Mandela and the other Prisoners of War

[TamilNet, Monday, 09 December 2013, 11:56 GMT]
As South Africa prepares for the funeral of iconic anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela, who passed away at the age of 95 on Thursday, leaders of the world have paid their tributes to the man who was incarcerated as a political prisoner under the apartheid regime for 27 years. Powerful countries in the West, including the USA and UK, which had once denounced Mandela as a ‘terrorist’, are now in the forefront paying homage. However, these establishments still continue to support countries that practice illegal detention and brutal treatment of prisoners-of-war (PoW). Noting this hypocrisy, a British-Kurdish activist, drawing a comparison between Mandela and PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan who has been kept in solitary confinement in a Turkish prison for 13 years, questions how one political leader is considered a “freedom fighter” and the other a “terrorist”.

Ruwayda Mustafah, a Kurdish writer and activist based in the UK, writing in the site Kurdishvoices.com on 6 December, argues “Abdullah Ocalan, similar to Nelson Mandela has renounced violence, continuously called for dialogue, peace, diplomacy and understanding between Kurdish people and the Turkish state.”

“He has played an instrumental role in supporting the peace-process in Turkey, although little credit has been attributed to him within the Turkish media in his role as a peace-mediator.”

“When people mourn Nelson Mandela, his legendary work, and praise his strength, I wonder, do they do the same for Abdullah Ocalan? What I don’t understand is, how is it that we have come to accept the imprisonment of Abdullah Ocalan as “justifiable” but not that of Nelson Mandela?

“Surely, if Mandela’s imprisonment was unwarranted (and no doubt it was) then the same line of reasoning/logic can be applied to Ocalan.”

Currently, Turkey is a strategic partner of the USA.

That these establishments that talk about human rights abuses alone but fail to challenge Sri Lanka over the question of hundreds of LTTE cadres who continue to remain PoWs without any sort of legal aid and are being subject to routine abuse should be no surprise.

While the Mandela that the establishments promote is the architect of ‘reconciliation’ – and this Mandela is acceptable by Sinhala leaders including those like Ranil Wickremesinghe to justify the fundamentally flawed LLRC recommendations and the unitary state of Sri Lanka – the other Mandela they would like to obfuscate would be the uncompromising fighter against structural racism.

However, Mandela fought in a completely different context. Apartheid South Africa was a racist state privileging the minority whites over the majority blacks, practicing structural discrimination against the latter.

Whereas Sri Lanka is a genocidal state that seeks the annihilation of the Eezham Tamil nation through structural genocide.

Tamil activists perceive that Mandela’s relevance to the Tamils lies more in the zeal with which he pursued his political goals strategically.

They join the world community in remembering the iconic leader.

TNA MP calls for international investigations on prisoners of war

[TamilNet, Sunday, 15 September 2013, 23:51 GMT]
Tamil National Alliance (TNA) parliamentarian Suresh Premachandran has called for an international investigation on the state of Prisoners of War (POW) according to international law on the conduct of war. Addressing a press conference in Jaffna on Friday, Mr Premachandran said the latest witness declaration by the SL military at Vavuniyaa High Courts that there are no former LTTE surrendees in their custody any more, while there are still hundreds of family members looking for their kith and kin, who had been handed over personally by them to the SL military, clearly indicated that the international community should now take the initiative to bring about international investigations on both war crimes and on the state of the Prisoners of War (POW).

“We are still having hundreds of witnesses, who had handed over their family members to the Sri Lankan Army in the hope that they would be released sooner or later. But, now the Sri Lankan military has given a witness statement to the Vavuniyaa High Court claiming that no LTTE members had surrendered to the Army and that no one is under their custody anymore as such. This clearly leads to the demand for an international investigation on both the war crimes and on the Prisoners of War,” Mr Premachandran said.

Apart from the witness statement by the Sri Lankan military at the Vavuniyaa High Court, Sarath Fonseka, the former Sri Lanka Army commander, who is now in political opposition to Mahinda Rajapaksa, has also stated in Jaffna last week that there was no LTTE commanders or key members handed over to the SL military. He went on declaring that all who were in custody under his command were accounted for and handed over to the new administration.

Sarath Fonseka had also gone on record denying that former Trincomalee Political Head of the LTTE, Mr Elilan, had been handed over to the SL military at Vadduvaakal in Mullaiththeevu.

Elilan’s wife Ananthi Sasitharan, who also represents the kith and kin of missing persons, is contesting the provincial council elections in the North seeking a political voice for them.

“Be it a key member of the LTTE or not, the Sri Lankan military has no right to kill the prisoners of war,” Suresh Premachandran MP further said at the press conference held in Jaffna.

SL presidential sibling and economic development minister Basil Rajapaksa told the people of Jaffna not to bring in the issues of missing persons and the issue of land appropriation in former High Security Zone during the election campaign.

Earlier, the Sri Lankan government claimed that more than 12,000 LTTE members had surrendered. Apart from a known number of people still held in prisons, all the remaining have been released after a so-called rehabilitation programme at the hands of the genocidal military. But, the fate of hundreds of key members who were handed over or filtered away from the people by the SL military after the end of war, is still not known.

