Sri Lanka genocide story draws 22m visitors, says Argentine paper

[TamilNet, Friday, 27 January 2012, 03:33 GMT]
The Spanish Language Diario La Tarde, an evening journal published by independent journalists in West Argentina said the recent web publication of the story "Genocidio: (Primera entrega) - La masacre de los Tamils en Sri Lanka," [Genocide: (First Delivery) The Slaughter of Tamils in Sri Lanka] drew 22 million visits in two days. The story appearing in Spanish covers history to the conflict, the slaughter at Mu'l'livaaykkaal, and asserts the post-conflict miliary aggression in Tamil areas as a form of structural genocide.

The story was pieced together by the paper's correspondent in England, Juan Manuel Velazquez with assistance from an Argentinian exile in UK and his Tamil contacts, according to the paper.

The article draws attention of the Spanish readers by comparing the burning of the Jaffna Library to if "Franco regime in Spain had come to burn the library of Salamanca or the Universidad de Granada, or as if military dictatorship of the regime in the Argentina had been looted and destroyed the historical documents of the Jesuit missions of the library of the Archdiocese of Córdoba."

The article mentions Archbishop of Mannar, Rayappu Joseph, compilation of the "list of 146.679 Tamils disappeared or killed between 2008 and 2009, of which 40,000 deaths occurred in the fateful 48 hours of the final assault on the enclave [Mu'l'livaaykkaal]."

The article questions why more than 50,000 Taml civilians are still in camps or in prison if the war was over two years earlier, and why the continued selective punishment of Tamils is still continuing. The paper avers to Colombo's strategy as intended to "exterminate" Tamil people, and proceeds to document the historical evidence in support of why the paper is calling the mass killings a genocide.

External Links:

LaTarde:

La masacre de los Tamils en Sri Lanka