National - Event Notice
Thursday January 01 1970

Stop The Slaughter Of Tamils - Protest

national | anti-war / imperialism | event notice

Thursday April 16, 2009 16:13

by Laura Fitzgerald - Socialist Party

lauracfitzgerald at gmail dot com

5pm Wednesday 22nd April, Indian Embassy, 6 Leeson Pk. Dublin 6

Protest against the murderous Rajapaska regime in Sri Lanka

After a week of escalating protests worldwide against the mounting slaughter of Tamils in Sri Lanka, the Rajapakse government announced a two-day halt to the fighting with the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

This was for 13-14 April - the two days on which the Sri Lankan New Year is celebrated. But this did not constitute a ceasefire as demanded by the tens of thousands of protesters around the world who have been showing their opposition to the regime's slaughter of Tamils, nor a realistic opportunity to rescue the hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in the ‘no fire’ or horribly mis-named ‘safe zones’.

At best a few hundred badly injured men, women and children would have been evacuated by sea to hospitals like Pulmoddai, near Trincomalee and a few thousand more civilians would have been herded into the government’s barbed-wire encircled ‘transitional villages’. In fact, a handful of people left the area.

President Rajapakse denies point blank to the United Nations that any civilians have been coming under artillery fire from Sri Lanka's Army. Doctors and Human Rights organisations report otherwise. Civilians fleeing the area have told BBC reporters of almost constant gunfire and an acute lack of water, food and medicine. “We had nothing to eat for the last five days”, explained one man accompanying his wounded son to the Pulmoddai hospital after witnessing his wife being killed by a shell attack.

We need to continue to show our opposition to the atrocity facing Tamils at the hands of the Rajapaska regime. The Indian government is utterly complicit in these war crimes - PROTEST AT THE INDIAN EMBASSY, 5pm, Wednesday 22nd April, 6 Leeson Pk., Dublin 6.