Political Discretion & Sri Lanka’s Genocide Against Tamil

By February 22, 2015 -February 22, 2015

Braveen Nagendram

“I lived as best I could, and then I died. Be careful where you step: the grave is wide” – Epitaph for a Palestinian Child of the Nakba (“Catastrophe”) by Michael R. Burch

Genocide – The necessity to define

On the ashes of WWII the world had the moral duty to become conscious of the extent to which human violence and hatred went, so far as committing to eradicate the Jews. Despite the macabre events being so clear to the eyes, no words could fulfil the description of the ferocious crimes committed.

The horror and cruelty of inhumane acts, such as the Holocaust, cannot and must not repeat in the future. For this reason Raphael Lemkin, a Polish jurist of the Jewish origin, had the necessity to describe such violence in a univocal and exhaustive term. Thus, Lemkin’s neologism -“Genocide” formed, by the fusion of the greek wordghenòs (race, genre) and the latin word caedo (to kill).

The neologism was not sufficient; a neo legis had to be legislated to punish the perpetrators of genocide. It was in the same spirit that the General Assembly of the United Nation declared in December 1948, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide¹.

Nevertheless, the definition did not stop the dejavù of the genocide throughout the years. Despite more and more crimes being committed with the scheme and exact manner as in the definition of “Genocide”, the UN fails to recognise them. Why? Are these crimes jurisdictionally not eligible to be considered as genocide? Or, is there a political discretion for these bodies to decide whether these crimes can be considered as genocide?

Eelam Tamils and the structural genocide

Since 1948 the Eelam Tamil nation is being subjected to discrimination and state sponsored violence. In the name of independence the British unleashed their creation “Ceylon”, a unitary state structure, denying the pre-colonial condition of equity among the nations in the island. By suffocating the democratic aspirations of the Eelam Tamils, the British left the island imposing a majoritarianism system where the Mahawamsa ideology was institutionalised.Read More