Modern day genocide?

We like to think of genocide as things of the past, and anomalies in the history of man. I think most people today can't understand the reason behind genocide simply because today's world and global culture is so different from the past. So is it possible that there genocide is occurring in Sri Lanka?

I got caught in traffic today outside the UN office on the Jalan Damansara side. Apparently there were protestors protesting the genocide in Sri Lanka, which took me by surprise, because I thought, "how could genocide happen in this day and age?" followed by "how could genocide happen without me, who trolls news sites everyday repeatedly, hearing about it?"

The very real issue is that many governments in South Asia still take very conservative stances and are able to cover up such ugly issues, especially from worldwide press. This, of course, is a great explanation on why this didn't make front page news. The more disappointing reason is probably that the head honchos in BBC, Reuters, Associated Press and CNN didn't think it was news worthy, or even worse, it was reported but dropped out of sight just like the ethnic cleansing in Kenya.

Google being the powerful tool it is gave me the answer.

From The Star: The overlooked Lankan genocide:

Since Kilinochchi – the Tigers’ administrative hub – fell in January, some 2,000 civilians, most of them women, children and old people, have been killed and about 5,000 have suffered serious injuries. The numbers are the highest so far in what is increasingly being described as genocide against the Tamils.

The Tamil civilians, comprising Hindus, Christians and also Muslims, are being killed and maimed from shelling by the Sri Lanka army as well as from the brutality of the Tigers.

In a 44-page report issued recently after a fact-finding mission, the Human Rights Watch squarely accused the Sri Lankan army of war crimes – bombing hospitals and other supposedly safe zones and blatantly killing civilians.

It also didn’t mince words in charging the LTTE with equally appalling violations, resorting to so-called “human shielding”.

They prevent civilians from leaving conflict areas; they shoot those trying to flee to government-controlled territory and do forced recruitment of teenagers and children to fight in the battlefields.

“The Sri Lankan armed forces and the LTTE appear to be engaged in a perverse competition to demonstrate the greatest disregard for the civilian population,” HRW said in the report titled “War on the Displaced: Sri Lankan Army and LTTE Abuses against Civilians in the Vanni.”

The government and the Tigers have strongly denied attacking civilians but with the government having barred journalists and neutral parties from entering the war zone, there is little to doubt HRW’s findings.

As the human rights organisation put it: “Instead of using its victories in the field to promote a more open and democratic nation, the Sri Lankan government has conducted a cynical campaign to prevent all independent public coverage of its military operations and the plight of civilians caught up in the war.

Those who have managed to escape the fighting have found themselves virtually imprisoned in what the government calls “welfare villages”, but are in effect, razor-wired concentration camps.

Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa has repeatedly claimed that the civilians who escaped from LTTE captured areas are being treated “most humanely”. In the same breath, he has also maintained that the government “would not exhibit the troubled Internally Displayed Persons’ (IDPs) faces to gain international sympathy.”

From the lawyer who served the papers himself, from Boston Globe: Genocide in Sri Lanka:

THE BARRAGE of media reporting of the grim conflict in Sri Lanka has captured popular imagination, but has overlooked the grisly Sinhalese Buddhist genocide of innocent Hindu or Christian Tamil civilians by a US dual citizen and US green card holder. The two should be investigated and prosecuted in the United States.

Acting on behalf of Tamils Against Genocide, I recently delivered to US Attorney General Eric H. Holder a three-volume, 1,000 page model 12-count genocide indictment against Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Sarath Fonseka charging violations of the Genocide Accountability Act of 2007. Derived from affidavits, court documents, and contemporaneous media reporting, the indictment chronicles a grisly 61-year tale of Sinhalese Buddhists attempting to make Sri Lanka "Tamil free."

Rajapaksa and Fonseka assumed their current offices in December 2005. They exercise command responsibility over Sri Lanka's mono-ethnic Sinhalese security forces. On their watch, they have attempted to physically destroy Tamils in whole or in substantial part through more than 3,800 extrajudicial killings or disappearances; the infliction of serious bodily injury on tens of thousands; the creation of punishing conditions of life, including starvation, withholding medicines and hospital care, humanitarian aid embargoes, bombing and artillery shelling of schools, hospitals, churches, temples; and the displacements of more than 1.3 million civilians into camps, which were then bombed and shelled. This degree of mayhem inflicted on the Tamil civilian population because of ethnicity or religion ranks with the atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo that occasioned genocide indictments against Serbs by the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

During the past month, a virtual reenactment of the Bosnian Srebrenica genocide of more than 7,000 Muslims has unfolded. Sri Lanka's armed forces employed indiscriminate bombing and shelling to herd 350,000 Tamil civilians into a government-prescribed "safety zone," a euphemism for Tamil killing fields. There, more than 1,000 have been slaughtered and more than 2,500 have been injured by continued bombing and shelling.

As a preliminary to the horror, roads and medical aid were blocked, and humanitarian workers and all media were expelled. During a BBC radio interview on Feb. 2, Rajapaksa declared that outside the "safety zone" nothing should "exist." Accordingly, a hospital has been repeatedly bombed, killing scores of patients. Rajapaksa further proclaimed that in Sri Lanka, any person not involved in fighting the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam is a terrorist.

The State Department lists Sri Lanka as an investigatory target in the Office of War Crimes. The New York-based Genocide Prevention Project last December labeled Sri Lanka as a country of "highest concern." President Barack Obama has made the case for military intervention in Sudan or elsewhere to stop genocide. All the more justification for the United States to open an investigation of the voluminous and credible 12 counts of genocide against a United States citizen and permanent resident alien assembled by Tamils Against Genocide.

A genocide indictment would probably deter Rajapaksa and Fonseka from their ongoing atrocities against Tamil civilians. There is no time to tarry.

I'm not sure what 'barrage of media' he's talking about, I certainly haven't seen it. Some have said this is pure exaggeration and bullshit like the Kampung Medan fiasco very well may have been, but the issue remains that if people are dying, shouldn't someone somewhere be doing something about it?