Within the last three months, 6,500 Tamil civilians have been killed, 14,000 have been injured and almost 200,000 have been forcibly detained in military-run camps by the Sri Lankan government as part of its campaign to annihilate the separatist Tamil Tigers (LTTE). In its most recent attempt to address this situation, the UN Security Council has demanded that the LTTE simply surrender to the Sri Lankan government. Regardless of one's opinion of the LTTE, the idea that it would be willing to surrender under the present circumstances is ludicrous. As the Country Director of a prominent international NGO* put it, "asking the LTTE to lay down arms - really stupid - why not just ask them to shoot themselves in the head?" His comment was probably an understatement.

Because it suspects that any one of them could have connections to the LTTE, the Sri Lankan government is holding virtually every civilian who emerges from the war zone indefinitely in "barbed-wire internment camps" in which there are "regular rapes and killings", according to Medico International, "enforced disappearances" according to Human Rights Watch, and "overcrowding, malnourishment, dehydration and limited medical facilities" according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Admitted LTTE members would almost certainly be subjected to even more egregious abuses at the hands of the worst human rights violator in South Asia. It is therefore unsurprising that LTTE members, regardless of their ideology, would prefer a relatively quick death via explosion or cyanide capsule rather than surrender and risk being tortured, raped, starved and/or imprisoned prior to being killed.

While the US's suggestion that the LTTE surrender to a third party is more reasonable, it is also completely unrealistic. In a recent interview, Sri Lanka's Defense Secretary made it clear in no uncertain terms that Sri Lanka would never consider such a proposal, stating that the US "should be ashamed of that kind of request. We will not hand [LTTE members] over to anybody."

If the international community is genuinely committed to ending the fighting in Sri Lanka, it needs to take practical steps, such as invoking the Responsibility to Protect doctrine and deploying an international monitoring mechanism, in order to create conditions in which both sides would be forced to agree to a ceasefire.

*Name has been withheld to protect the individual's safety.            

Though there have been numerous reports indicating that the Sri Lankan Army (SLA) has been systematically raping Tamil women fleeing the country's war zone for the past four months, the Sri Lankan government's brutal methods of media censorship have almost entirely prevented these stories from being publicized. The most notable exceptions are two articles in the Tamil media, one that reported "130 women were taken for sexual abuse" after fleeing the war zone by SLA soldiers, and one that described "shocking stories of sexual violence meted out" to Tamil women civilian detainees in military-run detention camps. However, the untold personal accounts from witnesses and victims of these crimes are countless.

In February, a doctor in the Vavuniya hospital, speaking on the condition of anonymity, reported that he had an entire ward full of women who had been raped by soldiers, many of whom had bite marks "all over their bodies." In March, a woman who is being forcibly held in a female-only "transit camp" reported the soldiers had raped virtually every detainee in the camp while taking them outside individually to "interview" them about possible connections to the rebel Tamil Tigers (LTTE). Another anonymous source, who is involved in disposing dead bodies from the conflict zone, said that the majority of bodies of women who the army claims were LTTE members had been raped.

The Sri Lankan military has a long history of raping Tamil women with complete impunity. A 2002 Amnesty International report said there had been "a marked rise in allegations of rape by police, army and navy personnel" and that "not a single member of the security forces has been brought to trial in connection to incidents of rape in custody." In 2000, the Asian Human Rights Commission issued a statement that "impunity continues to reign as rape is used as a weapon of war in Sri Lanka".

