-called transnational interim Tamil government (in a Western capital), war crimes allegations have all become pressure points in the Western media. None of these concerns arise out of altruistic reasons It was not too long ago, no Western media out-let was willing to pay much attention on the struggle of the Tamils.

The Rajapaksha government however has not flinched. The backing of the majority of the Sinhala masses for the President is solid.

Concerning the IDP detention and the delay in re-settlement, Sri Lanka officials use the argument that they have to separate the chaff from the wheat, as it were. Once again, the problem of differentiation between civilian and combatant blurs the line. The argument becomes circular.

What is most worrying to this writer is that, within the twists and turns of this narrative, amidst all this “Sympathetic” noise, the voice of the Tamils in the island is drowned and not heard. Many are jockeying for power and position both inside and outside Sri Lanka… All in the name of Tamils.

In this political quagmire reality and idealism seem to be poles apart. Ideologues with their myopic vision have failed the Tamils.

Only realistic pragmatic approaches will help Tamils rebuild their traumatised lives in Sri Lanka.

Twenty-six years ago, the state-sponsored pogrom against Tamils in Sri Lanka resulted in the deaths of 3000 people, and property damages of over $300 million U.S.

The days between July 24 and July 30, 1983, were tragic, and unforgettable, for the Tamils. The May 2009 war, which killed nearly 40,000 Tamil civilians, was record high, beating the July ‘83 holocaust. For the Sri Lankan government, it is victory, but for Tamils, it is the month to reflect and remember. Now May is, to Tamils, like February is to Black people around the world. Tamils the world over observe this occasion with rallies, vigils, and prayers.

Tamils around the world have been organizing peaceful rallies, and other events, to reflect and remember the massacred Tamils. The Tamils were killed by the Sri Lankan armed forces, with no mercy whatsoever, even when they were given promise that they would not be killed if they sought refuge in the designated zone which was recognized as ‘safety zone’.

Within five months, Tamils were killed day and night, up until May 19th, of 2009. After the Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, came to power in 2005, he said he would crush the Tamil Tigers (LTTE), and pledged that he would set out the ‘Mahinda Chinthana,’ which would outline how his government would rule the country. After he came to power, he became wild, and ordered his armed forces to eliminate the LTTE in the eastern part of the island.

East remains dangerous for people to live

Mahinda’s armed forces went on a rampage in the East in 2006 with the guise of fighting the LTTE in order to gain full control of the sluice gates of the reservoir in Mavilaru. The use of ‘Operation Watershed’ to gain the control of the sluice gates of the reservoir, was successful, after the LTTE fighters denounced the war saying that they lifted the ban for access to the reservoir.

The Mahinda administration even annulled the cease fire agreement signed by the former Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, and the LTTE leader, V. Pirapaharan, which came into effect in 2002. The Sri Lankan armed forces even took the lives of employees of INGOs (International Non-Governmental Organizations), as well as local employees of NGOs, academics, businessmen, journalists, etc.

The government took decisive action against the foreign agencies, which were working in the Tamil areas, and ordered them to vacate. The government opened up a confrontation with the aid of agencies and media outlets. But the LTTE leadership kept saying that they were sticking to the 2002 ceasefire agreement. They even announced that the Sri Lankan government was the one which unilaterally breached the agreement, but the LTTE was respecting it.

The LTTE even took control of Sampur, in the Trincomalee district, but after mounting pressure from the international community, the LTTE had to return to their original barracks, after bringing the areas under their full control. When the Sri Lankan armed forces were launching massive military operations, the LTTE was maintaining silence and retreating from the Sri Lankan armed forces.

The Tamils around the world were hoping that the LTTE leadership was tactically withdrawing for a day to come. But, the eastern military operation, instigated by the Sri Lankan armed forces, drove over 300,000 people to seek refuge. Many of them are still alive, under pathetic conditions, even after the government announced that they brought the eastern province from the LTTE.

Nearly four years have passed after capturing the East, but the economic and security situations remain a grave concern. Unidentified men, as usual, kidnap people and they are taken to secret locations. Women are still facing difficulties, but the reports of these abuses have been kept silent. The eastern province has been given control of the pro-government paramilitary, the Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Pulikal (TMVP).

The Sinhala colonization is on the rise in the aftermath of the so-called liberation of the East from the LTTE. This has predominantly taken place after chasing the inhabitants off the land to refugee camps, making them displaced people who wander around without the right to own their own lands. Another event that is taking place is that the government is sponsoring to build Buddhist temples in the liberated areas. Other than that, there are no prospects for the people who inhabited the land.

