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The Times calls for world boycott of
Sri Lanka over detainees
Expressing outrage at Sri Lanka’s treatment of Tamil detainees, The Times of London called Friday for the world to boycott the island until the detainees are released. “Sri Lanka wants no witnesses to what is now being done in these modern concentration camps. … None of [the IMF] money should be paid until independent aid agencies are guaranteed access to the Tamil camps and until Sri Lanka starts to release those detained. Other world bodies — the Commonwealth, the United Nations and even world cricketing organisations — should boycott Colombo until reconciliation begins,” the paper said in its editorial.

The full text of the Times’ editorial follows:

Doctors’ Orders
Colombo’s order to the Red Cross to cut back its work at Tamil internment camps is an outrage. The world must boycott Sri Lanka until it starts releasing detainees.
There is something despicable about forcing doctors to lie about war crimes. By their calling, doctors are committed to relieving human suffering, to helping the sick and preventing disease. It is therefore particularly disturbing to see the five doctors who remained with the besieged Tamil civilians as the Sri Lankan Army closed in being paraded before journalists to deny their earlier casualty reports. Men who risked their lives to save lives are now being forced to take part in a political charade to cover up the appalling suffering two months ago — suffering that is still being inflicted on 300,000 Tamils interned in detention camps in northern Sri Lanka.

As the army squeezed the Tamil Tigers into an ever smaller strip of beach, the doctors were the only source of news about the slaughter caused by the military’s indiscriminate shelling. The United Nations found that more than 7,000 civilians were killed between January and May. Subsequent aerial photographs of beach graves, revealed in The Times, suggested that the figure was more than 20,000. World outrage embarrassed the Colombo Government. The doctors were swiftly arrested and nothing further was heard of them until Wednesday.

Their recantation, clearly made under duress, was as ludicrous as it was humiliating. Mechanically rehearsed but clearly nervous, they drastically reduced the death toll estimates, denied that a key hospital had been shelled and insisted that they had been forced to exaggerate the totals by Tiger fighters. In response the UN yesterday asserted tersely that it stood by its figures.

Few people will be fooled by Colombo’s crude attempt at a propaganda victory. For the Government took a far more sinister and callous step yesterday when it ordered the International Committee of the Red Cross to scale back its operations in Sri Lanka, leave the camps where it has been monitoring conditions and halt its aid programmes. The need for expatriate assistance was much less now than before, the Government asserted. Sri Lankans were fully able to meet all the needs of those detained in “welfare villages”.

The claim is an outrageous lie. Senior international aid figures said yesterday that about 1,400 people a week are dying at one of the big internment camps. Tamil civilians, rounded up after the government victory on the pretext of a security need to weed out former fighters, are suffering from hunger, disease, insanitary conditions, overcrowding and the enforced separation of families. The Government has taken almost no steps to free them. Indeed, a former Sri Lankan foreign minister has accused it of a policy of deliberate “ethnic cleansing” to change the population balance.

Colombo’s order puts the Red Cross in a difficult position. Historically, it has rarely spoken out — even about Nazi concentration camps — so as not to jeopardise access to those in greatest danger. It was the only aid agency allowed inside the war zone in the final stages of the conflict. But its few statements angered the Government. Sri Lanka wants no witnesses to what is now being done in these modern concentration camps.

If the Red Cross is forced to withdraw, however, the outside world should step in. The Sri Lankan Government is awaiting a $1.9 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund to address its balance-of-payments crisis and postwar development. None of this money should be paid until independent aid agencies are guaranteed access to the Tamil camps and until Sri Lanka starts to release those detained. Other world bodies — the Commonwealth, the United Nations and even world cricketing organisations — should boycott Colombo until reconciliation begins. A nation cannot run concentration camps and expect the world to look away.

Courtesy: http://www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=13&artid=29761

http://www.timesonline.co.uk: July 10, 2009
Tamil death toll ‘is 1,400 a week’ at Manik Farm camp in Sri Lanka By Rhys Blakely in Mumbai
About 1,400 people are dying every week at the giant Manik Farm internment camp set up in Sri Lanka to detain Tamil refugees from the nation’s bloody civil war, senior international aid sources have told The Times. The death toll will add to concerns that the Sri Lankan Government has failed to halt a humanitarian catastrophe after announcing victory over the Tamil Tiger terrorist organisation in May. It may also lend credence to allegations that the Government, which has termed the internment sites “welfare villages”, has actually constructed concentration camps to house 300,000 people.

Mangala Samaraweera, the former Foreign Minister and now an opposition MP, said: “There are allegations that the Government is attempting to change the ethnic balance of the area. Influential people close to the Government have argued for such a solution.”

News of the death rate came as the International Committee of the Red Cross revealed that it had been asked to scale down its operations by the Sri Lankan authorities, which insist that they have the situation under control.

Mahinda Samarasinghe, the Minister of Disaster Management and Human Rights, said: “The challenges now are different. Manning entry and exit points and handling dead bodies, transport of patients, in the post-conflict era are no longer needed.”

Last night, the Red Cross was closing two offices. One of these is in Trincomalee, which had helped to provide medical care to about 30,000 injured civilians evacuated by sea from the conflict zone in the north east.

The other is in Batticaloa, where the Red Cross had been providing “protection services”. This involves following up allegations of abductions and extrajudicial killings, practices that human rights organisations say have become recurring motifs of the Sri Lankan Government.

The Manik Farm camp was set up to house the largest number of the 300,000 mainly Tamil civilians forced to flee the northeast as army forces mounted a brutal offensive against the Tigers, who had been fighting for an ethnic Tamil homeland for 26 years.

Aid workers and the British Government have warned that conditions at the site are inadequate. Most of the deaths are the result of water-borne diseases, particularly diarrhoea, a senior relief worker said on condition of anonymity.

Witness testimonies obtained by The Times in May described long queues for food and inadequate water supplies inside Manik Farm. Women, children and the elderly were shoved aside in the scramble for supplies. Aid agencies are being given only intermittent access to the camp. The Red Cross was not being allowed in yesterday.

Experts suggest that President Rajapaksa, the country’s leader, is yet to make good his victory pledge to reach out to the minority Tamil community. “The discourse used by the Government is of traitors and patriots,” Paikiasothy Saravanamuthu, of the Centre for Policy Alternatives, a Sri Lankan analyst, said. “There is no indication that this mode of thinking is slipping.”

Mr Rajapaksa is known for not tolerating dissent; a trait that human rights organisations say was demonstrated this week when five Sri Lankan doctors who witnessed the bloody climax of the country’s civil war and made claims of mass civilian deaths recanted much of their testimony.

The doctors said at a press conference on Wednesday that they had deliberately overestimated the civilian casualties. As government officials looked on, they claimed that Tigers had forced them to lie.

The five men added that only up to 750 civilians were killed between January and mid-May in the final battles of the war. They were then taken back to prison, where they have been held for the past two months for allegedly spreading Tiger propaganda.

The number was far below the 7,000 fatalities estimated by the United Nations. An investigation by The Times uncovered evidence that more than 20,000 civilians were killed, mostly by the army.

The doctors denied other former testimony, including the government shelling of a conflict-zone hospital in February for which there are witnesses from the UN and the Red Cross.

The statements met with scepticism from human rights campaigners. Sam Zarifi, the Asia- Pacific director for Amnesty International, said that they were “expected and predicted”. He added: “There are very significant grounds to question whether these statements were voluntary, and they raise serious concerns whether the doctors were subjected to ill-treatment.”

Courtesy: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6676792.ece