German authorities arrest Six Tamil activists

On the 3rd of March, in dawn raids, six Tamils were arrested in Nordrhein-Westfalen on the charge of forming a 'criminal group' to collect money for an ‘illegal organisation’. The obvious question that arises is, why is it that now, nearly one year after the Sri Lankan regime ended the war on the island - by killing, according to Gordon Weiss , 'as many as 40,000 civilians during the last stages' - the authorities in Germany have suddenly decided to arrest several individuals who are highly respected within the Tamil community? The important clue is, that soon after the arrests, the Sri Lankan TV news headlines featured the triumphant Major General Jagath Dias proclaiming his great success in working with the German authorities in securing these arrests. On the BBC, Jagath Dias justified the arrests in Germany thus, 'although the LTTE was defeated in Sri Lanka, the group is still very active in Europe in many other forms'. Major General Jagath Dias' proclamations of his collaboration with the authorities have legitimacy because he is, in fact, the deputy ambassador for Sri Lanka in Germany! He was also the highest ranking operational commander on the ground during the final stages of the massacre of the Tamils – the period that Gordon Weiss (United Nations' spokesperson in Sri Lanka at the time) was talking about.

Dias, is directly responsible for the indiscriminate air raids and the use of heavy weapons against the Tamil population, which by April 2009, according to United Nations internal documents, were resulting in the death of 116 people a day. He is responsible for bombing civilian habitations, hospitals as well as the government's self-proclaimed 'safety zones' or 'no fire zones' - causing innumerable deaths of civilians, doctors and aid workers, depriving essential services like food, water, and health facilities in war zones. He is directly responsible for execution of a group of LTTE civil-administrators and political leaders who had come unarmed and with white flags – despite that fact that wide publicity was given to this internationally negotiated surrender. Dias is responsible for the Sinhala soldiers under his command maltreating the dead bodies of the Tamils to add insult to the injury that the Tamil society underwent. He is responsible for ordering the military assault on the Tamil population forcing them to move en masse away from their homes – and at the end of the war - incarcerating, the remaining 280,000 people in concentration camps for six months. He has overseen the detention in unspecified location at least 12,000 Tamils - with no access to legal representation or any other kind of external contact, including that of the International Committee of the Red Cross (for details of the war crimes and crimes against humanity charges against the Sri Lankan regime and its military see the report of the Dublin Tribunal).