The politics of terror

In the meantime Sri Lanka is in the process of becoming a military state. Despite the ending of the war the Sri Lankan army will expand from 200,000 to 300,000 to become an army of occupation in the north and east. The Tamils are the big losers. Hated by the Sinhalese where will they go? They cannot be held in camps indefinitely where the child mortality rate is estimated to be in the hundreds each month.

Another Australian response has been to give the expanding terrorism industry, driven by an unsophisticated and ill-advised AFP, its head. They continue to pursue through the Supreme Court of Victoria charges of terrorism against three young Tamil men for allegedly being members of the LTTE and sending funds to that organisation. Why pursue the case when the Sri Lankan government says that the LTTE no longer exists? In any case funds despatched to the LTTE when it existed could have been used for any purpose, humanitarian, educational as well as military, given that the LTTE constituted the governing authority in the north.

Australia must protest the continued detention of Tamils in Sri Lanka. It must seek to provide urgent humanitarian assistance of a kind provided after the tsunami, it must seek the release of Tamils from the camps and allow access by the international media. It must facilitate the processing of detainees for migration who have family and relatives in Australia. The Sri Lankan government have behaved a lot more badly than the Fijian government; Sri Lanka should be expelled from the Commonwealth.

Australia must protest the conviction of editor and journalist J.S. Tissainayagam by the Sri Lankan High Court for two editorials criticising the government. Dr Sam Pari, spokeswoman for the Australian Tamil Congress said to the ABC that writing against the Sri Lankan government’s war on the Tamil people in their eyes amounts to supporting terrorism.

Dr Pari said Australia should be treating Sri Lanka in the same way that it treated South Africa and place sanctions against Sri Lanka.

In terms of press freedom, Sri Lanka ranks 165 out of 175 countries surveyed by the International Press Institute.

Mr Tissainayagam is the winner of international awards for courageous and ethical reporting and in May, Barack Obama described him as an “emblematic example” of a journalist persecuted for doing his job.

The crushing of Tamil towns and settlements in the north, the murder and continued detention of hundreds of thousands of Tamils in appalling conditions amounts to ethnic cleansing and no amount of hiding behind the war on terror will alter that stark and appalling truth.

What a changed nation we are when we send Admirals to argue for incarceration of innocents rather than act as a vehicle for humanitarian assistance. We have been railroaded by the needs of the terrorism industry which has fuelled apprehension and fear, when what is required is a more sophisticated understanding of the causes of terrorism. Addressing poverty, racism, the disproportionate distribution of power, abuse of power and the debilitating effect of corruption, would enable the causes of terrorism to be addressed before violence is embraced as a course of action to address injustice.