Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} by Frances Harrison Still Counting the Dead. Still Counting the Dead: Survivors of '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 . The books also highlights the failure of the , whose staff left before the final offensive started. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] Related Research Articles. The 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 against the government by the led Liberation Tigers of Tamil , which fought to create an independent Tamil state called in the north and the east of the island due to the continuous discrimination against the Sri Lankan by the Sinhalese dominated Sri Lankan Government, as well as the 1956, 1958 and 1977 anti-Tamil and the 1981 burning of the 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 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. human rights groups such as and , as well as the United States Department of State and the , have expressed concern about the state of human rights in Sri Lanka . British rule in Ceylon, the 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 (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 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 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 . 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 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 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. 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, 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. This Land Belongs to the Army is a 2014 documentary film by Indian journalist and filmmaker Maga.Tamizh Prabhagaran. This film shows Sri Lankan civil war and shows the current post-war status of Sri Lanka. It also shows several controversial acts by the Sri Lankan government and the armed forces including Sinhalization and Land grabbing by the military. The film also features new testimonies from Tamil victims and an exclusive interview with a who is said to be a Sri Lankan Army officer, who speaks about the use of chemical and heavy weapons during the civil war. Mullivaikkal Remembrance Day is a remembrance day observed by Sri Lankan Tamil people to remember those who died in the final stages of the Sri Lankan Civil War. It is held each year on 18 May, the date on which the civil war ended in 2009, and is named after Mullivaikkal, a village on the north-east coast of Sri Lanka which was the scene of the final battle of the civil war. Download Now! We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with Still Counting The Dead Frances Harrison . To get started finding Still Counting The Dead Frances Harrison , you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed. 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I n the bloodbath that ended the 26-year civil war in Sri Lanka in 2009, tens of thousands of civilians lost their lives in a few terrible months. The world's politicians looked the other way. Some governments even praised Sri Lanka for its "victory over the terrorists", in reference to the defeat of the rebel Tamil Tigers. The UN Human Rights Council passed a remarkable resolution that praised the Sri Lankan government's "commitment to promotion and protection of human rights". Many find it difficult to imagine that those few months in Sri Lanka may have cost more civilian lives than all those killed in Syria in the past 18 months. The satirist Kurt Tucholsky wrote: "One man's death: that is a catastrophe. A hundred thousand dead: that is a statistic." In Still Counting the Dead , Frances Harrison reclaims the human catastrophe from the statistics. As BBC correspondent, Harrison lived in Sri Lanka from 2000 to 2004. Her book tells the stories of individuals – doctor, nun, teacher, shopkeeper, volunteer and more. From these stories emerges a tapestry of suffering. Harrison does not shy away from the "callous brinksmanship" of the Tamil Tigers, but it was ordinary Tamils who suffered most from the government's final onslaught. They suffered when the Tigers treated them as human shields; they suffered when Sri Lankan commanders cynically declared a "zero civilian casualty policy", even as they targeted civilians inside the misleadingly named no-fire zone. The third and last of the official no-fire zones meant tens of thousands were crammed onto a sliver of sand in north -east Sri Lanka – "a tropical beach transformed into a place of random slaughter". Hospitals whose GPS details were shared with the authorities were regularly shelled by government forces. "Eventually [doctors] learned their lesson," Harrison writes: unmarked and unannounced hospitals were not targeted. One doctor is still amazed at the conclusion he was forced to draw: "They wanted to kill as many as possible." The interviews are mostly with those now in exile, in cafes, homes or hotel rooms in unnamed towns and countries – fear of the Sri Lankan authorities remains strong. Some have never told even those closest to them the full nightmare of what they experienced, including rape or being forced to witness it. Occasional acts of generosity pepper the narrative. Above all, though, the story is one of horror. One woman describes watching a grandmother with a child in her arms, blasted into pieces. With bitter humour, the woman telling the story comments that if there is indeed a God he had better watch out: "Then He's like the United Nations and Red Cross people who abandoned us, I will punch Him in the eye." Anybody who has worked on Sri Lanka knows this story has had too little impact. With luck, this book can help change that. It can perhaps increase pressure on Sri Lanka to allow accountability before a Commonwealth summit in Colombo next year. As a nun who travelled to the heart of the war zone to help people tells Harrison: "Justice has to be done. It's not enough to talk of peace. You cannot have injustice and speak of peace." Still Counting the Dead. Frances Harrison, who was a BBC correspondent in Sri Lanka from 2000-2004, reflects on the horrors experienced by Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority during the final, brutal months of the war, and comments on the UN’s recent inquiry report. For