6 January
2014. A World to Win News Service. In a sharp
indictment of the Mahinda
Rajapaksa
regime in Sri Lanka, video footage screened by UK television Channel 4 News has
shown the military shooting unarmed people in the head at point blank range,
with many bodies of men and women lying on the ground.
One of the
victims of these executions was a woman known as Isaipriya, a
high-profile journalist who was part of the press and communications department
for the Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam
(LTTE). Her body
was identified by a close friend, who said that due to health conditions
Isaipriya never carried a gun or went to the battlefield. Instead she carried a
camera and notepad to document the situation around her. Her varied artistic
talents included acting, singing and dancing, and she became a TV presenter for
LTTE's channel. The LTTE were fighting for a homeland in the north and east of
Sri Lanka where the majority of the population is
Tamil.
The
Channel 4 video shows 27-year-old Isaipriya being led away half-naked and being
given a cloth to cover herself by people in military uniform who are heard
saying they had found Tamil Tiger rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran’s daughter. She is seen telling her captors "No, I am
not her."
While what caused her death is uncertain, the video shows cuts to
her face and her hands
appear to be tied behind her back. Later in the video her body is seen
positioned in a ditch alongside another bound woman. The Sinhalese-speaking
soldiers look directly into the camera.
The
Sri Lankan Ministry of Defence website lists18 May 2009, as the date of her
death and the names of the soldiers who killed her.
It refers to her as Lt Col Isaipriya and says
she was killed along with 31 other LTTE leaders while engaged in a hostile
operation against the Sri Lanka Security Forces during
an offensive attack by troops of the 53rd division in the last few
days of the war. Some 100,000 people lost their lives in the 26 year-long civil
war.
Experts
and many others dispute the assertions made by the government. After considering
the images and whether there should be prosecution of those responsible,
international war crimes lawyer Julian Knowles
said: "To my eye, two things stand out – one is the fastening of the hands
behind the back. It's difficult to see how that could have happened if this
death occurred in the course of battle. Secondly there's the absence of any
weapons – and thirdly the bodies look posed or arranged. They don't look like
they've fallen necessarily in battle as the result of a battle-led injury, so
it’s difficult to think of a mechanism how they could have died other than a
cold blooded execution."
He
went on to say, "Even if she had been injured in battle and left to die by the
soldiers pictured in the video, that still constituted a grave breach of the
Geneva Convention…
that
these mopping up operations did involve the mass killings of civilians or
combatants who were trying to surrender. Mopping up operations is just really a
euphemism… this is astonishingly powerful evidence of a type I've only seen in a
handful of times –
there's
some footage from Yugoslavia about mass killings – and this is up there. It's
within a very very rare category of evidence where killings are actually
captured on tape and the idea that there can be a debate about whether there
should be an investigation in the face of evidence like this is very
surprising."
Rajapaksa
insists that no war crimes were committed during or after the country's civil
war and has repeatedly refused to allow an independent investigation of
atrocities on the part of his troops who allegedly killed 40,000 civilians. But
the evidence indicates that he rules the country now with the same efficiency,
viciousness and iron hand that he used to annihilate the Tamil Tigers and tens
of thousands of people who supported them. Human
rights organizations say the country has not stopped pervasive human rights
violations such as extra-judicial killings, disappearances and the weakening of
checks on executive power through media freedom and judicial
independence.
Since 2009
the former war zone of the north has continued to be heavily occupied by the
army. Infrastructure is being greatly improved and Sinhalese are flooding to the
north, which Tamils see as another form of occupation. The
president's brother Gotabaya has said that it is unnatural for the north to be
predominantly Tamil. There are 89,000 war widows in the north and east of Sri
Lanka and these
women endure sexual harassment and violence from the huge army contingent that
still occupies and basically runs the area.
A United Nations report said 70,000 civilians were still
unaccounted for after the war. Almost 10,000 are still living in refugee camps.
Another UN report says that after Iraq, Sri Lanka has the highest number of
disappearances in the world, over 5,600 people. The actual number is considered
to be much higher. Most of these disappearances date back to the civil war, but
today disappearances of social activists, journalists and government opposition
figures continue at an alarming rate. Recently even a high court judge was
assaulted after complaining about executive interference in the courts.
