தமிழர்களைக் கொல்லும் கொத்தபாயா, சரத் பொன்சேகாவுக்கு எதிராக நடைபெறும் வழக்கிற்கு உதவி செய்யுங்கள்

https://www.tamilsagainstgenocide.org/Donate.aspx

சூடான் நாட்டில் நடைபெற்ற படுகொலைகளுக்கு காரணமான சூடான் நாட்டுத்தலைவரை சர்வதேச நீதிமன்றம் கைது செய்யும் படி தீர்ப்பளித்து இருக்கிறது. இவ்வழக்கு 2002ல் ஆரம்பிக்கப்பட்டது. கொத்தபாயா , சரத் பொன்சேகா ஆகியோருக்கு எதிராக நடைபெறும் வழக்கிற்கு உதவி செய்யுங்கள்.

International Criminal Court sets sights on Sudan's Omar al-Bashir

The International Criminal Court is to issue an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese President, over the alleged genocide in Darfur, according to reports.

The move by judges in The Hague is the first time that the tribunal on war crimes has sought the detention of a sitting head of state since it began its work in 2002.

Details of the charges against Mr al-Bashir had not been disclosed, The New York Times said.

Last year, the ICC's chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, asked the court for an arrest warrant for Mr al-Bashir on 10 counts of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur.

Mr Moreno-Ocampo said that a military campaign that targeted civilians had been masterminded by Mr al-Bashir.

UN officials said that Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary-General, had been told of the decision to issue the warrant, which was expected to be formally announced at the court in the next few days.

A majority of Security Council members have argued that the case against Mr al-Bashir should proceed, saying that he has not done enough to stop the bloodshed in Darfur to be reprieved.

Many African and Arab nations counter that issuing a warrant for Mr al-Bashir's arrest could backfire, diminishing Sudan's willingness to negotiate for peace, The New York Times reported. Others, including some UN officials, worry that a warrant could provoke reprisal attacks against civilians, aid groups or the thousands of international peacekeepers deployed in Darfur.

Lawyers familiar with the case said that the court had already sought to freeze the President's assets.

Sudan's UN Ambassador, Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamad, said: "We have not been told about this but it would not be a surprise to us. It does not concern us."

According to the United Nations, 300,000 people have died and more than 2.2 million have fled their homes since rebels in Darfur rose up against the Khartoum Government in February 2003. Sudan puts the death toll at 10,000.

The Arab-led government responded to the rebellion with a ferocious counter-attack, which the court's prosecutor called a genocidal strategy against Darfur's black African ethnic groups.

On Tuesday, Mr Ban urged Khartoum to act "very responsibly" if an arrest warrant is issued for Mr al-Bashir.

The UN chief told a press conference that whatever decision the ICC reached, "it will be very important for President al-Bashir and the Sudanese government to react very responsibly and ensure the safety and security'' of UN peacekeepers and protect the human rights of the population".

In Washington, the Save Darfur Coalition, an alliance of more than 180 US faith-based, advocacy and human rights organisations, said that UN member states must not continue "to do business as usual with al-Bashir once he is an indicted war criminal".

It added: "At a minimum, countries should not allow him to travel to their territory and should limit diplomatic interaction with him in Khartoum to efforts to end the crisis in Darfur and bring peace to all of Sudan."

The group said that the Sudanese government should be warned that it would be held responsible for any pre-emptive or retaliatory action against civilians, humanitarian aid workers, or UN and African Union peacekeeping forces.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/worl...icle5713868.ece

COMMENTARY:

Bosnia has its Radovan Karadzic, Sudan has its Omar Bashir and the United States could have its Gotabhaya Rajapaksa. He is a United States citizen serving as Sri Lanka's Sinhala Buddhist defense secretary who may be complicit in an ongoing genocide against Sri Lanka's Tamils.

While Mr. Rajapaksa enjoys a presumption of innocence, the United States should be investigating to ensure it is as scrupulous in genocide enforcement as is expected of foreign governments.

Until Mr. Karadzic's recent capture by Serbia, the United States had imposed economic sanctions against the Serbian government for noncooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal. An additional earmark of United States abhorrence of genocide is the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) in the U.S. Justice Department. It is tasked to investigate individuals complicit in Nazi-sponsored acts of persecution who subsequently entered the United States by fraud. The guilty are denaturalized or deported.

