The Tamil Genocide by Sri Lanka

The Tamil Genocide by Sri Lanka
Author: Francis Boyle
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2010-04-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0932863876

Sri Lanka’s government declared victory in May, 2009, in one of the world’s most intractable wars after a series of battles in which it killed the leader of the Tamil Tigers, who had been fighting to create a separate homeland for the country’s ethnic Tamil minority. The United Nations said the conflict had killed between 80,000 and 100,000 people in Sri Lanka since full-scale civil war broke out in 1983. A US State Department report offered a grisly catalogue of alleged abuses, including the killing of captives or combatants seeking surrender, the abduction and in some cases murder of Tamil civilians, and dismal humanitarian conditions in camps for displaced persons. Human Rights Watch said the U.S. report should dispel any doubts that serious abuses were committed during the final months of the 26-year civil war. The report gains added significance since, during these five months, the Sri Lankan Government denied independent observers, including the media and human rights organizations, access to the war zone, and conducted a “war without witnesses.” This book traces the ongoing engagement of international lawyer Francis A. Boyle during the last years of the conflict. Boyle was among the very few addressing the international legal implications of the Sri Lankan Government’s grave and systematic violations of Tamil human rights while the conflict was taking place. This is the first book to develop an authoritative case for genocide against the Government of Sri Lanka under international law.

The Tamil Genocide by Sri Lanka

The Tamil Genocide by Sri Lanka
Author: Francis A. Boyle
Publisher: Clarity Press
Total Pages: 139
Release: 2009
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780932863706

Sri Lanka's government declared victory in May, 2009, in one of the world's most intractable wars after a series of battles in which it killed the leader of the Tamil Tigers, who had been fighting to create a separate homeland for the country's ethnic Tamil minority. The United Nations said the conflict had killed between 80,000 and 100,000 people in Sri Lanka since full-scale civil war broke out in 1983. A US State Department report offered a grisly catalogue of alleged abuses, including the killing of captives or combatants seeking surrender, the abduction and in some cases murder of Tamil civilians, and dismal humanitarian conditions in camps for displaced persons. Human Rights Watch said the U.S. report should dispel any doubts that serious abuses were committed during the final months of the 26-year civil war. The report gains added significance since, during these five months, the Sri Lankan Government denied independent observers, including the media and human rights organizations, access to the war zone, and conducted a war without witnesses. This book traces the ongoing engagement of international lawyer Francis A. Boyle during the last years of the conflict. Boyle was among the very few addressing the international legal implications of the Sri Lankan Government's grave and systematic violations of Tamil human rights while the conflict was taking place. This is the first book to develop an authoritative case for genocide against the Government of Sri Lanka under international law.

Sri Lanka and the Responsibility to Protect

Sri Lanka and the Responsibility to Protect
Author: Damien Kingsbury
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2012-03-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1136639977

This book is about the issues and challenges facing the implementation of the Responsibility To Protect principle in the case of Sri Lanka, where the Tamil Tigers have been fighting to create a separate state.

This Divided Island

This Divided Island
Author: Samanth Subramanian
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2015-12-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1466878746

Samanth Subramanian has written about politics, culture, and history for the New York Times and the New Yorker. Now, Subramanian takes on a complex topic that touched millions of lives in This Divided Island. In the summer of 2009, the leader of the dreaded Tamil Tiger guerrillas was killed, bringing to an end the civil war in Sri Lanka. For nearly thirty years, the war's fingers had reached everywhere, leaving few places, and fewer people, untouched. What happens to the texture of life in a country that endures such bitter conflict? What happens to the country's soul? Subramanian gives us an extraordinary account of the Sri Lankan war and the lives it changed. Taking us to the ghosts of summers past, he tells the story of Sri Lanka today. Through travels and conversations, he examines how people reconcile themselves to violence, how the powerful become cruel, and how victory can be put to the task of reshaping memory and burying histories.

Losing Santhia

Losing Santhia
Author: Ben Hillier
Publisher:
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2019-07-27
Genre:
ISBN: 9780994537867

On a small stretch of sand in north-eastern Sri Lanka 2009, the armed forces slaughtered tens of thousands of Tamils. The Tamil Tigers, who had waged a three-decade-long war of national liberation, were militarily defeated. But some of their ranks survived. Santhia was one. After the war, she and her infant son tried to reach Australia but were stranded in Indonesia. Santhia died in a Jakarta hospital in October 2017 aged just forty-two. Sponsored by the Tamil Refugee Council, Ben Hillier travelled to Indonesia and Sri Lanka after Santhia's death to piece together her life. In this essay, she appears as an individual expression of a nationals fight for liberation. The essay is paired with a seminal document, Liberation Tigers and Tamil Eelam freedom struggle, written in 1983 by Anton Balasingham on behalf of the Tigers' political committee.