Terror of the white vans
One form
of suppression and terror is the men in white vans who come to snatch people
away from their homes or on the streets. Most of these people are never seen
again. Leena
Manmekalai from
Channel 4 News documented this in her film White Van Stories. Despite
severe
vigilance and intimidation by the Lankan military, her team interviewed 500
families whose members disappeared
after being abducted,
taken for enquiry or surrendering during the last stage of war in 2009.
The
resolute determination of the families to get their stories told gave
Manmekalai courage
to continue. She went through heavily militarized zones, endured intense
intimidation and risked possible "disappearance" herself, like many journalists
who dare criticize the government. On one occasion she was held for questioning
for several hours and on another she was told to leave the country.
Channel
4 News aired the Isaipriya
video
shortly before the three-day summit by the Commonwealth Heads of Government in
Colombo last November. Outraged Indian Tamils demonstrated against India's
planned participation in the event hosted by the Sri Lankan regime. India was
obliged to send a lower-level delegation. Among the 50 mainly former member
British colonies making up the Commonwealth today, Canada and Mauritius
boycotted the meeting.
Before the summit opening, UK prime minister David Cameron made a
visit to the Tamil region, where he was confronted by several hundred people
holding up pictures of loved ones disappeared by the Rajapaksa government.
Cameron as well as other politicians called for transparent and independent
investigation of the regime's "alleged war crimes". Rajapaksa simply responded
to these criticisms as hypocritical, considering the long history of violence
and abuse endured under British colonial rule in Asia.
A
statement by the Ceylon Communist Party (Maoist) entitled, "The Commonwealth
Heads of Government Meeting: A
Meeting of Genocidal Criminals, Terrorists, and Torturers,"
summarizes it like this: "The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM)
was held in Sri Lanka recently, between the 15th and 17th of November 2013. This
is at a time when the Sri Lankan State and the current Rajapaksa regime is being
held accountable for 'alleged' war crimes and atrocities during the final phase
of the civil war by the UNHRC in Geneva, led by the U.S. and its coalition of
partners. The U.S., as the number one terrorist, genocidal state in the world
and in history, which stands accused of the most horrendous and barbaric war
crimes, and its equally complicit coalition, is holding one of its trusted
junior neo-colonial partners accountable for war crimes. This has to do with
consolidating effective control over the lifelines and the politics of Sri Lanka
in the context of intensifying inter-imperialist rivalry to maintain and expand
strategic superiority in the Asia Pacific/Indian Ocean Region between the U.S.
and China. It shows up the murdering hypocrisy of the imperialist system,
including that of the United Nations.
"To be expected, the Commonwealth, a crowning world body of former
genocidal colonial predator states along with their bloodied neo-colonial
enforcers, has conferred its blessings and approval on one of the most trusted
and ruthless neo-colonial terrorist executors of world imperialism – the Mahinda
Rajapaksa regime. The Commonwealth has conferred chairmanship to an 'alleged'
war criminal being held accountable by the UN. The regime seized upon the chance
to ingratiate and legitimate itself with this club of colonial-imperialist
criminals in order to save its neck from the Geneva stranglehold.
"It was indeed pathetic and comic to see H.E. the President beaming
with supreme pride as he showered his supine and servile graces upon Prince
Charles, who had represented the Queen of Britain – one last archaic symbolic
vestige of colonial barbarism, genocidal conquest and plunder. This is the
Executive President who is claimed to be the reincarnation of a legendary line
of Sinhala warrior-conqueror kings. The one who had authorized and orchestrated
the military decimation of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and
'liberated the Motherland'. This is the President who stands up as the guardian
of the Sinhala-Buddhist Nation, the living embodiment of militant patriotism,
fighting to defend the Land, Religion and Language of the 'chosen people'
against any and all foreign powers. The charade, the hypocrisy, the sheer
ideological jugglery and political bankruptcy, the abject colonial servility was
drowned out by the sustained din of official patriotism, jingoism and
self-glorification, designed to stupefy and entrance the masses into fervent
submission to the regime.
"It was just one sick show of abject servility and capitulation to
colonial-imperialist and regional hegemonic powers who are busily dividing up,
slicing and devouring the country in order to advance their geo-political
strategic interests in the region, with the regime living off the fat spoils of
imperialist exploitation, profit and plunder. "
-end-
C
.
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