UN completes relocation from Tamil Tiger areas
 Photo: OCHA  |
| The Vanni area of Sri Lanka. Humanitarian agencies have withdrawn to Vavuniya |
UN agencies have relocated all international staff and offices from areas under the control of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the north to areas under government control, with the last convoy of UN vehicles leaving on 16 September.
"The convoy left in the morning and was assured safe passage through areas they control by the Tigers and also through areas where there is now fighting by the Sri Lankan forces," Gordon Weiss, UN spokesman in Sri Lanka, told IRIN.
The convoy included staff and vehicles from other international humanitarian agencies that worked in Tamil Tiger-held areas in the central-northern area of Sri Lanka, known as the Vanni.
The Sri Lankan government issued a directive on 5 September that the security of the agencies and staff could not be guaranteed in the Vanni due to the deteriorating security situation.
Public protests
However, the process had to be suspended from 12 to 15 September when protesters blocked the only access road out of the Vanni.
On 12 September, demonstrators gathered near the offices of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and World Food Programme (WFP) in Kilinochchi town, 300km north of the capital Colombo, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) said in a situation report released on 15 September.
"Negotiations with the protesters failed to enable the departure of a small convoy of INGO/UN vehicles that were scheduled to leave," the IASC report stated. The protests continued until 15 September.
Fighting has been nearing the A9 highway, which runs across the Vanni-pic: Amantha Perera-IRIN
UN officials held discussions with the Tamil Tigers after the protests to secure safe passage. On 15 September the office of the UN Resident Coordinator in Sri Lanka said in a statement that it had received assurances from the Tigers for staff to travel out of Vanni safely the next day. It also highlighted that the security situation was too unstable for them to continue remaining in the Vanni.
"We reiterate that we have been compelled to temporarily relocate from Kilinochchi because of our security assessment that the situation has become too dangerous to remain working from there at this time," the UN stated.
Weiss told IRIN that fighting and shelling had been reported on the highway used by the convoys to leave the Vanni the previous day. "There was shelling and fighting very close to the A9 [highway on 15 September]," he said.
Security fears
"We need to be mindful of what we do, when, where and how in a militarised zone," Jeevan Thiyagaraja, executive director of the Consortium of Humanitarian Agencies (CHA), a national umbrella body of local and international humanitarian agencies, told IRIN. "There is an element of physical risk in the current situation."
Representatives of international relief organisations working in the Vanni were planning a fact-finding trip to plan how to provide relief assistance effectively in the future, he said.
UN and other humanitarian agencies will be based in the northern town of Vavuniya, about 60km south of Kilinochchi for their operations in the Vanni.
Weiss said the UN was prepared to ensure supplies and humanitarian work in the Vanni continued from its offices in Vavuniya. The location has been developed as a humanitarian operations hub.
"We are prepared to keep supplies moving to the Vanni and assist the government's humanitarian work for civilians in the Vanni and those who come out. We share the concern for the welfare of the growing number of people displaced."
According to CHA, 13 organisations, including UN agencies, were working in the Vanni with 534 employees when the directive to pull out was received. The majority of staff members are locals living within the Vanni, who did not relocate.
Reported by UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs [irin news]
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The newly appointed UN Commissioner Of Human Rights, Navanethem Pillay, in her address to the UN Human Rights Council last week, expressed remarkable words of wisdom. She said that discrimination and inequality of citizens cause genocide. In July this year, a top prosecutor of the International Criminal Court said “the crime of genocide is an intention”.
Genocide is a crime against humanity and collective punishment is a war crime. It is not the number of dead in any military action that determines as to whether a crime is genocide or not. It is the intention to recklessly harm and exterminate a people.
The intention of genocide is often not expressed openly by any state for fear of consequences. The intent could only be inferred from “the trigger happiness” any state has against any ethnic group as it happened in Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. Mass exodus of civilians fearing death, fleeing from their homes, as seen in Kilinochchi now, is a sign of genocidal fear arising from past genocidal acts.
The Sinhalese in the South of Sri Lanka(SL) were actively engaged in discrimination and unequal treatment of Tamil citizens, at least for the past 50 Years. Tamil genocide carried out on a minor scale in 1983, has now graduated to a major scale, with full participation by the state and the Sinhalese owned media.
Richard Perle, a neo conservative, came up with the notion that “we must decontextualise terrorism”; that is we must stop trying to understand the reasons for terrorism, as it affects civilians and bring destruction.
If “decontextualisation of terrorism” and “war on terrorism” are justified then decontextualisation of genocide or collective punishment of civilians of any ethnic group should be foremost in any decontextualisation exercise. Therefore, “Global war against collective punishment or genocide should take precedence over “Global war on terrorism”, as both are terrible crimes, affecting civilians more than terrorism.
Whatever reason any government tries to give, either for collective punishment or genocide would therefore not be good enough to justify them.
If we apply this argument to the recent events in Georgia, Russia had used the principle of “de-contextualisation of genocide”, when it went into Georgia to stop the genocide in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Admirably, Russia is the first country to have engaged in “Global war on genocide”, which is definitely more important to humanity than “war on terrorism”.
Soldiers in SL were engaged in a fusion of collective punishment and military terror termed “Collective Punishment Using Military Terror”(CPUMT), against Tamil civilians in the North East(NE), long before anybody had heard of Osama bin Laden.
In 1979, Sri Lankan soldiers pulled out more than 18 unarmed politically active Tamil youth from their peaceful homes at night, tortured them and killed before dawn. Their mutilated bodies were thrown on the streets of Jaffna.
After this first violent act of collective punishment for political belief in Tamil Eelam, many such CPUMT acts were carried out by the state, under a culture of impunity, for the past 29 years. The savageness of attacks by the army, with almost 100 percent Sinhalese soldiers, increased as years passed by.
After 9/11, the Government of Sri Lanka(GOSL), a wrong beneficiary, successfully distorted to the rest of the world that terrorism in SL had nothing to do with its CPUMT but had everything to do with LTTE. It rebranded the separatist struggle as terrorism to obtain political and military support from the USA, Britain, Israel, Pakistan, China and India. India is now accused of having more than 200 military personnel helping the Sri Lankan military in the war. Consequently, GOSL stepped up its crime of CPUMT on Tamils to reach a higher rung in its genocidal ladder. Those countries that supported have thus become “participants’ in this crime.
Speaking in the Russian parliament, in support of recognising the two newly independent countries, a government speaker said that Russia “saved the region from genocide”. As a responsible member of the UN Security Council, Russia should not only save its region from genocide, it does have a global resposibilty to prevent any genocide anywhere, including genocide in the NE of SL.