Was/is there Genocide against the Sri Lankan Thamil people? 

Thoughts on 'genocide', prompted by the claims in 2009, as the war ended with the military defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Thamil Eelam (LTTE) insurgent movementm, that there had occurred in the Vanni battlefields, a "genocide" against the Thamil people. This 'genocide' claim referred to the probable deaths of many thousands of Thamil civilians who had been displaced in successive Sri Lanka military offensive and sought refuge behind LTTE lines. The charge was that the Sri Lankan military had carried out sustained bombardments (aerial and ground artillery) of these refugee concentrations behind Tiger lines without regard to casualty risks resulting in many civilian deaths. Thamil anti-government militant sources, especially those abroad, had claimed that at least 45,000 Thamil civilians had been killed in the Vanni battles due to indiscriminate bombardments by government forces and that this 'deliberate' slaughter amounted to a 'genocidal' action.

Two quick points:- 

(a) Whether as much as 45,000 civilians died in the Vanni battles of first half of 2009 has not yet been confirmed statistically (and may never be); and this figure could be more or, less in number. Given the nature of the warfare in the Vanni theatre at the time and, the Sri Lankan military's historic post-colonial proneness to ruthlessly suppress anti-state insurgencies with much emphasis on physical elimination, there is a grave possibility that mass killing could have been meted out by the state military on civilians trapped in the Vanni theatre. Nevertheless, there is also the broadly similar possibility that these casualty figures could have been a lot less given the geography of the threatre, the resilience of the Vanni Thamils and the strength of the Sri Lankan armed forces' discipline.

(b) But this constant refrain of 'genocide' with specific reference to the bout of mass killings during the military defeat of the Thamil Eelamist insurgency is actually the incorrect use of terminology and one that could ultimately be self-defeating for the Eelamist cause. This is due to the melodramatisation of the mass civilian casualties by the misuse of the term 'genocide' in a manner that obfuscates the correct meaning of the term and could mislead the public to then dismiss the 'genocide' charge as untrue. This endangers the correct and precise application of the term 'genocide' in relation to the Thamil Eelam struggle.  Since those killed in the Vanni in 2009 were almost exclusively of one ethnic origin, it is possible to legitimately make the charge of genocide. But at most the mass civilians casualties are only the tip of the genocide iceberg. The correct understanding of 'genocide' under international law, is one that acknowledges the mass deaths in 2009 as being just one aspect - the aspect of massacres of civilians - in the international legal definition of 'genocide'.

The term 'genocide' refers to the systematic elimination (cide) of a 'genus' - a type of species - in a manner that the identity of that genus is no longer recognised as extant and deserving to be addressed. Following on from the German Nazi programme for the elimination of various European minority ethnic identities such as the European Jews (the 'Ashkenazi' Jews) and the Roma (Gypsy) first through systematic discrimination and marginalisation and, subsequently through the organised, industrial-scale, physical elimination (killing) of these communities, the United Nations adopted a definition of 'genocide' that defines it as the elimination of a human community (ethnic, religious, caste, clan etc). Under this definition - which is the universally recognised technical definition - the elimination or non-recognition of any human social grouping amounts to 'genocide'. Therefore, it is wrong and misleading to attempt to limit the application of 'genocide' to incidents of physical collective elimination.  Certainly the charge of 'mass killings' is melodramatic and serves to draw attention to war theatre atrocities. It does little else. Doing so in the 2009 Thamil case is to do injustice to the Sri Lankan Thamil people who have been subjected to and continue to be subjected to the slow, long-drawn-out, application of the true, larger, definition of 'genocide' as defined in international law - that is, the sustained and systematic elimination of a community identity. 

Of course, far more sweeping and sustained, systematic and cruel has been the Israeli genocide against the people of Palestine, specifically the non-Jewish peoples (Arab, Druze, Christian, Muslim, etc).