{"id":137472,"date":"2014-08-18T22:23:33","date_gmt":"2014-08-18T22:23:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=137472"},"modified":"2014-08-18T22:31:53","modified_gmt":"2014-08-18T22:31:53","slug":"britains-three-decades-dirty-war-tamil-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/britains-three-decades-dirty-war-tamil-people\/","title":{"rendered":"Britain&#8217;s three decades of dirty war against the Tamil people"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Phil Miller<\/em><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"introtext\" style=\"color: #444444;\">Watching the UK Border Agency hand over Tamil refugees to a Sri Lankan regime that had tortured them prompted me to explore Whitehall&#8217;s real foreign policy towards this Indian Ocean island.<\/span><span style=\"color: #444444;\">\u00a0<\/span><br style=\"color: #444444;\" \/><br style=\"color: #444444;\" \/><span style=\"color: #444444;\">The resulting report,\u00a0<\/span><a style=\"color: #275994;\" title=\"Sri Lanka report\" href=\"http:\/\/ptsrilanka.org\/images\/documents\/britains_dirty_war.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">Britain&#8217;s dirty war against the Tamil people, 1979-2009<\/a><span style=\"color: #444444;\">, will be launched next week in Glasgow.\u00a0<\/span><br style=\"color: #444444;\" \/><br style=\"color: #444444;\" \/><span style=\"color: #444444;\">I was fortunate to be guided through this journey by Viraj Mendis, who knows British duplicity only too well. He was deported to Sri Lanka by Thatcher in 1989, after sheltering for a year inside a church in Manchester.\u00a0<\/span><a style=\"color: #275994;\" title=\"News article link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk\/news\/greater-manchester-news\/viraj-mendis-banned-from-funeral-of-priest-895477\" target=\"_blank\">Banned from Britain<\/a><span style=\"color: #444444;\">, Viraj continues to fight for Tamil peoples&#8217; rights from his adopted home in Germany.<\/span><br style=\"color: #444444;\" \/><br style=\"color: #444444;\" \/><span style=\"color: #444444;\">The report initially examines Thatcher&#8217;s policy on Sri Lanka during her decade in power. Her opening salvo was to dispatch former MI5 director (<\/span><a style=\"color: #275994;\" title=\"Jack Morton Powerbase link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.powerbase.info\/index.php\/Jack_Morton\" target=\"_blank\">Jack Morton<\/a><span style=\"color: #444444;\">), a veteran of\u00a0<\/span><a style=\"color: #275994;\" title=\"Malaya\" href=\"http:\/\/markcurtis.wordpress.com\/2007\/02\/13\/the-war-in-malaya-1948-60\/\" target=\"_blank\">Malaya<\/a><span style=\"color: #444444;\">and Ireland. He reported back on \u2018the depressing picture of apparatus and morale in the security forces tackling the Tamil problem\u2019, at a time when the Tamil armed struggle for independence was just beginning.\u00a0<\/span><br style=\"color: #444444;\" \/><br style=\"color: #444444;\" \/><span style=\"color: #444444;\">Then, from 1983-1987,\u00a0<\/span><a style=\"color: #275994;\" title=\"KMS powerbase profile\" href=\"http:\/\/www.powerbase.info\/index.php\/KMS\" target=\"_blank\">KMS Ltd<\/a><span style=\"color: #444444;\">, a British mercenary company comprised of ex-SAS soldiers (many of them\u00a0<\/span><a style=\"color: #275994;\" title=\"Dhofar powerbase profile\" href=\"http:\/\/www.powerbase.info\/index.php\/Category:Dhofar_War\" target=\"_blank\">Dhofar<\/a><span style=\"color: #444444;\">\u00a0veterans), trained Sri Lankan police commandos, army officers and helicopter gunship pilots in counter-insurgency techniques. KMS became infamous in the late 1980s when its boss,\u00a0<\/span><a style=\"color: #323232;\" title=\"David Walker powerbase profile\" href=\"http:\/\/www.powerbase.info\/index.php\/David_Walker_(SAS)\" target=\"_blank\">David Walker<\/a><span style=\"color: #444444;\">, was implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal. It is now one of Britain&#8217;s oldest private military contractors, trading under the name of\u00a0<\/span><a style=\"color: #275994;\" title=\"Saladin Powerbase profile\" href=\"http:\/\/www.powerbase.info\/index.php\/Saladin_Security_Ltd\" target=\"_blank\">Saladin Security<\/a><span style=\"color: #444444;\">.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.spinwatch.org\/index.php\/issues\/war-and-foreign-policy\/item\/5672-britain-s-three-decades-of-dirty-war-against-the-tamil-people\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Phil Miller Watching the UK Border Agency hand over Tamil refugees to a Sri Lankan regime that had tortured them prompted me to explore Whitehall&#8217;s real foreign policy towards this Indian Ocean island.\u00a0The resulting report,\u00a0Britain&#8217;s dirty war against the Tamil people, 1979-2009, will be launched next week in Glasgow.\u00a0I was fortunate to be guided through [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":137473,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,18,1615],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-137472","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-latest-news","9":"category-uk-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137472\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}