USA COMPLICIT IN MASSACRES AGAINST TAMIL NATION

[London's Tamil community support Tamil Tigers and
Tamil people against Sri Lankan state terror]

U.S. imperialism backs slaughter in Sri Lanka

By Sara Flounders
Workers World
May 6, 2009

The government of Sri Lanka, with U.S. arms and military
aid from Israel and Pakistan, is waging a brutal war
against the Tamil people of Sri Lanka.

The Tamil population there is a nationally oppressed
minority. They have waged a long, strong struggle for
self-determination in Sri Lanka, a large island country of
20 million people located southeast of India.

The Sri Lankan government’s present campaign is justified
as an effort to destroy, with a so-called “final
offensive,” the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
Yet the Sri Lankan army has opened a new attack against the
entire civilian population.

The government has moved tens of thousands of Tamil into
strategic hamlets and concentration camps. Hundreds of
thousands of Tamil civilians have been displaced. Recent
military operations include mass arrests of civilians
fleeing battle areas, torture and targeted assassinations.
Many prohibited weapons designed to create terror among
civilians, including napalm, white phosphorus and cluster
bombs, are provided to the Sri Lankan military by U.S.
military aid.

The Boston Globe reports: “The United Nations estimates
that some 6,500 civilians have died and 14,000 have been
injured in the government’s merciless offensive against the
Tamil Tigers in the northeast of the country. ... 100,000
refugees need medical care, food, and shelter, and another
50,000 are under shelling in a five-square-mile war zone.”
(April 25)

Sri Lanka’s military declared on May 1 that their troops
had cornered Tamil Tiger rebels, who have been fighting for
an independent homeland since 1983, in a
five-kilometer-long strip of territory in the northeast and
were poised for their final assault. The LTTE has said that
they will return to guerilla warfare tactics if they are
forced out of the area they have held in the north of Sri
Lanka.

On May 2 the Sri Lankan Army fired artillery shells on the
only remaining makeshift hospital at Mu’l’li-vaaykkaal, in
a government-declared ‘safety zone’ in the Mullaittivu
district of the northern war zone. The attack killed at
least 64 patients and attendees, including a volunteer
doctor, and wounded 87. The online news service TamilNet,
the Associated Press and Reuters all reported on this
civilian massacre.

Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who is also
commander-in-chief of the country’s armed forces, and
Defense Minister Gotabahaya Rajapaksa, his brother, have
banned international aid groups, human rights monitors and
independent journalists from the entire region. Defense
Minister Rajapaksa has dual U.S. and Sri Lankan
citizenship. He has often compared the Sri Lankan war
against the LTTE to the U.S. “war on terror” against
Islamic militants.

Imperialist policies of divide & rule

The problems of Sri Lanka today are rooted in the racist
divide-and-rule policies established under British colonial
rule of the island, then known as Ceylon. Along with the
indigenous Tamil population, the British brought in more
than a million Tamils as indentured slaves to work the tea
plantations on the island in the late 18th and 19th
century. Singhalese chauvinism was encouraged.

When British imperialism was defeated in the whole South
Asian subcontinent in 1948, the British handed the
government in Sri Lanka to the dominant Sinhalese
nationality. The Sinhalese continued the policy of imposing
their language as the only official language and limiting
access to health care, schools, universities, civil service
and all forms of political participation for the
impoverished Tamil community.

Repeated attempts by moderate Tamils to effect change were
met by fierce government repression. Communal violence by
chauvinist Sinhalese, backed by the Sri Lankan government,
killed thousands of Tamils in racist pogroms in 1956, 1958,
1977 and 1983. Tamil homes and small businesses were burnt
in many villages. These systematic and
government-sanctioned attacks led Tamil youths to take up
armed struggle as the only means to defend their people.

Just as the U.S. government demonizes national liberation
movements in Palestine, Lebanon, the Philippines, Nepal and
Colombia as terrorist, the LTTE is on the U.S. list of
“terrorist” organizations. But the real terror is the
tactics used against nationally oppressed people to
suppress justified resistance.

The Tamil diaspora in the U.S., Canada and Europe has
condemned the atrocities by the Sri Lankan army against
civilians and organized many demonstrations and protests
calling for an immediate halt to the brutal offensive being
waged by the Sri Lankan army against the Tamil people.

A statement by professor Jose Maria Sison, chairperson of
the International League of Peoples’ Struggle, “condemns
the criminal use of chemical weapons, nerve gas, cluster
bombs and other types of bombs and artillery fire by the
Sri Lankan army against the Tamil people. Under the
auspices of the U.S., the Sri Lankan regime gets open
political support from India and its military acquires its
war materiel from Pakistan, a notorious military proxy of
the U.S. in the region. The blatant use of banned weapons
constitutes a war crime under the Geneva conventions.”

As with many other struggles for self determination and
sovereignty, this struggle of the oppressed Tamil
nationality deserves international support. It is essential
that progressive organizations raise their voices in
solidarity with the Tamil struggle and against the brutal
U.S.-financed repression in Sri Lanka today.