racist reuters reporter simon gardner equates tamils with terrorists yet again

as if in a hurry to fill the shoes of racist dumeetha luthra (btw i like the fact one of my posts detailing her racist reporting comes on top in google search for her name. serves a racist like her right, don't you think?) reuters correspondent in sri lanka simon gardner has posted a racist report equating tamils with ltte terrorists this is not the first time he has let slip his disgusting racist prejudices.

his headline originally read "Sri Lanka fights and evicts Tamils from capital". in other words sri lanka fights tamils not terrorists, according to this so called journalist. (original report with that title was withdrawn after about two hours though most of the content remained the same. see below for the original report). even the modified titles retains a version of inaccurate ethnic cleansing sounding "tamils evicted from colombo ".

may be reuters will soon report that americans and british are fighting against 'muslims'.

this racist also quotes an (as in one) unnamed(!) analyst saying that eviction of 376 tamils without identification and without any reason to be in colombo, is equivalent to ethnic cleansing. nowhere does he mention the fact that hundreds of thousands of tamils live in colombo. and that only real case of ethnic cleansing in sri lanka was carried out by ltte terrorists in north where presently almost 100% of the population is tamil.

he ignores the fact that most tamils do not support ltte and its terrorism.

he also ignores that most of the tamils in sri lanka live under areas under government control. the largest group of tamils the upcountry tamils are democratically represented in sri lankan government and the areas they live in are not affected by war. he also forgets to mention the fact that most of the northeast tamils (who are numerically smaller than upcountry tamils) also live in area under government control.

my opinion
i do not approve this move by police, precisely because it gives an opportunity for racists like simon gardner to make exaggerated claims about ethnic cleansing, though such claims can be easily refuted.

peacenik parroting expected
no doubt sl peaceniks (who also never mention the ltte's ethnic cleansing of northern province) will also claim that this eviction of 376 tamils is equivalent to ethnic cleansing. after all they always parrot absurd theories and exaggerations dreamed up by terrorist propaganda office as a matter of course.

remember how they claimed that there is a plan to ethnically cleanse trinco after the small riot there in april 2006. peacenik ngo, centre of policy alternatives, allegedly sent a fact finding mission led by sunila abeysekera to investigate and then issued a statement purporting to be its results. only it turned out that the statement was a word for word plagiarism from a post by pro ltte writer dbs jeyaraj who was not mentioned. most of the claims made in that statement including allegation of ethnic cleansing have proved false. one can verify that by going to trinco (and i regularly do) and observing how ethnically mixed a city it is, and how wrong cpa and other peacenisk were.

as always leading the peacenik pack in parroting terrorists, is the free media movement (yes the same group that protested against arrest of ltte related sinhala terrorists who were plotting to blow up buses in colombo). it seems that sunanda deshapriya of fmm wants nothing better than to see bombed civilian buses in colombo.

holding racists to account
best way to fight racists (especially racists like simon gardner who pretend to be journalists) is to expose and point out their racist attitudes to the public scrutiny.

it is up to sri lankan public to hold people who make such claims about ethnic cleaning to account. we must record their statements during the next few days and ask them in a week, a month, or a year later, to explain themselves when it becomes evident that there was no such ethnic cleansing and hundreds of thousands of tamils continue to live in colombo.

i will personally keep tabs on sri lankan bloggers who fall for this and parrot exaggerations about ethnic cleansing and i will remind them of their statements in the future.

original report

Sri Lanka fights and evicts Tamils from capital

By Simon Gardner

COLOMBO (Reuters) - Sri Lanka evicted hundreds of ethnic Tamils from the capital on Thursday citing security concerns, as troops battled Tamil Tiger rebels in jungles in the island's restive east.

Military spokesman Brigadier Prasad Samarasinghe said the army killed five insurgents overnight in a jungle area called Thoppigala in the eastern district of Batticaloa, and that fighting continued on Thursday as Japan's special peace envoy visited camps for war-displaced families in the area.

"We are continuing with our operation in Thoppigala and neutralising their positions," Samarasinghe said. He said four soldiers were injured during Wednesday's clash, the latest in a series of land and sea battles amid renewed civil war.

Back in Colombo, police packed 376 minority Tamils deemed without valid reasons to be in the capital into buses, most of them headed towards the northern district of Vavuniya - which is now the front line of the renewed civil war.

Rohan Abeywardene, Inspector General of Police for Colombo, said the ethnic Tamils were being sent back to their own villages for their own safety amid a rash of abductions blamed on state security services and Tamil Tiger rebels, and to avoid insurgents infiltrating the capital.

"Some people who had no valid reasons to be in Colombo and are just hanging around, they have been requested to leave and told they had better get back to their own villages," he said. "It is for their own good. You all have been complaining about people being abducted and arrested and detained."

"There is also a possibility that LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) cadres are among them also," he added.

Officials said most of those evicted would cross over into Tamil Tiger-held territory to return to their villages and that the Tigers had agreed to let them cross defence lines. The Tigers were not immediately available for comment.

ETHNIC CLEANSING?

Analysts decried the eviction as a shocking violation of human rights, with one likening it to a form of ethnic cleansing.

The move comes after a series of suspected Tamil Tiger bomb attacks in the capital in recent months as a conflict that has killed nearly 70,000 people since 1983 deepens.

Japanese envoy Yasushi Akashi, who is on a 5-day visit to try and find ways to salvage a battered peace process visited an elite police commando base and camps housing internally displaced in Batticaloa on Thursday, an aide said.

The camps are located far away from the jungles where the fighting is taking place.

Akashi was also due to visit the former rebel stronghold of Vakarai further north, which troops captured in January along with a vast swathe of eastern territory the rebels controlled under the terms of a tattered 2002 truce.

Japan has played down expectations of any breakthrough from the visit, but says the envoy will try to push forward an initiative to create a devolution proposal to end the conflict.

Reuters (IDS)

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