The Times reports:
About 1,400 people are dying every week at the giant Manik Farm internment camp set up in Sri Lanka to detain Tamil refugees from the nation’s bloody civil war, senior international aid sources have told The Times.
The death toll will add to concerns that the Sri Lankan Government has failed to halt a humanitarian catastrophe after announcing victory over the Tamil Tiger terrorist organisation in May. It may also lend credence to allegations that the Government, which has termed the internment sites “welfare villages”, has actually constructed concentration camps to house 300,000 people.
…
Witness testimonies obtained by The Times in May described long queues for food and inadequate water supplies inside Manik Farm. Women, children and the elderly were shoved aside in the scramble for supplies. Aid agencies are being given only intermittent access to the camp. The Red Cross was not being allowed in yesterday.
That is more than the number of people who died in total during the Gaza conflict. Those who are dying here are not engaged in attacking other Sri Lankan civilians. They’re not even members of militias. Neither this is a question of Tamil civilians being caught up in a civil war. The conflict has ended. These deaths are retribution.
However, because Sri Lanka is backed by China and not by the United States, it knows it has no need to show any concern at all for civilian deaths, or attempt to reduce them at all.
Ironically, that is also the reason that there will be no significant concern about or opposition to these needless deaths from much of the ‘anti War’ ‘Left’.