The OSI would thus be well suited to lead a genocide investigation of the defense secretary. The United States criminal code prohibits the crime, wherever perpetrated, by a United States national, green-card holder or any other person found or brought into the country.

Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" featuring anti-Jewish diatribes previewed the Holocaust. The parallel political dynamic at work in Sri Lanka is the Buddhist Mahavamsa combined with Buddhist monk teachings that non-Buddhist Tamils must be exterminated to honor Buddha's vision of an ethnically pure Sri Lankan state. As recently as July 20, 2008, AFP news service quoted Mr. Rajapaksa's close colleague, Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka, as describing Sri Lanka as a "Sinhala nation" to the exclusion of Tamils. That exclusionary concept is reminiscent of Hitler's ambition to make Nazi Germany "judenfrei," or free of Jews. And just as Hitler's Waffen SS was pure Aryan, the Rajapksa-Fonseka Sri Lankan armed forces are virtually pure Sinhala.

An investigation of Defense Secretary Rajapaksa would seem amply justified by the benchmarks of the Karadzic or Bashir indictment or arrest warrant. All three are potentially culpable under the time-honored doctrine of command responsibility. Generally speaking, it imposes criminal liability on government superiors who either knew or had reason to know of war crimes by subordinates and neglected to take reasonable measures to prevent or to punish the perpetrators.

Mr. Karadzic confronts a trial for, among other things, genocide of thousands of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. On July 14, 2008, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, applied for an arrest warrant against President Bashir. The application accused him of genocide by killing, raping and starving members of the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups.

The prosecutor specially emphasized that President Bashir "denies victims [of genocide] access to the criminal justice system, while using the system against those who did not comply with his genocidal orders. [He] protects, promotes and provides impunity to his subordinates, in order to secure their willingness to continue committing crimes. He could authorize investigations of members of the armed and security forces, but the only officers investigated are those who refuse to participate in crimes." Prosecutor Moreno-Ocampo concluded: "Al Bashir's motive was control of power. His pretext was a 'counterinsurgency.' His intent was genocide."

There is reason to believe that Gotabhaya Rajapaksa has been complicit in a Srebrenica-like genocide or worse against Sri Lanka's Tamils on the installment plan. Since entering office in November 2005, he has been witness to the extrajudicial killings of more than 1,500 Tamils, torture, scores of kidnappings, countless arbitrary detentions and displacement of more than 250,000, a staggering percentage of Tamils who have not fled abroad seeking asylum. The Asian Human Rights Commission reported on Feb. 2, 2007: "A disappearance every five hours [in Sri Lanka] is a result of a deliberate removal of all legal safeguards against illegal detention, murder and illegal disposal of bodies."

The U.S. State Department's 2007 human rights report on Sir Lanka elaborated: "[T]he overwhelming majority of victims of human rights violations, such as killings and disappearances, were young male Tamils. Credible reports cited unlawful killings by government agents, assassinations by unknown perpetrators, politically motivated killings and child soldier recruitment by paramilitary forces associated with the government, disappearances, [and] arbitrary arrests and detentions. ... By year's end, extrajudicial killings occurred in Jaffna on a daily basis and allegedly perpetrated by military intelligence units or associated paramilitaries."

There has not been a single prosecution for these crimes. Indeed, in the entire 60-year history of the Sinhala-Buddhist dominated governments in Sri Lanka, no crime against a Tamil has ever been punished - a grisliness that apes Hitler's impunity for Nazi crimes against Jews.

The United States cannot credibly berate other countries over lax assistance in genocide prosecutions if does not meticulously enforce its own genocide prohibitions. Gotabhaya Rajapaksa deserves a presumption of innocence. An investigation could exonerate him of criminality. But both direct and circumstantial evidence militate in favor of taking at hard look at what has been done and is being done to Sri Lanka's Tamils.

Bruce Fein is a constitutional lawyer at Bruce Fein & Associates and a representative of Tamils Against Genocide, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the prosecution of perpetrators of genocide against Tamils.

