Sri Lanka: If This Is Not Genocide, Then What Is It?
Dr. Brian Senewiratne
Accountability for Tamil Genocide in Sri Lanka!
For some inexplicable reason, there still seems to be a problem with the term ‘Genocide’. The word has been clearly defined in the UN Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention).
It as adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1948 (coincidentally almost the same time that the newly independent Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was then, had just decitizenised a million Plantation Tamils, one seventh of the population at that time, in one of the worst acts of political barbarism anywhere in the world. That was when I, a 16 year old schoolboy, decided to get involved because what was done was simply unacceptable and a disastrous start for a newly independent country).
The Genocide Convention came into effect in January 1951 (by which time the Plantation Tamils had not only been decitizenised, but disenfranchised as well).
Resolution 260, Article 2, states:
“Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures to prevent births within the group
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
The Sri Lankan government has done all of these to the ethnic Sri Lanka Tamils who live in the North and East. The requirements to constitute ‘Genocide’ have been met.