Eastern victory led to Northern military overtures

Upon completion of the so-called liberation of the Eastern military operation, the Mahinda administration immediately turned their guns toward capturing the North, especially the Vanni, which was the headquarters of the LTTE. There, the LTTE was having a de facto government with police, the judicial system, custom offices, etc., similar to a parallel government, resembling the way Colombo was ruling the rest of the island.

Tamils were hoping that the Vanni would be the graveyard for the advancing Sinhala armed forces. But the LTTE was still maintaining the policy of retreating, except against defensive attacks. The LTTE never launched offensive attacks, even though they did have the military prowess to launch such military offences against the advanced armed forces. This shocked the Tamils. One by one, the Sri Lankan armed forces captured the areas of Vanni.

Within the five months of military offensives, especially from January 2009, the Sri Lankan armed forces gained control of over 10,000 square kilometres of landmass of the North. Over 350,000 Tamils, who were the residents in the control of the LTTE, had no choice but to go with the flow. They were butchered like animals being hunted for meat, despite the continuous call from the international community, to put a halt to the fighting, in order to secure the release of the civilians.

The Sri Lankan government even offered to declare a ‘safe zone’ and asked the people to move in to the region, but, the government did not respect it, saying that they had to launch shelling and aerial bombardment since the LTTE fighters too sought refuge in the area, in the cover of civilians. Upon considering the massive sufferings of civilians, the LTTE leadership formally announced that they silenced their guns to safeguard the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

Even after the LTTE silenced their guns, the Sri Lankan armed forces crushed to death thousands of Tamils, as well as LTTE fighters, who meant to surrender to the Sri Lankan armed forces with white flags. Even the LTTE’s senior political leaders were shot to death at gunpoint, after they were given promise that they could surrender with a white flag.

The military operation came to a complete stop by May 19, 2009. On this day, the Sri Lankan armed forces announced that they found the dead body of the LTTE leader, Pirapaharan from the Nanthikadal lagoon in Mullaitheevu. With the end of this military operation, the Mahinda administration announced a great victory and said they defeated the LTTE, which was a calling on a military outfit in the island with conventional military power with naval, air, and land forces, as well as the ferocious ‘Black Tigers’ who sacrificed their lives for the cause of Tamil Eelam by detonating bombs in their bodies.

Victory for Sinhalese and Grief for the Tamils

In the final phase of Eelam War IV, the Sri Lankan government announced victory, but the war wounded the Tamils, leaving 40,000 of their beloved ones dead. Mahinda won both presidential and parliamentary elections for the second consecutive term. The Mahinda administration, so far, has not offered a political solution to the Tamils’ grievances. Rather, the government is making anti-Tamil activates, such as deploying Sinhala families, to occupy the residences and properties belonging to the Tamils in the North as how they do it in the East. They are building Buddhist shrines, establishing military camps, and deploying more troops in the Tamil areas. All these are taking place in the time the government is celebrating the victory over the LTTE.

As their future becomes futile, Tamils feel that they are insecure in their traditional homeland. Anti-Tamil cultural events are on the rise in the Tamil homeland. Young people have been given drugs in order to ruin their future, and many other anti-social events have taken place with the support of the Sri Lankan armed forces. The Tamil paramilitaries, which are supporting the government, help these anti-social activities. Kidnappings, raping, and killings are back to normal in the Tamil areas. In the recent past that was common during the war time. This is the ground reality, in the Tamil areas, and Tamils are still facing a security threat in Colombo and other Sinhala areas.

During this grave environment, the Mahinda administration is planning widespread celebrations to mark the first anniversary of the end of the Eelam War IV. The government announced a week of celebrations to honour soldiers, starting May 12, including a victory parade in Colombo, the capital, on May 20. The government said that during war heroes’ week the army also planned to hold religious ceremonies and raise funds to help disabled soldiers.

In the meantime, Tamils, who fell victims to the State-sponsored terrorism, have already started peaceful rallies and prayers to reflect and remember the people who died. Tamils around the world have started rallies and other forms of gatherings from May 1st. Many Tamil organizations are announcing and holding week-long rallies, vigils, and prayers for the dead people, and they will continue until May 19th.

