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{PDF EPUB} Still Counting the Dead by Frances Harrison Still Counting the Dead Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Still Counting the Dead by Frances Harrison Still Counting the Dead. Still Counting the Dead: Survivors of Sri Lanka's Hidden War is a book written by the British journalist Frances Harrison, a former BBC correspondent in Sri Lanka and former Amnesty Head of news. The book deals with thousands of Sri Lankan Tamil civilians who were killed, caught in the crossfire during the war. This and the government's strict media blackout would leave the world unaware of their suffering in the final stages of the Sri Lankan Civil War. The books also highlights the failure of the United Nations, whose staff left before the final offensive started. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] Related Research Articles. The Sri Lankan Civil War was a civil war fought in the island country of Sri Lanka from 1983 to 2009. Beginning on 23 July 1983, there was an intermittent insurgency against the government by the Velupillai Prabhakaran led Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which fought to create an independent Tamil state called Tamil Eelam in the north and the east of the island due to the continuous discrimination against the Sri Lankan Tamils by the Sinhalese dominated Sri Lankan Government, as well as the 1956, 1958 and 1977 anti-Tamil pogroms and the 1981 burning of the Jaffna Public Library carried out by the majority Sinhalese mobs, in the years following Sri Lanka's independence from Britain in 1948. After a 26-year military campaign, the Sri Lankan military defeated the Tamil Tigers in May 2009, bringing the civil war to an end. The Tamil National Alliance is a political alliance in Sri Lanka that represents the country's Sri Lankan Tamil minority. It was formed in October 2001 by a group of moderate Tamil nationalist parties and former militant groups. The alliance originally supported self-determination in an autonomous state for the island's Tamils. It supported negotiations with the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to resolve the civil war in Sri Lanka. The TNA was considered a political proxy of the LTTE which selected some of its candidates even though its leadership maintains it never supported the LTTE and merely negotiated with the LTTE just as the Government did. Major human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as the United States Department of State and the European Union, have expressed concern about the state of human rights in Sri Lanka . British rule in Ceylon, the government of Sri Lanka and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as well as various other paramilitaries and marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) rebels are accused of violating human rights. Although Sri Lanka has not officially practiced the death penalty since 1976, there are well-documented cases of state-sponsored 'disappearances' and murders. Frances Harrison is a British journalist who worked with the BBC. She read English literature at Trinity Hall, Cambridge and did an MA in South Asian Area Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University and an MBA at Imperial College London. Thousands of people have disappeared in Sri Lanka since the 1980s. A 1999 study by the United Nations found that Sri Lanka had the second highest number of disappearances in the world and that 12,000 Sri Lankans had disappeared after being detained by the Sri Lankan security forces. A few years earlier the Sri Lankan government had estimated that 17,000 people had disappeared. In 2003 the Red Cross stated that it had received 20,000 complaints of disappearances during the Sri Lankan Civil War of which 9,000 had been resolved but the remaining 11,000 were still being investigated. The 2008–2009 SLA Northern offensive was an armed conflict in the northern Province of Sri Lanka between the military of Sri Lanka and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The battle broke with the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) offensive attempting to break through the LTTE defence lines in the north of the island, aiming to conclude the country's 25-year-old civil war by military victory. Mahalingam Kanagalingam Shivajilingam is a Sri Lankan Tamil politician, provincial councillor and former Member of Parliament. Between 2008 and 2009, major protests against the Sri Lankan Civil War took place in several countries across the world, urging national and world leaders and organisations to take action on bringing a unanimous cease fire to the Sri Lankan Civil War, which had taken place for over twenty-five years. Tamil diaspora populations across the world expressed concerns regarding the conduct of the civil war in the island nation of Sri Lanka. The civil war, which took place between the Sri Lankan Army and the separatist group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam is believed to have killed over 100,000 civilians. Protesters and critics of the Sri Lankan government that triggered a culturally