On Genocide; An Open Letter To Sumanthiran
By Karthigesu Nirmalan-Nathan –September 22, 2015
Karthigesu Nirmalan-Nathan
Dear Mr. Sumanthiran MP,
Permit me to begin by saying, that the use of the “G” word should be measured. That said, I want to make it abundantly clear what happened in Mulliyvaikal was indeed “Genocide” and fits the definition perfectly – if you as a lawyer feel that you can’t prove it as such with the mountain of evidence available, your certificate is not worth the paper it is printed upon.
I’ve never cried Genocide for what happened to our beloved Tamil people and us as a community and citizens of “Sri Lanka.” – Yet, it is very evident that since the Sinhala Sri Riots, Sri Lanka has crossed the threshold of the G-word in every communal violence subsequent to that. You yourself was displaced twice as I recall in one of your narratives.
If it would be difficult to get a hearing at the International Criminal Court, for that is the rightful place for any “Genocide” trial to be heard, I am quite happy to have them on the docks on a watered down charge of “War-Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity” in a properly constituted hybrid court within the shores of Sri Lanka. .My wish is to get the perpetrators on the dock wherever and however possible!
However, I take it very personally when you degrade the Northern Provincial Council and our much respected Chief Minister Hon. Wigneswaran and in the process insult every member of our ethnic group – for passing the resolution asserting the actions of the then administration of Mahinda Rajapaksa (not to mention previous governments) constituted “Genocide.”
Sumanthiran
Permit me to throw some light as to why the word “Genocide” came into being. The purpose was to make the crime of mass murder of any or all of a group of people by their own government, an international offence. It is pure and simple one can never take one’s Government within the geographic boundaries of that particular country. It is worth noting at the time of the now famous Nuremburg Trial there was no law to deal with a crime of the magnitude of the holocaust. The word “genocide” was not in use before 1944. Before this was established, Winston Churchill referred to it as a crime with no name. In that year, a Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin described the policies of systematic murder founded by the Nazis as genocide. The word genocide is the combination of the Greek word “geno” (meaning tribe or race) and “caedere” (the Latin word for to kill). The word is defined as a specific set of violent crimes that are committed against a certain group with the attempt to remove the entire group from existence or to destroy them. Lemkin defined genocide as follows:
