The foreign secretaries of France and Great Britain flew to Sri Lanka, where they pleaded with the government to call a ceasefire in order to rescue the civilians who were still trapped. There were later reports, which the government denied, that as many as forty thousand civilians were killed during the Army’s final offensive, and that their bodies were burned or buried in secret mass graves. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admonished Sri Lanka’s government, saying that “the entire world is very disappointed” by the “untold suffering” that was being caused by its efforts to end the war. (The Tigers did in fact prevent some civilians from fleeing, and shot hundreds of them as they tried to escape.) The Tigers’ defenders, meanwhile, claimed that the Army was committing genocide. The Army had ordered most relief workers and all international observers to leave the area, but it nonetheless billed its offensive as a “humanitarian operation” to rescue hostages from the Tigers. On April 21st, the Army broke through the Tigers’ defenses, creating a chaotic corridor that, over several days, allowed nearly two hundred thousand famished and wounded civilians to flee into its custody. Hemmed in by the sea, a lagoon, and a hundred thousand government soldiers, they were all but helpless, as the Army kept up a barrage of fire from gunboats, aircraft, and field artillery. By mid-April, the Tamil rebels and the civilians were trapped on a bloody stretch of beach about a mile long. Hundreds of people were killed every day. It then shelled those zones repeatedly, while issuing denials that it was doing so and forbidding journalists access to the area.
TAMIL TIGER SERIES
With international concern mounting over the safety of the civilians, the Sri Lankan Army designated a series of “no-fire zones” and told civilians to assemble there. Their remaining fighters, a force of about fifteen thousand, retreated into the jungle near the coastal town of Mullaittivu, taking along more than three hundred thousand Tamil civilians who were trapped with them. For an organization that had controlled much of northern and eastern Sri Lanka for nearly a decade, it was a devastating reversal. The Tigers’ collapse began in January, 2009, when they lost the town of Kilinochchi, their de-facto capital. To the extent that a counter-insurgency campaign can be successful, Sri Lanka is a grisly test case for success in modern warfare. Where it differed was in the government’s brutal effectiveness in putting down the insurgency. In many respects-its entrenched religious and ethnic conflicts, its festering guerrilla warfare and suicide bombings, its seamless interchange between civilians and combatants-the war prefigured any number of later conflicts. The Tigers were persistent suicide bombers, as well as relentless guerrilla fighters, and the war took at least a hundred thousand lives in Sri Lanka. The Tamil army-known as the L.T.T.E., or simply the Tigers-was led by Velupillai Prabhakaran, a charismatic, elusive man who had become one of the most successful guerrilla leaders of modern times. The battlefield defeat ended a vicious conflict that for twenty-six years had divided Sri Lanka along ethnic lines, as the country’s Tamils, a mostly Hindu minority, fought for the creation of a separate state against the ruling majority of Sinhalese Buddhists. In a three-year offensive of increasing sophistication, the Sri Lankan Army had outmaneuvered one of the world’s most ruthless insurgent armies. When the end came for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, in May, 2009, it was overwhelming and unmerciful. All of them appear to have been freshly executed.
The camera turns to show at least eight other bodies, including those of several half-naked women, lying in pools of blood. Off camera, the shooter can be heard laughing giddily and exclaiming, “It’s like he jumped!” The soldiers kill two other men in similar fashion, and then dispatch a number of wounded prisoners. One soldier, dressed in the uniform of the Sri Lankan Army, forces him into a sitting position on the ground, kicks him in the back, and steps out of the way as the other soldier comes forward and shoots him in the back of the head. The mobile-phone video clip shows a pair of soldiers pushing a naked, blindfolded man into the frame.
0 kommentar(er)
