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To Yield To Terrorism Is To Feed It
by Vidyamali Samarasinghe
Friends of Sri Lanka in U.S. (FOSUS)
I was in Sri Lanka the day Tiger terrorists attacked The Central
Bank in Colombo. My rushed visit was not a happy one for I lost a
much loved sister to a sudden illness. I wish that I could erase that
week from my mind for another reason. I heard the bomb that
destroyed the Central Bank and Ceylinco House and witnessed the
resultant agony of the innocent at the hands of Prabhakaran and his
programmed killers. Brutality of the Tigers is so well known that
the New York Times in May 1995 unequivocally stated that
Prabhakaran "has shown a bloodthirstiness in dealing with
opponents that has been compared with some of the cruelest figures
in recent Asian history, including Pol Pot of Cambodia. "Terrorism
by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is used with brutal
impunity for a campaign of 'ethnic cleansing' in the North and the
East, for intimidation and murder in the South. My former
colleague at the Peradeniya University, Dr. Hasbullah, a Muslim
activist has shown very clearly how every Muslim, whose ancestors
have been living in the Northern district of Jaffna and Mannar had
been terrorized by the Tigers into leaving their homes. Thousands
of Muslims thus driven away are now languishing in refugee camps.
In their relentless pursuit of having an 'ethnically cleansed' North
and East, the Sinhala and Muslim border villages have been
transformed into killing fields for the machete and ax brigades of
the Tigers.
To the Tiger terrorist group of Sri Lanka every single Sri Lankan
outside their group is their enemy or a convenient hostage to their
cause. To the Tigers, it seems, killing a Sinhalese in particular, is to
have one less enemy to cope with. The Central Bank bomb blast
had no warning, hence it was a pre-meditated act to kill and maim.
The resilience of all Sri Lankans, Sinhala, Tamil (40 percent of the
community live among the Sinhalese in the South) Muslim,
Burgher, is such we will build another Central Bank and a
Ceylinco building, reenergize our financial institutions and secure
our oil installations and our ports. But we cannot bring back the 18
of our sisters who while they were working in the library of the
Central Bank were buried alive by the Tigers, bring back a mother
to two little girls, herself a single parent who worked at the Air
Lanka office. We cannot erase the human tragedy of more than
hundred lives lost in one deadly blast. We cannot give back the
sight to at least ninety people, some of them blind in both eyes.
Varuni Jayasekera was an employee of Air Lanka. Her office was
just across the Central Bank building. Mother of two pre-teen girls
whose father, Varuni's husband had died of an illness a few years
earlier. Her killer, who carefully planned this pre-meditated murder,
though very well known, will not be prosecuted any time soon. I
shall call the next victim Mr. X, because he did not lose his life and
being very strong minded would feel uncomfortable at receiving any
personal sympathy we surely would feel. He, a top executive,
working relentlessly to keep our leading financial institutions
thriving was working at his computer when the bomb blast
occurred. He had no time to protect his eyes. A deeply religious
man, an avid reader with a brilliant mind, he has lost the sight of
both eyes. Damage to both corneas has been so severe that no
amount of surgery could repair them. Varuni Jayasekera and Mr. X
did not ask for a separate state, did not vote for one, did not take up
arms to kill the innocents of a fellow ethnic group. All they did
want, in fact, as millions of others in Sri Lanka did was to ask for a
peaceful resolution through a democratic process.
Terrorists, by definition do not like democracy. Indeed as the U.S.
State Department Human Rights Report of 1995 has pointed out
the LTTE does not tolerate freedom of expression, it tightly
restricts the print and broadcast media in areas under its control
and has often killed those who oppose it. Ambassador E. Gibson
Lampher, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, in his
submission on November 14, 1995 to the House Committee on
International Relations, Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific had
made a few pointed observations on the current situation in Sri
Lanka. Ambassador Lampher, while commending the Sri Lanka
government for its efforts on maintaining human rights, pointed out
that "[t]he LTTE controls territory in Northern and Eastern Sri
Lanka through authoritarian rule, denying the people under its
control of their civil liberties. The LTTE regularly carries out
extrajudicial killings, including civilian massacres and
assassinations, disappearances, arbitrary arrests, detention and
torture."
