Sri Lanka News Updates with Discussions

You must recognise that Tamils exhausted all their political avenues before the militants took to the centre stage.

You must recognise that the successive Sri Lankan governments practiced majorityism rather than democracy.

You must recognise that the Sinhala polity betrayed the trust that was placed on them to treat the minorities with equal respect.

You must recognise that the LTTE militancy was born on the back all these that grew engulfing other groups along with the moderate politicians. All along the Sinhala polity was endeavouring to crush it rather than tacking the underlying issues.

I will now talk about the British Government and IRA. When I first arrived in England back in 1977, the IRA was very active setting off bombs all over the mainland Britain. Bomb scare was a normal event on those days. I know we cannot compare the Northern Irish problem with Sri Lanka, but we can draw parallels.

The IRA was a symptom of the Catholic grievances in the same way LTTE is the symptom of Tamil grievances. The British tried to crush militarily; ministers after ministers came out with endless rhetoric: we will never give into the terrorists and the rest. But they never got anywhere; IRA enjoyed the support of the Catholic community.

In the end, the British government decided to tackle the underlying issues; they appointed a Royal Commission headed by Right Hon. Chris Pattern to study the grievances of the Catholic community. The study took a couple of years to complete, and the findings and recommendations were fully accepted by the British government. The study looked at the aspects of the social integration etc; recommended a whole host of changes in terms of policing and governance etc.

British government implemented the changes in every sense of the word despite the displeasures of the Protestant community paving the way for better integration and harmony between the communities. Such actions rendered the IRA redundant; there was no reason for their existence.

Don?t you think that GOSL need to take a lesson from this; instead, they have strengthened LTTE militarily and internationally as a portent entity worthy of recognition. To substantiate this, I will say that the international community does not want LTTE destroyed, but on the hand they are calling for the destruction of Islamic fundamentalism.

You are intelligent enough to recognise that if this impasse were to continue, there will come a time when the IC will favour a con-federal or a total separation. This is why I say that the Sinhalese allow their emotions to dictate rather than using their heads.

There is no other way; both parties must abide by their part of the bargains moving the peace process forward to a point from where the violence will not recur. The power should be decentralised with tangible autonomy to the regions. First of all, there need to be a strategy; a plan of some sort; publish a proposal, and invite the warring parties to participate etc. There is no good having convention after convention without engaging LTTE; LTTE and GOSL are the protagonists, and they must settle it.

LOS ANGELES - Atrocities against civilians and prisoners by Army soldiers during the Vietnam War were more common than originally disclosed to the public, according to a Los Angeles Times review of recently unsealed government files.


Some 9,000 pages of records ? the largest collection of documented war crimes in Vietnam ? include sworn witness testimony, investigative files and status reports for top military brass that detail 320 wartime atrocities substantiated by the Army.

Still, few soldiers were held accountable for the war crimes, according to the newspaper's findings which appeared in Sunday's edition.

The abuse was not restricted to one rogue Army division, but was committed by every Army division operating in Vietnam, the Times review found.

Among the incidents documented in the files:

_Seven civilian massacres from 1967 to 1971 that left at least 137 dead.

_Seventy-eight additional attacks on unarmed civilians that left at least 57 dead, 56 wounded and 15 intimacyually assaulted.

_141 incidents in which U.S. soldiers tortured civilian detainees and prisoners of war.

In one incident detailed in the report, members of the B Company in February 1968 rounded up and gunned down a group of villagers that included women and children after being ordered by a lieutenant to 'kill anything that moves.'

The files, collected by a Pentagon task force in the 1970s, do not include the most notorious U.S. atrocity, the 1968 My Lai massacre. The incident, which left some 500 Vietnamese villagers dead, was exposed by reporter Seymour Hersh the following year.

Retired Brig. Gen. John H. Johns, who was part of the task force that gathered the files, said he no longer thought the atrocities should remain in the dark.

'We can't change current practices unless we acknowledge the past,' said Johns, 78.

The files show investigators found enough evidence to charge 203 soldiers with crimes related to the mistreatment of Vietnamese civilians and prisoners. But only 57 soldiers were court-martialed and 23 convicted, the Times reported.

Fourteen soldiers received prison sentences ranging from six months to 20 years, but most served much less time.

A former legal adviser to the Army's Criminal Investigation Division said there was scarce interest in prosecuting Vietnam war crimes after the war.

'Everyone wanted Vietnam to go away,' said Steven Chucala, now a civilian attorney for the Army in Virginia.