based civil war to be a systematic genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Sri Lankan Tamil minority in Sri Lanka. There are allegations that war crimes were committed by the Sri Lankan military and the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam during the Sri Lankan Civil War, particularly during the final months of the Eelam War IV phase in 2009. The alleged war crimes include attacks on civilians and civilian buildings by both sides; executions of combatants and prisoners by both sides; enforced disappearances by the Sri Lankan military and paramilitary groups backed by them; acute shortages of food, medicine, and clean water for civilians trapped in the war zone; and child recruitment by the Tamil Tigers. A panel of experts appointed by United Nations Secretary-General (UNSG) Ban Ki-moon to advise him on the issue of accountability with regard to any alleged violations of international human rights and humanitarian law during the final stages of the civil war found "credible allegations" which, if proven, indicated that war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed by the Sri Lankan military and the Tamil Tigers. The panel has called on the UNSG to conduct an independent international inquiry into the alleged violations of international law. The Sri Lankan government has denied that its forces committed any war crimes and has strongly opposed any international investigation. In March 2014 the United Nations Human Rights Council authorised an international investigation into the alleged war crimes. The Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission was a commission of inquiry appointed by Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa in May 2010 after the 26-year-long civil war in Sri Lanka. The commission was mandated to investigate the facts and circumstances which led to the failure of the ceasefire agreement made operational on 27 February 2002, the lessons that should be learnt from those events and the institutional, administrative and legislative measures which need to be taken in order to prevent any recurrence of such concerns in the future, and to promote further national unity and reconciliation among all communities. After an 18-month inquiry, the commission submitted its report to the President on 15 November 2011. The report was made public on 16 December 2011, after being tabled in the parliament. With the Sri Lankan Civil War spanning nearly 30 years, (1983-2009), it has been portrayed in a wide range of ways in popular culture. Sri Lanka's Killing Fields was an investigatory documentary about the final weeks of the Sri Lankan Civil War broadcast by the British TV station Channel 4 on 14 June 2011. Described as one of the most graphic documentaries in British TV history, the documentary featured amateur video from the conflict zone filmed by civilians and Sri Lankan soldiers which depicted "horrific war crimes". The video filmed by civilians included scenes during and after intense shelling of civilian targets, including hospitals, by the Sri Lankan military. The "trophy video" filmed by Sri Lankan soldiers showed scenes of blindfolded victims being executed and dead bodies of naked women being dragged onto trucks by soldiers as they made lewd remarks about the victims. The documentary also included interviews with civilians who managed to survive the conflict, United Nations staff based in Sri Lanka during the conflict, human rights organisations and an international law expert. The documentary was made by ITN Productions and presented by Jon Snow, of Channel 4 News. Lies Agreed Upon is a documentary produced by Sri Lanka Ministry of Defence in response to a documentary aired by Channel 4, named Sri Lanka's Killing Fields , about the final weeks of the Sri Lankan Civil War. The documentary gives the Sri Lanka Ministry of Defence response to war crimes accusations and rebuts points made by the producers of the Channel 4 documentary, who presented it as "a forensic investigation into the final weeks of the quarter-century-long civil war between the government of Sri Lanka and the secessionist rebels, the Tamil Tigers." Lies Agreed Upon was first aired at an official function held at Hilton Hotel, Colombo on 1 August 2011, one and half months after the broadcasting of "Sri Lanka's Killing Fields". Ministry of Defence released another report named Humanitarian Operation – Factual Analysis : July 2006 – May 2009 on the same day. The Tamil Genocide by Sri Lanka: The Global Failure to Protect Tamil Rights Under International Law is book by Francis Boyle on the final stages of the Sri Lankan Civil War and its alleged war crimes. World without Genocide The United Nations, which has acknowledged its calamitous failures under the Responsibility to Protect — R2P, a doctrine that Canada was pivotal in establishing — is still trying to tally the numbers and apportion the blame, four years on: 40,000 to 70,000 civilians killed over five months of the final conflagration, the number the UN now accepts, though many argue the figure is far higher.
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