However, the current level and pattern of rapes is likely unprecedented, suggesting that they may be acts of genocide. Rape has historically been a trademark of genocide, with Rwanda, Darfur and Bosnia being prime examples. According to Former US Ambassador for War Crimes David Scheffer, "rape can be so well planned and done on such a mass scale as to wipe out much of an ethnic group just as thoroughly, if more slowly, than large-scale murder". He explains that for

women who had been raped during the atrocities in the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Uganda and the eastern Congo...the experience was devastating to their character, their ethnic bonds and often to their physical health. Even if they were still physically able to bear children, these women typically were ostracized from their communities and could not marry their ethnic men...mass rape can destroy a substantial part of a group and thus constitutes genocide.[1]

The UN Genocide Convention requires its parties - which include Canada, Australia, the USA, the UK and 136 other countries - to "prevent and punish" genocide, "whether committed in time of peace or in time of war". Classifying the rapes and other atrocities currently being committed in Sri Lanka as genocide is therefore crucial to stopping them.

......
[1] According to international law, acts that cause "serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group or deliberately inflict on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part" constitute genocide.

In today's world, democracy is often portrayed as the ideal political system for every country and society, far superior to any of the more primitive alternatives. However, Sri Lanka's democratic history and particularly the country's current state of affairs suggest that the atrocities we imagined could only be possible under fascist regimes can transpire within democracies as well.

Sri Lanka's democracy has manifested itself as an oppressive majoritarianism based on the popular belief that it is inherently a Sinhalese Buddhist country, and therefore institutionalized discrimination against other ethnic groups is justified. Lieutenant-General Sarath Fonseka, Sri Lanka's Army Commander and one of the most powerful men in the country, expressed such a sentiment quite clearly in September 2008. According to him, Sri Lanka "belongs to the Sinhalese" and non-Sinhalese "must not try to, under the pretext of being a minority, demand undue things."

Such discrimination has been a consistent feature of Sri Lankan society since it gained independence from Great Britain in 1948 and became a democracy. Especially during last three decades the government has unceasingly violated the human rights of Tamils. These abuses include arbitrary arrests and detainment, often accompanied by torture in police stations; racial profiling and frequent harassment at military checkpoints; inferior public educational provisions for Tamils as compared to Sinhalese; suppression of language rights; and white van abductions of Tamils 4-5 times a day.

Since the beginning of 2009, however, this discrimination has been taken to an entirely new, unprecedented and nightmarish level in the North of the country: genocide. Based on Fonseka's words and actions, it is clear that he thinks the Tamil minority has, in fact, "demand[ed] undue things" and therefore deserves to be ethnically cleansed. Such government initiatives as "IDP Centres" that bear a remarkable resemblance to concentration camps, the systematic rape of Tamil women, an embargo on food and medical supplies (and subsequent epidemics of preventable and treatable diseases), mandatory civilian registration, and repeated bombings of hospitals and government-created 'safe zones' strongly suggest that Sri Lanka's government intends to destroy the entire Tamil population, not just the LTTE.

Even if the Sri Lankan government succeeds in making the country ethnically homogeneous, it will still, inevitably, be a pluralistic society, as all societies are: there will always be people of different ages, viewpoints and countenances, to say the least. Within a majoritarian system, after one minority is destroyed, the majority will inevitably turn against another group. Lasantha Wickramatunga, a recently assassinated Sri Lankan journalist, quoted a poem by Martin Niemöller in his self-written obituary that forewarns of such a phenomenon:

First they came for the Jews

            and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists

            and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists

            and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me

            and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Wickramatunga and Niemöller's warning should be heeded: if we fail to stand up for the persecuted minority today, we may very well be the persecuted minority tomorrow. An overhaul of Sri Lanka's political system, complete with extensive, genuine devolution and full-proof safeguards on minority rights is needed now to save society as a whole.

"It is a very serious misrepresentation of the situation in Rwanda to describe the killings simply as 'the slaughter of civilians' or 'the mass killings,' without explaining who is killing whom. The vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of killings in Rwanda have been committed by the government militia and government army who have been implementing a well-organized plan of genocide of Tutsis."

-Michael Doyle, BBC, 6/20/1994

.........

The pervasive myth that there is an ongoing "humanitarian crisis" in Sri Lanka rather than a genocide is about to result in problems that extend far beyond semantics.

