'Disseminate Lanka’s genocidal ambitions’

Published in The New Indian Express, Chennai on May 8, 2011:

Link:http://expressbuzz.com/cities/chennai/%E2%80%98disseminate-lanka%E2%80%99s-genocidal-ambitions%E2%80%99/272483.html

CHENNAI: : Even though the United Nation’s Advisory Panel’s report asserts massive war crimes were committed by Sri Lanka during the last phase of the war, Tamils should not only toe the UN’s line, but disseminate to the international community that the state had indeed orchestrated a genocide on thousands of innocent Tamils under the pretext of ‘war on terrorism’, Prof Manivannan from Madras University has said.

Addressing a conference on ‘UN Advisory Panel Report-Eezham Freedom Struggle in geo-political web’ here at Loyola College on Saturday (organised by Save Tamils organisation), Manivannan said, “We the Tamilians have the moral obligations to go beyond the UN line of only war crime were committed by Lanka and should expose the island nation, which organised a mass genocide to kill the aspirations of a community over the past six decades, to the world.”

Though many of us feel let down by the UN panel for merely stating that war crimes were committed by Lanka, we should see the report in a new dimension that it would (in future) pave way for the Tamils and even the other communities feeling suppression in their countries to rely upon the report to seek justice from internationally acclaimed tribunals, Manivannan said.

Since the massacre and systematic cleansing were meted out on ethnic Tamils for the past six decades, it is high time for the island nation to own up the moral responsibility to render justice to the oppressed Tamils in the country in future, Manivannan demanded.

Besides him, Prof. Paul Newman from Bangalore presented the mandate of the UN panel and elaborated on how the three-member panel worked to collect different data to nail the Lankan state, which had committed war crimes at the end of the war in 2009.