to give you an idea about what palestinians are up against it is instructive to watch bill maher interview rapper m.i.a. (maya arulpragasam) on his show real time the other night.
it seems to me that maher sort of gets it when it comes to tamils terrorized by the state terrorism of sri lanka. of course, if you have ever watched his show you would know that the just is incapable of wrapping his head around the fact that the zionist entity has been doing this for decades in palestine. phil rees’ program “dining with terrorists” that was on al jazeera a couple of months ago highlights the state terrorism of sri lanka (and he also did this on palestine, which i blogged about at the time). here is his episode on sri lankans terrorizing the tamils:
in the guardian yesterday gethin chamberlain documented tales of tamils being terrorized by sri lanka:
Sopika is one of at least 250,000 Tamil civilians being held in Menik Farm in the north of the country. Barbed-wire fences encircle the endless rows of white tents, preventing civilians from getting out and journalists from getting in, as the government continues to prevent the stories of Sopika and thousands like her from being told.
Yesterday, Sri Lanka’s health ministry announced that it is investigating three doctors detained by the military accused of giving false information about war zone casualties to the media. The physicians were among the few sources of information on those wounded and killed in the fighting, since most journalists were banned from the area.
But slowly the stories of ordinary Tamils are emerging. And Sopika’s harrowing account of her recent ordeal, related via intermediaries, helps explain why the authorities are so keen to restrict the flow of information.
Her story is testimony to the brutality of both the Tamil Tiger fighters and the government during the final stages of a 26-year conflict, during which each side accused the other of acts of unspeakable cruelty. Both, it seems, were telling the truth and it is the Tamil civilians who paid the price.
Sopika was born on the island of Kayts, off the northern tip of Jaffna. Until eight months ago, she and her older brother and younger sister lived with their parents in a village overlooking the Indian Ocean.
Then they left to visit the town of Madhu on the mainland. As the government unleashed its military offensive against the Tigers, their route home was shut off. Desperate to escape the shelling, they were driven ahead of the advancing government forces, further into LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) territory, moving from place to place, dodging air strikes and artillery.
Human rights groups and international officials have accused the government of heavily shelling areas densely populated with civilians in the last weeks of the war. The government has denied using heavy weapons. But by the time the family reached Mullaitivu, Sopika said she found the noise of the jets and artillery overwhelming. Her parents decided they had to make a break for it. It was 2am when they set off with several other families.
“As we were walking, the Tigers started to fire and the young boy walking in front of me got shot,” she said. “My face and clothes were splattered with the blood of this boy. He died.
“We turned back because we were afraid of more death,” she said.
Sopika said she remembered the moment when a sniper’s bullet killed a relative sitting close by.
“I saw the bullets hit her head… half her face fell off,” she said.
The family decided to try again to escape. This time they headed for the shore, again setting out at 2am, hoping that the darkness would provide them with cover from the guns of the Tamil Tigers and the government forces.
“We were walking in between the shooting from both sides, and we realised that we could be seen in the moonlight,” she said.
In front of her, a 12-year-old boy and his mother were caught in the crossfire, collapsing dead on the ground. “We missed death by a few feet,” she said. They turned back again.
The next day, there was no food, so the children went to bed hungry. They awoke again at 2am, and joined another family walking towards the shore.
“We started to walk a long way… no, really we started to run, we were scared we would get caught by the LTTE, we would get beaten,” she said.
Dodging the bullets, they pushed on through shrubs and thorn bushes. “There was no road or path, there was a lot of mud and ditches,” she said. “Once I fell over a dead body.”
Nearing the shore of the lagoon, they started to crawl on their bellies across the sand, terrified of being caught by the Tigers. Entering the water, Sopaki found the waves crashing down on her head. She could not swim; she had never learnt.
“I was terrified because the water was up to my neck,” she said. “I could barely stand as the current kept pulling me down. The navy’s searchlights kept beaming into the water. I cried out ‘Appa Appa’ [father, father] when I fell into a trough. I nearly drowned. During the entire journey, we just wanted to run, but we couldn’t.”
Finally emerging from the water, they could see the army ahead of them. “We were told to lie down. They wanted to search us,” she said. The soldiers gave them biscuits, dates and water and put them on a bus. “People were shouting and crying because many of them had lost their relative during the search operation,” she said. Sopaki was also crying because her father and brother were missing, but the next day they were reunited.