The US is planning to conduct a naval operation to evacuate the 150,000 Tamil civilians still trapped in the conflict zone. Such an action could potentially be heroic, saving tens of thousands of lives. It then seems like nothing short of a nightmarishly cruel joke that the US intends to immediately turn the evacuees over to the Sri Lankan government "for transfer to Internally Displaced Person (IDP) centres" that have repeatedly been characterized as concentration camps by a variety of human rights organizations and foreign government representatives.¹

How did the US end up on the verge of helping the Sri Lankan government wipe out its primary minority population?

In an attempt to prove that they are unbiased, the vast majority of media organizations, aid agencies, politicians and the UN consistently criticize both the government and the LTTE as equally responsible for the ongoing 'humanitarian crisis'. Such attempts to be 'impartial' have resulted in the almost ubiquitous oversimplification, euphemization and flat-out distortion of the present situation in Sri Lanka, and more specifically the popular misconception that the government is killing and displacing Tamil civilians out of negligence rather than malice. If public actors had the courage to call the situation for what it is -- genocide --the US would not be preparing to hand over tens of thousands of Tamil civilians to a government that intends to imprison, rape and/or kill them. In fact, it would be legally required to take steps in the opposite direction, as both domestic and international law compel the US to intervene to prevent and punish genocide.²

This is not the first time that genocide has been misreported and misrepresented in such a manner. BBC journalist Michael Doyle reported that there were "serious attempts to 'balance' what was essentially an unbalanced story" while he was covering the 1994 Rwandan genocide:

"I used to take regular calls from BBC editors in London asking me to make sure I 'put the other side,'" he writes, and describes an incident in which "some RPF [Rwandan Patriotic Front] soldiers killed five churchmen...Newsrooms around the Western world seized on the killings with undisguised glee - it was as if here, at last, was proof that the 'other side' was just as evil...Five murders, condemnable and awful though they may be, cannot, in my book, equate with 5,000 or 50,000 or however many had been committed by the other side by that time. I believe that highlighting this case, giving it the prominence it got, was misleading."³

As a result, the international community refused to even acknowledge that Rwanda was undergoing genocide until it was already over. Former President Clinton has repeatedly stated that his biggest regret as President was his failure to admit that Rwanda was undergoing genocide and subsequently failing to intervene. He estimates that the US "would have saved at least a third of those lives" lost had he acted.

Fifteen years later, the media and international community appear to be making virtually identical mistakes in Sri Lanka. Since the beginning of 2009, the Sri Lankan government's continuous aerial bombings have killed an average of 40 Tamil civilians and injured 100 more each day, for an approximate total of 2,400 Tamil civilian deaths and 6,000 injuries within two months. Yet, the media consistently points to LTTE suicide bombings - which have killed a total of 11 civilians in the same time period⁴ as evidence that both sides are equally reprehensible.⁵

Even more problematically, treating the LTTE and the government as identical culprits implies that they have the same motives for killing civilians- namely that they both want to win a war (and civilians just happen to have been caught in the crossfire). However, several government initiatives, including the systematic rape of Tamil women, the aforementioned IDP centres/detention camps, an embargo on food and medical supplies (and subsequent epidemics of preventable and treatable diseases), mandatory civilian registration, and repeated bombings of hospitals and government-created 'safe zones', suggest that it intends to destroy the entire Tamil population, not just the LTTE.

It is then clear then that the US will be complicit in genocide if it releases 200,000 Tamil civilians into the custody of the Sri Lankan government. Such a tragedy is unlikely to be averted unless the public rhetoric on Sri Lanka changes immediately. Every person and organization that comments on Sri Lanka needs to understand the potentially disastrous consequences of euphemizing genocide, as well as the vital importance of having the courage to call it as it is.

