The Times of London yesterday criticized the Sri Lankan government’s decision to intern Tamil civilians for security reasons.
It was one of the 20th century’s most bestial images, and one that was invented by the British. The concentration camps set up by Lord Kitchener to intern Boer women and children were officially intended to shelter civilians while the British Forces conducted a scorched-earth policy to deprive Boer combatants of food and shelter. In fact, they were places of brutality, hardship and death.
And now the barbed wire is going up again, as Tamil civilians are herded into makeshift compounds.
The victorious Sri Lankan Army, sweeping across the last holdouts of the separatist Tamil Tigers, is proposing to imprison tens of thousands of noncombatants in a “safe zone” for up to three years as the area is “cleansed” of rebel supporters. Starvation, despair and death are all too easy to predict.
Some 250,000 civilians have been trapped by the fighting in the northeast of the island. Hundreds have already been killed, either by Tiger fighters firing on them as they tried to escape or by government troops shelling the rebel enclave, now only some 70 square miles. Many of those fleeing the crossfire have been killed by mines. The International Committee of the Red Cross has done its best, but was forced yesterday to evacuate 160 patients from a makeshift hospital where artillery shelling killed 16 people earlier in the week. The United Nations is planning for an exodus of 150,000 people. But the troops appear intent on holding them, ostensibly for their safety but in fact to root out any supporters or relatives of the Tiger fighters.
Human rights activists have denounced these as illegal detention centers and demanded, as a minimum, international inspection and control. A century after Britain’s shameful treatment of the Boers, this country should be the first to protest at this odious plan.