Tamils who live around the world, including Australia, Great Britain, Canada, Germany, France, India, Norway and the U.S., are wearing black clothes to mourn the people killed by the Sri Lankan army, as a remembrance. They are also seen wearing red ribbons to symbolize the innocent blood spilled in the war crimes against Tamil people.

The protesting Tamils urge that the international community should not maintain silence. As the first anniversary of the war comes to an end, Tamils around the world are united in their grief for those innocents who became victims of war crimes, and they urge the international community not to forget the war crimes committed by Sri Lanka, and to bring the perpetrators to justice.

The Tamil National Alliance, which is the largest Tamil political party, urged the Tamil people to mourn and hold silent prayers, on May 17, to mark what it called a day of “catastrophe.” The TNA said: “During the height of the war several thousand Tamil people were killed and hundreds of thousand others suffered heavy losses and were forced to flee their homes…This catastrophe is one of the worst in world history.”

Tamils were describing the July ‘83 holocaust as the worst they had seen in their history, but the Tamils came up with no words to describe the war of 2009, and tens of thousands of people were butchered all alone in the month of May, 2009, which broke the previous record catastrophe of July ’83. Sri Lanka is celebrating the death of Tamils, with a large Sinhala crowd, as a military victory, but for Tamils it is the month to reflect and remember. This is the month for them to unite and foster their support in obtaining their freedom. It is the time to make a vow to put pressure upon the international community to investigate the genocide of the war, conducted by Sri Lanka, and to punish the perpetrators, in the same way Slobodan Milosevic was punished by the International Court of Justice.

In the wake of my death I know you will make all the usual sanctimonious noises and call upon the police to hold a swift and thorough inquiry. But like all the inquiries you have ordered in the past, nothing will come of this one, too. For truth be told, we both know who will be behind my death, but dare not call his name…

– written by Lasantha Wickramatunge, the slain editor of The Sunday Leader in the letter addressed to President Rajapaksa, published posthumously shortly after his assassination, a dying deposition

The Sri Lankan culture of impunity is complementary to its state of blatant denial.

The latest is the outright denial of the statements made by Gordon Weiss who had been with the UN for fourteen years having served last in Sri Lanka. In an interview with Australian TV, SBS, Weiss stated that from credible information collected from NGOs serving in the war zone and civil servants his estimate of those killed would be in the region of 40,000 persons. This includes persons killed by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), whenever they used Tamils as human shields and prevented Tamils leaving the scene of the last minute battle.

We have been maintaining  that  the estimated  government killings of  innocent Tamil people  would be in the region of 35,000,  men, women and children  through indiscriminate aerial bombings on civilian targets , use of cluster  bombs and poison gases, provided also by India in competition  to  the chosen  friends  like China, Russia, Iran and Myanmar meant to be aimed at civilian  targets and crowded hospitals, a fact denied constantly by the Sri Lankan government during the crucial period between January and May 2009 with no international or independent media allowed in.

This is in contrast to the version of the secretary to the president in a media interview (Daily Mirror) stating that it was a hand to hand fight between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan army perhaps like Dutu Gemunu and Elara 2300 years ago. In early March 2009 alone, the conservative UN estimate was nearly 2500 civilians killed.

We are also strongly inclined, in hindsight, to believe that these massacres were planned in advance with no independent media to be allowed in and conducted with the blessings of most of the sectors of the Sri Lankan Buddhist clergy for whom killing Tamils is not an infringement of their  Dhamma, thanks to the impunity justified by the Mahavamsa. 

We are aware that Gordon Weiss, an Australian, while in Sri Lanka living within a terrorist State, was understandably restrained in releasing statements for fear of his life and that of his family. He has now had the opportunity in the SBS interview to come out with the truth, clear his conscience and get the record straight for his memoirs. We cannot see any reason why Weiss should lie in relation to the figure as long as the fact remains that tens of thousands of innocent Tamils were killed with impunity. In early March 2009, when questioned about the unusual number of civilian deaths, a UN spokesperson in Geneva stated that they were not interested in counting dead bodies.  

When Ban Ki-moon, along with his side kick, Vijay Nambiar, was touring the Tamil war torn areas by air he must have been persuaded to believe that the carnage he saw was part of the permanent landscape of the Vanni, with no evidence, in his view, of a massacre of such magnitude. The UN’s estimate is around 7000 deaths.  In response to Weiss, the UN, while not refuting his figure, has said that they do not have verifiable figures of how many casualties there were. We believe that Weiss would have periodically kept his head office of the UN updated on the casualty figures. A more accurate actual figure will have come out in the wash when Weiss’ memoirs are soon published and aired to the world. 

