The Sri Lankan war hero

A new President in Sri Lanka - a man who oversaw the mass killings of Tamils. 

Mr Rajapaksa faces a series of international war crimes charges for his role in the crushing the Tamil insurgency, and has been accused of  torture and abduction of rebels and civilians, including journalists and rights activists during the civil war which ended in 2009. 

He is also accused of condoning sexual violence and extrajudicial killings - claims he has denied....

He is also hailed as a war hero by most Sinhalese for ending a three decade bloody war against the Tamil Tigers, together with his brother.

The country's majority Sinhala Buddhist population comprise about 70 per cent of the island, with ethnic Tamil Hindus at 12.6 per cent, Muslims at 10 per cent and Chrsitans at 8 per cent. 

But the divisive politics of the Rajapaksas, who are backed by extremist Buddhist clergy who have been responsible for past attacks on minority Muslims and Christians, has raised fears of a Rajapaksa dynasty comeback.  

Mahinda is expected to become prime minister under a new constitution which would grant him greater powers.

As Mr Rajapaksa prepared to be sworn in as the island’s new president on Monday in the ancient kingdom of Anuradhapura, the minority communities in the North and East who voted for Mr Premadasa, said they were fearful for the future.  

Some 40,000 Tamils were massacred by government forces:

By the middle of January 2009, with the Tigers in hopeless retreat, the Rajapaksa government declared the first of a series of what they called no-fire zones, into which they encouraged as many as 400,000 Tamil civilians to gather "for their own safety." But instead of protecting these no-fire zones, government forces relentlessly shelled them, all the while insisting, implausibly, they had a policy of "zero civilian casualties."

Innocent Tamil civilians died by the thousands, in what some regard as nothing less than a genocide. Episodes from that massacre were preserved like scenes from a nightmare in short video sequences, uploaded at necessarily low resolution on satellite phones during brief breaks in the shelling.

In one of the videos, two young girls, held back in their bunker in case another shell falls, scream in fear and anguish while in front of them the dead and terribly injured lie prostrate. Then one of the girls recognizes one of the damaged bodies in front of her. "Mama!" she screams.

Another family lies huddled in a shallow bunker. Shells are falling nearby. "Don't take the video," one woman, clasping her child protectively, screams at the cameraman. "Please get in the bunker. What are you going to do with the video? They are killing everyone." The cameraman keeps filming.

In the makeshift hospitals at the time, a series of medical points set up in abandoned primary schools, the suffering was truly awful. Critical shortages of antibiotics and anesthetics caused untold pain and countless unnecessary deaths.

Vany Viji, a young Tamil woman from London who had been visiting the region and became trapped by the fighting, was one of those who volunteered to help in the last hospital. Still traumatized by her memories of those days, she recalls helping to restrain a seven-year-old boy while, without general anesthetic, a doctor sawed off his left arm and leg, shattered irretrievably by a shell. "I was holding his mouth so he didn't scream."

A UN report concluded that the government deliberately and illegally denied humanitarian supplies like anesthetics. At the same time, government forces targeted and shelled these hospitals, killing hundreds.

And now a man with blood on his hands - the former defence chief in his brother's government - is in charge.

I don't hear any noises from the left. Didn't they used to protest about this sort of thing? But there are no Jews involved, and no Latin American socialist heroes like Morales, so it probably doesn't matter....

Comments

[Gavin Greenewalt]

not quite the topic but the tamils did not gain a huge quantity of sainthood points.

[Gavin Greenewalt]

your point about noises from the left and the jew haters is spot on

[Mick H]

Yes, the Tamil Tigers were guilty of quite a few atrocities of their own.

But still - possibly 40,000 civilians massacred by the government - in 2009! - and nobody seems to be bothered. And now one of the architects of those killings is the newly elected president. And....silence.

[Gavin Greenewalt]

in my youth(ha ha)i was aware of the sri lanken war but few others were.i heard that the Tamils were the originators of the suicide bomb.the Indian interest was toned down.it seems as if it went on for at least a decade.in the west it was a non issue. some tamils blew up a canadian airliner and nobody wanted to talk about it.it was so not on the radar.