By Bruce Fein | The Boston Globe, February 15, 2009
THE BARRAGE of media reporting of the grim conflict in Sri Lanka has captured popular imagination, but has overlooked the grisly Sinhalese Buddhist genocide of innocent Hindu or Christian Tamil civilians by a US dual citizen and US green card holder. The two should be investigated and prosecuted in the United States.
Acting on behalf of Tamils Against Genocide, I recently delivered to US Attorney General Eric H. Holder a three-volume, 1,000 page model 12-count genocide indictment against Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Sarath Fonseka charging violations of the Genocide Accountability Act of 2007. Derived from affidavits, court documents, and contemporaneous media reporting, the indictment chronicles a grisly 61-year tale of Sinhalese Buddhists attempting to make Sri Lanka “Tamil free.”
Rajapaksa and Fonseka assumed their current offices in December 2005. They exercise command responsibility over Sri Lanka’s mono-ethnic Sinhalese security forces. On their watch, they have attempted to physically destroy Tamils in whole or in substantial part through more than 3,800 extrajudicial killings or disappearances; the infliction of serious bodily injury on tens of thousands; the creation of punishing conditions of life, including starvation, withholding medicines and hospital care, humanitarian aid embargoes, bombing and artillery shelling of schools, hospitals, churches, temples; and the displacements of more than 1.3 million civilians into camps, which were then bombed and shelled. This degree of mayhem inflicted on the Tamil civilian population because of ethnicity or religion ranks with the atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo that occasioned genocide indictments against Serbs by the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
During the past month, a virtual reenactment of the Bosnian Srebrenica genocide of more than 7,000 Muslims has unfolded. Sri Lanka’s armed forces employed indiscriminate bombing and shelling to herd 350,000 Tamil civilians into a government-prescribed “safety zone,” a euphemism for Tamil killing fields. There, more than 1,000 have been slaughtered and more than 2,500 have been injured by continued bombing and shelling.
As a preliminary to the horror, roads and medical aid were blocked, and humanitarian workers and all media were expelled. During a BBC radio interview on Feb. 2, Rajapaksa declared that outside the “safety zone” nothing should “exist.” Accordingly, a hospital has been repeatedly bombed, killing scores of patients. Rajapaksa further proclaimed that in Sri Lanka, any person not involved in fighting the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam is a terrorist.
The United States assailed and sanctioned Serbia for noncooperation in apprehending genocide defendants Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic, and Ratko Mladic. The United States should be no less scrupulous in prosecuting suspected genocide by its own citizens or permanent residents. Further, under Article 5 of the Genocide Convention of 1948, ratified by the United States Senate in 1986, the United States is obligated to provide “effective penalties” for genocide. That imposes an obligation on signatory parties to investigate and to prosecute credible charges - a benchmark that has been satisfied by TAG’s 1,000-page model 12-count indictment of Rajapaksa and Fonseka.
The predictable defense of counter-terrorism will not wash. Not a single Tamil victim identified in the model indictment was involved in the war between the Government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The lame excuse of defeating terrorism was advanced by Sudanese President Omar Bashir to a genocide arrest warrant over Darfur issued by chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo of the International Criminal Court. The chief prosecutor retorted that although Bashir’s pretense was counterterrorism, his intent was genocide.
The State Department lists Sri Lanka as an investigatory target in the Office of War Crimes. The New York-based Genocide Prevention Project last December labeled Sri Lanka as a country of “highest concern.” President Barack Obama has made the case for military intervention in Sudan or elsewhere to stop genocide. All the more justification for the United States to open an investigation of the voluminous and credible 12 counts of genocide against a United States citizen and permanent resident alien assembled by Tamils Against Genocide.
A genocide indictment would probably deter Rajapaksa and Fonseka from their ongoing atrocities against Tamil civilians. There is no time to tarry.
Bruce Fein is counsel for Tamils Against Genocide and former associate deputy attorney general under President Reagan.
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.
Tags: genocide of Tamils, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Sarath Fonseka, Sinhalese, Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka's armed forces
2 comments:
This is yet another issue by the World Tamil Movement in its ongoing international propaganda campaign to discredit the Sri Lanka government. This Propaganda movement has been going on since 1983 when the LTTE orchestrated reprisals by killing 13 soldiers and then filmed and photographed the outraged reaction of the Sri Lanka community. During the ensuing years the LTTE has continued to use invented and completely false propaganda to sully and defame the SL government. People are gullible, particularly those trained through commercial advertising to believe what they see and hear on TV – seeing and heraring being the two most important senses through which humans absorb information.
The problem is that few if any, question what they see and hear. When they see and hear this propaganda a sufficient number of times, they begin to believe it.
Here are few things you should check, because if you publish on the Internet, you should be factual, unless of course, like Bruce Fein, you have some other insidious agenda. In the case of Bruce Fein, he has been “bought” by the LTTE, and he has to do what he is doing to earn the money. I can say this without any reserve because I know all of what he is saying to be absolutely false. Check the following.
First and foremost, the current insurgency in SL is not, and has never been a religious issue. Buddhists and Hindus (the Tamils are mostly Hindus), have been living with each other for 2500 years, without a SINGLE problem, for the simple reason that both are pacific, non-aggressive religions, that do NOT attempt to convert because both DO NOT have missionary organisations. In the case of Buddhism, conversion is one of the few things that is forbidden. Most Buddhist temples even have small Hindu kovils inside them as many Buddhists worship Hindu Gods, Buddhism not having any Gods.
This insurgency is by a small group of militant Tamils who adopted an old canard of Tamil politicians for a Federal State, which they changed into a Tamil Homeland. The reason why the Diaspora Tamils support this is because they had to give “Refugee” ass the reason for emigration, and they now cannot say that there was no cause to emigrate. Also, there is constant intimidation by the LTTE to ensure they keep up this façade. Tamils who do not support them are summarily dealt with, even murdered.
Check this: that fully 75% of the Tamils in Sri Lanka continue to live among their Sinhalese and Muslim neighbours as they have done for generations. The security forces have, during the past few months, been able to defeat the Tamil insurgents, which now number about 600. These insurgents have collected about 15,000 Tamil civilians and are using them as human shields, despite repeated pleadings by the UN and ICRC to release them. Everyday hundreds of these civilians manage to slip the LTTE and escape into the protection of the Security Forces.
The aim of the current spate of propaganda is to get the international community to force the SL government to declare a ceasefire. The Government will not agree to this as all previous ceasefires (there have been four of them from 1983 to the present day), have been used by the insurgents to regroup and reorganise, and then attack the public again and again.
What the government is doing is LIBEARTING the Tamil people from the clutches of the LTTE.
I do not have to counter any of the allegations made in Bruce Fein’s indictment, as ALL of them are completely false. Besides, you will not believe me if I counter them. You must find out for yourself. Until you do, please stop adding to LTTE propaganda.
Jay de Silva
Australia
Your report is true, what is going on in SL is GENOCIDE under the pretext of a "war on terrorism". More than 2000 civilians have been butchered ruthlessly by the war criminal Sinhala government. No matter what the propaganda of the war criminals in the SL government, one cannot hide the fact that this is a GENOCIDE!
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