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There has still been no visible international outcry about the horrific war crimes which are continuing to be perpetrated by the Sri Lankan military against the minority Tamil population?

A recently released disturbing video which shows what appears to be the execution of naked and blindfolded prisoners by Sri Lankan soldiers reinforces the need for an international commission of inquiry into possible war crimes committed during the recent armed conflict in Sri Lanka.

The video shows men in Sri Lankan army uniforms firing assault rifles point-blank at two naked, blindfolded, and bound men sitting on the ground. Eight other bodies are visible on the ground nearby, all but one unclothed.

According to Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka, a multi ethnic exile organization, the video was taken by a soldier with a cell phone in January 2009. While Human Rights Watch could not confirm the video’s authenticity, an independent expert consulted found nothing in the video that would dispute its authenticity. The summary execution of prisoners is a violation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and it is a war crime.

“The blood, blindfolds, and mud of this apparent atrocity makes nonsense of President Rajapaksa’s claims of a clean war against the Tamil Tigers,” said Steve Crawshaw, UN director at Human Rights Watch. “An international inquiry needs to get to the bottom of this and other war crimes committed during the past year’s fighting.”

Without a government investigation, the Sri Lankan army states “The video footage recently aired on ‘Channel 4′ UK claiming to display alleged atrocities committed by Sri Lankan forces against Tamils is absolutely false and fabricated. It has been deliberately put together to bring disrepute to the Government of Sri Lanka, states the Presidential Secretariat in Colombo.”

Sri Lankan Government officials like the High Commissioner to Britain, Nihal Jayasinghe, denies that the video shows the execution of Tamil Tiger prisoners by the Sri Lankan military, instead he claims that the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) “masqueraded” in Sri Lankan uniforms as a form of “disinformation”.

Human Rights Watch has long criticized the Sri Lankan Government’s failure to carry out impartial investigations and prosecute those responsible for the numerous human rights abuses committed by Government forces during the conflict. There have been serious ongoing violations of human rights, and the backlog of cases of enforced disappearances and unlawful killings runs to the tens of thousands.

Human Rights Watch called for the United Nations secretary-general or other UN body to create an independent international commission of inquiry to investigate violations of the laws of war by all parties to the armed conflict in Sri Lanka, and to make recommendations for the prosecution of those responsible.

President Rajapaksa denies everything saying that there “was no violation of human rights. There were no civilian casualties.”and the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, gives him credibility by issuing a joint statement from Sri Lanka in which the government said it “will take measures to address” the need for an accountability process for violations of international humanitarian and human rights law.

“Since telling the UN secretary-general three months ago that he’d conduct investigations, Rajapaksa has sat on his hands,” said Steve Crawshaw of Human Rights Watch. “Ban should stop relying on the president’s promises of domestic action and make it clear that an international commission is needed if the victims of Sri Lanka’s bloody war are to find justice.”

During the conflict the Sri Lankan government evicted all NGOs and journalists from the war zone, and maintained tight control over media coverage of the fighting in the final stages of the war. With local media under tight control of Sri Lanka defense ministry under the direction of Sri Lanka’s President’s brother and US Citizen, Gotabhaya Rajapakse, journalists depended on the UN and other aid officials for information.

Since the civil war earlier this year when the Sri lankan military overran the Jaffna peninsular which had been held as autonomous Tamil territory several years by the forces of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) who were fighting for Tamil self determination,over a quarter of a million Tamil civilians living in the Jaffna peninsular have now been interned in the Manik Farm concentration camp.

An estimated 300,000 inmates, the civilian population of Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu and Mannar districts are now detained in Vavuniya, there are no accurate figures of how many people are in each camp or who they are, they are housed in six zones, three on either side of a central passage. The names of the people detained are not recorded, and thus there is no accountability for crammed into these camps.

