BETA

Last week the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) decided to ‘liberate’ some more Tamils through yet another ‘humanitarian mission’ using bombs and shells. This time this privilege was given to the Tamils living in the Musali region of Mannar.

This costal region, consisting of twenty or so small fishing hamlets, is a war destroyed community trying to stay afloat, by shallow water fishing off their coastal areas. During the last two years they have been economically deprived by fishing restrictions, but were left alone without the Sri Lankan Army (SLA) camps and check points.  

The GOSL systematically destroyed these people in the eighties and nineties like it did all over the Tamil Northeast. SLA camps and check points dotted this region too. They strangled the people in every possible way. By doing so the GOSL tried its best to pacify them, but failed miserably.

After the Ceasefire Agreement of 2001 the people of this region, both Tamils and Moslems, were trying their best to make a peaceful existence without harming anyone.

Most of the international aid workers know these people well, as they have worked with them since the Ceasefire.

This is the community GOSL ‘liberated’ last week. As usual, they were bombarded and shot at during this ‘liberation’. When people tried to run away to sanctuaries such as churches they were ambushed by SLA’s Deep Penetration Unit (DPU). After one of these ambushes, the highly decomposed bodies of two children were identified by the local people. These two children were among the twelve civilian victims killed in one DPU attack. They were a four year old girl Puvisuvetha and a four year old boy Rehushan Selvakumar.

In Jaffna this week, three children, all of them are under thirteen years of age, from the same family, sought protection with Human Rights Commission, due to death threats issued allegedly by paramilitary armed men operating with the SLA.  

On the 13th of August Sri Lanka Air Force (SLAF) bombed a civilian area in Vavuniya and destroyed Maruthoadai Tamil Mixed School.  

None of these above said crimes were deemed worthy of any news space, not even as short news stories on the margins of inside pages of (non Tamil) Colombo press.

Amnesty was the only organisation to condemn these crimes. We could not find a single press release or any other information in UNICEF’s website regarding these crimes.

The official GOSL line of burying the dead, wounded and the internally displaced Tamils, especially children in ‘liberation’ spin statistics cannot blur the fact that the GOSL is waging a war against Tamils especially against Tamil children.

During the last twelve months, almost a fifth of those killed in the Eastern operations were Tamil children.  In the last two weeks, they comprised more than ten percent of those injured and killed.

The GOSL and its friends remark that the Tamils make a practice of sending children to war thus insinuate that Tamil children killed by SLA are all child soldiers. This is an abominable lie. The two children who were killed in DPU attack were in a vehicle with their families trying to escape bombardment by the SLA.

In reality the SLA does not care whether its victims are children or not. The fact is that it bombs and shoots at figures it considers suspicious, with full knowledge that there are children and there are schools on its ‘liberation’ path. Therefore, SLA that fires at children is an army that kills children.

The majority of Tamil families in the Northeast are below the poverty line, because of the GOSL imposed war and economic sanctions. And as we all know, children are the first to suffer.

This then is not a series of unfortunate mistakes, as it is being portrayed by the GOSL and its friends in the international community, but rather reflects the GOSL's contempt for the lives of Tamil children and its terrifying indifference to their fate.

We may brand the Government of Mr Rajapakse as anti-Tamil and thus its indifference to the sufferings of the Tamils as natural. ‘I was elected primarily by a Sinhala constituency’ Mr Rajapakse recently said.
 
But is it true that the majority of Sinhalese are indifferent to the sufferings of Tamil children just like Mr Rajapakse?

A good number of Sinhalese celebrate the ‘liberations’ of Tamils by their Army, and even those that do not, continue to ignore the killings of Tamil children by their soldiers.
    
Yet the majority of Sinhalese claim to practice one of the most progressive and ethical religions of the world: the teachings of Lord Buddha. A society meant to hold ethical considerations in high regard should at least ask itself: Is it permissible to shoot at civilians who are escaping bombardments, especially when some of those people will be children?

It must be so, as we continue not to see any letters of condemnation of these attacks written to the news editors of the Sinhalese dominated Colombo media, by the Sinhalese readers.

It is becoming clear that the Tamil children are almost always fired, bombed and blown up during SLA offensive operations.

The killings are justified as if it's dead and it's Tamil, it's a Tiger. If the dead consist of Tamil children, then they too are Tigers.

That is the truth, and with institutions such as UNICEF, which are supposed to safeguard every child’s health, education, equality and safety, seeming to turn a blind eye to these crimes, who knows how long our children will suffer.

GOSL is waging a war against Tamils especially against Tamil children

If it's dead and it's Tamil, it's a Tiger