{"id":115182,"date":"2021-06-13T17:18:03","date_gmt":"2021-06-14T00:18:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=115182"},"modified":"2021-06-13T17:18:03","modified_gmt":"2021-06-14T00:18:03","slug":"erasing-the-eelam-victory-part-20-c1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2021\/06\/13\/erasing-the-eelam-victory-part-20-c1\/","title":{"rendered":"ERASING THE EELAM VICTORY Part 20 C1"},"content":{"rendered":"

KAMALIKA PIERIS<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n

The main\ncharge against Sri Lanka at the UNHRC is that they deliberately killed\nthousands of civilians in the last phase of Eelam War IV. Rajiva Wijesinha was\nSecretary-General of the Sri Lankan Government Secretariat\nfor Coordinating the Peace Process<\/a> (SCOPP) from\n2007\u20132009. In that capacity Rajiva had access to war data. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rajiva found that\nvery few allegations of civilian deaths were made to the Peace Secretariat until\nthe end of January 2009, when for the first time there was allegations of\nhundreds killed. In 2008 when forces took Kilinochchi, the total civilian deaths\naccording to Tamilnet was only 78.  It\nwas only on Jan 26th<\/sup> 2009 that a massive number of civilian deaths\nwere announced, just after the first No Fire Zone was declared.  UN Resident Coordinator Neil Buhne said he\nthought most of the firing in the NFZ came from LTTE, said Rajiva.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analysts\nobserved that the government\u2019s offensive in the Eastern   Province had succeeded without civilian\ncasualties.  The army would have followed\na similar policy in the North. Analysts noted that the international community has been closely watching the\nconduct of the war. Had there been any loss of civilian lives the     international    community would have definitely tried to\nstop the offensive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The intelligentsia\nin Sri Lanka took a similar position. If the army had targeted civilians\noutside the conflict area, then we would have known, said Lalith de Mel, former\nhead of Reckitt and Colman. There would have been some information.  But there was none. There can be no truth in\nthis story. (Lalith\u201d p 151-2)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rajiva\ncommented on the paucity of civilian casualties in the war. The reports of the\nSri Lanka Monitoring Mission   indicated\nthat there were hardly any civilian casualties. This is almost unique in the\nhistory of this type of military operation. Western nations are much less cautious,\nRajiva observed. In Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004, the US army completely destroyed homes,\nschools, hospitals and killed civilians in droves, said analysts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have been\nable to establish that the armed forces have been concerned only with military\ntargets. There certainly had not been wanton attacks on civilians, said\nRajiva.  Air Force gave me full accounts\nof whatever they had targeted, and their record was impressive. In the period\npreceding the last phase there has been allegations of just 76 civilian deaths arising\nfrom over  air force 500 sorties   <\/em>  Air force had refused to take certain targets\nsaying it would lead to civilian casualties. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We took our\ntargets in the air force when we were 100 percent certain   that they were solely LTTE targets, Air Force\nsaid. We abandoned over 150 targets where we could inflict massive destruction\non LTTE as they were close to civilians. LTTE lasted two years and ten months\nonly because the Air Force had gone out of their way to avoid civilian\ncasualties.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

IDAG-S [1]<\/a>\nin its book The Numbers Game\u201d  , stated that\nhigh resolution satellite imagery  of the\nsecond and third No Fire Zones, showed that shells fired by the army, during\nthe months of February to May, 2009 \navoided  civilian settlements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

IDAG-S found that the aerial photographs of the   zone confirmed this. The Tamil civilian camp,\ntheir \u2018tent city\u2019, was vast and stretched for several hundreds of miles. The\ntents were so densely packed together that if the area had been attacked by army\nmortars, the resulting fires would have destroyed vast swathes of tents.  But the photographs show the tents\npractically untouched. The majority\nof the permanent structures in this zone were also intact.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

[1]<\/a> Independent  Diaspora Analyst\nGroup, Sri Lanka . IDAG-S is a think tank of academics,\nprofessionals and analysts from  the Sri Lankan diaspora in Europe, North\nAmerica and Australia. The lead author is an aerospace engineer who was able to\nbring a wide range of multidisciplinary skills to the task. https:\/\/groundviews.org\/2013\/05\/28\/sri-lankas-numbers-game\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KAMALIKA PIERIS The main charge against Sri Lanka at the UNHRC is that they deliberately killed thousands of civilians in the last phase of Eelam War IV. Rajiva Wijesinha was Secretary-General of the Sri Lankan Government Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process (SCOPP) from 2007\u20132009. In that capacity Rajiva had access to war data. Rajiva […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kamalika-pieris"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}