Link: After 70,000 dead, Tigers surrender in war-weary Sri Lanka
It appears that the surviving LTTE leaders have declared an end to their campaign to build their own breakaway state. There remains a small area where holdout fighters are still trapped but apparently the leader of the LTTE has indeed been killed.
"In other capitals, and in the office of United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, there were grave criticisms of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa for a campaign of unprecedented violence that appeared to ignore humanitarian concerns and the Geneva Conventions as the Sri Lankan military bombed and shelled tens of thousands of Tamil civilians whose homes and lives are intermixed with the Tiger forces. There have been at least 7,000 civilian casualties in the north" - TheGlobeandMail.com
The fierce battles have resulted in about 250,000 refugees, many of whom are wounded. These civilians have been displaced and cannot return home for fear of reprisals from remaining LTTE members. The article states that the LTTE regime was a punitive and strict regime. Once again, the sheer magnitude of the humanitarian cost of this conflict is immense and these people have been victims of both the LTTE regime and the governments programme of shelling and bombing.
2 comments
Hi Emm in Sidcup, I've enjoyed the read, some very thoughtful stuff. Oh, and less seriously, are you going for the world record in "blogs I follow"? ;-)
@ Frogblogger: Hiya! Thanks for stopping by. :) I just follow anything I like, I guess, or people who follow me. I read them in Google Reader so it makes for easy browing! :)
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