Sinhala “lebensraum” in progress in Vanni, warns Prof.Boyle

Prof Francis Boyle, University of Illinois College of Law

“The Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) is continuing to inflict Nazi-type crimes and atrocities against the Tamils even after their alleged excuse of fighting a “war against terrorism” has been exposed as a bogus pretext to annihilate the Tamils and to steal their lands and natural resources. This is what Hitler and the Nazis called “lebensraum”–”living space” for the Sinhala at the expense of the Tamils. The GOSL’s “ethnic cleansing” of the Tamil Homeland for the benefit of the Sinhala is now underway,” warns Francis Boyle, professor of International Law at the University of Illinois College of Law.


“With the UN already under fire for withholding and downplaying the number of civilian casualties in Sri Lanka, another ongoing controversy has opened up concerning the number of internally displaced persons detained in the IDP camps in northern Sri Lanka. Between the May 27 and May 30 reports of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, over 13,000 IDPs simply disappeared from the camps,” reported Inner City Press which is covering the affairs at the United Nations in New York.

“Concerning these missing 13,130+ genocide-survivors from the Safety Zone, Article 7(1)(i) of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court provides that the “enforced disappearance of persons” is a Crime Against Humanity “when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack,” Boyle said.


Clearly the GOSL’s enforced disappearances of these Tamils and other Tamils in the past has been both “widespread” and “systematic” as documented over the years by numerous human rights NGOs. The GOSL’s widespread and systematic enforced disappearances of Tamils over the years constitutes a Crime Against Humanity, Boyle added.

“According to the Nuremberg Charter (1945), the Nuremberg Judgment (1946) and the Nuremberg Principles (1950), the paradigmatic example of a Crime Against Humanity is what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jews.

“Historically, this Nuremberg Crime Against Humanity was the legal precursor to the International Crime of Genocide as defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention,” Boyle said.

Lebensraum served as a major motivation for Nazi Germany’s territorial aggression. Adolf Hitler believed that the German people needed Lebensraum – for a Großdeutschland, land, and raw materials – and that it should be taken in the East. It was the stated policy of the Nazis to kill, deport, Germanize or enslave the Polish, and later also Russian and other Slavic populations, and to repopulate the land with reinrassig (racially pure) Germanic peoples.

Sri Lanka Government’ Nazi-type crimes in the Vanni appear motivated by the doctrine of lebenstraum, and the future survival of Tamil culture in Sri Lanka is in peril, says Prof. Boyle.