Despite repeated international entreaties, the Sri Lankan state is continuing to kill Tamil civilians with artillery and airstrikes. More than three thousand shells were fired on Tuesday alone, at the tiny enclave where hundreds of thousands of starving Tamils are cowering, surrounded by the army.
This slaughter is taking place in plain sight of the international community. Yet the international response, especially those of the UN and western liberal states, has been pathetic.
What is shocking is not only that Sri Lanka can casually kill hundreds of people on account of their ethnicity, but that it is, at the same time, allowed to thumb its nose at those powerful liberal states which have long espoused human rights, the Geneva conventions and, most recently, the responsibility to protect.
Sri Lanka allowed a tiny amount of food and medicine into the warzone on 2 April – 27 long days ago. The UN asked Colombo for humanitarian access to the suffering people in the northern warzone and the hundreds of thousands who escaped the shelling only to be penned behind razor wire in government camps. It was bluntly refused. Yet senior UN official, Sir John Holmes, who rushed to Sri Lanka on Monday, nonetheless handed over $10m before leaving. Holmes, interestingly, was last year denounced by Colombo as a "terrorist sympathiser" for criticising the impact of the government’s war on civilians. His protest was a murmur.
Last week the UK, the EU and the UN called for a humanitarian ceasefire. Sri Lanka refused. On Saturday the White House demanded that Sri Lanka stopped the shelling of the "no-fire zone". Sri Lanka instead escalated its shelling and bombing, which is killing thousands of children. No word as yet from the White House.
What is important here is that the US, UK and EU are allies of Sri Lanka and have strongly backed the military campaign against the Tamil Tigers, while holding out hope – and it was nothing but misguided hope – that Colombo would put forward a political solution to the decades-long Tamil question.
Now, despite the "never again" rhetoric that appeared in the wake of the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and the genocide in Rwanda and Darfur, the UK and like-minded states are, by their lacklustre response, emboldening Sri Lanka’s defiance of international norms and its wholesale killing of Tamil civilians.
This human catastrophe is happening on Brown’s, Sarkozy’s, Ban Ki Moon’s and Obama’s watch.
This is not from ignorance or the impossibility of verifying what is going on – the UN’s and US’s satellites have long been tracking and photographing the mayhem in northern Sri Lanka.
The foreign ministers of UK, France and Sweden were scheduled to arrive today in Colombo to secure a ceasefire and halt the massacres. But no sooner had their visit been announced, Sri Lanka refused the Swedish minister, Carl Bildt, a visa.
Sweden has reacted, quite rightly, by recalling her envoy to Colombo.
However, the decision by the other two ministers, Britain’s David Miliband and France’s Bernard Kouchner, to continue their visit is a further signal of the lack of international resolve when it comes to genocidal states. They and the rest of the EU should instead have responded in step with Sweden.
While many other countries expect Britain to take leadership in ending the catastrophe in Sri Lanka, its former colony, London’s response continues to be strikingly and demonstrably weak. It is arguable that Britain’s failure to mobilise an adequate international response to Sri Lanka is actually making it possible for the killings to continue.
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