The War Crime Sri Lanka Can't Hide

Sri Lanka could eventually be tried for a vicious Genocide against women and children and civilian non-combatants.

(SACRAMENTO, CA) - Many Americans are catching bits and pieces about the newly released photos of the 12-year old son of Tamil Tiger leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran. Images of the handsome boy, Balachandran Prabhakaran, clearly suggest they were taken just before he was murdered by Sri Lankan military forces.

Even the Huffington Post covered it, yet I suspect that most yanks have no idea what this unique culture is about, nor do they fully comprehend the horrors of the recently ended Sri Lankan civil war their country supported, between the government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, (LTTE), the famed Tigers of Tamil Eelam. It isn't the fault of the American for knowing little to nothing about this struggle, instead the blame falls on the shoulders of the U.S. media which is not worth its weight in blood.

The demise of this group of people, up to 160,000 of them or more, was engineered in part by former U.S. President George W. Bush who helped officially designate the Tamil Tigers as a terrorist group when in fact the U.S.-backed bloody government of Sri Lanka had terrorized the Tamils for years before they ever fought back.

We now know that a number of Americans were well aware of what was taking place and there

While our articles on the Tamil Genocide are widely read in Sri Lanka, this article is specifically written for the American audience. If people know what happened, we stand some chance of preventing it from happening again.

Who are the Tamils?

I sadly think that probably close to 99% of the people in the U.S. do not know who the Tamils are, and I didn't either until I began writing about this conflict. Now I feel like I am at least part Tamil and that is from my heart. There is nothing sadder than being embraced by an embattled culture, nor are many things more rewarding for a journalist.

Most Tamil people live in Tamil Nadu, a state of India, that is by coincidence where Salem, India is located. A large contingent of Tamils live in Sri Lanka, most are in the north coastal area. Tamil activists told me last year at the large Tamil gathering in Baltimore known as FeTNA, (Federation of North American Tamil Sangams), that a land bridge once connected India and Sri Lanka and that explains many things about how the Tamils ended up in both countries. Many historians agree and there is strong evidence of the former connecting land bridge.

Tamil problems of equality and acceptance accelerated after Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon, gained independence from British colonialism in 1948. The majority culture, the Singhalese Buddhists, have time and time again attacked their Tamil neighbors.

In fact for three decades following independence, Tamils in this island nation attempted to use a demonstrated model to gain peace, that is Gandhi-style non-violent protest. It worked in India, and it failed in Ceylon.

Believing their culture to be one of the most ancient on the face of the earth, the Hindu and Christian Tamils finally found no choice but to fight back, and the Tamil Tigers were formed in the early 1970's to defend the population from the GoSL military and police and roving mobs of Sinhala Buddhist civilians. These Buddhists had (have) a tendency to set fire to Tamil villages, rape Tamil women, and commit murders.

Over time, the Tamil Tigers experienced strong levels of corruption. Some members broke away, some abandoned their ideals and began working for the government, and others held fast and true. The LTTE would be plagued by their use of child soldiers, however a closer examination of that story shows that many young Tamils spent their lives waiting to become part of this paramilitary force of great fighting capability. They were patriotic like anyone else and the Tamil Tigers were their protectors.

The civil war in this country was horrible. The LTTE created the suicide bomb and used it to great effect. However many believe their most well known credit, the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, was a set up. No matter what, evidence in the matter was weak and the governments were both working against the LTTE at that point and happy to convict their members in the high profile killing.

The answer to the question, who are Tamils? They are human beings with all the rights of human beings as defined under the 1947 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As a culture, they have been around longer than most.

Death in a War of Deception

Velupillai Prabhakaran was the founder and leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the militant organization that sought to create an independent Tamil state in the north and east of Sri Lanka. He was murdered by Sri Lankan government forces at the close of the civil war, in fact his death brought an end to the conflict.

The photo that the Sri Lanka government released initially, showed the body of Prabhakaran with a cloth covering the top of his head.

In realty, there is no top of his head. He was executed like countless other Tamil militants, with a round fired into the back of his head, and it largely destroyed his forehead, replacing it with a gaping bullet exit wound.

The other photos and video showing the actual wounds were soon leaked. One shows the Sri Lankan government crudely removing pieces of Velipillai Prabhakaran's brain.

He is seen dead in uniform, with his clothing removed, and then with his body smeared in mud. All of this is depicted in the Channel-4 program, Sri Lanka's Killing fields.

Prof. William Schabas, a Human Rights Lawyer featured in Sri Lanka's Killing Fields: War Crimes Unpunished, says Velupillai Prabhakaran's fatal injury was not the result of a combat death, but an execution, a murder, and in this case, a war crime.

"We announce today with inexpressible sadness and heavy hearts that our incomparable leader, the supreme commander of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), attained martyrdom fighting the Sri Lankan government," the rebels' chief of international relations, Selvarasa Pathmanathan saidt.

"His final request was for the struggle to continue until we achieved the freedom for his people."

As previously stated, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam were defeated in Sri Lanka during the conclusion of this war in 2009, but the resistance is still in existence, the group is widely viewed as a resistance force that stood only for the liberation of the Tamil people.

It is a fact that the final push that began in 2005, came at a time that a cease fire was in existence. This was not observed by Sri Lanka's government. This fact alone is stark and haunting. It had taken a long time and many deaths to finally achieve peace and Sri Lankan President Majinda Rajapakse and his brothers who run Sri Lanka, shattered it.

Son of a Tiger

The Channel 4 documentary reveals how the Sri Lankan Army (SLA) located this otherwise elusive military leader. It seems Velupillai Prabhakaran's fatal mistake, was trusting that officers in the SLA would behave like human beings and above all else, respect civilians who surrendered. He made the wrong assumption, they tortured his son into providing the information. Then they murdered the boy in cold blood.

