{"id":82494,"date":"2013-04-15T12:10:50","date_gmt":"2013-04-15T12:10:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=82494"},"modified":"2013-04-20T12:45:25","modified_gmt":"2013-04-20T07:15:25","slug":"amid-abuse-and-fear-tamils-continue-to-flee-sri-lanka","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/amid-abuse-and-fear-tamils-continue-to-flee-sri-lanka\/","title":{"rendered":"Amid Abuse And Fear, Tamils Continue To Flee Sri Lanka"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Krista Mahr<\/a><\/span>–<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Krista Mahr<\/p><\/div>\n

The offices of a Tamil newspaper in northern\u00a0Sri Lanka<\/a>\u00a0were attacked on Saturday morning, the latest in a string of outrages on the press and a fresh reminder of how the war\u2019s end nearly four years ago did not bring peace for all in this South Asian nation. In what has been reported as the second strike on the paper\u2019s operations in two weeks, senior staff of\u00a0Uthayan<\/em>, a Tamil paper that has been critical of the government and the nation\u2019s powerful military, told reporters that three armed men broke into the paper\u2019s headquarters in the northern city of Jaffna, setting fire to the day\u2019s edition and to its printing presses.<\/p>\n

No employees were hurt in the attack, but they have been in the past. In 2011, an editor and reporter were attacked, and in 2006, gunmen stormed the paper\u2019s offices, killing two members of staff. Eswarapatham Saravanapavan,\u00a0Uthayan<\/em>\u2019s owner and a parliamentarian for the Tamil National Alliance party,\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0the U.K.\u2019s\u00a0Independent<\/em>\u00a0newspaper that he believed the attack on Saturday may have been linked to the military, which a military spokesman has denied.<\/p>\n

The tensions revealed in the incident are becoming depressingly familiar. The clouds have been darkening over this picturesque island nation in recent years as euphoria over the end of its long-running civil war has ebbed. Since its 2009 defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE<\/a><\/span>), an insurgency group that for decades fought for an independent homeland for the nation\u2019s ethnic Tamils, the Sri Lankan government has not responded to increasingly vocal demands from the international community for a investigation into alleged\u00a0war crimes<\/a>\u00a0committed in the final stages of the conflict. In March, 25 countries, including\u00a0India<\/a>, passed a U.S.-sponsored U.N. Human Rights Council resolution calling for a probe into those allegations and expressing concern at ongoing reports of human-rights abuses, including extrajudicial killings, disappearances and torture. Colombo called the measure a threat to Sri Lanka\u2019s domestic reconciliation efforts; Minister of Media and Information and government spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0the state-run Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corp. that \u201cthe U.S. government is trying to undermine Sri Lanka\u2019s endeavor to consolidate peace and harmony.\u201d<\/p>\n

That recalcitrance \u2014 paired with an oversize army without a war to fight and the enduring distrust of some sectors in the Tamil community \u2014 has prevented a more meaningful peace from taking hold. \u201cIt was the end of a war, but not the end of conflict,\u201d says Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu<\/a><\/span>, executive director of the Center for Policy Alternatives (CPA), a Colombo-based research group. \u201cThere are flagrant violations of rule of law and a culture of impunity that envelop this country.\u201d<\/p>\n

One\u00a0<\/strong>of the most obvious symptoms of that culture has been the near relentless siege on the nation\u2019s press. Sri Lanka ranks 162 of 179 countries in Reporters Without Borders\u2019 2013 World Press Freedom Index. Tamil news outlets, particularly those with historic links to the separatist movement, have long been regular targets, but members of Sri Lanka\u2019s Sinhala majority have not been spared either. In 2009, months before government forces defeated the LTTE,\u00a0Sunday Leader<\/em>\u00a0editor and TIME contributor Lasantha Wickrematunge, an outspoken critic of the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, was\u00a0assassinated by two gunmen<\/a>\u00a0on the way to his office,\u00a0prompting an exodus<\/a>\u00a0of independent-minded journalists. Wickrematunge had predicted his own demise. In a\u00a0chilling posthumous editorial<\/a>\u00a0published days after he was murdered, he wrote: \u201cWhen finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recently, rights groups staged a\u00a0campaign<\/a>\u00a0to stop the United Arab Emirates from deporting a well-known Tamil television reporter back to Sri Lanka, where they feared she would be tortured. Their concerns are well founded. Reports of military and police torture and sexual violence against Tamils with alleged separatist ties were not uncommon during the 26-year civil war. Returning Tamils now appear to be facing the same abuses. A Human Rights Watch report on alleged rapes that took place between 2006 and \u201912 found that sexual violence continues to be used by security forces against male and female prisoners with suspected links to the insurgency. Because the agency was unable to speak to those currently in detention in Sri Lanka, or conduct open research in the country, it believes that the 75 cases it has documented represent \u201ca fraction\u201d of total custodial rape cases.<\/p>\n

To escape this climate of fear, it appears that an increasing number of Tamils are fleeing Sri Lanka, boarding barely seaworthy vessels, bound for an uncertain future as asylum seekers. This is despite the government\u2019s official effort to reconstruct the war-torn north of the country. \u201cYou have a significant number of people leaving postwar, at a point at which the government is assuring that economic development is prioritized and reconciliation is being effected in earnest,\u201d says the CPA\u2019s Saravanamuttu. The fact that so many people are choosing to go \u201cseems to suggest people in the north don\u2019t feel that way. They are voting with their feet, so to speak, and they are paying fairly large sums of money and risking life and limb to do it.\u201d Saravanamuttu says that official numbers of the number of people leaving are unavailable, but to give just one example, over 6,000 Tamils arrived in Australia in 2012, some 30 times higher than the 2011 figure.<\/p>\n

Uthayan<\/em>, the newspaper whose offices were attacked, had been reporting on the encroachment of the military into local businesses in the north, the paper\u2019s owner has said. The ratio of military to civilians is exponentially higher in the region compared with the rest of the country, and now that they are not required to mop up armed insurgents, soldiers have taken on nonmilitary roles, such as farming and running small shops that compete against Tamil businesses. While new roads have been built and internationally funded efforts are under way to help the region get back to some version of its prewar self, many say that the military\u2019s overwhelming presence stands in the way of a return to\u00a0anything resembling normalcy<\/a>. Saravanamuttu recalls what one man from Jaffna told him after the war:\u00a0<\/strong>\u201cThings might look better, but they feel a lot worse.\u201d<\/p>\n

Courtesy\u00a0http:\/\/world.time.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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