¹ Including: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (HRW), the Chairman of the European Parliament Delegation on Relations with South Asia and multiple Indian Members of Parliament. A December 2008 HRW report details the "government's policy of indefinitely detaining virtually all civilians fleeing from LTTE-controlled area sin military-guarded camps", and describes the camps as being characterized by indiscriminate killings, lack of basic necessities and sanitation and generally dire conditions. HRW's February 2009 follow-up report states that camp conditions have "further deteriorated since the beginning of 2009" and that "the perimeters of the sites are secured with coils of barbed wire, sandbags, and machine-gun nests."

2 International law requires the US and other signatories to the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to intervene to "prevent and punish" genocide. Domestic law (US Chapter 50A - Section § 1091) requires the US to punish any genocide committed by a US national. Sri Lanka's Defence Secretary and Army Commander, two of the primary architects of the genocide, are both US nationals.

3 Michael Doyle, "Reporting the Genocide" in The Media and the Rwanda Genocide, ed. Allan Thompson (London: Pluto, 2007), 155.

4 There have been three LTTE suicide bombings thus far in 2009: one on January 2^nd at an air force building in Colombo that killed one person, one at a detention camp on February 8^th  that killed 20 soldiers and eight civilians, and another one on February 20^th  that targeted an air force building in Colombo and killed two civilians (though at least one of those civilians was killed by the military's anti-aircraft fire).

5 I am not attempting to defend the LTTE here. My point is only that the number of civilians being killed or otherwise harmed by the LTTE is miniscule compared to the number of atrocities being committed by the government. In any case, the LTTE currently lacks the capacity to do much more damage than they already are doing.

Sri Lanka is making a lot of international news lately, but the gravity of the situation is not being conveyed - not even close - primarily due to the Sri Lankan government's propaganda and brutal censorship of the media.

I'm an American who has been working in the country for the past two years. Within the last six weeks, I've watched Sri Lanka's 25-year ethnic conflict become a full-scale genocide against the Tamil population (the primary minority group in the country). Some of the more obvious indications include:

1.     The government is in the process of putting approx. 300,000 Tamil civilians into military-run camps, which are, for all intents and purposes, Holocaust-style concentration camps: forced labor, lack of basic necessities and sanitation, indiscriminate killings and generally dire conditions.

2.     A few weeks ago, the military began systematically raping the women being held in these camps.

3.    In mid-January, the Sri Lankan military created a "safe zone" for Tamil civilians who were still in the war zone so that they would not be "caught in the crossfire". Once the civilians moved into the area, the military started bombing it, even hitting a hospital multiple times.

4.    The government instituted a mandatory registration last month whereby all Sri Lankan citizens are legally required to provide the government with such details as their name, ethnicity and home address.

At this point, it is fairly evident that the only way that the genocide will end is through international intervention. The international community, however, while showing growing concern about the situation and urging an end to the violence, is generally under the impression that Tamil civilians are merely being caught in the crossfire, not deliberately slaughtered. Unless it becomes clear to the rest of the world that the Sri Lankan government is intentionally trying to wipe out the Tamil population, it is unlikely that the international community will take any sort of meaningful action.

This post is an attempt to help get information about the genocide beyond the borders of Sri Lanka, if even in a very small way. Here are some ways you can help out as well:

·       Share this post friends. 

·       Contact Obama about these abuses and ask him to discontinue all aid to the Sri Lankan government, impose economic sanctions and appoint an official to coordinate a US response to the genocide.

·       Contact the State Department and ask them to urge Obama to do all of the above. Secretary Clinton has already demonstrated her interest in the situation by calling for a ceasefire.

·       Contact the the US Mission to the United Nations, and ask them to work with the Security Council to place economic sanctions and an arms embargo on Sri Lanka.

·       Contact your Congressperson and urge her or him to take immediate action to help end the genocide in Sri Lanka.

·       Write letters to the editors of your local newspapers along the same lines. You can find contact info for your local media here.

·       Reach out to community organizations to raise awareness about the situation and ask members to do any or all of the things on this list.

In the interest of not making this post ridiculously long, I've given a rather simple summary of an obviously very complex situation, but I'd be happy to provide additional information upon request.

Thanks for reading.