The family arrived at Menik Farm eight days ago, just as the fighting reached a climax. Two days later, the government announced that the war was over. But their ordeal is not.
Conditions inside the camps are squalid: food and water are in desperately short supply and even the government admits the toilets are inadequate.
Others imprisoned behind the wire have their own tales of hardship and horror. According to private UN documents, at least 7,000 civilians were killed in the final months of fighting in the war. The Red Cross says it evacuated 13,769 sick and wounded people and their relatives from the war zone.
“It is a great relief that the war is over, but peace has come at a very high price, with thousands of civilians killed, including large numbers of children,” said James Elder, the Unicef spokesman in Sri Lanka. “There is no end to the gut-wrenching stories of death and destruction that scar these children.”
meanwhile in the telegraph richard dixon illustrates how sri lanka is continuing to terrorize the tamil population:
State terrorism has always been the major problem in this tiny island. It is an ugly and arrogant monster that always keeps his head above the seas and mountains of Sri Lanka.
Properties of the Tamils were destroyed and Tamils were burned to death in the seventies.
For more than sixty years, successive Sri Lankan governments backed by racist Sinhala extremists have been oppressing the Tamil minorities. They brutally killed thousands of innocent Tamils, burnt their properties and sent the rest in ships as refugees to the North of the country in the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties.
When Tamils asked for their rights, Sinhala extremists always responded with violence.
Pearl of the Indian ocean has now become a land of the demons.
They have now killed thousands of innocent Tamils in one of the most cruel wars in the history of the mankind. They used internationally banned weapons on innocent women and children and murdered them without showing any mercy.
They kept on using the buzz words “War on Terror” and “Humanitarian Operation” to justify their atrocities. They made the people to starve for months, denied medicine to the sick the elderly and let the wounded to die in the open fields.
Innocent women and children were killed in hospitals, schools and even inside bunkers. Thousands of wounded civilians were burnt alive in the bunkers.
They brutally killed the rebels who surrendered with white flags and violated all the norms of a conventional war.
They are now busy burning and dumping the bodies of innocent Tamils.
Media and aid workers are not allowed to the war zone because the Sri Lankan forces are working day and night to hide all the evidences.
Those who did manage to leave the war zone were sent to barbed wired concentration camps. Sri Lankan forces are regularly filtering out young people from the concentration camps and taking them for questioning. Many of these children don’t return.
Young Tamil women are raped and tortured in these notorious camps. Dead bodies of the innocent Tamils are thrown outside the camps with deep wounds on their heads and necks.
Forced disappearances, random killings, rape, torture and the list goes on. Sri Lanka has become one of the worst countries in the world that telling the truth is considered as a crime and those who tell the truth are punished.
Wounded children had to hide in the bunkers fearing further attacks.
Pearl of the Indian ocean has now become a land of blood thirsty demons.
Experts of the free world have failed to see the bigger picture.
Many military strategists, political analysts and terror experts in the free world have either failed to recognise the deeper issues in Sri Lanka or they have deliberately applied a methodology to cause one of the greatest humanitarian tragedies of the century.
In any conflict resolution or problem solving exercise, one of the most important parts is to see a bigger picture and define the problem accurately.
What goes wrong very often is that the parties who come forward to solve an issue tend to focus on just part of the problem or they try to deal with the symptoms instead of the root cause.
It will be worse, when a party deliberately implement a wrong solution to a problem with hidden agendas.
When they do that, they don’t just fail to solve the main issue but they even end up making the real problem much bigger.
Complexities in the Sri Lankan civil war very often make even the so called wise to misinterpret the truths and make decisions against the vulnerable in the society.
A complete jigsaw puzzle that shows a crying baby can be made into a monster if half of the pieces are removed.
Instead of becoming sympathetic towards the crying baby, the jigsaw player is now confronted with a monster that is made up of half of the pieces.
Those who considered that LTTE was the only problem had failed to understand that they were missing half of the pieces in the puzzle.
Implementing solutions without understanding a problem can cost innocent lives and what has happened in Sri Lanka in the last few months is a proof for this.
