As the gory details of what the Tamil population of northern Sri Lanka have been subjected in recent weeks emerge – bit by bloody bit – there is need for a full accounting of every act of barbarity committed against them by the Sri Lankan government.
For, behind Colombo’s public parade of bodies of dead rebels and tasteless celebrations of ‘victory’ over the Tamil Tigers there hides today a horror list of unspeakable crimes carried out by the Mahinda Rajapakse regime.
Make no mistake about it- for all the Sri Lankan spin about what really happened in the final weeks of assault on the LTTE- the simple fact remains that this was a war conducted with no respect for either global opinion or any human norm, international convention or law.
And the governments of the world, blinded as they are by the perverse notion that every evil is acceptable in the global ‘War on Terror’, seem to have completely lost their moral compass in the case of Sri Lanka. Or are they keeping quiet because those who died in this grossly one-sided war were dark-skinned, poor and the term ‘genocide’ cannot be applied to them no matter how many of them are murdered in cold blood?
For the people of the world, the perpetual and historical victims of state terror, there remains no option but to fight back and demand justice. To begin with here are ten questions that need to be answered immediately:
- How many civilians died in the final weeks of assault on the LTTE inside the ‘no fire’ zone and what has happened to their corpses?
- Why were hospitals treating the injured and the sick inside the ‘no fire’ zone repeatedly shelled by the Sri Lankan army and what is the fate of the Tamil doctors who reported this to the global media?
- What kind of banned weapons did the Sri Lankan forces use in their operations against the LTTE and which governments around the world supplied these to them?
- Despite repeated official assertions that the ‘war is over’ why is the Sri Lankan government afraid of allowing independent media, humanitarian workers and human rights groups access to war affected areas?
- Why are the thousands upon thousands of Tamil refugees – Sri Lankan citizens all of them- still being kept behind barbed wires like cattle corralled off before slaughter and why are Tamil youth being abducted from within these camps ?
- Why are the repeated reports of Tamil women being raped by Sri Lankan army personnel not being investigated?
- Why are Sri Lankan journalists questioning the conduct of the war being killed, tortured or forced into exile if the government has nothing to hide?
- How can a chauvinist regime responsible for the worst kind of prejudice and atrocities against its minority population be entrusted with either their immediate rehabilitation or long-term solutions to the island’s ethnic question?
- How long will it be before Mahinda Rajapakse and all high officials under his command are brought before an International Tribunal to account for their war crimes and crimes against humanity?
- Now that the Tamil Tigers are defeated is it not time for the world to tame the rampaging Sinhala Lion too?
Satya Sagar is a journalist, writer and video-maker based in New Delhi. He can be contacted at sagarnama@gmail.com
Towards the end of the first chapter of Das Kapital, after having established the validity of the labor theory of value, Marx has a section on the Fetishism of Commodities. To understand this section is to understand the whole first chapter and also to see why socialism is necessary. This article is an attempt to explain the meaning of this section and to apply its lessons to our times.
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