{"id":115281,"date":"2021-06-16T15:48:24","date_gmt":"2021-06-16T22:48:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=115281"},"modified":"2021-06-16T15:48:24","modified_gmt":"2021-06-16T22:48:24","slug":"erasing-the-eelam-victory-pt-20-c2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2021\/06\/16\/erasing-the-eelam-victory-pt-20-c2\/","title":{"rendered":"ERASING THE EELAM VICTORY PT 20 C2"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

There was much speculation as to the number of\ncivilians killed in the last phase of the Eelam War IV, which ended in May\n2009. In the absence of reliable statistics,  \nthe Security Council and the Office of Secretary General had begun to\nrely on reports from Human Rights Watch and other international NGOs during the\nlast phase of the war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Persons who had some association with the war,\neither as a UN worker or a journalist assigned to cover the war or some such\ncapacity put forward their estimates of civilians killed. The numbers they\nprovided ranged from 147,000 estimated by the journalist, Frances Harrison    to 70,000 and 60,000. Finally the Eelamists\ndecided to settle on 40,000 as the figure for civilian deaths in the last phase\nof the war. The Darusman Report quoted this figure. This became the accepted\nnumber.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 Eelamists\ntried to find proof for these many deaths.  They looked for satellite photographs that\nindicated 40,000 bodies, but could not find any such satellite photos. 40,000 remained an arbitrary figure, with no\ndocuments to support it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The estimate of 40,000 civilian deaths at the\nend of the war was howled down by anti-Eelamists.  Criminal lawyers wanted to know where are\nthe bodies\u201d. Any assertion that there were 40,000 deaths must be matched by\nbodies, they said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Others pointed out that it was impossible to\nhide piles of skeletons or mountains of ashes derived   from\n40,000 bodies in an open area like Nandikadal, which was not heavily forested.\nAlso, if these bodies had indeed existed, then they would have been unearthed\nby the teams involved in mine clearing operations in the North. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

UN Crisis Operations Group (COG) based in Colombo,\nhad designed a rigorous methodology for collecting and verifying information on\ncivilian casualties, using multiple independent sources for each reported death\nor injury, leading to a conservative list of civilian casualties. But as time went on, UN found it\nincreasingly difficult to obtain corroboration from the required three\nindependent sources. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The UN placed the number of dead and the\nwounded, including LTTE combatants at 7,721 and 18,479, respectively. The\nreport dealt with the period August 2008 to May 13, 2009. The war ended a week\nafter the UN stopped collecting data. This UN report was not shown to the\ngovernment of Sri Lanka, but was given to the Darusman committee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lt. Col.  Anton Gash was the Foreign and Commonwealth\nOffice defense attach\u00e9 at the British Commission in Colombo during the closing\nstages of Sri Lanka\u2019s civil war.\n<\/strong>Gash\nestimated the number of deaths at 7,000 to 8,000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Foreign\nand Commonwealth Office had   told Lord\nNaseby when he asked for the Gash dispatches that Lt. Col. Gash was the FCO\u2019s\ndefense attach\u00e9 at the British Commission in Colombo during the closing stages\nof Sri Lanka\u2019s civil war. Many of his dispatches contain information provided\ndirectly to him by his contacts in the Sri Lankan government, the Sri Lankan\nArmy or other military sources. His reports indicate, he had access to reports\non troop movements, Sri Lankan military strategic thinking, and the movements\nof the LTTE and assessments of casualty figures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, after\nGash\u2019s departure, the UK discontinued having a resident Defence Advisor in\nColombo. Instead, New Delhi-based Defence Advisor looked after matters\npertaining to Sri Lanka,  for nearly a\ndecade. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the\n46th session of the Geneva-based United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). In  March 2021,  Sri Lanka belatedly, asked\nUK for the wartime dispatches by Gash. UK  \nrejected the request, saying that such a disclosure would impede their\nrelations with Sri Lanka. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

 Responding\nto Sri Lanka\u2019s request, for the full disclosure of dispatches, the UK played\ndown the importance of Gash reports. Gash reports couldn\u2019t be taken seriously,\nUK said,  as he merely reported irregular\ninformation obtained from various parties at different times. The reports had\nnot been based on properly examined evidence and information. They lacked independent\nconfirmation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lord Naseby,\nwho took strong action on this matter some years ago, had continued his\ninterest in the matter. He had earlier estimated that the civilian deaths were\nin the range of 7,000 to 8,000 deaths.  \nIn 2020, Lord Naseby put forward another number. He stated, I have\nspent 10 years looking at the reports by Gash, The University Teachers for\nHuman Rights Jaffna, the census and all other coverage I could find. The net\nresult is about 6,000 people killed, of which a quarter is Tamil Tigers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lt. Col. Anil Ameresekera stated that the\ngovernment conducted a very through Census after the end of the war using Tamil\nenumerators and arrived at a figure of approximately 7000 deaths during the\nlast few months of the war. This figure included LTTE cadres killed as well as\nthe civilians killed by the LTTE (sic). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

 Not everybody was pleased     about the reduced numbers. There is\nnothing for Sri Lanka to crow about with regard to the figure of 5,000, as\nagainst the figure of 40,000 in the Darusman report said Javid Yusuf. Five\nthousand is a large enough figure to be concerned about. But the more important\npoint is to determine what happened to each and every civilian unaccounted for,\nhowever big or small the numbers are. This can be done only after a proper\ninquiry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Are we seriously\nsaying that 7000 to 8000 is acceptable even though this number includes\ncombatants. The Gash report covers  a\nvery small period of the 30 year war, what about the rest of the war, asked\nTony Witham.  ( Continued)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KAMALIKA PIERIS There was much speculation as to the number of civilians killed in the last phase of the Eelam War IV, which ended in May 2009. In the absence of reliable statistics,   the Security Council and the Office of Secretary General had begun to rely on reports from Human Rights Watch and other international […]<\/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-115281","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\/115281","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=115281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115281\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}