SRILANKAN GENOCIDE INTERVENTION INITIATIVE

THE PROBLEM

Genocide is raging in Srilanka. The Srilanka Government and Srilankan army are killing Tamil people of all ages simply because of their ethnic identities.  Nearly every Srilankan Tamil’s village in Srilanka has now been destroyed.  The Srilankan Government intends to crush Tamil rebel groups and to rid Tamil people once and for all. The estimates of deaths of Srilankan Tamil now range approx 100,000. While the international community frets, makes idle threats (such as sanctions that are never imposed), and engages in talk about whether this is really genocide and  what should be done, hundreds of innocent victims continue to die daily.  Meanwhile Srilankan troops and Sinhalese racist allies attacking rape and murder with impunity.

The international community is not only comprised of individual nations, regional organizations and intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations. Every single human being is a member of the international community. We are all our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers when genocide erupts anywhere at anytime for any reason. Those nations, organizations and individuals that do not act to stop the genocide become bystanders to genocide.

THE ACTIONS WE URGE YOU TO TAKE

With ever fiber of our being, we urge every person who receives this message or reads it on this website to take action as follows:
Simply write a short note to United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Ms.Navanethem Pillay at tb-petitions@ohchr.org , and also ask that you consider sending a copy of your letter to United Nations Secretary General Mr. Ban-Ki-moon at sg@un.org and to his Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, MR. FRANCIS DENG at Contact Form of his office and e-mail it to each of them. The note can be as simple as "I implore you to act to stop the genocide in Srilanka, and to do so now.”  Please send a copy of your e-mails to heartvoice@terminategenocide.com so we can keep track of how many e-mails are sent.

We also ask that you consider sending a copy of your letter to US President Mr.Obama at president@whitehouse.gov.

*You can send a petition directly to the following Human Rights Address:
Mail: Petitions Team
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
United Nations Office at Geneva
1211 Geneva 10, Switzerland
Fax: + 41 22 917 9022

Model Complaint Form

UN Human Rights Links:

Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination

Racial discrimination: the United Nations takes action Fact Sheet

     
Mailing Addresses:
The Honorable Ban-Ki-moon
Secretary-General, United Nations Secretariat, Rm 3800, New York. New York 10017, USA
website: www.un.org/News/ossg/sg

President Barack Obama
The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500, USA
website:www.whitehouse.gov

Office of the Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on the Prevention of Genocide
Chrysler Building Room 5160; 405 Lexington Avenue; New York, NY 100174.
contact number is 212-457-1289. Switzerland
website: www.ohchr.org/english/about/hc/arbour.htm

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
U.S. Department of State 2201 C Street NW Washington, DC 20520, USA
website: www.state.gov/secretary/

President Juan E. Mendez
International Center for Transitional Justice, 20 Exchange Place, 33rd Floor, New York, NY 10005, USA
website: www.ictj.org
Email: jmendez@ictj.org

Patrick Burgess, Asia Director, International Center for Transitional Justice
Email:- pburgess@ictj.org

For Elected Officials in countries other than the USA, see UK (Westminster): Fax Your MP or TheyWorkForYou.com    Canada (Ottawa): MP Look Up   Australia (Canberra): AEC  Also: Websites of National Parliaments 

A POSSIBLE SOLUTION: "Make more noise!"

In her Pulitzer-prize winning book, "A Problem from Hell": America in the Age of Genocide, Samantha Power surmises that
The real reason the United States did not do what it could and should have done to stop genocide [in the past] was not a lack of knowledge or influence but a lack of will. Simply put, American leaders did not act because they did not want to...

The executive branch has felt no pressure from the home front. American leaders have been able to persist in turning away because genocide in distant lands has not captivated senators, congressional caucuses, Washington lobbyists, elite opinion stop genocide has thus been repeatedly lost in the realm of domestic politics. Although isolated voices have protested the slaughter, Americans outside the executive branch were largely mute when it mattered. As a result of this society-wide silence, officials at all levels of governments calculated that the political costs of getting involved in stopping genocide far exceeded the costs of remaining uniformed. ...It takes political pressure to put genocide on the map in Washington [D.C.]. When Alison Des Forges of Human Rights Watch met with National Security Adviser Anthony Lake two weeks into the Rwanda genocide, he informed her that the phones were not ringing. "Make more noise!" he urged. Because so little noise has been made about genocide, U.S. decision-makers have opposed U.S. intervention, telling themselves that they were doing all the could  --  and , most important, all they should --  in light of competing American interests and a highly circumscribed understanding of what was domestically "possible" for the United States to do (pp. 508-509).
 

In the same book, Power reported the following -- and we think, revelatory -- statement:
 Senator Paul Simon (D.Ill.) [now deceased], chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee believes public pressure might have alerted the U.S. response [to the outbreak  of the Rwandan genocide in 1994]. "If every member of the [U.S.] House of Representatives and [U.S.] Senate had received 100 letters from people back home saying we have to do something about Rwanda, when the crisis was first developing then I think the response would have been different" (p. 377).