What the Tamils and Palestinians have in common

Opinion: Tamils protest, and protest, humanitarian situation in Sri Lanka, but no one is listening.

Tom FentonApril 24, 2009 12:05Updated May 30, 2010 11:53

Civilians, some of the more than 100,000 that have fled the area held by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, hold food and water they were handed by Sri Lankan government soldiers in the town of Putumatalan, located near the "no fire zone" in northern Sri Lanka April 24, 2009. (David Gray/Reuters)

LONDON — For the past three weeks, dozens of flag-waving Tamils have been camping out in Parliament Square, trying to draw attention to the desperate plight of their ethnic minority in far-off Sri Lanka. Several are on a hunger strike. Busy Londoners seem to ignore them, except when the demonstrators hold up traffic. The Tamils are one of the world’s least popular causes.

An estimated 70,000 of them have been killed in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam's decades-long struggle for independence against the Sri Lankan government. Civilians trapped between the Tamil Tigers and government troops are in particularly dire straits right now. But their suffering is largely unseen by the world.

The Sri Lankan government has barred independent news organizations and most aid agencies from the combat zone in the northeast, where a dwindling band of rebel militia members is making a last-ditch stand against the Sri Lankan army. Tens of thousands of Tamil civilians are trapped in the war zone and trying to flee. Almost 3,000 have been killed in the fighting in the past two months. The government is pushing hard to finish off the rebellion and believes that if the cameras are not there, the world won’t care what happens.

That’s the same tactic the Israelis used when they attacked the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip last December. Like the Sri Lankan government, the Israeli army said it was keeping foreign journalists out of the war zone “for their own safety.” But some reporters, mostly Arabs, managed to transmit stories and pictures of the horrors of the Israeli bombardments of the densely populated Gaza Strip.

Now, under pressure from world opinion, the Israeli Army has completed an investigation into the actions of its soldiers during the siege of Gaza. Gen. Dan Harel, the deputy chief of staff, has announced that the army “discovered a small number of mistakes, not many, among the dozens of incidents we investigated.” That sounds suspiciously like a whitewash, and human rights organizations are calling for an independent investigation.

The plight of the Tamils attracts far less media attention, and one reason for this is that reporters and editors have a hard time figuring out who are the good guys and the bad guys in that conflict.