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If even half of what Frances
Harrison has uncovered about what the Sri Lankan state did to
crush the Tamil Tigers is true, then Colombo's political and
military leadership can be in the dock for war crimes.
The former BBC journalist talks to a few who got trapped in the
LTTE war zone until the Tigers were vanquished and later made
their way to the West -- with revolting stories of death,
destruction, savagery, torture, rape and humiliation of an entire
community heaped in the name of a war on terror.
"Tens of thousands of civilians were slaughtered by the Sri Lankan
government," a UN aid worker tells Frances, who painstakingly
tracks witnesses to know what happened during the end stages of
the war until May 2009 and, in some cases, beyond.
With international organisations abandoning over 400,000 Tamils
they should have protected, there was no place to run as the
military went on the kill, not bothering to differentiate between
LTTE fighters and civilians. One UN official concluded that the
government repeatedly declared safe zones "only to concentrate
civilians in one place so as to kill as many as possible".
This, of course, was not the official line. To the world, Sri
Lankan leaders kept parroting that they had a "zero civilian
casualty policy". Frances says the UN and many Western diplomats
in Colombo knew this was a lie "but remained silent".
Nobody knows for sure how many LTTE fighters and civilians
perished in the military blitzkrieg that began in 2008 and reached
its peak the next year. Sri Lanka adopted "scorched-earth tactics,
blurring the distinction between civilians and combatants, and
enforcing a media blackout". The world turned a blind eye, and
countries from India to China backed Sri Lanka. Everyone was ready
to accept Colombo's denials at face value. You get the
bone-chilling truth from Frances.
Frances meets scarred survivors who recount how they walked to
surrender to the army, "their bare feet stained with human blood"
and seeing "still burning, and limbless, decomposing corpses …
under vehicles or alongside bunkers". A priest remembers counting
"thousands of dead on that journey, most of them civilians, not
fighters". A Sinhalese soldier jeered: "We have killed all your
leaders and you are our slaves!"
A journalist who worked for the pro-LTTE web site TamilNet
describes seeing "children's brains exposed by shattered skulls"
and hearing "desolate screams of their mother".
A doctor who remained in the war zone saving thousands of lives
with a group of medics recalls that after January 2009, "people
would arrive (in barely functional hospitals) with all the flesh
blown off their limbs, the white bones visible like chewed joints
of raw human meat". If doctors shared details of their hospital's
location with the army, "the buildings were attacked (by artillery
and air) within days, if not hours".
The doctor says the military used white phosphorous. By the end of
the war, hospitals had no medicines, no bandages. Surgeries were
conducted using knives. After having seen thousands of limbs and
body parts, the surgeon today "cannot stand the sight of blood".
Each recall of the war's end stages - by a nun, a teacher, a
volunteer, a LTTE fighter, a shopkeeper and a wife - is more
horrific than the previous one. It is difficult to even imagine
that civilians in no way responsible for what the LTTE did were
subjected to such savagery by a state whose citizens they were.
The account by a distraught woman married to a pro-LTTE man brings
out shocking details of how Tamil women were raped at will.
Frances holds no brief for the LTTE. She denounces it for forcing
Tamil civilians to forcibly live in rebel territory. "Tamil
nationalist groups conveniently overlook the fact that the Tiger
leaders deliberately exposed their own people to slaughter and
refused to surrender…"
Sri Lanka's tragedy is not over. "Human rights activists and
journalists have continued to disappear well after the war ended -
not only Tamils but Sinhalese too." The book is a good guide to
understand why the Tigers went down - after having been seemingly
invincible for decades.
The book is also a powerful indictment of Colombo - and the LTTE.
It should be read by anyone wanting to know what happened in Sri
Lanka.
Book: "Still Counting the
Dead";
Author: Frances Harrison;
Publishers: Portobello Books;
Pages: 259;
Price: Rs.399
M.R. Narayan Swamy is a senior journalist and the author of three
books on Sri Lanka. He can be contacted at narayan.swamy@ians.in
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