At this moment, at least 60,000 civilians trapped in a tiny strip of land along the northern coast of Sri Lanka are being deployed as human shields by the insurgent force known as the Tamil Tigers — while artillery shells fired by the Sri Lankan army land indiscriminately among rebels and noncombatants alike. The UN asserts that at least 4,500 civilians have been killed since January as the government has sought to decisively end a bloody rebellion that has lasted for a quarter-century. The army is said to be preparing a final assault that, according to UN Emergency Relief Coordinator John Holmes, could produce a “bloodbath.” Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has spoken of “tens of thousands” of lives at risk. Yet the conflict has barely been reported, and the international community has barely stirred.

The fighting threatens to produce exactly the kind of cataclysm that states vowed to prevent when they adopted “the responsibility to protect” at the 2005 UN World Summit. This doctrine stipulates that states have a responsibility to protect peoples within their borders from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. When states are found to be “manifestly failing” to protect citizens from such mass violence, that responsibility shifts to the international community, acting through the UN. At the core of this norm is the obligation to act preventively rather than waiting until atrocities have occurred, as has happened too often.

Why, then, the silence? The most important answer is simple: “the war on terror.” Government officials have artfully, and relentlessly, appropriated the language of the war on terror to characterise their fight against the rebels, formally known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The group is one of the world’s most ruthless insurgencies: The Tigers perfected the technique of suicide bombing long before Islamist jihadists did so (using it in 1991 to kill Indian PM Rajiv Gandhi, among many others) and operate almost as a suicide cult. The US includes the LTTE on its list of foreign terrorist organisations. Any government that failed to aggressively confront such a threat would be guilty of failing to protect its citizens.

... contd.