HR situation deteriorating - UTHR(J)
The human rights situation in Sri Lanka is deteriorating, the University Teachers for Human Rights (UTHR) Jaffna said in its latest report released yesterday.
The award winning human rights organization, whose writers are in hiding overseas owing to threats, also said that the President’s pledge of a political solution once the war was won was disingenuous if one looked at the East where he claims he has restored democracy by instituting a “toothless provincial council.”
“A responsible government must think and do the political work it is there to do, in winning over the Tamils and to persuade the world that it has a viable plan to minimize the damage and loss of life, before sending in the armed forces. To conduct a war with the present chauvinistic outlook is utterly irresponsible by the Sinhalese youth being sacrificed, even if the State has no empathy for the Tamil victims,” UTHR said in its report.
The general mood among the people of the Wanni was strongly anti-LTTE four months ago, and resistance continues, UTHR said.
UTHR said, however, that resistance to the LTTE was either passive or tragically fatalistic. With increased aerial bombing and shelling and stories of increasingly repressive treatment of minorities coming from other parts of the country, the mood was changing, it said. Despite this, the LTTE, by October 2008, had once again become very aggressive in conscription.
It further adds that the current political and human rights situation in East Lanka portends a dismal future for democracy and security in Lanka as a whole.
The LTTE has regrouped and is carrying out regular attacks. And there is a reported upsurge in incidents of abduction, searches and abuse of women by government security forces and allied paramilitaries.
In the East, where the Government’s public relations men boast of development and the restoration of democracy, there is greater fear, uncertainty and a deliberate cultivation of communal tensions, UTHR said.
courtesy:dailymirror.lk
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