Mass Killing Is No Model

A Tamil woman cries for her deceased family members during a civil war remembrance in Mullivaikkal, Sri Lanka, May 17, 2024. © 2024 Eranga Jayawardena-AP Photo

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Today, we’re going to go back a decade and a half to get to the present day.

Fifteen years ago, in the final months of Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war, the world witnessed unbelievable horrors. 

The Sri Lankan military had been tightening the noose around its foes, the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) for some time. The military designated “no fire zones” where civilians were supposed to be safe – and then bombarded the areas mercilessly.

The Sri Lankan authorities argued that the LTTE was using civilians under their control as human shields, and that was true. The so-called “Tamil Tigers” were even shooting at families who tried to escape. In a sense, it was like a massive hostage situation – but that did not justify the military’s indiscriminate shelling of areas where civillians were highly concentrated.

It also didn’t justify the government restricting humanitarian supplies to civilians in the conflict zone, something the LTTE also did. 

The result of these months of horror in 2009 was up to 40,000 civilians killed. A UN expert study found, during that period, “virtually every hospital in the [region], whether permanent or makeshift, was hit by artillery.”

The abuses continued after the war had officially ended. The government of Sri Lanka imprisoned without charge over a quarter of a million ethnic Tamils displaced by the conflict. They locked them in overcrowded internment camps, in terrible conditions, and they would shoot at those trying to escape. 

The Sri Lankan army also forcibly disappeared an unknown number of people after the war. Many are believed to have been extrajudicially executed. That is, the military murdered them.

There has never been any justice for these crimes. Today, 15 years on, we’ve seen no accountability for atrocities by government forces, which not only include the indiscriminate attacks, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings, mentioned above, but also torture and rape. 

The LTTE leadership mostly either died in battle or were executed, and so can never face justice for their summary killings, bombings of civilians, abductions, and the use of child soldiers.

There’s been no reckoning with the past, and people cannot even mourn their lost loved ones in peace. Sri Lankan authorities are still, to this day, threatening and detaining people who try to commemorate the dead and disappeared. 

The final layer of terrible in all this, is that some militaries elsewhere started to see “the Sri Lanka method” as a “model” for fighting insurgencies, ignoring the horrific human cost. Some still do, even today. 

But mass killing of civilians should not be a model for anyone anywhere. The atrocities in human history should be a warning, not a how-to guide. – Human Rights Watch