5 years today - Satellite images confirm shelling of No Fire Zone, over 7000 Tamils killed in 3 months alleges TNA

30 April 2014

30 April 2009 - Satellite images confirm shelling of No Fire Zone, over 7000 Tamils killed in 3 months alleges TNALeaked satellite imagery from the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), revealed evidence of Sri Lankan shelling in the No Fire Zone, where 100000 Tamil civilians were estimated to be, reported the Inner City Press.The Tamil National Alliance, in a briefing to the British Foreign Secretary, alleged that over 7,000* civilians had been killed in Vanni with at least 14,000 injured over the previous three months.Speaking at a press meet, TNA MP Suresh Premachandran said,

“Sri Lanka government which had deceived the Tamils for the last 30 years is now deceiving the International Countries. It is killing its own citizens in violation of all the conventions of the UN including the one on Human Rights which the Sri Lanka government has ratified.”

“Why should the international community which had successfully made Kosovo an independent state for the killing of 1500 people remain passive though more than 7000 Tamils have been killed in the last 3 months alone?” he added.

The Tamil Guardian in its editorial wrote,

“Those who think that the LTTE will be destroyed in the coming weeks and that then it is a question of 'peace building' and 'development' for the next few years are gravely mistaken. The foundations for a cataclysmic civil war are being inexorably laid today. The kind of polarisation that sustain not decades, but generations of struggle has become widespread and embedded.”

(*The TNA estimates which echoed published UN estimates were later found to be drastically inaccurate. Anonymous UN officials, speaking to a French foreign correspondent in June 2009, said, 

"We rang the alarm bells for some months but no-one ever took the Sri Lankan government to task publicly.It gave the government a blank cheque to carpet bomb the whole area."

The United Nations in an internal review panel report later found that, 

'Seen together, the failure of the UN to adequately counter the Government’s under-estimation of population numbers in the Vanni, thefailure to adequately confront the Government on its obstructions to humanitarian assistance, the unwillingness of the UN in UNHQ and Colombo to address Government responsibility for attacks that were killing civilians, and the tone and content of UN communications with the Government on these issues, collectively amounted to a failure by the UN to act within the scope of institutional mandates to meet protection responsibilities.') 

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