Sri Lanka's Secrets

Sri Lanka's Secrets
Author: Trevor Grant
Publisher: Monash University Publishing
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2014-08-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1922235539

As the civil war in Sri Lanka drew to its bloody end in 2009 the government of this island nation removed its protection from UN officials and employees, who, along with other international observers, were forced to leave the conflict zone. President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his inner circle wanted, it seemed, a war without witness. The end result was the deliberate slaughter of an estimated 70,000 innocent civilians. However, many survivors, and some who died, were able to capture on camera the horrifying conclusion to the war and the cruel deprivations of the internment camps that followed. Today, through their images and testimony, Rajapaksa stands accused of war crimes. In Sri Lanka’s Secrets experienced journalist Trevor Grant presents the shocking story of the final days of this war, alongside the photographs and eye-witness accounts of many Tamils, including Maravan, a social worker who fled to Australia by boat after being tortured by soldiers seeking his folio of photographs. Grant also details the continuing torture and abuse of Tamils in Sri Lanka, and some national governments’ ongoing support for a regime that has abandoned any pretense of democracy. Foremost among these enthusiastic supporters has been the Government of Australia, cynically preoccupied with ‘stopping the boats’ fleeing Sri Lankan state terror. At any cost.

Still Counting the Dead

Still Counting the Dead
Author: Frances Harrison
Publisher: House of Anansi
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2012-09-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1770893059

"An extraordinary book. This dignified, just and unbearable account of the dark heart of Sri Lanka needs to be read by everyone." — Roma Tearne, author of Mosquito The tropical island of Sri Lanka is a paradise for tourists, but in 2009 it became a hell for its Tamil minority, as decades of civil war between the Tamil Tiger guerrillas and the government reached its bloody climax. Caught in the crossfire were hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren, doctors, farmers, fishermen, nuns, and other civilians. And the government ensured through a strict media blackout that the world was unaware of their suffering. Now, a UN enquiry has called for war crimes investigation, and Frances Harrison, a BBC correspondent for Sri Lanka during the conflict, recounts those crimes for the first time in sobering, shattering detail.

To End a Civil War

To End a Civil War
Author: Mark Salter
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 566
Release: 2015
Genre: History
ISBN: 1849045747

A fascinating inside look at what it takes to bring irreconcilable foes to the conference table and the pressures of brokering peace in an ethnically riven society at war with itself

Assembling Ethnicities in Neoliberal Times

Assembling Ethnicities in Neoliberal Times
Author: Nimanthi Perera-Rajasingham
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2019-10-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810140764

Assembling Ethnicities in Neoliberal Times: Ethnographic Fictions and Sri Lanka’s War argues that the bloody war fought between the Sri Lankan state and the separatist Tamil Tigers from 1983 to 2009 should be understood as structured and animated by the forces of global capitalism. Using Aihwa Ong’s theorization of neoliberalism as a mobile technology and assemblage, this book explores how contemporary globalization has exacerbated forces of nationalism and racism. Nimanthi Perera-Rajasingham finds that ethnographic fictions have both internalized certain colonial Orientalist impulses and critically engaged with categories of objective gazing, empiricism, and temporal distancing. She demonstrates that such fictions take seriously the task of bearing witness and documenting the complex productions of ethnic identities and the devastations wrought by warfare. To this end, Assembling Ethnicities explores colonial-era travel writing by Robert Knox (1681) and Leonard Woolf (1913); contemporary works by Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunesekera, Shobasakthi, Dharmasiri Bandaranayake, and Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan; and cultural festivals and theater, including vernacular performances of Euripides’s The Trojan Women and women workers’ theater. The book interprets contemporary fictions to unpack neoliberalism’s entanglements with nationalism and racism, engaging current issues such as human rights, the pastoral, Tamil militancy, immigrant lives, feminism and nationalism, and postwar developmentalism.

Buddhism and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka

Buddhism and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka
Author: Patrick Grant
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2009-01-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0791493679

Patrick Grant explores the relationship between Buddhism and violent ethnic conflict in modern Sri Lanka using the concept of "regressive inversion." Regressive inversion occurs when universal teaching, such as that of the Buddha, is redeployed to supercharge passions associated with the kinds of group loyalty that the universal teaching itself intends to transcend. The book begins with an account of the main teachings of Theravada Buddhism and looks at how these inform, or fail to inform, modern interpreters. Grant considers the writings of three key figures—Anagarika Dharmapala, Walpola Rahula, and J. R. Jayewardene—who addressed Buddhism and politics in the years leading up to Sri Lanka's political independence from Britain, and subsequently, in postcolonial Sri Lanka. This book makes the Sri Lankan conflict accessible to readers interested in the modern global phenomenon of ethnic violence involving religion and also illuminates similar conflicts around the world.