CBC News
By Brian Stewart, special to CBC News
Posted: Mar 22, 2012
Human rights violations are too big to ignore, Canada and the UN now say
ANALYSIS
Brian Stewart
Canada and abroad
When victims of mass abuse are ignored they are twice victimized: first by their oppressors, secondly by the world's indifference.That's why few failures in the field of human rights are more discouraging than the old double standard of favouring one set of victims over another.
Just ask the ethnic Tamil's of Sri Lanka. In the past three years they've absorbed brutality, military defeat and world indifference all at once, as other of the world's injustices took centre stage.
In the spring of 2009, at the end of that country's long civil war, as many as 40,000 Tamil civilians were allegedly slaughtered by the Sri Lankan military as the insurrection by the Tamil Tiger independence movement collapsed.
This number, based on estimates by the UN and respected human rights' groups, is considerably higher than the number of Libyans or Syrians killed in their respective uprisings, yet it still receives miniscule world attention by comparison.
Western nations like Canada sent fighter-bombers to help in Libya and have even agonized (vaguely) over possible intervention in Syria.
But they have done very little until only recently about the massacred men, women and children in Sri Lanka. Why is that?