A fever is considered as one of the body’s immune mechanisms to attempt a neutralization of a perceived threat inside the body, be it bacterial or viral. Carl Wunderlich discovered that fever is not a disease, but the body’s response to a disease.
Any sensible Physician would try to find out the root cause of the disease instead of wasting time dealing with the symptoms.
Disease in Sri Lanka is State Terrorism that has been going on for more than 60 years.
Unless the root cause is dealt with, Sri Lanka will continue to hear the voice of the oppressed louder and louder.
Mankind has already lost its sanity.
When BBC and other channels in the UK gave importance to the celebrations in Colombo but failed to mention about the thousands of wounded and dying Tamils in the war zone, one has to question if the mankind has already lost its sanity.
Sri Lanka celebrates killings, Killers are honoured.
We can’t bring peace to the trouble spots in the world with people who have heads but no hearts.
We desperately need diplomats who have the hearts for the oppressed and suffering people.
Tamils in Sri Lanka had their own nation before but it was merged with the Sinhala kingdoms during the British rule.
When they left this beautiful island in 1948, it was left to function as one country. Democracy failed in Sri Lanka because the successive governments that came to power were always chosen by the majority Sinhalese.
Sinhala governments backed by the Sinhala Buddhist extremists, always tried to please the majority in order to remain in power. They came up with policies to discriminate Tamils in education, employment and other arenas. Sinhala was made the only official language and Tamils were made as second class citizens.
Tamils can be compared to the Jewish people who lived under the Nazi regimes. Even under persecution, they worked hard to make their lives better.
Sinhala governments had many times ordered their agents to kill Tamils and destroy their properties. More than two thousand Tamils lost their lives in 1983.All of them were murdered by the Sinhalese in the south of Sri Lanka. They were murdered in prisons, schools, hospitals and even in churches.
Tamil Libraries were burned to dust in order to wipe out the history of Tamils from Sri Lanka.
Sri Lanka is no longer a safe place for the Vulnerable.
Sadly, one of the greatest humanitarian tragedies of the century is taking place in front of our eyes.
Response from the individuals, politicians, international organisations and heads of the states have shown to us that Sri Lanka is no longer a safe place for the victims but the wicked has a lot to rejoice for.
Saving innocent lives is one of the greatest things we can do to show to the world that we obey our conscience and we are still humans.
Thousands of wounded are still left in the killing fields of Sri Lanka. Tamils are persecuted in the concentration camps.
If we are going to wait till we get the permission from Sri Lanka, that is never going to happen. A killer who is busy dumping the bodies of the innocents is not going to invite us and show us how cruel he is.
Urgent steps should be taken to save the dying Tamils from the hands of the brutal Sri Lankan regime.
just as when “war” stops terror doesn’t stop in sri lanka against the tamils, so to is the case in palestine. the other night when the zionist entity bombed gaza, it trapped three palestinians inside the tunnels who were unable to get out for several days:
The men were found on Saturday in the collapsed tunnel on the Egyptian side of the border with Gaza.
The tunnel, which is near the border town of Rafah, collapsed five days ago.
Four men are still missing.
Al Jazeera’s Ayman Mohyeldin, reporting from Rafah, said: “They were not able to find them [the trapped men] on the Palestinian side … they notified the Egyptians … to immediately begin rescue efforts on their side of the border.
“We were told they were recovered unconscious … they were immediately rushed to hospital in Egypt. Their fate is still unknown although officials have confirmed they are indeed alive.”
Witnesses said the men had been able to communicate with rescuers for the first few days and were fed milk and water through a pipe that had been pushed through the sand.
and it seems there are promises of more such bombings will be happening in the coming days if evidence of new pamphlets dropped on gaza is any indication:
The heavily guarded border is the scene of sporadic fighting between militants and Israeli troops. Israeli forces killed two Palestinian fighters in a clash on Friday.
The Arabic pamphlets warn Gazans to stay out of areas 300 meters to 500 meters (yards) from the border fence, saying they risk being shot.
this is, i suspect, also why a new humanitarian aid convoy is not being allowed to enter gaza through the rafah border with egypt:
Rami Abdo, coordinator of the European Campaign to End the Siege, stated on Monday that the activists of the aid convoy are determined to cross into the Gaza Strip in order o deliver the humanitarian supplies, mainly meant to help the disabled and the sick.
body on the line 