Thursday, January 29, 2009

so where's the Ad Hoc United Nations Committee For the Realization of the Inalienable Rights of the Tamil People to Self-Determination?

The UN leads an evacuation of wounded civilians from the worsening bloodshed as the Sri Lankan government attempts to wipe out Tamil Tiger resistance once and for all. If they succeed, they'd become perhaps the first country to eliminate an ethnic secessionist bid through overwhelming violence since... well... I'm not coming up with any off-hand. Carthage, maybe? Point is, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this fails. (Update: the BBC has an interesting article about how the Tamils' sophisticated weaponry has been rendered useless by the military offensive. But, as they point out, suicide bombers don't require sophisticated weaponry.)

It is interesting, though, that the UN and the international community supports the 2-state solution and the creation of a Palestinian state in the Israel-Palestine conflict, but doesn't support the creation of an independent Tamil state in northeastern Sri Lanka. Why, you ask? I think geopolitics is the only answer.

Sidenote: when I was a boy, I thought the Tamil Tigers and Black Panthers were sports teams. Ooops.

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