By casc
The article below is from a recent publication put out by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. This is a big and wealthy think tank in Washington which has many distinguished Americans. The head is a former Senator from Georgia. The head of their South Asia Program is Ambassador Teresita Schaffer, a former U.S. Ambassador to Sri Lanka. She is very anti-govt and anti MR. She frequently testifies about Sri Lanka in a very negative way in the U.S. House of Representative and in the U.S. Senate. As patriot has said there is a lot of hypocracy in the U.S. and western government positions regarding Sri Lanka. The Sri Lanka Government is far more observant of human rights than is the U.S. or British government in Iraq. According to the British Medical Association’s (Lancet) study of 2004, 600,000 Iraqi civilians were estimated to have been killed. About one fourth of the Iraqi population is displaced either as internal refugees or as external refugees. You can see from the recent CSIS publication (see below) how biased these people are against Sri Lanka. There is not a single mention of the LTTE bus bombings that took place in January of this year.
I am not a Christian but I belive there is a verse in the bible which says “He who is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone”
Center for Strategic and International Studies
South Asia Monitor Publication, Feb 5
“Rajapaksa is a pragmatic nationalist but has neither a strategic vision nor a commitment to a compromise settlement. His efforts to forge a consensus within the political mainstream have failed, while taking the government further away from the kinds of proposals that might produce a settlement. The military gambit: The Sri Lankan government’s priority since Rajapaksa’s election has been to press for military success, hoping then to settle on its own terms. The army has achieved some gains.
Human rights crisis: Meanwhile, the conflict has created a massive human rights crisis. The International Crisis Group estimates that more than 1,500 civilians have been killed and 250,000 displaced in the crossfire since 2006. The total death toll is far higher, certainly several tens of thousands. Up to 40,000 civilians have allegedly been displaced by the Sri Lankan Air Force’s raids on the LTTE in the east. Claymore mines have taken their own human toll, most recently killing nine Tamil schoolchildren. There have been hundreds of extrajudicial killings and over 1,000 disappearances. Both sides blame each other for “collateral damage.” UN Human Rights Commissioner, Louis Arbour was bitterly criticized by the Sri Lankan government for drawing attention to the killings of humanitarian aid workers in the island nation.”
http://www.csis.org/component/option,com_csis_experts/task,view/id,62/
Teresita C Shaffer, Director
South Asia Program
Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
1800 K Street, NW, Washington DC, 20006
Phone: (202) 887-0200; Fax: (202) 775-3199
http://www.csis.org/saprog/
