KIA:WIA Ratios – Conjuring With The Dead And Ignoring The Wounded

Millions of words have now been written about the numbers of Tamil civilians killed during Sri Lanka’s victory over the Tamil Tigers in May 2009; probably more words than the millions of bullets fired during the war. But something didn’t ring true.

Missing from this civilian casualty toll inflation is any mention of an immutable fact of warfare: the ratio of dead to wounded. This was first analysed in a groundbreaking study in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in 1999, which examined casualty ratios in wars from 1940 to 1988. The study showed that the “number of people wounded is at least twice the number killed and may be 13 times as high” depending on the conflict type, weapons used and other factors.

Applying this ratio to Sri Lanka’s civilian casualty numbers during the last stages of Eelam War 4 shows a truly appalling misuse of civilian casualty numbers by international humanitarians, whose jaundiced view on Sri Lanka’s victory has led them to disregard basic mathematics, statistics, facts and logic.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Mohamed?

The UK has a Jihadi tourism problem. Since 2001 young Jihadis holding British passports have been quietly slipping out of the country to spend their gap years gaining valuable combat experience in hot and dusty places around the world. If they aren’t killed in action, they return home (as UK passport holders they can’t be denied re-entry to Britain) helping to spread the Jihadi gospel in cold, wet Britain and plan acts of ‘home-grown’ terrorism. Since they’re UK passport holders, they can’t just be executed abroad or quietly kidnapped and imprisoned by US forces. What to do?

The solution was simple, elegant, legal and lethal.

The Home Office says: “Citizenship is a privilege not a right. The Home Secretary has the power to remove citizenship from individuals where she considers it is conducive to the public good.”

“Search Interrogate and Destroy” – Hard COIN for Hard Times

In late 2012, workers digging foundations for a new wing in Matale Hospital unearthed partial skeletons of more than 150 people. Of the various theories that sought to explain how this mass grave came to be, the one that most people instinctively thought might be true was that this was the final resting place of victims of death squads from 2^nd JVP insurgency, which from 1987 to 1989 almost brought the Sri Lankan State to total collapse. The counter-insurgency (COIN) campaign, which in turn destroyed the JVP had few equals (except perhaps the 1990s Algerian counter-insurgency campaign and the India’s anti-‘Khalistan’ counter-insurgency in the Punjab) for its ruthlessness.

Mass grave being excavated in Matale Hospital, 2012

Unlike today’s COIN warriors who use seemingly benign terms like “Fight, Secure, Build”, Sri Lanka’s COIN warriors used the more honest, “Search, Interrogate and Destroy” to characterise their brutal, blood-stained and ultimately successful campaign to crush the JVP.

Could Jimmy Savile Fix It for the LTTE? WTF?

“Now then, now then, now then boys and girls..”

Guess who attended the World Tamils Forum (WTF) Conference in March 2009?

If Sir Jimmy and Prabha had lived long enough, they could’ve swapped stories about children.

Mr Poop Goes for a Walk

Amnesty International’s attacks on Sri Lanka’s poor war-time human rights record were rebutted with a kneejerk response from nationalistic Sinhalese politicians: “Amnesty is attacking Sri Lanka because it’s in the pay of the LTTE”. Most people (myself included) scoffed at such paranoid and ridiculous attacks on Amnesty. After all, this was Amnesty International, a neutral organisation dedicated to exposing wrongdoing across on the planet, not beholden to any government and funded solely by its member’s donations.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. The paranoids have finally been proven correct. In a bizarre move, Amnesty proudly proclaimed receiving over $50,0000 from an LTTE front organisation, the Canadian Tamil Congress, which recently held fundraising ‘walk-a-thon’ in Toronto for Amnesty International.

 

Alex Neve, Amnesty International accepting $50,000 from the Canadian Tamil Congress, 21st January, 2012

Saying Sorry Is The Hardest Thing To Do

Sri Lanka Army Deeply Regrets..

A ceremonial force once barely capable of defending itself, Sri Lanka’s Armed Forces have fought in cities and villages, in jungles and hills and at sea and in the air. They have mastered the complexities of combined operations and completely annihilated the one of the most effective insurgencies of the last fifty years, the hitherto invincible Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. But one indispensable military skill (which has been successfully mastered by all major Western powers), still eludes them. This is how to say sorry when you kill the wrong people for right reasons and kill the right people for the wrong reasons.

A Body Guard of Lies – Channel 4, The Truth and Sri Lanka’s “War Crimes”.

Sri Lanka Navy evacuating wounded Tamil civilians, May 2009

The Great Sri Lanka War Crimes Olympics has finally come alive with Callum McCray’s polemic documentary to be shown in the UK on 14^th June. McCray’s own viewpoint clearly betrays a man Fluffing so hard for the LTTE, its wonder that he hasn’t got lockjaw. Even the title “Killing Fields of Sri Lanka” was obviously chosen to echo the Cambodian Genocide.

Come and Have a Go If You Think You’re Hard Enough.

You’ve won a brutal, pitiless 30-year war against probably the most effective and ruthless semi-conventional insurgent/terrorist group anywhere.

You’ve defied massive international pressure to stop the war as you were about to declare absolute and crushing victory.

You’ve pressed ahead with the war despite heavy civilian casualties.

You’ve faced two years incessant of criticism of your victory with unceasing demands for international investigations of abuses and war crimes trials of your victorious forces from human rights groups, Western media and diaspora supporters of the defeated force.

Your victory and the manner of its achievement have been condemned in report issued by the UN Secretary General. Gruesome execution videos damning your military and attempting to compare your country to Rwanda and Cambodia are about to be released.

Even celebrating your victory has been criticized by countries that still obsessively celebrate their military victories 60 years after the event.

UN’s Navi Pillay (Navi who?) demands ‘full disclosure’. Obama ‘Michael’ Corleone insists ‘we took care of family business’.

“We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority.” President Obama in 2008.

Western bloc human rights organizations are very, very hesitantly dipping their toes into the ‘prosecute Obama for assassinating Osama ‘cos it was a human rights violation’ narrative. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and The International Crisis Group are being extremely circumspect about tackling the US and President Obama’s actions.

'It’s not personal, its strictly business.’

Ken Livingstone’s has Bus Bomber Vote in the Bag.

A UK coroner’s inquest into the 7^th July London Tube & Bus bombing, when UK Jihadi suicide bombers murdered 52 Londoners has finally delivered a verdict of ‘unlawful killing’. Thanking the traumatized survivors who gave evidence, the coroner said “during the course of hearing evidence I ran out of superlatives in describing the courage and heroism of many who survived.”

Ken with his favourite dead terrorist.