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There are other signs that the refugees will do well to wait and watch. With May 2009, the so-called “humanitarian operation” to “rescue” civilians of the Vanni (Northern Province) from the LTTE may have come to an end—and with it, a bloody era of suicide bombings and indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas—but signs of the struggle, and what led to it, persist. Human rights reports tell of continuing disappearances, torture, sexual violence and restriction of political space. And Rajapaksa has made no mention of a political solution to the decades of ethnocentric policies that gave rise to the secessionist movement. On the contrary, repressive emergency laws are still in effect, and the north and east remain highly militarised. As the WikiLeaks cables revealed last Decem- ber, the Sri Lankan army had planned to invest $3 billion in doubling its army strength, and setting up permanent army camps under the two new military commands established in the formerly LTTE-controlled areas of Kili- nochchi and Mullaitivu in the Northern Province. The few journalists who have managed to visit the regions describe how many thousands have been displaced with the army commandeering large tracts of land and designating them ‘high security zones’. Full story...
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There are other signs that the refugees will do well to wait and watch. With May 2009, the so-called “humanitarian operation” to “rescue” civilians of the Vanni (Northern Province) from the LTTE may have come to an end—and with it, a bloody era of suicide bombings and indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas—but signs of the struggle, and what led to it, persist. Human rights reports tell of continuing disappearances, torture, sexual violence and restriction of political space. And Rajapaksa has made no mention of a political solution to the decades of ethnocentric policies that gave rise to the secessionist movement. On the contrary, repressive emergency laws are still in effect, and the north and east remain highly militarised. As the WikiLeaks cables revealed last Decem- ber, the Sri Lankan army had planned to invest $3 billion in doubling its army strength, and setting up permanent army camps under the two new military commands established in the formerly LTTE-controlled areas of Kili- nochchi and Mullaitivu in the Northern Province. The few journalists who have managed to visit the regions describe how many thousands have been displaced with the army commandeering large tracts of land and designating them ‘high security zones’. Full story...
Don't miss:
- Sri Lanka's killing fields (Graphic)
- The Sri Lankan soldiers "whose hearts turned to stone..."
- Footage of Sri Lankan soldiers' atrocities against Tamils (Graphic)
- Sri Lanka condemned over aid workers' murders...
- Sri Lanka’s white vans deliver fear and oppression...
- Sri Lanka and the Tamil genocide...
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