In Sri Lanka, according to the UN, some 2,800 civilians have been killed in the past two months in fighting between government forces and the separatist Tamil Tigers. As the authorities try to administer a final crushing blow to the Tigers, who are fighting for a state for the minority Tamils, and bring an end to a war that has lasted 26 years and killed some 70,000 people, over 100,000 civilians are now trapped in what is supposed to be a safe zone, a small coastal strip of land where the Tigers are making a last stand. In the past couple of days, over 100 of civilians have been killed in an artillery barrage. New York-based Human Rights Watch calls the zone the “most dangerous place on earth”.
The Sri Lankan government takes the view that if civilians have died in the zone it is the fault of the Tigers. As far as it is concerned, it is not to blame — and it is determined to destroy the rebels once and for all. But ordinary people are trapped. As in Gaza during the three-week Israeli assault, they cannot escape. They are paying the ultimate price in a bloody shootout.
Their safety and security must be the prime consideration for the Sri Lankan government. It has a duty to protect them. The fact that the Tigers are ruthless and vicious, that they have terrorized people into submission and kill anyone who gets in their way or who does not toe the line may be true but it is now irrelevant. The end is in sight. The Tigers are all but beaten even though in this final act they almost certainly hope to use the fearful, trapped Tamil civilians as machine gun fodder in a final propaganda blow against the Sri Lankan government. Sri Lanka must not allow that to happen. It must not lose the moral high ground at this decisive hour. If it does not put a temporary halt to the assault and allow civilians to escape, thousands could die. That would create a new wave of hatred. The Tigers might be destroyed but there would be a new generation of vengeful terrorists to replace them.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has expressed his fears to Sri Lanka about the desperate situation; representatives from the group of four that has tried to mediate a peace on the island — the US, the EU, Norway and Japan — have called on Sri Lanka to stop shelling the zone and allow civilians to escape. It is the only sane solution. But whether Sri Lanka will act or the Tigers permit an exodus is another matter.
The Tigers are a fanatical group. Time and again they have shown they attach no sanctity to human lives — Tamils or the Sinhalese.
But the Sri Lankan government will have to remember that there will be a Tamil problem even after the Tigers are crushed. Tamils have to be given meaningful autonomy within a federal structure. This means the Sri Lankan government should not alienate the Tamil public opinion. Sometime it may be easy to win the war. But the real victory is one that does not lose the peace.
Medvedev should break his silence
A stand for the rule of law would not only give Russian Prresident Dmitri Medvedev credibility in the West, but it could reinvigorate the demoralized ranks of Russians who still yearn for democracy, said New York Times in an editorial yesterday. Excerpts:
Medvedev has been president of Russia for almost a year, and it’s hard to think of anything on which he has demonstrated independence from his mentor and predecessor, Vladimir Putin. Many Russia-watchers wistfully recall his early condemnations of Russia’s “legal nihilism” and rampant corruption and hope that Medvedev will one day rise up and, to borrow a metaphor, push the perezagruska button on human rights issues.
Now would be as good a time as any.
On March 31, three people beat Lev Ponomaryov, a 67-year-old human rights activist, outside his home. A month earlier, Ponomaryov’s passport had been revoked and he was charged with slander for statements he made in the United States about human-rights abuses in Russia. Sergei Kovalev, a 79-year-old Soviet-era dissident who spent 10 years in labor camps and internal exile for what the KGB used to call “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” fired off an open letter to Medvedev.
He assailed the government’s tolerance for “home-bred fascists” and its “cynical laissez-faire leniency” to those who carry out politically motivated violence. So far, no reaction from Medvedev.
Nor has he reacted to the farcical new charges against Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, the former top officers of the dismembered Yukos oil company who were arrested in 2003.
The charges then were tax evasion; now they have been expanded to the theft of Yukos’s entire oil production. If the first trials at least could have been explained as a political reckoning for a powerful and ambitious oligarch, the new ones are show, intended only to keep Khodorkovsky and his colleague in prison forever. It is tough and dangerous for the young president to buck his mentor and take on this bunch. But he is the democratically elected president.
