The Tamil Tigers and Hama

We learned today that an anonymous UN report has blamed the Sri Lankan government of killing 10's of 1000's of civilians through indiscriminate shelling in the final phase of its war against the Tamil Tigers. Anyone remember that particular war? Will anyone remember this particular report (within less than 12 hours, it's already been relegated off the front page of the BBC News website; you'd have to look up S.Asian news to find anything on it)? Well, apparently this particular war took place between January and May 2009. Strange, if you think that Israel's Cast Lead Operation (war, if you like, massacre if you are so inclined) took place in December 2008 and January 2009 - lot's of TV coverage, UN resolutions and a very high profile UN report commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council. Funnily enough, the Beeb tells us that the chances of this new report being adopted by the UNHRC are remote, since it has many friends and allies (you know, Bahrain, Qatar, Russia, Cuba, Pakistan and China - oh and Libya (whose current membership is suspended (at least until the noise dies down)). Reminds me of another parallel in time - anyone who knows anything about the middle-east knows that Sabra and Shatila was a terrible massacre of Palestinians in Lebanon in 1982 for which Israel was responsible - people tend to forget it wasn't actually the Israelis that carried out the killing of between 700 and 3,500 people - but you know what? it was bad and Israel had a moral responsibility to prevent the attack. There were mass demonstrations in Israel afterwards and a national commission of enquiry that lead to Ariel Sharon resigning from government. What our journeyman liberal middle-east experts are only now starting to hear about, albeit tangentially, is that in the same year Hafiz Al Assad of Syria flattened on entire quarter of one of Syria's major cities following an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. He killed between 10,000-50,000 people. Who knew? Just might help explain something of why Syria traditionally scores higher than Israel in international popularity surveys.