Island - 9/22/99

Are the SL Tamils finally seeing what they've done to themselves, and that they are going nowhere?
Mahes

COLOMBO, Sept 22 (AFP) - A senior UN official has warned Sri Lanka's Tamil rebels they could be charged with war crimes and castigated Tamil politicians for backing violent ethnic struggle.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Radhika Coomaraswamy said Tuesday that it was time that Tamil society told its leaders that the killing of unarmed civilians was a war crime. "In this era of international tribunals this should be abundantly clear," Coomaraswamy, who is Tamil, said in an article published in the Island newspaper on Wednesday.

She said the failure of Sri Lanka's minority Tamils to mourn the assassination of moderate Tamil lawmaker Neelan Thiruchelvam could mean complicity and indifference but also fear and terror. "I have interviewed many victims of war. Silence is their first reaction. The greater the horror, the greater the silence," she wrote. "The Tamil leadership in all its variety has been single minded in its pursuit of ethnic Tamil nationalism through the use of armed violence. Has this strategy worked? "We (Tamils) claim that this has given us dignity. Has it? The majority of our people are now in diaspora and not in their 'homeland', eking out a living in some part of the globe. "Their children will soon be second generation migrants and will assimilate. I was on a plane with a Sri Lankan Tamil boy who spoke neither English nor Tamil - he only spoke French." She said Sri Lankan Tamils were now treated as outcasts in every airport in the world. An estimated 500,000 to one million Sri Lankan Tamils have left the country since 1983. Coomaraswamy slammed the exploitation of ethnic loyalty and argued that democracy was more important than ethnic loyalty and that moderate legislator Thiruchelvam had been killed because he stood for pluralism and tolerance. The killings of unarmed civilians brought shame to the Tamil community, she said. Her remarks came three days after suspected Tamil Tiger guerrillas, led by women fighters, butchered 54 ethnic Sinhalese in the east of the country. The massacre was seen as a retaliatory attack for the airforce bombing that killed 22 Tamil civilians three days earlier. Both attacks have been condemned by human rights groups. "No human being who believes in human rights or social justice can ever justify these actions, she said. "We have said this to the Sri Lankan government many times but it is time for the Tamils to turn the search light inward."