Stop silence on Sri Lankan killings
THE international community has let down the Tamil minority of Sri Lanka by remaining silent when genocide was taking place.
There exists visual evidence of mass graves in the aftermath of the war against the Tamil people of Sri Lanka.
It is imperative that the international criminal court begins to issue warrants of arrest for Sri Lanka’s military and political leaders, for crimes against humanity.
According to the International Criminal Court, crimes against humanity are: “Waging war without justification. Holding prisoners without giving them due consideration, legal representation, or any rights. Crimes against humanity: murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts committed against civilian populations, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.”
The US Supreme Court Justice, who was chief US prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crime trials of Nazi leaders, said the following:
“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilisation cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. If we can cultivate in the world the idea that aggressive war-making is the way to the prisoner’s dock rather than the way to honours, we will have accomplished something towards making the peace more secure.”
The Sri Lankan government is guilty of genocide against the Tamil people of that country.
The international legal definition of the crime of genocide is found in articles 11 and 111 of the 1948 convention on the prevention of genocide.
It is often and truthfully said that war exposes the worst side of human nature.
But even when outright military warfare comes to an end, man’s inhumanity to man continues – humanity’s war on itself goes on, never ending.
The Sri Lankan armed forces conducted a scorched earth policy.
All they cared about were their own selfish desires, oblivious to the human wreckage they left behind.
The misery of their victims met with deaf ears, blind eyes and lying tongues.
The violence continues, the brutality, the cruelty, the suffering. Genocide continues to be an odious scourge on mankind, such as the massacres in Sri Lanka. The indiscriminate bombings of Tamil population centres, including hospitals and schools, amounts to a gross violation of the law of armed conflict as set out in the Geneva conventions, and is a war crime.
In December 1983, the review of the international Commission of Jurists concluded that “evidence points clearly” to the “violence by the Sinhalese (amounting) to acts of genocide.”
Sri Lanka went from paradise-under-the palms to one of the world’s hell-holes.
It is an example of how democracy, so often described as a panacea for poor in struggling countries, can tear a country apart if politicians do the wrong thing. FAROUK ARAIE
Johannesburg.