IC turns deaf ear to struggling Eezham Tamil Prisoners of War’

[TamilNet, Thursday, 05 July 2012, 09:05 GMT]

The international community of establishments and their agenda-driven outfits continue to turn deaf-ear to the plight of the Eezham Tamil Prisoners of War (POWs), failing to accord the necessary international legal status to Eezham Tamil POWs, who have become the ‘pawns of genocide’, activists in the island blamed following the reports on Wednesday that a 28-year-old Tamil prisoner, Ganesan Nimalarooban from Nelukku'lam in Vavuniyaa, had succumbed to his injuries at Mahara prison in South. All the 122 prisoners who were inside the raided prison cell in Vavuniyaa last Friday were taken to Anuradhapura prison, where Sinhala prison guards and criminal inmates tortured them for more than 10 hours. 22 of these Eezham Tamil POWs were later transferred to Mahara prison and Nimalarooban, hailng from a poverty-stricken family in the suburb of Vavuniyaa, was one of them.

According to the family of the victim, he was only arrested on mere allegations that he was an LTTE member. The family was struggling to access the body of the victim for burial. The body of the victim is at the mortuary of Ragama government hospital, informed sources said.

Sri Lankan prison guards and Sinhala inmates in the prisons in the South, especially at the notorious Anuradhapura prison, have been torturing and harassing 122 Eezham Tamil Prisoners of War, who were forcefully relocated after the fatal commando attack on the protesting prisoners last Friday, the sources in the South said.

TNA parliamentarians Selvam Adaikkalanathan, Sivasakthi Ananthan and Suresh Premachandran visited Mahara prison on Wednesday. Six of the 22 prisoners transferred to Mahara prison have been admitted at the hospital in the prison, they said. Another four are admitted at public hospital outside the prison, they said. The victim is one of these four, they added.

Suresh Premachandran, the media spokesman of the TNA, speaking to TamilNet said he was concerned that the lives of Tamil ‘political prisoners’ are threatened at the hands of the Sri Lankan prison guards and Sinhala prisoners in Anuradhapura prison. He was counting on legal action in Sri Lankan courts on behalf of the family to get the body of the slain victim.

There were 32 confirmed political prisoners and prisoners of war in Vavuniyaa prison although there were 122 prisoners in total at the raided facility. It was these 32 prisoners who were severely attacked.

Mr Premachandran said he was only able to confirm that 3 prisoners were transferred to Bogombara prison in Kandy, 1 to Anuradhapura and 22 to Mahara.

In the meantime, Jaffna based rights activists have called for Eezham Tamil diaspora in Norway and Switzerland to take up the matter with their respective governments, which had the ‘opening’ to engage with the LTTE and the GoSL, the parties till the last moment of the failed peace process and the war in which they even attempted to assist and witness as remote third parties to white-flag surrender of certain LTTE officials and cadres.

“Why the establishments of the IC that seek to control the flow of Tamil asylum seekers taking boats through human trafficking agents, avoid focusing on the plight of the Tamil POWs,” one of the activists questioned.

Meanwhile, providing details of the raid on Vavuniyaa prison, the sources in Vavuniyaa said that the SL forces had also fired gunshots causing injuries to the suffering prisoners after firing more than 20 tear gas bombs into their cell on Friday.

Many of the prisoners were bleeding and were in unconscious state already when they were brought to Anuradhapura, where they were subjected to torture between 1:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. They were not provided any food or water.

The ill-treatment of the Tamil POWs were exposed to the global Tamils following the raid on Friday, which has come three years after the end of war.

The Tamil prisoners were peacefully protesting over a number of days, demanding to show them one of their inmates who was subjected to severe torture and allegedly taken away by the SL military.

However, their protest took the form of a ‘polite’ hostage taking drama, when three Sinhala officers attempted to forcefully feed them to end their hunger strike last week.

The enraged prisoners of war, most them former LTTE cadres, kept three of the prison officers as hostages causing the prison authority to enter into negotiations through a Judge. They were demanding the return of the tortured inmate, Saravanabhavan, for the release. The hostage drama and the ‘negotiation’ failed to produce any result. Later, on Friday, the SL Special Task Force commandos raided their cell.

The news was completely suppressed by the SL prison authorities. Even the southern media that wage a campaign against the ruling regime in Colombo failed to give coverage. The prisoners, using cell-phones, which they kept hidden in their possession, had communicated to the outside world through exiled Tamil journalists who are operating websites from outside the island.

The SL Defence establishment, in a hurried psy-ops manoeuvre twisted the story in its projection against the Tamil diaspora. While doing so it had admitted that there was a violent prison raid where STF commandos were deployed and that the prisoners were transferred. The SL defence establishment alleged that the prisoners were being ‘guided’ over satellite phone by the ‘LTTE diaspora’.

There was no update on the situation of those numbering around 100, who were allegedly being detained in Anuradhapura prison.

Chronology:

05.07.12  ‘IC turns deaf ear to struggling Eezham Tamil Pris..

29.06.12  SL forces fatally attack protesting Tamil Prisoner..