Bemoaning the luxury of three meals a day to Tamil IDPs

These Tamils might not have experienced the Sri Lankan brand of "free elections" for some time but they certainly have come from an environment of abundance in both agriculture and fisheries in the Vanni before the military raids began in early 2009.
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(August 08, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Palitha Kohona, a former senior public servant in the Australian Federal government, currently the secretary to the Sri Lankan ministry of foreign affairs serving the terrorist State of Sri Lanka in an interview with the July issue of Himal, South Asian says: "We make sure that they (the Tamil IDPs) get three meals a day which is costing us more than a million dollars a day and medical care (232 doctors have been sent to look after them). Now, 40,000 of the children who came out of the LTTE areas attend school". What a five star luxury short of Champagne and Caviar they afford to the Tamils they claim to have liberated now with breakfast: bread and lentil, lunch: boiled rice and coconut sambal and dinner: coconut Sambal and boiled rice. What more do they want. This is good enough for the Tamils. This is what President Rajapakse meant by "liberation" with the Tamils paying the price for their freedom: from hunger, privation and liberty.

These Tamils might not have experienced the Sri Lankan brand of "free elections" for some time but they certainly have come from an environment of abundance in both agriculture and fisheries in the Vanni before the military raids began in early 2009. Kohona's statement should be viewed in the backdrop of when the Tamils began to be starved with the onset of the war when the Sri Lankan government sent only thirty percent of the food requirements to more than 350,000 civilians in the Vanni a part of whom now constitute those in the concentration camps in Vavuniya.

It would be recalled that in late April 2009 in an interview with Al Jazeera, Kohona, contradicting his statement made two weeks before that, completely denying the aerial bombings on civilian targets including hospitals by the Sri Lankan government within the farcical No Fire Zone (NFZ) finally admitted when confronted with pictures of them justifying this act of genocide as being a retaliation "perfectly legitimate", against guns located on the ground, stating that the attacks were proportionate, when in actual fact, they were an act of indiscriminate aggression and by no means self defence. Now in the Himal interview he states he was misquoted.

Kohona in the Himal interview grudges the 232 doctors servicing these 287,000 IDPs interned in the camps, the proportion of which is one doctor for every 1237 patients and potential patients making it remotely evident and suspicious of the horrendous extent of the state of ill health in the internment camps, while the number of military personnel with no knowledge of the Tamil language with their racial prejudices to effectively communicate with the Tamil people doctoring these camps are far in excess of this proportion. Tamils do not want private hospital treatment for their hundreds dying of malnutrition, traumatic disorders, meningitis, chicken pox, measles with serious consequences of permanent brain damage and damage to other organs with another hundreds of patients dying weekly with the government having no place to covertly bury them. Tamils trapped within, want freedom to look after themselves and seek their own remedies. They have had enough of the State patronage loving them to death. At least now the Sri Lankan state must let them go without strangling them with their overbearing love and affection. Leave them alone to go back to their homes and survive, and this is all what we ask.

While hedging the issue of their disgraceful human rights record, Kohona boasting of support from nations with dismal human rights records makes a pathetic effort to shift the blame for the failures and the serious lapses on human rights on the international community for not acting cooperatively when in actual fact any cooperation on their part has been rendered impossible and fruitless with a rogue state like Sri Lanka around, permanently defaulting.

Not defining what kind of schooling that is, Kohona says: "Now, 40,000 of the children who came out of the LTTE areas attend school" while not talking of the grades of these children and what kind of education they are being given comparable to the children in the Sinhalese areas. Are they having classes under trees writing on sand? Are the teachers from among those incarcerated in the camps? It has been reported that many children have lost their tertiary and university education because they have either been separated from their parents, having been killed, or missing. Do they have the proper mental condition to pursue any studies or do they end up as victims of genocide?

In response as to when the IDPs would be settled back in their original homes, Kohona repeats the Mantra that their homes have been heavily mined. Who in their sanity would mine their own houses unless the State is now launching a programme of mining in their genocidal quest. What is more, 300,000 refugees from the Vanni, it is claimed walked in several directions to reach their veritable prisons in Vavuniya and there had not been a single report of a land mine exploding. Further Kohona talks as if he was unaware of the Indians designated in their complicity to delay, saying that it would take 3 years to have the entire area de mined, an utter drain of money and time, a ploy to delay the process and to enrich the Indian contractors and themselves with foreign aid

Military weapons said to have been buried by the Tigers do not go off by themselves. He states: "Water has to be connected, electricity has to be connected, the schools and clinics have to be rehabilitated and the roads have to be restored. It's a huge challenge, and we hope that the international community will assist us in this." One should be out of their mind to believe this insincere concern for the Tamils coming especially from Kohona. We can give the guarantee that these will never happen. There is nothing to connect water for they lived on water from the rivers and wells with no electricity in all parts. Again this is all a ruse to get as much aid as possible, delay until most people are decimated and the funds squandered.

Kohona states: "The next task is to separate the LTTE combatants from the non-combatants. We have no intention of keeping large numbers of former combatants in jail - they must be rehabilitated". We can now tell you that they have already been killed in the jails that they were kept in as reported even in websites favourable to the government. In Sri Lanka there is the history of suspected Tamil militants taken in for questioning never returning home. Rehabilitation in their parlance is death by violence, an example, the Bindunuwewe massacre.

On being asked about the internment camps, Kohona says, apart from other crap into which we are not going into: "First, children were being dragged into the jungle by the armed groups to be inducted into their units. The UN wanted us to stop that. The only way to do that was to put a security fence around the camps. Then, the other thing was, the locals were looting the UN supplies. They were coming in and walking away with water pumps, roofing material etc. So the UN asked us to put those fences. Now when we put in the fences on our own, everybody is complaining that we are putting people into "internment" camps. I think that is a little cynical and unfair". They claimed that the LTTE were no more, and the children that were abducted was actually done by their military to share in the human loot for domestic child slavery, another crime against humanity. So according to Kohona what were to be enclosed within razor wires were infra structure material and not humans but while fencing, human beings got caught up inextricably into these! As to how they came to be within these wires is then a mystery and they cannot find a way to release them. Further according to him, while UN helicopters were landing, children were seen standing beside fences (These fences must have materialised in the landscape) as they usually do and The Times using these picture made it known to the world that people were being interned within concentration camps. How preposterous. After all 40,000 attend school with the question being: are these "schools" outside of the wired boundaries. If The Times (of London) did not call them internment camp they would not be internment camps. Perhaps they would have been virtual prisons called by another name.

Identifying the Sinhala polity with the Sri Lankan State, Kohona plays up to the Sinhalese people, hankering for their support to the State to offer help towards the Tamil people's welfare. He says: "I think the State and the Sinhalese people will do all that is necessary to care for the Tamil people", revealing that any welfare for the Tamils has to be not of their own right but on the approval and the sufferance of the Sinhalese people. The racist State in the wake of its outrageous human rights record and crimes against humanity has to invent new stories day to day, if not hour to hour, to paint a pathetic picture lacking of any realism.

[The writer is editor in chief of the Eelam Nation)

-Sri Lanka Guardian