SLA war crimes eerily similar to Srebrenica Scorpions' terror, says Boyle
kumare
Summary executions violate Common Article 3 to the Four Geneva
Conventions of 1949, to which Sri Lanka is a contracting Party,
prohibiting in subsection I(d) "... the carrying out of executions
without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted
court...." Violations of the Geneva Conventions are war crimes, said
Professor Francis Boyle, after watching the video on the cold-blooded
extra-judicial killings carried out by the Sri Lanka Army (SLA)
soldiers, published by a German-based group 'Journalists for Democracy
in Sri Lanka (JDS)' Tuesday.
Scorpion Trnovo massacre
"We have a video of the same being done to Bosnians at Srebrenica by
Serbia's 'Scorpions,' which I viewed with one of the few male
survivors while in the killing fields of Srebrenica itself," Boyle
added, continuing:"Of course the Scorpion executions were just a small
element of the Serbian genocide at Srebrenica."
Srebrenica massacre of 6 Bosnian Muslims
A video of Serb paramilitary soldiers Scorpions, caught in the act of
murdering six Bosnian Muslim youths in July 17, 1995, near the town of
Trnovo, Srebrenica, discovered 10 years later, shocked Serbia and led
to the arrest and later conviction of the soldiers. The six Muslim men
and boys were forced to lie down with their hands tied before being
shot in the back by their captors. Two of the victims were 17, while
the others were in their 20s and 30s. A Belgrade war-crimes court
sentenced four Scorpions to a total of 58-years in prison.
The New York Times reporting on the story on the 6-person massacre by
the Scorpians, said: "The faces of the perpetrators can be seen and
their insults to the Muslims can be heard. The film was shot by a
Scorpions member."
Video in 3GP format
In remarkable eerie similarity with the SLA crimes, the SLA terror
video was also obtained by an SLA soldier using a mobile-phone camera,
and the SLA soldiers are also heard spewing insults to the naked Tamil
prisoners.
JDS: Video evidence of extra-judicial executions in Sri Lanka
"Scorpions, however, did not strip and then murder the Bosnians in the
nude. But the GOSL Army did exactly that, which is even more akin to
what the Nazis did to the Jews, depriving their victims of the last
shred of their humanity before dying," Boyle observed.
Killings by SLA
German police ready to shoot dead jewish men stripped naked
On the disappearances inside internment camps, the press release
issued by the JDS said: "The Sri Lankan government justifies the
internment of approximately 280,000 Tamil people, for over three
months now, on the basis that they are 'screening' for LTTE cadres.
These camps still remain out of bounds for independent media and human
rights observers. Apart from these known camps, it is widely believed
that there are over 10,000 Tamils are held in undisclosed locations.
Further, as a recent BBC report reveals the interned Tamils have to
regularly experience the trauma of the appearance of the 'dolphin
vans' in the camps - as these whisk away people - who then disappear."
Commenting on the disappearances, Boyle said, "when the enforced
disappearances are "widespread" or "systematic" they become Crimes
against Humanity under the Rome Statute for the International Criminal
Court," adding:"Crimes against Humanity are the precursor to genocide,
just as Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jews--I also visited Dachau."
The Scorpions (Škorpioni) were a Serbian paramilitary group which
actively sought out the extermination of other ethnicities in the wars
in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo. The unit was formed in
1991 in what was then the breakaway Croatian Serb Republic of Serbian
Krajina. The Scorpion leader was Slobodan Medić.