by Vssubramaniam    June 03, 2011

UN Secretary General Ban appointing the ‘expert panel’ for Sri Lanka (SL) war crimes is lauded by many as a pioneering act of statesmanship. Others are suspicious over Ban not vigorously pursuing on the ‘expert panels’ main recommendation struggling to surmount the obstructionist antics of a Keralite Mafia (Nambiar) in the UN. The obstacles in this initial step itself were immense to almost scuttle Ban’s pains to ensure that UN delivered on its mandated role of serving humanity. The UN’s crimes initiative is a must to at least slow down the culture of impunity amongst human rights abusers resorting to genocide brutality to eliminate community (ies) viewed as aliens within a country. The turmoils of today highlight the urgency for the UN and affiliated institutions to re-invigorate themselves to deliver effectively on the mandated role they were created for.

The ‘expert panel’s’ findings are hard-hitting on SL’s genocide. All the shallow semantics the SL regime and its apologists indulge in do not have many takers. By itself the ‘expert panel’ report is a historic document destined to end an evil (a genocide) if unchecked would engulf humanity in greater disaster. To dismiss the ‘expert panel’ report simplistically as not an official UN Report, falsely claiming that it is factually incorrect, biased against an Asian nation and destroys SL’s own LLRC’s reconciliation work are sadly exercises in self-deception. Hence SL’s adversarial mindset is causing the soaring support for the ‘expert panel’ report worldwide.

Even the customary apologists for the SL genocide in M’kal Narayanan pioneered SAAG (SouthAsiaAnalysisGroup) and the Hindu, now carry more balanced features on Indo-SL relations. The SAAG Director’s ‘why South Asia Analysis Group is focussing on the Sri Lankan War and the UN Report.  The answer is simple.  We need to know the truth and why the massacre of civilians in the last days of the war was allowed to happen. This is not to absolve the LTTE who were equally ruthless and unmindful of civilian casualties.  But we want to know why the world was a mute witness to this event?  What was the role of UN-the Security Council and -above all India? These are legitimate questions’. This is SAAG’s response to the query of a few hardcore SAAG elements.  It signals the end of the strangle hold that the Keralite mafia especially M’kal Narayanan/Menon had over Delhi’s SL policy-making  causing immense sufferings the Eelam Tamils endured under a brutal ethno-religious genocide.

An immensely grateful Gothabhaya Rajapakse who in May 2009 flaunted the ‘in the loop’ lever in the face of Delhi then now  goes further to claim ‘Lanka informed India of every step’, ‘...two senior officials...kept in regular contact...These had continuous discussions’ ..’India could directly influence the military campaign in Sri Lanka’ at the ‘Defeating terrorism ...’ seminar on 30 May 2011. The association of the two senior officials with the SL team conducting the war was so close that Gothobhaya was emboldened to make claims implicating Delhi in the massacres and other crimes in SL. Whether the two officials acted outside their mandate or had Delhi’s blessings will be known for certain only when an independent tribunal gets going. Delhi’s reluctance to support the ‘expert panels’ report lends some credibility to Gothbhaya’s ‘in the loop’ claim.

Winds of change that are blowing strongly across the world (except in China and Russian; notorious human rights abusers) is also being felt in India more so at the ground level. Hence the drubbing that Delhi rulers and its partner, the DMK suffered in the recent TN elections over Delhi’s policies supportive of the genocide Rajapakses. The partisan Indian media that once denied Eelam Tamil analysts a platform to promote the Eelam Tamil cause is now accommodative on the ‘war crimes for SL’ issue.

The issue for Eelam Tamils to be placed urgently before the Indian public today is for their survival as a community facing a ruthless ethnic cleansing in SL that is continuing. Only the success of the international community’s war crimes initiatives against SL will guarantee the lives of Eelam Tamils in SL. The much respected ‘expert panels’ report appeals most to the truly humane elements in world. This is evident in NAM (Please see ‘Sri Lanka: Confronting the killing fields’ in Jakarta Post 25 May 2010) in session in Indonesia and UNHCR. There is international pressure on UNHRC to act on the panel’s principal recommendation, namely appointing an independent mechanism to investigate the ‘expert panels’ allegations at its meetings in June 2011. The principal actors who manipulated the May 2009 UNHRC session into effectively supporting SL’s genocide then unfortunately included dharmic Delhi.  Numerically the renowned human rights abusers still dominate the UNHRC (not as much as in May 2009) yet despite the candid UN ‘expert panels’ recommendations for a war crimes tribunal for SL genocide the UNHRC is almost in a dormancy state. Delhi’s role in May 2009 UNHRC is attributable to Gothabhaya taunting Delhi with his  ‘in the loop’ ladle.  

