C’wealth Heads Wring Their Hands: To Come Or Not To Come
By Pearl Thevanayagam -October 24, 2013
Pearl Thevanayagam
Government forces under Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksaannihilated well over 40,000 Tamils by May 19, 2009 in the last eight months of war (if one goes by Bishop of Mannar Rt Rev. Rayappu Joseph another 100,000 and we will never know) which began with a ferocity fuelled by the generous gifts of war machinery from several Commonwealth countries.
India and US provided aerial surveillance to enable the forces to make a three-pronged attack on Tamils. US, Ukraine, Russia, India, Pakistan and China provided or rather sold arms and ammunition to the government. Remember Hicorp and Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, the President’s brother’s private deal to supply weapons?
Hence Commonwealth countries are in a quandary. They are wringing their hands whether to maintain trade relations aka providing weaponry to member states during internecine warfare or to listen to their conscience on their abysmal record on human rights. Thanks to their munificence a good proportion of Tamils were annihilated. Money talks and it continues to talk. You can cry till you are blue in the face; what dictates superpowers is money be it through fair means or foul.
Demonstrations held by the Tamil diaspora across the world finally brought Sri Lankan government’s conduct of the ethnic war to world attention. The government reacted to LTTE resistance by unleashing terror on hapless Tamil civilians who fled for their lives leaving loved ones and watching them dying from aerial bombardment including cluster bomb attacks inflicting burns the survivors of which are still trying to recuperate.
Use of chemical weapons is a subject so far kept away from both the LLRC and Ms Navi Pillay. Rape, torture, point-blank shootings close range are well documented in The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka video by Callum Mcrae which will once again be shown with fresh eye-witness accounts of war atrocities at Frontline Club in London on November 05, 2013.Read More
