Friday, May 22, 2009

Blood on the White Sand

22,000 people were killed.
With the death of the Tamil resistance, the world has changed, and not for the better.


Sri Lanka army toll shows scale of war

By Joe Leahy in Mumbai

Published: May 22 2009 18:14 | Last updated: May 22 2009 18:14

The Sri Lankan army has for the first time given an indication of the scale of the fighting in the civil war that ended this week, saying that more than 6,000 soldiers were killed and nearly 30,000 wounded in the final three years of conflict.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam fought for 25 years for an independent homeland for the country’s Tamil minority in the island’s north and east but were finally crushed by the overwhelming military force of the government led by Mahinda Rajapaksa, the nationalist president.
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The military estimates that up to 22,000 Tamil Tiger rebels were killed in the final three years of the ­conflict.

The release of the casualty figures came as Sri Lanka was on Friday night preparing to receive Ban Ki-Moon, United Nations secretary-general. Mr Ban was expected to call on the government to give international aid groups full access to its refugee camps.

Nearly 300,000 people who were displaced by the conflict have ended up in camps in Vavuniya, in the north of the island, and are in desperate need of medicine and supplies.

Western governments and the UN’s most senior human rights official have called for an independent inquiry into possible war crimes in the conflict, amid accusations that the government had shelled civilians and the rebels had held refugees at gunpoint for use as human shields.

However, Vijay Nambiar, Mr Ban’s chief of staff, who has been in Sri Lanka since last week, said the priority was the refugees’ welfare.

“I don’t think we need to be straight away rushing into all kinds of allegations,” Mr Nambiar said. “The idea is to say that in the conduct of all these things, we have to tell them there are norms.”

The UN this week said the conflict had killed between 80,000 and 100,000 people since it erupted into full-scale civil war in 1983 – including unofficial and unverified tallies showing 7,000 civilian deaths since January, Reuters reported.

The release of the government figures followed the killing of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the LTTE’s leader, this week as government security forces overran the last pocket of resistance.

“Since [July 2006], 6,261 soldiers have laid down their lives for the unitary status of the motherland and 29,551 were wounded,” Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, defence secretary, told the state-run Independent Television Network.

The casualty figures compare with 4,600 soldiers from the US, the UK and other countries who have died in Iraq since 2003 and is a grim illustration of the cost of Colombo’s strategy of pursuing a military solution to the island’s conflict.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

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