CLASSIFIED | POLITICS | TERRORISM | OPINION | VIEWS

Your concerns on Sri Lanka-The Directors and Staff -HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH

Asoka Weerasinghe Gloucester . Ontario . Canada

July 9, 2008

The Directors and Staff
*HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH*
New York

*Re: Your concerns on Sri Lanka*

If I were you, I would have a sleuth hanging around your office coffee urn and the water cooler to see whether anyone is spiking your coffee and water with an anti-Sri Lanka drug, or else you all wont come up with such questionable rubbish on Sri Lanka’s human rights and lambasting the Sri Lankan government. Beyond my asking you, what the heck did you all smoke before you came to office this morning, I smell a “We Gotch Ya!
Sri Lanka” rat among you lot, and a damn putrid one too.

You have the audacity and the temerity to pretend that you all are squeaky clean and impartial when going after the Thai insurgents for beheading civilians, but not the Tamil Tigers, the most ruthless terrorists in the world. They are the maestros of lamp post killings, burning alive their opponents, plucking infants from their mothers arms and bashing their heads among rocks as if they are bashing coconuts in the front of a statue of God Ganesh seeking blessings for a safe journey, and chopping off the wrist of one defiant Tamil who went and dropped his ballot into a ballot box without boycotting the government election. That is how sick these Tamil Tigers are, and that is how sick *Human Rights Watch* is for condoning such human tragedy. You call
yourselves* Human Rights Watch*, my foot!

It was the wee-morning of the 30^th November 1984; the place was the Dollar Farm and Kent Farm in the north-east of Sri Lanka. A witness of this massacre by the Tamil Tigers speaks … “Thereafter the Cultivation Officer and about another 15 persons who were living on the Farm were pulled out of their village huts by these Tamil terrorists and herded into the Office building. Thereafter the terrorists locked the door of the Office Building, poured kerosene oil around the building and set fire to it. While the office building was burning the terrorists started throwing bombs inside the building.” And *Human Rights Watch*, you seem be nonplused about such brutality and have the audacity to hound the Sri Lankan government which is fighting this brand of terrorism and trying to honour the right-to-life of its citizens. Just get off Sri Lanka government’s back.

There were 10 people who were executed included six members of one family who were made to kneel before they were shot from behind at the site of an irrigation ditch in the village of Siripura in the east of Sri Lanka.

The day was the auspicious day for the Buddhists, it was Vesak of 1984, and they had every intention to go to the village Buddhist temple in the morning to pay homage to the Buddha. Not a chance as the cowardly Tamil Tiger bastards’ got them before it could happen. Fourteen year old J.D.
Chandrasiri who survived by pretending to be dead among the huddle of bodies, described the killing in which his sister, brother-in-law and their four children died having being shot by these cowards.

“Two terrorists broke into our four room mud house on the outskirts of the village around midnight. We were made to kneel in a mock-execution inside the house and then marched out about 30 yards across the irrigation ditch to a dirt road leading to the village. We were made to kneel at a sign which said ‘Stop’ and at this time the men opened fire.
As soon as I heard the sound I fell flat on my stomach and pretended to be dead.” *Human Rights Watch*, don’t you all have a single heart that weeps for these poor villagers who were killed by the Tamil Tiger terrorists. These are the Tamil Tiger terrorists you refuse to vilify, yet have the audacity to go after the Sri Lankan government which is fighting these terrorists in the name of Human Rights to assure its people their right-to-life. For Pete-sake, be human and get off the Sri Lankan government’s back and let them do what is right for its unarmed, innocent peoples.

Two hours after dusk on Saturday the 1^st of December in 1984, the most inhumane and beastly attack on innocent fisher folk by the Tamil Tiger terrorists took place in two fishing villages of Kokilai and Nayaru, 12 miles south of Mullaithivu. On that fateful day 14 innocent Sinhalese civilians were brutally butchered by the Tamil Tiger terrorists. They didn’t even spare innocent children, let alone the women. Two young sisters in their early 20s were tied to each other with their long flowing hair and were shot through their faces at close range. These two young women died embracing and hugging each other.

These are the Tamil Tigers that *Human Rights Watch* has preferred to throw in a life line by going after the Sri Lankan Government. I say “Just cut it out”. Show us that you too like most of us have qualities of humanity, and have the courage to point our fingers at wrong doers, not fearing their festoons of ammunition around their necks, nor the sight of them cradling their Kalashnikovs, and refusing to be silenced with their tainted $1000 dollar bills.

Don’t your working Manual say, that the Governments under the pressures of country insurgencies by un-elected groups, who fancy themselves as Freedom Fighters, have the right to defend the right-to-life of its citizens a very tenet of Human Rights. That they have the right to fight off their enemy who are coming at them with Kalashnikovs and claymore mines, with equally sophisticated weaponry rather than battling its enemy with catapults and stones and bamboo sticks?

Come on *Human Rights Watch*, grow up. Have you been wearing blinkers all this while? What is going on in Sri Lanka is a bloody war, and they shoot at each other, they kill and they die. And there are always human rights violations in such a theatre. The fact is there is nothing that the Goody-Two-shoes, *the Human Rights Watch* can quote nor thrust in front of the face of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, saying, “Here Sir, this is our War Bible, which shows you how to go to war and not kill any one, nor violate human rights, which we expect you to follow, or else…”
It is that simple.

*Human Rights Watch*, let’s see how fair you are, let’s see how grown up you are, and let’s see how righteous you are by going after the Tamil Tigers, the way you have been going after the Thai insurgents. If this is beyond you, and if your “We Gotch Ya! Sri Lanka” mandate doesn’t permit you to do so, then my advice to you is to *Keep Your Noses and hands off Sri Lanka.’*

**If you all are feeing the heat around your necks right now ladies and gentlemen, then it would certainly be from the spitting cart wheels of anger from my eyes.

Sincerely,
Asoka Weerasinghe

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