What Macrae did was to remove any doubts about the fate of 12-year old Balachandran Prabhakaran. We already knew what happened, we had all viewed the death photos that show the small boy with five bullet holes laying in the dirt. But the new photos of him sitting in the custody of Sri Lankan soldiers, taken immediately before his death, make it a wrap.

As the war was going out of control, young Balachandran was sent to turn himself into the GoSL along with his bodyguards, in order to protect his life. Treacherous to the end, the Sri Lankan Army (SLA) forced the boy to reveal information about his father, and then he was executed like so many other Tamils who used white flags to surrender.

This story is one of tens of thousands that tell of murder and a government's elimination of its own people. I have followed many parts of the saga and the links to all of my previous reports are listed below. I hope Sri Lanka will eventually be tried for this vicious Genocide of women and children and civilian non-combatants. The only thing the GoSL has shown us is that they will not admit anything, and therefore the credibility of this government is greatly strained, it has been caught in one lie too many.

With almost 25 years of experience on the west coast and worldwide as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor, Tim King is Salem-News.com's Executive News Editor. His background includes covering the war in Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007, and reporting from the Iraq war in 2008. Tim is a former U.S. Marine who follows stories of Marines and Marine Veterans; he's covered British Royal Marines and in Iraq, Tim embedded with the same unit he served with in the 1980's.

Tim holds awards for reporting, photography, writing and editing from traditional mainstream news agencies like The Associated Press and Electronic Media Association; he also holds awards from the National Coalition of Motorcyclists, the Oregon Confederation of Motorcycle Clubs; and was presented with a 'Good Neighbor Award' for his reporting, by the The Red Cross.

Tim's years as a Human Rights reporter have taken on many dimensions; he has rallied for a long list of cultures and populations and continues to every day, with a strong and direct concentration on the 2009 Genocide of Tamil Hindus and Christians in Sri Lanka. As a result of his long list of reports exposing war crimes against Tamil people, Tim was invited to be the keynote speaker at the FeTNA (Federation of Tamil Sangams of North America) Conference in Baltimore, in July 2012. This is the largest annual gathering of North American Tamils; Tim addressed more than 3000 people and was presented with a traditional Sri Lanka ‘blessed garland’ and a shawl as per the tradition and custom of Tamil Nadu

In a personal capacity, Tim has written 2,026 articles as of March 2012 for Salem-News.com since the new format designed by Matt Lintz was launched in December, 2005. Serving readers with news from all over the globe, Tim's life is literally encircled by the endless news flow published by Salem-News.com, where more than 100 writers contribute stories from 23+ countries and regions.

Tim specializes in writing about political and military developments worldwide; and maintains that the label 'terrorist' is ill placed in many cases; specifically with the LTTE Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, where it was used as an excuse to slaughter people by the tens of thousands; and in Gaza, where a trapped population lives at the mercy of Israel's destructive military war crime grinder. At the center of all of this, Tim pays extremely close attention to the safety and welfare of journalists worldwide.

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Kumar July 27, 2017 10:25 pm (Pacific time)

Prabhakaran killed as many Tamils as the Sri lankan govt, if not more. There is no question of war crime here. Tigers are a designated terrorist organization. They are not combatants belonging to a specific country, which has signed any convention like geneva or hague. For too long, Prabhakaran has been deceiving Tamils with a mirage of Eelam and has been fleecing them for funds. Good riddance!!!

PNayar February 27, 2013 4:15 am (Pacific time)

This article is like wearing rose tinted glasses and justifying everything the terrorist extremists have done. its the most ridiculous and misinformed piece of writing i have ever read on this subject and the history (for heaven sake stop trying to find the origins of this and that by just scratching the surface when not even historians can be sure!), its bias is glaringly and grossly visible and utterly distasteful and offensive to any reasonable Sri Lankan citizen who has had to live in the country that suffered through the war. SHAME ON YOU! Let us live in peace. Tamils in Tamil Nadu India don't give a rat's ass about Tamils in SRi LAnka or for their well being. If you cared about the Tamils in Sri Lanka you would stop trying to pick and pick at slowly healing wounds, to further the cause of a bunch of selfish people nursing bruised egos. Stop it already.

Anonymous February 26, 2013 8:14 am (Pacific time)

Yo "Tim "King"" Have you swallowed hook line and sinker the fabrications of the terrorist rump? Those who sent thousands of forcefully-conscripted children who were barely taught how to hold a gun, to man the front lines (cannor fodder), are suddenly the champions of “Human Rights”….. Sri Lanka knows, all too well, who these people are…. opportunists, who’d do anything (fabrication/lying is a norm for them: “anything goes, as long as we get our hallucinated homeland”) to get their means.

Tim King: Actually most of the young soldiers spent their childhoods waiting to join the LTTE, of course at times it was pure conscription and this was a bad move, a reflection of the desperation of a group of people eternally hounded and attacked by so-called Buddhists. I know the Tamils, they are a beautiful people and I have a great deal of respect, and also for Singhalese who care about the right things and never supported the annihilation of these people.

bala February 25, 2013 4:50 am (Pacific time)

Dear Americans... please investigate below claim..
assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, was a set up

Tim King: Thank you for your thoughts Bala, I hope people do investigate the story and draw their own conclusions. I certainly do not claim my theory to be an absolute fact but evidence does suggest this may not be what people assume it to be. I have written an articles about this that I will share here, again thank you: Murugan, Santhan, Perarivalan, and the Academic Achievements of Assassins Tim King Salem-News.com

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The War Crime Sri Lanka Can't Hide

Who are the Tamils?

Death in a War of Deception

Son of a Tiger

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