Rather than being ‘internally displaced persons’ these people are in reality ‘internally displaced prisoners’, the camps are large open prisons where all their rights are denied and human rights abuses occur in the open, because the press is banned and the red cross are denied regular access to these so called ‘Welfare villages’ the failure to improve the circumstances in which these people are being held is in reality a systemic genocide of Tamils

The Manik Farm prison camp is the second largest centre of human habitation on the island of Sri Lanka, after the capital Colombo and it is lookin like more camps are being built, and more people are still being transported into the camps from outside.

Each zone is self-contained and all inmates are prevented from leaving their zone or interacting with relatives in another zone unless they have the permission of the Sri Lankan Ministry of Defence, inside the zones, 2-3 families are housed in each temporary dwelling. This is ten to fifteen individuals, many of them adults, crammed into a small tent. There is absolutely no privacy and solitude is only a dream.

Witness testimonies have described long queues for food and inadequate water supplies widespread malnourishment, restricted food, there is not enough water for people to drink and many have been forced to drink from the bathing pools. The lack of sanitation however means that these are basically breading grounds for bacteria and this is one of the major causes of the rampant spread of diseases through the camps. Malnutrition, chicken pox, diarrhoea, malaria, respiratory infections and skin diseases are common, spreading rapidly through the tight swarm of people. Deaths are common.

In late June, Dr. Vinya Ariyaratne, the executive director of the Colombo based NGO Sarvodaya Shramadana Sangamaya said tens of thousands of Tamil children were malnourished with many acutely malnourished. “About thirty thousand to thirty five thousand children are sheltered in Manik Farm. Many of them are suffering from diseases and some still suffer from injuries sustained in the military operations. Fifteen to twenty percent of them are also suffering from acute malnutrition,” “The international standard is for 20 people to use one toilet, but in Manik Farm about 70 people are sharing one toilet,”.

In mid-June the international charity World Vision warned that more impending monsoon rains could spread waterborne diseases such as Cholera if sanitation and drainage were not improved quickly, Suresh Bartlett, World Vision’s country director was quoted as saying. “When the rains come in two weeks or so, I can’t imagine what conditions will be like due to the lack of any proper drainage and toilet system,”

News of the horrific death rate at the Manik Farm camps come as the International Committee of the Red Cross is scaling down its operations in Sri Lanka.

It has been over two months since Al Jazeera television screened a film report about kept about the dire conditions in which Tamils War refugees were being held in Sri Lanka’s “welfare camps”and the reaction from the international community has been silence.

Former Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera has stated “There are allegations that the Government is attempting to change the ethnic balance of the area. Influential people close to the Government have argued for such a solution.”

The current situation was well predicted by the assassinated Sinhalese journalist Lasantha Wickrematunga who wrote “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”.

We need to ask why is this mass punishment of the Tamil population being perpetrated, why is Sri Lanka being rewarded for their war crimes and genocide with IMF loans and foreign aid donations?

These camps were built with international aid primarily from the UN, and we should be asking why are more international donations are now putting in further infrastructure which will make the camps a more permanent fixture, rather than allowing the population to return to their homes, or resettling them in alternative permanent accomodation.

Very soon the monsoon rains will begin, as flooding will worsen the existing camp conditions: poor sanitation, overcrowding, disease and malnourishment, this will inevitably lead to a preventable humanitarian crisis

To avoid this massive loss of life, what needs to happen now is for these displaced Tamil civilians to be be granted the right to return to their original homes in the Northern and Eastern districts before the onset of the rains.

The question is will the UN continue to allow itself to be complicit in the genocide and persecution of the ethnic minority Tamil population by the Sri Lankan Government in breach of the Geneva convention and the Declaration of Human Rights?

Visit the Act Now website for more information about what you can do to protect the lives of Sri Lanka’s Tamil population, by raising awareness of the situation in the concentration camps for internally displaced people.

Visit the Stop Tamils Genocide website

Download ‘Unlock the camps in Sri lanka’ - Amnesty International Briefing

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 11:34 pm and is filed under War blog, What is going on?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.