| by Pearl Thevanayagam
(May 20, 2013, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) Article 2 of the 1948 UN CPPCG (Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide) defines genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Four years ago the government fulfilled its credentials and passed with flying colours its graduation on genocide as defined by UN CPPCG on ethnic Tamils who comprise 12 percent of the 21 million strong population.
The Sunday Times and The Island editorials are very modest and smug about the victory parade celebrations. Inwardly gloating and outwardly pretending to smack the hands of the government not for celebrating the genocide of 100,000 Tamils but for spending lavishly on the tamashas with public funds.
Had it not been for LTTE leader Velupillai Prabakaran and JVP leader Rohana Wijeweera and their insurgents the world would not know the human wrongs committed by the island’s trustees aka governments since independence in the name of national pride.
Both the LTTE cadres and Marxist Sinhala youth were primed into rebellion in their youth when their hormones were raging and whose hopes for a better future seemed utterly bleak as government after government chose to turn a blind eye to their aspirations and ambitions for a better future.
Tamils were not saints. They subjugated those belonging to so-called low castes into subservience as much as the British limited education up to Grade Five for indentured Tamil labourers from South India so that they could sweat it out in the tea plantations to fatten their coffers. Ethnic Tamils and Sinhalese refused to cow down to the British and become coolies. To this day Tamils are playing their caste card to gain political mileage and even as refugees in foreign countries they trumpet caste impressing naïve foreigners.
These refugees are a far cry from the conservatism associated with ethnic Tamils. Gone are the days when a young man is ostracised for being seen in a toddy tavern never mind a Tamil girl. Food and Wine supermarkets are simply grand arrack taverns.
Culture and morals take a back seat when it comes to making money and Tamils are obsessed with accumulating. Perhaps this is veering off the subject at hand which is the commemoration of a genocide fours years ago.
Tamil struggle to gain parity with the Sinhalese was time and again curtailed by elite Tamils intent on their own selfish motives. Tamils were let down not just by the Sinhala majority government but by their own leaders. From G.G.Ponnambalam to Lakshman Kadirgamar, from Neelan Thiruchelvam to Anandasangari they failed to fulfill the aspirations of the rural and oppressed Tamils.
Until Western media descended on Sri Lanka and managed to raise their images struggling in war-torn areas and the Tamil refugees abroad who spoke for them in every corner of the world, their plight went largely un-noticed.
Enough has been written about the war which parallels with wars in Africa, Middle East, Bosnia and Afghanistan. Unlike these other war-torn nations Sri Lanka is a tiny island and taken proportionately Tamil pogrom is best defined as genocide.
Now Sri Lanka’s war is on UN and world agenda and sustaining this momentum through campaigns and rallies is the only option to prevent a repeat of the war that ended.
(The writer has been a journalist for 23 years and worked at Weekend, The Daily News, Sunday Leader and Weekend Express in Sri Lanka as sub-editor, news reporter and news editor. She was Colombo Correspondent for Times of India and has contributed to Wall Street Journal; Washington Bureau, where she was on work experience from The Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley, California. Currently residing in UK she is also co-founder of EJN (Exiled Journalists Network) UK in 2005 the membership of which is 200 from 40 countries. She can be reached at pearltheva@hotmail.com)
 Article 2 of the 1948 UN CPPCG (Convention on the Prevention and ...){kind=link}