Sixteen years after the world failed to stop mass atrocities against innocent civilians in Rwanda, the world’s response to the genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka is shockingly similar.
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.