While the bomb blast in the heart of Colombo last January
demonstrated in no uncertain terms the reach of the arm of killers,
we should never let it slip our minds that 'ethnic cleansing', has
continued to be the basis of a machete and ax brigade of Tiger
terrorists. We seem to associated the concept of ethnic cleansing
with former Yugoslavia. Not so my friends, Tigers started that in
Sri Lanka way before. The proposed Eelam territory cuts across the
districts of Polonnaruwa, Anuradhapura in the North Western
province, Batticaloa and Ampara in the Eastern province and
Moneragala in the Uva province. The LTTE claims that these
villages are a part of a separate 'Tamil homeland.' Professor Gerald
Peiris of the Department of Geography, Peradeniya University has
demonstrated that such a claim is indeed a false one. Using early
population distribution records of Ceylon, Professor Peiris has
shown that, although some of these villages have had new settlers
from the South in new irrigated colonization schemes, they were
either old Sinhala villages known as 'purana gamas' (ancient
Sinhala villages), or areas left uninhabited, and certainly not the
ancestral homeland of the Tamils. The Tamil homeland claim of the
Eastern Province was at best limited to the coastal littoral of
Batticaloa. Kingsley de Silva, Foundation Professor of Sri Lanka
History of the University of Peradeniya has done a meticulous
historical analysis of the Tamil homeland concept and proves the
sheer untenability of a historical foundation for a Tamil homeland
which encompasses the Eastern province.
Some of the villages that have come under ethnic cleansing terrorist
attacks are Kebelithigollewa, Kalyanipura, Welioya, Bowatta,
Panema, Parakramapura, Mangalagama and Kotiyagala. Almost 90
percent of huts in these villages are one room dwellings. The Tigers
do not use guns but hack and chop the defenseless villages, men,
women and children. In 1995, in October alone, the villages of
Bowatta, Mangalagama, Parakramapura, Kotiyagala and
Herathmillewa were attacked. 117 villagers were hacked to death.
In point of fact the U.S. State Department Human Rights report
notes that "in October 120 Sinhalese civilians were massacred by
LTTE forces in an attempt to inflame communal violence. Many of
the victims were hacked to death." Indeed in the border villagers it
is pure and simple 'ethnic cleansing', to drive the non-Tamils from a
Tiger version of Nazi 'Lebensraum'.
Killing of any innocent person, in any region in the country,
whether Sinhala, Muslim or Tamil cannot be condoned. Now, let us
ask the question whether innocent Tamils in the North are targeted
the same way that Varuni was. The U.S. State Department Human
Rights Report states that during recent army offensives, the
government has taken measures to limit the number of civilian
casualties. The report notes that "notices were dropped warning
civilians to congregate in schools, churches and temples to
minimize risks." The same report states that the LTTE used
excessive force killing an indeterminate number of civilians. The
brutal nature of the Tiger terrorist group is clearly revealed in the
report which observes that, "[i]t was accused of using church and
temple compounds (where civilians are instructed to congregate in
the event of hostilities) as shield for the storage of munitions." We
beg the question, are civilians caught in the cross fire or are they
being deliberately used as a human shield by the Tigers? What is
clear is that civilians in the North are certainly not targeted by the
army for 'search, kill or maim' operations as the LTTE terrorist
group does with the Sinhalese, Muslims and Tamils.
At the recently concluded World Cup cricket tournament, the
Australian and the West Indian teams refused to play in Sri Lanka
for fear of terrorism, or so they said. The Economist in its February
10, 1996 issue pointed out that "Even in cricket, to yield to
terrorism is to feed it. "Terror tactics are designed to intimidate all
of us with its single minded brutality accompanied by intolerance
of diverse voices. We cannot yield to such terrorism. Varuni's
death, and those of others who died in the Central Bank blast, the
sorrow of their relatives, the terror that surely would be the final
thoughts of the farming and fishing families in the East who did not
have time to flee and hide, the suffering of the injured and the
maimed are our sorrow and our burden as well. It then becomes our
collective responsibility to think of ways and means to eradicate
that terrorism that has brought into disrepute a noble animal, the
Tiger.
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