Can I Give Sri Lankan Army the Benefit of the Doubt?

I can’t watch pictures of dead children any more, without making me chock and feeling utterly helpless. I don’t know what it is to a parent to lose a child, but I know what it is to have a child. And I can’t possibly imagine how a parent could bear lost of a child.

1000 people dead one say, 2000 people dead say others. Just numbers, anonymous people, rounded up to last digits for our convenience. But they all are people with faces, legs and hopes, some are parents to a child like our parents and some child to a parent like our children.

As a citizen in a democratic country, I have a moral and civil responsibility to what our army is doing. If Sri Lankan Army shelled on those civilians, they should burn in hell, we all should burn in hell, because we know better, because we have other options. We drag this war more than a quarter century. I know every single day it drag further, it only bring suffering to everyone, but we could wait couple of more days, couple of more weeks, if needed couple of more months. We don’t have to risk large number of civilians. We shouldn’t have risk children. There are other options. There are better options.

But at this moment, I’m willing to accept government’s version of the story and give benefit of the doubt to Sri Lankan Army, only because LTTE does not have any military power that they can use for a victory or even for survival against Sri Lankan military, but they still don’t want to surrender, because they have a single card left, which they have been using quite vigorously and successfully. Civilians. They keep on holding thousands of civilians that they collected on their retreat, not to keep as pets, or as hotel guests, but for their military use, just like bullets, buckets and such other objects that they may dispose for their tactical benefit. And Canadian and British LTTE members propagate civilian death to the maximum military benefit of LTTE. More civilians die, more children die, more advantage they collect. Attract enemy fire on to civilians or deliberately killing civilians for propaganda, always has been fully working tactic for LTTE. In the absent of military power, I don’t think LTTE is sitting around a table playing cards with each other smoking cigars, or drinking tea or reading comic books. They are working on the only tactic left for them to reach their goal – a ceasefire. That is kill civilians, thousands by thousands, until so call “international community” forces government to go to a truce. It is brutal tactic. But it is a working tactic. It is bloody working tactic.