Action Alert Archive
Take Action Now! (USA) Ask Congress to call for an immediate ceasefire in Sri LankaMarch 17, 2009 Recent reports from Colombo, Sri Lanka indicate that U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM) is planning to support an evacuation of Tamil civilians trapped by the Government of Sri Lanka's ruthless offensive. These plans, confirmed by Assistant Secretary Boucher, would involve U.S. military assets in the forced uprooting of over three hundred thousand civilians. These civilians would then be left under the control of the Sri Lankan Government who would force them into what Human Rights Watch has called "internment centers masquerading as 'welfare villages'". The Sri Lankan Government, which has engaged in a relentless war on the displaced through indiscriminate shelling and aerial bombardment, has continued the prosecution of this war through its treatment of civilians imprisoned inside these internment camps. Civilians in these camps live in squalid conditions without access to the outside world. They are "surrounded by barbed wire and machine gun nests" and are denied access to basic necessities. Sri Lanka - which had the highest rate of state-enforced "disappearances" in 2006 and 2007 - has already begun to lay the groundwork for disappearing hundreds of thousands more by deliberately underestimating the number of displaced in the region and denying access to the region for human rights monitors, aid organizations and journalists. The government has said that civilians inside territory controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) can be presumed to support the LTTE and therefore deserve to be treated as combatants. LTTE suspects - according to the government all 330,000 displaced - are secretly taken away upon entry into the camps for "arbitrary detention or possible enforced disappearances," Human Rights Watch reports. US PACOM's ill-conceived evacuation of these civilians will exacerbate the crisis and will make the United States an accomplice to the Sri Lankan government's genocidal war against Tamils. We ask you to express these concerns to the State Department, and urge them to halt plans to deliver hundreds of thousands of civilians into the hands of the Sri Lankan government. Instead, the United States should pressure the Sri Lankan government to accept an immediate ceasefire, along the parameters of the 2002 ceasefire agreement, which enables full access for human rights monitors, aid organizations and journalists throughout the region. |
The mission of People for Equality and Relief in Lanka (PEARL) is to end the systemic human rights abuses against the Tamil population in Sri Lanka, and promote equality, rights and justice on the island. PEARL is 501(c)3 non-profit organization led by human rights activists concerned about the situation in Sri Lanka. |
