Who killed whom in Sri Lanka?

Posted on January 2nd, 2014
H. L. D. Mahindapala

Bruce Haig, former deputy High Commissioner of Australia to Sri Lanka, is back again doing what he normally does: demonizing Sri Lanka, his bête noir. (Canberra Times – 2/1/2014) This time he is quoting the Second Session of the Peoples’ Tribunal on Sri Lanka which sat in Bremen in December 2013. He is a part of the lobby that regurgitates today what the Tamil propagandists had said yesterday.

According to Haig, the Peoples’ Tribunal report consists of ex-parte statements of thirty witnesses without being cross-checked for veracity.  This is not the first time that reports of this nature have come out against Sri Lanka. Even the notorious  report presented by the anti-Sri Lankan Darusman to the UN Secretary-General consisted of accusations based on ex-parte statements. Evidence to be credible must be verifiable. The easiest tactic to demonize anyone is to produce ex-parte reports.

The main charge is that the Government of Sri Lankan (GOSL) has been, and continues to be, engaged in “genocidal “ attacks on the Tamils, which Haig compares to Nazi elimination of Jews.  Though he is  high on rhetoric he is very low on substance. He has failed to substantiate his charge that the GOSL acted like the Nazis  in exterminating the Tamils. The facts deny his jaundiced view of Sri Lanka.

First, in May 2009 and a global audience witnessed the exodus on prime time global TV nearly 300,000 Tamil civilians fleeing the fascist grip of Tamil Tigers  and running into the arms of the Sri Lankan Security Forces.  The hapless Tamil civilians who were used as a human shield to protect Velupillai Prabhakaran, the internationally banned Tiger terrorist, without food, water, medicine or shelter in the last months of war in 2009, were rescued by the Sri Lankan forces and provided with the basic essentials for survival. Prabhakaran’s fascist terror led the New York Times  (May 25, 1995), to brand him as the  “the latest Pol Pot of Asia”.

Second, the entire Tamil leadership in the democratic mainstream were eliminated physically by “the Tamil Pol Pot” on the basis that there can’t be two tigers in the same mountain.

Third, even at the height of the war (from 1976 – 2009) the Sri Lankan government provided free education, health, medical and other basic essential for the survival of Tamil civilians who were lived under “the Tamil Pol Pot’s” regime. Mr. Haig was the deputy high commissioner in Sri Lanka in the nineties and he would have known this fact if he was doing his  job with due diligence.

Fourth, elections were held in September 2013 restoring to the Tamil civilians the right to elect their own administration for the first time in the  history of the northern region dominated by the Tamils.

Fifth, over 2,000 Tamil policemen and women have been appointed to protect the Tamil population.

Sixth, to meet the charge of “genocide” the Government held a census in the north and the east to assess the amount of human losses/disappearances. The census was conducted by Tamil teachers and public servants in the north and the east. And the figure, calculated under UN recommended rules for census, was around 8,000 – slightly higher than the original figure of 7,000 odd estimated by Gordon Weiss when he was the UN representative in Colombo. Without anybody having counted the figures Weiss jacked it up to 40,000 after he decided to write his book in Australia.

There is another census in progress right now to cross-check the figures of the first census and also to get a broader picture of the losses in the north and the east.

The accusation of “genocide” is based on a fictitious figure of 40,000 killed in the last five months of the war in 2009. But the verifiable statistics give the lie to the exaggerated figures touted by the likes of Haig and Weiss.

Besides, there were two parties to the war in the north. Can Weiss and Haig tell us whose bullet killed whom? If 40,000 died on their calculations can they tell us who counted the bodies for them? The Tiger  terrorists were shooting at point blank range even the Tamils who were fleeing into the arms of the Security forces. Their suicide bombers infiltrated the queues of Tamils waiting to be counted at the Army checkpoints and blasted the escapees.

So can Haig and Weiss tell us how many of the 40,000 were killed by the Tigers and how many were killed by the Security Forces? Also who is responsible for the killings when the “Tamil Pol Pot” refused to lay down arms and negotiate even after the Norwegian negotiators appealed to them to save lives by ending the war?