decades, Sri Lanka was the setting for civil war between the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Sri Lankan government. Then, in the first few months of 2009, the war reached a bloody climax, ending with the death of tens of thousands of civilians. Through a strict media blackout, the Sri Lankan government ensured that the world was unaware of their suffering. Following the war, Frances Harrison, who was the resident BBC correspondent in Sri Lanka from 2000-2004, interviewed survivors, whose horrific stories she recounts in her new book, Still Counting the Dead: Survivors of Sri Lanka’s Hidden War . How would you place the Sri Lankan war in the context of modern history? It’s a war that’s been going on for decades. Actually, the root causes of it started way before I was even born. But I focus very consciously on one particular little slice of it, which I really place in the context of the post-9/11 world in which we live, because I think those are the attitudes in terms of the “” that really influence the reporting of the war, and attitudes of the international community to it. And that’s, of course, what we saw in the UN inquiry report last month. The executive summary that was dropped – but widely leaked – put it very nicely in that context and talked about how UN senior officials told governments what they wanted to hear – namely, that the Tigers were the baddies, because they were the ones that were proscribed as a terrorist group. Looking at what happened in 2009, you have to ask: How can you have a war so costly in terms of human lives, and yet not really reported and not really registering on people’s radars? It’s a really interesting question in the world of satellite phones, social media, and forensic science. I think one answer is the mindsets that were created by 9/11. Looking at the way the UN behaved in the last phase of the war, would you say it was a question of a deliberate policy of obscuring the truth, rather than of negligence? The UN is a large organization. Some of the people in the UN – mostly in the lower ranking levels, the middle guys – were incredibly brave, actually. They risked their careers, and their lives, sometimes, to help people. But there were two or three very senior officials who didn’t reveal information, and I think they made really, really questionable judgment calls, and it had an appalling impact. The report quotes another UN official who raises the question of whether they were complicit, and I think lawyers will have to look at that in the future and ask whether that was indeed the case. I think it’s clear that they suppressed information. It may have been an ideological outlook on life, it may have been what they felt they were expected to do, or what member states wanted to hear, or it may have been lack of comprehension. It’s really hard to impute a motive to them – but the effect of it was appalling. The UN seems to be in this situation relatively often, where it fails to respond to some sort of humanitarian disaster, normally associated with war, and then there are all these mea culpas afterwards. As a reporter, do you find that frustrating? Well, “never again” – and then it happens again. A lot of people have pointed out that the language of this report is similar to previous ones, and that the report itself says that lessons weren’t learned from Rwanda that should have been. And now they’re talking about using this report to learn lessons for Syria, which, at one level, is fine, because people are dying in Syria every day, and everybody wants that to stop. If they can use this report to galvanize more action about Syria, fine. But actually, what I think many feel is that this is not over for them. And to use this report for some other country only, whilst they might have sympathy for those people, is quite aggravating for them. The UN has really failed to act, even now, on Sri Lanka. Having a report is one thing, but it doesn’t really end there – it’s not like that’s done and dusted for people who live in that country, or for people abroad. We’re talking about a grave failure, but there’s no apology to those people, and there’s no putting the record straight in the sense of setting up a commission of inquiry to look into war crimes, which is what Ban Ki-moon’s own advisers suggested he should do. What role did foreign governments play? I think, broadly speaking, a lot of them turned a blind eye. It was the same sort of mindset: They wanted the LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam] gone, out of the equation. They saw them as troublesome, as problematic for any kind of peace solution in Sri Lanka, and thought they had sort of had their chance to talk peace and bungled it. I think many western countries had that approach. Obviously, proscription of the LTTE as a terrorist group was a key turning point. It unbalanced the whole relationship with the government, and made it very difficult to talk about anything other than a military solution. Many governments were quite happy to have the LTTE out of the equation, but I don’t think they realized the war was going to be quite as brutal as it turned out to be, and that so many people would die. I’m sure they wouldn’t have signed off on it if they’d known that. It got completely out of hand, in a way. You can see that if you read all the WikiLeaks cables through the months: A note of desperation sets in towards April/May 2009. Now, we’re three and a half years on, and we see a government in Colombo that has no (so-called) terrorist threat to worry about, but isn’t sharing power with Tamils, isn’t doing the slightest thing to make concessions to them or to put things right, denies absolutely everything that happened, is increasingly eroding the rule of law, and is oppressing its own people as well as minorities. So, having effectively supported, or turned a blind eye to, a government that did that, and then to see that it’s not a much better Sri Lanka as a result, is embarrassing. And I think we’re seeing more pressure, more anxiety, more embarrassment, and more impatience internationally. Was it really impossible for the average person to know what was going on at the time? I think, broadly speaking, people knew that