Responding to the call by Ban Ki-moon for the pursuit of the process of accountability into all such allegations, including the crimes against humanity, Rajapaksa’s office has stated that any such inquiry is unwarranted and uncalled for. Elated by his recent victory, Rajapaksa, with the support from his newly found geopolitical friends, can well afford to tell Ban Ki-moon, with scant regard, to go to hell (wish we could use more colourful language). This also throws a spoke in the wheel of the foreign minister, Bogollagama, who had been oiling the way with Nambiar.  With his clout with Ban Ki-moon, for a permanent position  in the UN for his son, perhaps in return for old favours in the truly  Sri Lankan (or Nammadal) fashion – and why not? — in a culture of corruption all around.  A low tactic within what is said to be the highest body.

Returning  to Lasantha, whose murder was completely denied, he wrote further in his posthumous piece:  “…I want my murderer to know that I am not a coward like he is, hiding behind human shields while condemning thousands of innocents to death… All that remains to be written is when. A military occupation of the country’s north and east will require the Tamil people of those regions to live eternally as second-class citizens, deprived of all self respect. Do not imagine that you can placate them by showering “development” and “reconstruction” on them in the post-war era. The wounds of war will scar them forever, and you will also have an even more bitter and hateful Diaspora to contend with. A problem amenable to a political solution will thus become a festering wound that will yield strife for all eternity…”  

Prophetic. If, at all, anything comes out of the belated investigation, it would be to implicate Fonseka and permanently silence him on the question of his revelations of war crimes.   The murderer, obviously, is not the one who dealt the final blow on Wickramatunga’s head but the one who ordered his death.

The furthest that President Rajapaksa went from his government’s denials  was the appointment of the  “independent”  Presidential Commission to inquire into the execution style murder of Tamil  workers of the French NGO in Muttur in the east and the cold blooded  murder of five University undergraduates by the Special Task Force in Trincomalee, which ruffled international feathers, of which nothing came out, for the inquiry was intended to be a farce from the very outset with all the fanfare of an international  panel of internationally eminent persons overseeing its proceedings much to their disappointment – having been made fools of. 

When the LTTE was in existence it was convenient to transfer the blame for all crimes against humanity on the LTTE but with them no more it is just denial or feigning ignorance. We are not in any way holding a brief for the LTTE for their share of the crimes as we have never  done. It would be insane to assume that certain crimes, by any reasoning, could not have been committed by the LTTE. The murders of: Kumar Ponnampalam,  Tamil and Sinhalese, journalists  like Taraki and Lasantha Wickrematunge, fourteen other journalists, Tamil parliamentarians like Joseph Pararajasingham  of Batticaloa in the east, Maheswaran, and Ravi Raj, Christian priests, General Janaka Perera who posed a political threat to the establishment, Kethesh Loganathan;  and  the disappearances of  dissenting academics and other disappearances, abduction of children and others,  rape of Tamil women and even children, unresolved murders, incarcerations of an unknown number of Tamils and detention of others  without trial, and numerous other crimes.

The Rajapaksa government has been in a denial mode hoping that the truth will go away.  In the current case of the missing journalist and cartoonist, Pradeesh Eknaligoda, his wife, in her anguish and ultimate desperation, defies the ruthless Sri Lankan regime in daring to say that the government is responsible for her husband’s disappearance. She is one of the thousands of such Sri Lankan wives and mothers waiting for their loved ones to return.

If the Sri Lankan government is to claim that they fought Tamil terrorism for thirty years, then the Tamil people resisted the terrorism of the Sri Lankan State for fifty years or more. To deny this will be to make caricature of history. The revelation of war crimes made by Fonseka have been denied and such denial  endorsed by the Sinhala polity branding it as an unpatriotic act of  treachery against the Sinhalese people and the Sri Lankan State, as if war crimes and crimes against humanity as long as they are committed against the Tamils, are not to be deemed a crime. This portrays the signs of moral decay and the future degradation of the Sri Lankan society, the majority of whom cannot look at themselves as they really are in their own eyes and face the truth, thus reflecting the quality of their own leadership.  The question is whether the Tamil nation should remain part of such a society which is in imminent decay.