 The piece by V Suriayanarayan and Ashik Bonofer ‘SRI LANKA: Myths and Realities ..’ in SAAG,  25 May 2010 is timely arguing forcefully that Delhi change course and ‘not bail out Sri Lanka in the United Nations.’ ..‘On the contrary it should raise its voice in support of the suffering Tamils in the island. Their feelings of anguish and agony should be reflected in the utterances of the Indian representatives in the United Nations’. Surianarayanan’s observations on the feelings of Eelam Tamils whom he met on his conducted tour of Jaffna are that … ‘All of them were unanimous that India, especially Tamil Nadu did not do anything constructive to prevent the killing of innocent civilians during the last stages of the Fourth Eelam War.’ These are Tamils speaking out despite the danger of serious harm in the heavily militarized North from the SL armed forces policing closely on civilians conversing with visitors. Despite Delhi, this endorsement of the ‘expert panel’ report by a reputed analyst like a Suryanarayanan belies the genocide SL’s outrageous lie that not a single Tamil civilian was killed in Mullivaykkal and that its war was a ‘humanitarian operation’ that ‘liberated’ the Tamils.  Those liberated from Mullivaykkal were herded straight for detention behind barb wire fenced camps and Gothabhaya Rajapakse’s ‘in the loop’ snipes soon after the May 2009 massacre were meant to terrify Narayanan and Menno into submission with hints to implicate them for their role in the crimes that SL committed unless Delhi thereafter supported  SL unconditionally.

The international tribunals the expert panel proposed will expose the bankruptcy of SL’s frivolous claims that the civilian casualties were caused more by the resistance fighters using them as human shields. According to  accounts gathered by diaspora visitors the killings in Mullivaykkal were the result of SL’s indiscriminately firing; none claimed to have witnessed the resistance firing and killing  civilians attempting to escape from the ‘no fire zone’. Only a tribunal investigation will provide the answers. According to Tim King – Salem, SL mis-used the human shield logic to shift the blame for the killings away from the SL armed forces on to the resistance fighters. SL is a past master in lying and lying big. Easy to recall is the classic Bernard Goonetileke’s (SL’s Ambassador to US) claim that LTTE stole 130 000 Norwegian passports and sold to Al Qaida for its questionable fund raising. This story turned out to be a massive hoax.

To mislead international opinion the figures of civilian killings were deceitfully under reported at 7 000 in which UN Nambiar actively colluded with SL. Apart from the tens of thousands killed in Mullivaykkal, SL ethnic cleansing involved more killings as early as January 2009 in Kilinochchi about the time it fell to the SL forces. There were repeated low flying bombings of civilians sheltering in sand trenches killing as many as 24 out of 28 in one spot alone and not counted killed. That spot (a mini-Mullivaykkal ) is out of bounds to anyone. Civilians fearful of such killings began fleeing east behind the retreating resistance forces to avoid being killed. How many more such mini-Mullivaykkal massacres sites are scattered in Kilinochchi is anyone’s guess. These massacres put to shame the ethnic cleansing in Serbia. The ‘expert panel’s conclusions are based on the killings in the main Mullivaykkal massacre and not the killings that occurred in the numerous mini-Mullivaykkals spread throughout Kilinochchi. Only after tribunal proceedings will reliable estimates of total Eelam Tamils killed be known. The figure of 40 000 is an understatement.     

The ethnic cleansing killings in Kilinochchi were replicated in Mullativu on a much larger scale. In a certain area in Mullativu (exact location is withheld for the safety of civilians still there) SL armed forces enthused by the success in the Kilinochchi ethnic cleansing massacres fired as many as 25 to 30 shells into each and every house forcing the occupants there to flee behind the retreating resistance fighters solely to escape certain death. To paint these civilians who fled the rapacious SL armed forces into the no fire zone’ to save their lives as LTTE’s human shields is a perversion of the truth. These same civilians trustingly fled into the officially declared ‘no fire zone’ also to save their lives but were cheated instead when ‘the no fire zone’ turned out to be a massive SL military entrapment tactic to concentrate as many civilians as possible for rapid massacre before international pressure builds up to halt it. This SL military field tactic was very cost effective for SL’s ethnic cleansing but the expert panel was only convinced to classify all those killings as SL massacres. Tamils wonder whether the Narayanan conceived the ‘no fire zones’ for use as ‘massacres zones’. However it is in Delhi’s interest not to lose this advantage and co-operate with the ‘expert panel’ to hold SL officials solely responsible for those massacres absolving M’kal Narayanan/Menon from blame.