something quite nasty was happening, but not necessarily the scale of it. I didn’t really know how intense the suffering was, and I lived there. I knew the people, I knew the area, and I talked to one of the Tigers throughout the war. I came away and watched it long distance, and I was aware that it was horrible. But when I actually sat down to interview people, I was very surprised by how dreadful it was. It was a lot worse than I had anticipated. What was the most surprising thing to you? I remember talking to some of my journalist friends who were going to Colombo when the war ended. It shocked me that the government was basically going to detain everybody who was a survivor in the internment camp, when there were clearly abuses going on. When I started to do the interviews, I thought the story would be about the last five or six months of the war. What I didn’t bank on was that the period in the refugee camps, the escape from those camps, and people’s experiences afterwards, would be quite so dramatic. In 2009, war in Gaza was getting a ton of the world’s attention – as it is again now. How do you explain which stories the public, the media, and foreign governments, for that matter, attach themselves to? Gaza gets more attention because rebels for the whole Middle East represent rebels for the Muslim world, because of what’s at stake strategically, and because it’s just better known. But obviously it’s upsetting that in Gaza there were maybe 1,500 people killed in the Israeli incursion in January 2009, and shortly afterwards there were thousands and thousands of people being killed in Sri Lanka, but Gaza got all the attention. It’s very frustrating that human life isn’t treated equally in different places, but Sri Lanka, I think, is really complicated. It’s really small, and it’s not as strategically important – except possibly for and China. On top of that, the terrorism label deterred people from really understanding what happened. I think it’s amazing that you can have an atrocity that is probably one of the worst in recent decades in terms of the scale of death, and have such little reporting on it. We’re talking about four or five months, perhaps, of the worst killing. The UN panel report says 40,000 people were killed, the latest report says possibly 70,000, and I think it’s even possible (though I find it very difficult to accept) that it could be more than that. There are lots of indications that well more than 100,000 people are missing from the population database, though there are obviously questions about how accurate that is. People flooded into safe zones, and then were basically sitting ducks. Can you talk a bit about that? There’s a lot about the story that, when I really dug into it, I found very difficult to conceive, to accept, and to understand. Even now, if you ask me to explain why a government would deliberately shell a hospital, I can’t really tell you, because the motivation is so bizarre. But yes, the government unit actually declared three no-fire zones. The first one was around Jan. 20. They dropped leaflets and made announcements on the radio telling civilians they should go to a specific area. That area was right on the frontline. At that point, they could have declared it on the coast, where people could have been picked up by a ship or would have been further away from the fighting, but they didn’t. And those no-fire zones were deliberately and indiscriminately shelled with large numbers of people in them. The UN witnessed that, and if you read the inquiry, at the back, there are all the radio reports they sent in at the time with the time codes, like, “0400 hours: Those three shells came and outside of our bunker dead bodies are all around us.” This is the first time that evidence has come out in public. The big question is, if it had been made public earlier, what might the impact have been? At least people wouldn’t have been able to say, “We didn’t know.” It’s very hard to conceive that this kind of thing could be possible, and that’s probably what makes it easy to ignore it or deny it. What could the outside world have done in Sri Lanka? They could have put a lot of pressure on the government to hold back, and to have some kind of cease-fire where they could have tried to evacuate people. I don’t think there was enough pressure on the government. They got the message that they could really get away with it. How would you classify the peace? It’s a very uneasy peace in the sense that one side is the victor – it’s victors’ justice, it’s triumphalism. There’s an increased militarization in these conflict areas, with the army as one ethnic group. There’s no way Tamils can organize culturally or politically. It’s quite an assault on their identity now. Tamils can’t even mourn. They can’t get together and mourn the dead, which is the most basic thing after a war in which tens of thousands of people were killed. The army has actually increased in size. It’s involved in business in the northeast, and it’s controlling life. In a way, it’s very much an occupation now. I don’t think that’s sustainable, and I don’t think that’s healthy for the future. Frances Harrison was the resident BBC correspondent in Sri Lanka from 2000-2004, and is the author of the recent book , Still Counting the Dead: Survivors of Sri Lanka’s Hidden War . Still Counting the Dead. The tropical island of Sri Lanka is a paradise for tourists, but in 2009 it became a hell for its Tamil minority, as decades of civil war between the Tamil Tiger guerrillas and the government reached its bloody climax. Caught in the crossfire were hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren, doctors, farmers, fishermen, nuns, and other civilians. And the government ensured through a strict media blackout that the world was unaware of their suffering. Now, a UN enquiry has called for war crimes investigation, and Frances Harrison, a BBC correspondent for Sri Lanka during the conflict, recounts those crimes for the first time in sobering, shattering detail. About the Author. Frances Harrison. Frances Harrison has worked as a foreign correspondent for the BBC posted in South , South , and Iran. From 2000–4 she was the resident BBC Correspondent in Sri Lanka.