"the United States must improve its relations with the tiny island nation, which is crucial to protecting shipping lanes in the region.... “The United States cannot afford to ‘lose’ Sri Lanka’’
Even if it means IGNORING WAR CRIMES and CONCENTRATION CAMPS!
"Tamils press Kerry over Sri Lanka report
Ethnic Tamils in Boston protested yesterday in front of Senator John F. Kerry’s office against a report that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released earlier this month that calls for friendlier relations between the United States and Sri Lanka.
I suppose they should be happy the Globe deigned to cover them at all.
Also see: Kerry's Colossal Insult
And that was way back in February!!!
Why did you have to lie to the kid, Kerry?
Six months after the Sri Lankan army defeated a Tamil rebel army that had controlled the northern part of the island for decades, many Boston-area Tamils complain that the Sri Lankan government is still keeping more than 100,000 Tamils in camps for internally displaced people and not allowing them to leave. (The Sri Lankan government has pledged to close the camps next month.)
The Boston-area Tamils association has been urging Kerry and other US officials to open a war crimes investigation, charging that the Sri Lankan army shelled hospitals and killed civilians. But two Senate Foreign Relations staffers who traveled to Sri Lanka in November say that the United States must improve its relations with the tiny island nation, which is crucial to protecting shipping lanes in the region.
The report recommends resuming military training for Sri Lankan officials, reinstating the Peace Corps, and giving humanitarian assistance to all areas of the country, not just to Tamil areas in the north. “The United States cannot afford to ‘lose’ Sri Lanka,’’ the staffers wrote in their report, which noted that Sri Lanka is beginning to cultivate closer ties with some nondemocratic countries, including China, Iran, and Libya.
Oh, THAT is ALSO a PROBLEM!
ANOTHER NATION drifting out of U.S. orbit!!!
Related: When Was the Last Time You Heard About.... Sri Lanka?
Nothing is as it seems, is it?
Yesterday, members of the Boston Tamil group gathered outside Kerry’s office in Bowdoin Square and handed over about 45 letters of complaint to one of Kerry’s aides. The protesters claimed that the report was biased toward the Sinhalese ethnic majority that rules Sri Lanka, and against the Tamil minority that has been fighting for a separate homeland for decades....
Hey, the New World Order supersedes any indigenous independence movement anywhere (unless a government needs to be overthrown or an enemy created; then western intelligence agencies create them).
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BATTICALOA, Sri Lanka - Trapped by the civil war, Vairamuttu Bavani, a Tamil, lost six members of her family and both her legs to a bomb. She spent months detained in an overcrowded refugee camp. And she remains under tight scrutiny by local authorities, who have visited her almost every day since her return....
Well I think it safe to say she won't be running away anywhere.
Bavani is one of tens of thousands of refugees who are struggling to rebuild their lives in postwar Sri Lanka....
During the final months of the war, nearly 300,000 mostly Tamil civilians were trapped between rebels and advancing government troops, and these refugees are now in various stages of limbo. The quarter-century war cost 80,000 to 100,000 their lives, as the Tamil Tiger rebels fought for a separate state for Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority.
Such senseless slaughter, and that of innocents.
After the rebels lost in May, the government herded the remaining civilians, along with straggling rebel fighters, to overcrowded camps. Rights groups and Western governments decried conditions in the camps, saying they amounted to an illegal form of collective punishment.
What is interesting here is that AmeriKa's Zionist press covers this form of collective punishment (must be who Sri Lanka is allying themselves with, huh?) while failing to use the term to describe occupied Palestine.
Faced with mounting international pressure and advancing monsoon rains that would have caused havoc at the low-lying camps, the government recently unlocked the camps, saying most of the remaining 127,000 refugees are free to go home once they register with authorities. The government has vowed to close the camps by the end of January. Even those who have returned from the camps say they have been told not to travel without police permission, and security officers visit their homes to question them regularly. Many wait, painfully, for news of loved ones who vanished or were taken by the military for questioning.
Yeah, and can you imagine waiting for news of a loved one, readers?
Rights groups worry that the government’s surveillance of refugees and its failure to provide them with better livelihoods will exacerbate the ethnic tensions that fueled the conflict.
“It’s alienating the 300,000 displaced and their relatives,’’ said Meenakshi Ganguly, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. “They’re all going to feel like they’re living in a state where they are not trusted and don’t belong. That’s a highly dangerous situation.’’
Hey, the WAR is OVER and the REBELLION CRUSHED, so....
Sri Lanka’s Hindu Tamil community, 18 percent of the country’s 20 million people, has complained of decades of discrimination at the hands of the Buddhist Sinhalese majority.
Yes, that is such an odd "religious" confrontation, isn't it?
What is even odder is the Zionist MSM's exclusion of the Christian component of the Tamil community.
And how can Buddhism be involved? I thought that was peaceful religion.
Sri Lanka’s president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, promised to address the lingering tensions after the war ended. Now he says he will address them after elections, scheduled for Jan. 26. Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara, a military spokesman, said refugees are not under surveillance, and that police only bring returnees in for questioning if there is reason for suspicion. “If they have been harassed, they should have informed the authorities there,’’ he said.
Don't you love lying governments?
Rishard Badurdeen, Sri Lanka’s resettlement minister, said refugees being resettled in the north, swathes of which were flattened during the final battles, get tin sheets from India to help rebuild their homes, $219 in cash from UNHCR, and six months of dry rations from the World Food Program, said Badurdeen. Farmers get additional agriculture grants, he said. Those sent home to the east are eligible for food rations.
Yeah, a TIN SHACK is really a GREAT HOME -- especially when the MONSOONS are coming!!!
Many refugees bear deep hatred for the Tamil Tigers. They say rebels shot civilians who tried to flee the war zone and stole their children to replenish the ranks of dying fighters.
That could ALL WELL BE TRUE; however, they did it with covert backing from India and Israel!!!
And I'm just a little suspicious anytime a Zionist War Daily starts hurling around those charges when they ignore them in the case of Israel! Did the Tamils steal organs from the bodies, too?
UNICEF has accused the rebels of forcibly conscripting more than 6,000 children.
“Raising children in that area was like raising cattle and sending them to slaughter,’’ said Sugadas Rajvathani, 34, who returned to her sister’s house in Trincomalee, a port town in northeastern Sri Lanka, on Oct. 30. She and her three children had spent months in flight. There was no food....
And somehow the WORLD ALLOWED this to continue for YEARS, huh?
Once again, the U.N FAILS!!!
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