Insensitivity in Newsweek June 4, 2009
Posted by savingsrilanka in Uncategorized.add a comment
After six months or more of complete silence on the Sri Lankan situation, Newsweek published a tiny article on Sri Lanka in their International roundup section after the Tiger’s defeat. I was glad they mentioned the country at all, except the author’s tone is shockingly insensitive at best (and scandalously offensive at worst), albeit unintentionally, to the minority Tamil civilians. My jaw dropped when I read, “…the population, just 11 percent of which is Tamil, agreed to tolerate the suspension of some civil rights, as when Tamil refugees were put in temporary holding camps to screen fighters from civilians.” This is like praising Americans during WWII for “agreeing” to send U.S. citizens of Japanese descent into internment camps.
The article also mentions the lack of public outcry evidence that the citizens happily gave the government free reign during the war. Well, of course! The Sinhalese outcry would have been quiet if existent, because they wanted the Tigers defeated. Any Tamil objections, as we have seen elsewhere on this blog, have been stifled violently. There are human rights activists, both Tamil and Sinhalese, who protested, but at this point I’m getting the feeling that writer Christian Caryl did not do heavy research on the situation.
I sent in a letter to the Newsweek editor to complain and I’d urge you to do the same; you see, Newsweek owes it to us all to run a true coverage and analysis of the Sri Lankan situation, not just a terse and blithe afterthought of a piece which completely misses the angle of human suffering going on.
