Sri Lankan military forcibly “resettles” Tamil detainees

By WSWS Reporters 

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The following report was compiled by a team of World Socialist Web Site reporters who investigated the conditions facing the last group to be forcibly resettled.

We travelled 85 kilometres from Jaffna to Suriyapuram, near Pudukuduirippu, where the final group of war detainees were moved. As you pass Kilinochchi town going toward Pudukuduirippu, you see many military camps. Signs on unoccupied land that read “reserved for military use” indicate that more facilities are being prepared. The entire area remains under military occupation.

People originally from Pudukuduirippu and nearby villages, including Keppapilawu and Seeniyamotai, are not allowed to re-enter their villages, which are occupied by the military. Justifying the government’s decision to keep residents out, Mullaithivu District Government agent N. Vedanayagam declared: “They can compromise national security and hence, we could not settle them in their original villages.”

Remembering Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields

By Gareth Evans | Project Syndicate

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One of the worst atrocity crime stories of recent decades has barely registered in the world’s collective conscience. We remember and acknowledge the shame of Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur. We agonize about the failure to halt the atrocities being committed almost daily in Syria. But, at least until now, the world has paid almost no attention to war crimes and crimes against humanity comparable in their savagery to any of these: the killing fields of Sri Lanka in 2009.

Three years ago, in the bloody endgame of the Sri Lankan government’s war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, some 300,000 civilians became trapped between the advancing army and the last LTTE fighters in what has been called “the cage” – a tiny strip of land, not much larger than New York City’s Central Park, between sea and lagoon in the northeast of the country.