Exposure?

The Times 'exclusive', available today on their website, decries a "hidden massacre" of Tamil civilians in the Sri Lankan peninsula. As the video quite correctly points out, civilian refugees were spread across the Tiger encampment in makeshift homes. There are gun emplacements clearly visible around the camp: mortar pits, ammunition trucks, command points are all interlocked in the network of the refugee settlement. What the images also show are the graves of large numbers of Tiger fighters and, supposedly, less elegant civilian graves interspersed along the outskirts of the settlement. The UN accusations laden against the Sri Lankan army, following the end to the civil war with the death of Velupillai Prabhakaran, are rife with claims that they ignored the no-fire zone and continued to shell the settlement with no regard for the threat of civilian casualties. It's as if the responsibility for the deaths of these civilians should be held by the Sri Lankan army instead of the Tamil Tigers themselves. Much like the Hamas occupation of the Gaza strip, the Tigers were a terrorist organization quite willing to defend themselves with a human barrier. Obviously, when civilian casualties are taken it is used as a propaganda tool to turn the remaining civilian population against the enemy and align it with the occupying ideology. Many of the refugees were threatened at gun point to remain in the settlement rather than flee their homes, like many others who managed to get away. The Tigers played on the ignorance they enforced upon the innocent refugees, in the final actions of a battle they had already lost. To place the blame with the Sri Lankan army, and bypass the repugnant and, I hope you'll agree, cowardly actions of the terrorists, is a crime in itself.