Those who survived in the ‘no fire zone’ massacres, SL ‘liberated’ them, marching them straight into (according to Gothabhaya) the Narayanan conceived Menik farm detention camps. This was SL’s much boasted ‘humanitarian operation’ but media images of the bone starved civilians trekking into the detention camps are vivid enough for the public to judge how genuine the Rajapakses’ much boasted ‘reconciliation’ will turn out to be. Members of the visiting diaspora are prepared to vouch under affidavit the stories as narrated by the interned victims of SL’s genocide.

Only an impartial international tribunal will unearth the truth on the numbers of Tamils killed by the SL armed forces and those who were human shield casualties.  UN Nambiar mentioned as a UN party to the under-reporting of the killings in May 2009 to deflect pressure for action by the international community is unlikely to contribute anything worthwhile.

Delhi/India unlike most civil nations has not expressed support for the ‘expert panel’s report perhaps to avoid being implicated under the ‘in the loop’ rule of the two Indian officials Gothabhaya referred to frequently. It would be a disaster for Delhi to repeat its May 2009 UNHRC action on behalf of genocide SL especially after the ‘expert panel’ report. The media in India now appreciative of the criminality of the SL genocide that renowned Eelam Tamil analysts like Usha Sri Skandarajah, Sivanendran and numerous others are given a platform to deliver their desperate cries to save the lives of Eelam Tamils still living in SL. The view of Eelam Tamils is that ‘India, especially Tamil Nadu did not do anything constructive to prevent the killing of innocent civilians during the last stages of the Fourth Eelam War’. Since Indraji a true Indian,  with MGR of TN supported Eelam Tamils to gain strength to withstand the brutal SL genocide; Delhi thereafter supported the Sinhala Buddhist SL ethnic cleansing to rid SL of over 50 per cent of the Tamils from the Tamil  soil, killed or driven out as refugees overseas.

The May 2011 TN election is an eye opener for Delhi/Chennai. The Tamilian voters can no longer be bought and extending support for the SL genocide especially after the horrors of the massacres and ‘expert panel’ report was viewed as unpardonable. Though the Keralite mafia officials blundered the Indo-SL relations during the critical period leading to the Mullivaykkal massacres and gifted away Delhi’s leverage to SL; Delhi is now subject to SL’s public taunts coupled with implied threats to implicate Delhi in the SL crimes. Gothbhaya now speaks publicly beyond ‘in the loop’ terms; instead speaks of Delhi ‘teams (M’kal Narayanan/Menon) in...continuous discussions ‘on the conduct of the war’. The conduct of M’kal Narayanan/Menon in Colombo has locked Delhi in with claims that they ‘prodded’ Colombo to finish the war before the change of government. This blemishes Delhi’s ‘war on terror’ as ‘a war on civilians‘. Though M’kal Narayanan/Menon’s covert involvement were in the public domain, the’ expert panel’ wasn’t sufficiently convinced on Gothbhaya’s ‘in the loop’ hints to omit any mention of Delhi’s involvement in the SL massacres. Delhi  should not gift this advantage away to SL by further support for SL. TN’s perceptive voters factored Delhi’s involvement when delivering their verdict bitter enough for the UPA politicians involved, Singh, Pranab, Chidambaram and others.  

To counter its ethnic cleansing international war crimes, SL’s boasts of its reconciliation works to redress Eelam Tamil sufferings in the North. But Ben Doherty for Sydney Morning Herald calls off this bluff in his first hand reporting of 14 May 2011, ‘Barely a building hasn’t been bombed and most people are living under canvas (‘UN-supplied tarpaulins’) and not settled back into their own homes. SL armed forces tease ‘. (you) came to the island from southern India and (your) homeland should be there’ reflects SL’s policy to keep the North a devastated and depopulated area where all fertile lands are given over to the Sinhala armed forces and their families and readied  for the setting up of army cantonments to turn the North into a predominantly Buddhist-Sinhala territory. Dispossession and destitute conditions are also meant to create conditions for a Tamil refugee exodus to southern India that Buddhist-Sinhala SL encourages. Hence when mine clearance drags on, armed forces camps for soldiers and their families with Buddhist statutes to wash off their sins are progressing successfully. The author describes the living conditions of the terrorized Tamils under army occupation ‘an open prison’. This is an indictment on the ‘reconciliation’ boast of SL that effectively masks the continuation of the Sinhala genocide.

 

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Region: India
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