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| Sri Lanka |
| Britain: ŽMore than 20,000 Tamils killedŽ in Sri Lankan war |
| 2009-05-30 |
| [ADN Kronos] More than 20,000 Tamil civilians were killed in the Sri Lankan military's final assault on separatist militants this month, a British newspaper said on Friday. The London Times said the figure was three times the official casualty figures released by the government. Fighting ended in the country's troubled north east when Sri Lankan troops crushed Tamil Tiger separatists accused of holding tens of thousands of civilians as human shields, said The Times. Citing its own investigation, the paper said most of the 20,000 deaths were caused by the government. Sri Lanka has insisted its forces stopped using heavy weapons on 27 April and respected a no-fire zone where 100,000 men, women and children were sheltering, the newspaper reported. Government officials blamed all civilian casualties on Tamil Tiger rebels concealed among the civilians. Confidential UN documents indicated 7,000 civilians died in the no-fire zone up to the end of April, The Times said. But citing aerial photographs, official documents, witness accounts and expert testimony, the news report said the death toll rose. It claimed that 1,000 civilians were killed each day until 19 May, the day after the death of the leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Velupillai Prabhakaran. A spokesman for the Sri Lankan High Commission in London dismissed the report. "We reject all these allegations. Civilians have not been killed by government shelling at all," he told the paper. "If civilians have been killed, then that is because of the actions of the LTTE who were shooting and killing people when they tried to escape," he said. The government last week announced the end of its 25-year civil conflict with Tamil separatists after the death of Prabhakaran. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #2 There's a lesson here. We taught the Japanese that lesson in 1945 at Hiroshima and Nagasaki: don't stage a surprise attack on the U.S. You won't like how we respond. Various other countries have either taught or learned this lesson the hard way over the millennia. Now the Tamils learned: stage a revolution, send out boom bitches to assassinate leaders in other countries, treat the people cruelly, and refuse to 'negotiate' when the rest of the world begs you to do so -- and you just might get mopped up completely by a pissed-off government and its army. Sure hope you got the message; be a shame if the Lankans had to do it again in a few years. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2009-05-30 16:15 |
| #1 'cud ya lend us somma them Lanka army blokes to come clean up finsbury park? |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2009-05-30 00:50 |