The Endless War

Last December, the government of Sri Lanka held a day of national festivities to commemorate the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. In April, intense fighting continues between government and LTTE forces. However, the escalating humanitarian crisis of the Tamil civilians remains unheeded by the international community.

The war on the island of Sri Lanka is one of disparities on a number of accounts. It is commonly misunderstood as one between a terrorist group and a legitimate state, and its status as Asia’s longest continuing civil war—lasting 26 years—with deeply rooted ethnic tensions is not properly considered by the United Nations, the United States, or any other nation.

The proscription of the LTTE as a terrorist organization by the U.S.—followed by the U.K., the EU, and others after September 11—has created a diplomatic imbalance on the island, legitimizing the Sri Lankan government’s indiscriminate military attacks on areas populated by civilians without impunity. Since the government’s official withdrawal from a ceasefire agreement with the LTTE in 2008, its military campaign has internally displaced over 200,000 Tamils in the northeast of the island, killing and injuring thousands.

With its proclaimed goal of rooting out terrorism, the Sinhalese-dominated government of Sri Lanka has systematically destroyed and taken control of nearly all of Tamil Eelam. This is the minority Tamils’ homeland, rightfully defended and governed by the LTTE following the 2002 Norwegian-led ceasefire agreement.

Caught in the midst of the Sri Lankan army’s continued offensive against the LTTE, the displaced Tamil civilians are currently subject to moral degradation, hunger, and numerous acts of genocide. In the name of security, the government continues to effectively exploit the LTTE’s terrorist designation to confine Tamil civilians to “welfare villages,” a euphemism for internment camps surrounded by barbed wire.

In early March, 38 members of the U.S. Congress sent a joint letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton highlighting the fact that Sri Lanka is one of eight “Red Alert” countries experiencing ongoing or imminent genocide, referencing a ranking produced by the New York-based Genocide Prevention Project. Human Rights Watch had reported that, from early January to the end of February alone, over 2,000 Tamil civilians had been killed and over 7,000 injured. More recently, government forces continue to kill or maim an average of 100 civilians a day.

Yet it remains a war without witnesses, and independent reports are rare. Foreign journalists, monitors, and aid workers are banned from the epicenter of the fighting, making it increasingly difficult to produce meaningful criticism of the government’s actions.

The LTTE’s continued call for a ceasefire and insistence on international monitoring and aid for civilians goes unheeded by the UN. In mid-March, the LTTE’s political head, B. Nadesan, put out a call for the UN to directly investigate the situation on the ground instead of taking the word of the government of Sri Lanka.

The immense call of the global Tamil diaspora, as well as independent voices to cease the violence and to support self-determination of Tamils, is similarly ignored and consistently fails to be put on the agenda of the UN Security Council. The protesting diaspora is of the same generation and people who have been subject to the Sri Lankan government’s discriminatory policies and violence since Sri Lanka’s independence from the British in 1948.

In mid-March, more than 120,000 expatriate Tamils demonstrated in Toronto, condemning the genocidal war and asking for international support. Countless other demonstrations carried out in London, Geneva, Paris, Washington, and all over the world have made calls for the international community to help stop the violence and recognize the LTTE as the voice of the Tamil people.

In his recent address to the World Tamils Forum in London, the American civil-rights activist Reverend Jesse Jackson reiterated the right to self-determination and the importance of an immediate ceasefire before any political solutions can follow. Similar expressions of concern uttered by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, as well as the president of East Timor and Noble Peace laureate José Ramos-Horta, remain meaningless to the government of Sri Lanka, which considers the systematic subjugation of Tamils the only solution to decades of racial tension.

Jegan J. Vincent de Paul is a graduate student in the Visual Arts Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture and Planning.