- The washington times

நான் ஒரு $100 பங்களிப்பு செய்திருக்கிறேன் இன்று..! நாம் எல்லோரும் இதற்கு உதவி நின்று இந்த நடவடிக்கை தொய்வில்லாமல் செல்ல உதவ வேண்டும்..!

Genocide in Sri Lanka

THE BARRAGE of media reporting of the grim conflict in Sri Lanka has captured popular imagination, but has overlooked the grisly Sinhalese Buddhist genocide of innocent Hindu or Christian Tamil civilians by a US dual citizen and US green card holder. The two should be investigated and prosecuted in the United States.

Acting on behalf of Tamils Against Genocide, I recently delivered to US Attorney General Eric H. Holder a three-volume, 1,000 page model 12-count genocide indictment against Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Sarath Fonseka charging violations of the Genocide Accountability Act of 2007. Derived from affidavits, court documents, and contemporaneous media reporting, the indictment chronicles a grisly 61-year tale of Sinhalese Buddhists attempting to make Sri Lanka "Tamil free."

Rajapaksa and Fonseka assumed their current offices in December 2005. They exercise command responsibility over Sri Lanka's mono-ethnic Sinhalese security forces. On their watch, they have attempted to physically destroy Tamils in whole or in substantial part through more than 3,800 extrajudicial killings or disappearances; the infliction of serious bodily injury on tens of thousands; the creation of punishing conditions of life, including starvation, withholding medicines and hospital care, humanitarian aid embargoes, bombing and artillery shelling of schools, hospitals, churches, temples; and the displacements of more than 1.3 million civilians into camps, which were then bombed and shelled. This degree of mayhem inflicted on the Tamil civilian population because of ethnicity or religion ranks with the atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo that occasioned genocide indictments against Serbs by the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

During the past month, a virtual reenactment of the Bosnian Srebrenica genocide of more than 7,000 Muslims has unfolded. Sri Lanka's armed forces employed indiscriminate bombing and shelling to herd 350,000 Tamil civilians into a government-prescribed "safety zone," a euphemism for Tamil killing fields. There, more than 1,000 have been slaughtered and more than 2,500 have been injured by continued bombing and shelling.

As a preliminary to the horror, roads and medical aid were blocked, and humanitarian workers and all media were expelled. During a BBC radio interview on Feb. 2, Rajapaksa declared that outside the "safety zone" nothing should "exist." Accordingly, a hospital has been repeatedly bombed, killing scores of patients. Rajapaksa further proclaimed that in Sri Lanka, any person not involved in fighting the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam is a terrorist.

The United States assailed and sanctioned Serbia for noncooperation in apprehending genocide defendants Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic, and Ratko Mladic. The United States should be no less scrupulous in prosecuting suspected genocide by its own citizens or permanent residents. Further, under Article 5 of the Genocide Convention of 1948, ratified by the United States Senate in 1986, the United States is obligated to provide "effective penalties" for genocide. That imposes an obligation on signatory parties to investigate and to prosecute credible charges - a benchmark that has been satisfied by TAG's 1,000-page model 12-count indictment of Rajapaksa and Fonseka.

The predictable defense of counter-terrorism will not wash. Not a single Tamil victim identified in the model indictment was involved in the war between the Government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The lame excuse of defeating terrorism was advanced by Sudanese President Omar Bashir to a genocide arrest warrant over Darfur issued by chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo of the International Criminal Court. The chief prosecutor retorted that although Bashir's pretense was counterterrorism, his intent was genocide.

The State Department lists Sri Lanka as an investigatory target in the Office of War Crimes. The New York-based Genocide Prevention Project last December labeled Sri Lanka as a country of "highest concern." President Barack Obama has made the case for military intervention in Sudan or elsewhere to stop genocide. All the more justification for the United States to open an investigation of the voluminous and credible 12 counts of genocide against a United States citizen and permanent resident alien assembled by Tamils Against Genocide.

A genocide indictment would probably deter Rajapaksa and Fonseka from their ongoing atrocities against Tamil civilians. There is no time to tarry.

Bruce Fein is counsel for Tamils Against Genocide and former associate deputy attorney general under President Reagan.

- http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editoria...e_in_sri_lanka/