Sri Lanka rebels: 1,000 civilians die in govt raid

[Coventina]

Source: Associated Press

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — Sri Lanka's Tamil rebels said Tuesday that 1,000 civilians died in a government raid on their territory that the military says freed thousands of noncombatants from the war zone. The military denied the accusation.

Government forces say they rescued thousands of civilians on Monday after they broke through a barrier built by the rebels to protect their territory. By Tuesday evening, the military said 52,000 had escaped.

But as troops have pushed the rebels into an ever-shrinking sliver of territory, both sides have accused the other of endangering civilians.

Rights groups say the rebels are holding many against their will to use as human shields. But those groups have also accused the government of indiscriminate shelling in the tightly packed region in its bid to end the 25-year war. Both sides deny the allegations against them.



Read more: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gVoaDFmbCYS-Usz9ACDRIengj21QD97MSFG83

[subsuelo]

1. Guardian Story...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/21/sri-lanka-tamil-tigers-deadline

The Tigers' political head, B Nadesan, told the Tamilnet website that the Sri Lankan army had killed hundreds of people with internationally banned weapons such as cluster shells, napalm bombs and phosphorus bombs.

A rebel spokesman, who gave his name to the BBC as Thileepan, said a hospital, an orphanage and many houses had been hit and huge numbers of civilians had been killed in a military onslaught on the area.

A senior UN official told the Guardian that the UN had been briefed by the Sri Lankan government to expect thousands more people to come out of the area in coming days.

But the UN children's fund, Unicef, warned that the civilians still trapped faced grave danger.

"If fighting continues and if the LTTE refuses to allow people to leave the conflict zone, we face the intolerable inevitability of seeing many more children killed," said Unicef's regional director for south Asia, Daniel Toole.

Eerily reminiscent of the slaughter in Gaza a few months ago.

[Igel]

4. In many ways.

Of course, we'd disagree on some of them.

However, I find the international "community" to be dreadfully naive. The Sri Lankans set up a no-fire zone for civilians to move into to be safe. The presumption is that the zone wasn't set up to provide a sheltered base of operations for the Tigers, but it was intended as a demilitarized zone.

Instead, it became a militarized zone, the Tiger's last redoubt. Could we have expected them to say, "We will stand our ground here and die, rather than run into the safe area and live to fight another day for our honorable and worthy god ... er, leader ... er, cause!"? Of course not.

It's the same in Gaza and elsewhere--if there's a place of safety and your life and your cause (often the same thing) are at risk, you go there. International law be damned, if it requires you to sacrifice yourself. Hospitals? Schools? If it's a shield, use it. Worry about moral judgment and possible courts later, if you survive.

This makes them legitimate targets--the no-fire zone, the hospitals, etc., etc., etc. We may *wish* it to be otherwise, but then we're still being naive. This time instead of being naive about the Tigers, we're being naive about the Sri Lankans.

It's the same in Israel and elsewhere--if you're trying to root out an enemy who will merrily regroup and try to kill you, once you've got him pinned you're not going to simply sit and say, "Gee, I know he's there, but I value my life much less than I value international law. I'll respect the most morally pure interpretation of the letter of the law and not bomb the hospital that my enemy is taking shelter in, even if it means I die later." No, you shell the enemy, and go with the less pure and more literal interpretation--you use force proportional to the objection of the battle, and if that means using imprecise weapons or shelling hospitals, you do it. The enemy has justified your means.

The result is two-fold naivete. We just stomp our feet and know what the correct outcome is, even if there's no way that it's going to be achieved by means that we approve of. We've set up a game with rules such that nobody will play and so that the outcome is unachievable. I figure it's a way of imposing high-minded irrelevance on ourselves, if that's what we actually believe; it might also be a form of cowardice, since making hard choices is usually a dirty business, and requires not black-and-white thinking, but evaluating shades of grey. Of course, I suspect many are actually willing to compromise their high-mindedness for some means if it yields what they consider acceptable outcomes, but only admit it when it's advantageous: that's not naivete, by any means, but what it is shall go unnamed by me in this post.

[Joanne98]

2. Reuters

Sri Lankan troops move in on Tigers

COLOMBO (Reuters) - Sri Lankan soldiers battled into the last redoubt of the Tamil Tigers on Tuesday, and an exodus of people trapped by the rebels in the coastal strip hit more than 62,000, the military said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) warned the situation was "nothing short of catastrophic" and urged both sides to prevent further mass casualties among civilians, saying hundreds had been killed in the past 48 hours.

The neutral agency did not assign blame to either side.

The operation gathered speed after the military's noon (2:30 a.m. EDT) deadline for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to surrender passed without any word from the separatists, in what appears to be the final act in Asia's longest-running war.

The LTTE hours later vowed no surrender, despite being massively outgunned by a military built up to wipe them out and finish a conflict that has percolated since the early 1970s but erupted into full-blown civil war in 1983.

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE53J0IZ20090421

[ohio2007]

3. Rights groups say the rebels are holding many against their will to use as human shields.

didn't see that comming

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3841453#3841503

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. Thousands continue to flee Sri Lanka war zone

Aid agencies warn of 'human avalanche' in Sri Lanka as civilians caught in war between government and Tamil Tiger rebels

Thousands more Tamil civilians were fleeing the rapidly diminishing sliver of rebel-held land in north-east Sri Lanka today as government troops continued their mission to capture the Tamil Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran.

As aid agencies warned of a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, with hundreds of civilians killed or wounded, the head of the Sri Lankan army, Lieutenant General Sarath Fonseka, told the BBC that troops knew the "general area" where Prabhakaran was based and that "action would be taken to destroy him". The general said only 300-400 Tamil Tiger fighters remained, but there could be 700 "forcibly armed" people in rebel bunkers.
...
The UN children's agency has raised concerns that the overcrowded ­internment camps to which civilians had been taken would be unable to cope with the influx of tens of thousands of people fleeing the fighting. Sarah Crowe, of Unicef, said it was facing a "human avalanche" and described the situation as being "on a knife edge".

Last night the International Committee of the Red Cross said it was worried about civilians still trapped in the zone. "The situation is nothing short of catastrophic. Ongoing fighting has killed or wounded hundreds of civilians who have only minimal access to medical care," said the director of operations Pierre Kraehenbuehl. "What we are seeing is intense fighting in a very small area overcrowded with civilians who have fled there."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/22/sri-lanka-tamil-war

[Mudoria]

6. This is a conflict which neither side has "clean hands".

Sometimes it's hard to understand which side has the right of things. One thing is for sure though, the innocent civilians are the people paying the price.

[ohio2007]

7. Tamil tigers "herding" their human shileds ( video from UAV )

SL Gov video - civilians escaping LTTE


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppo21s1rM7g&feature=player_embedded

thats not rocks along the shoreline of the beach. It's a mass of humanity.