Politics in the Zeros

Counterinsurgency doctrine is the symptom of an idea more primeval and dangerous: violence is the solution.

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Flashing back from a card game, I reflect on some of the things I’ve seen. How am I compared to what?

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BBC headline trumpets, “Tamil refugees are allowed home.”   But read the article.  In fact, only 4,000 of the hundreds of thousands of Tamil refugees got to leave the camps this week. How many refugees are there?  The number commonly cited is 300,000– yet BBC says Vavuniya-adjacent Menik Camp alone holds 300,000 displaced people.  Anecdotal reports [...]

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Boston.com offers a stunning series of photos from the last days of the Sri Lankan conflict.  Some of them are gruesome.  Others are astoundingly beautiful.

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Sharif Abdullah writes: I continue to monitor the lack of progress in Sri Lanka since the end of the war. Now, months after the crushing defeat of the Tamil Tigers as a military force, there are still hundreds of thousands of innocent Tamil civilians locked in detention camps, with no relief in sight. Today, the trustworthy [...]

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For those unfamiliar with UTHR(J), they are a group of former professors, Tamils all, which has been critical of both sides in the Sri Lanka conflict– one of the few relatively unbiased sources of information and analysis on the conflict.  They have strongly criticized both LTTE and GOSL, resulting in the assassination of one of their founding members [...]

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Two problems with the defeat of the Tamil Tigers. First, the Sri Lankan government has not addressed the lingering grievances of the Tamil minority and has done little to alleviate the systemic and institutional racism in the country. [The government has] won the war, but are fully capable of losing the peace. They must quickly [...]

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“At this time when attention has been focused on the last phase of war and on the humanitarian crisis in the north, there is another less publicised crisis that requires urgent attention. This concerns the breakdown of law and order and the spate of kidnappings, murders and extortions taking place in the east and other [...]

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Sharif Abdullah writes: I shed no tears for the passing of the LTTE or its leader, Prabhakaran.  The goal of the organization was always unrealistic and its methods always brutally violent.  I am not sorry to see them go. I do lament the orgy of violence, and the bloodlust that still grips the island.  With [...]

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It’s official: the shooting war between the LTTE and Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) is over, and LTTE leader Prabhakaran is dead. GOSL killed an estimated 8,000 Tamil civilians getting the job done (some put the number far higher), and has incarcerated as many as a quarter million more in camps surrounded with razor wire. [...]

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