I honestly haven't heard a thing about this.

It's because, frankly, no one cares about Sri Lanka. At least to Americans, it seems like one of those countries where bad things are just supposed to happen; which makes some sort of sense, given the civil war there. Israel has the appearance of a much more Western, stable nation, as a result of which the western media is much more critical of Israel than Sri Lanka.

I think it may also be because the West feels that Israel is the only representation of itself in the Middle East, while Sri Lanka is just another Asian nation.

All I know about Sri Lanka is that they have a deadly staring frog.

The situations are pretty different, but it is troubling how there's nothing anywhere about this. The Sri Lankan civil war's been going on for decades and here the government is about to win and we hear nothing. The tragic civilian deaths aside, we should be getting news about just the fact that the war's going on. The media picks and chooses which story to tell, and we lose a lot of meaningful information in the process.

Here was the link the quote was pulled from. Its just baffling, an estimated 5 MILLION dead in Congo in their long running war (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/24/rwanda-congo-war-crimes) , civilians shelled in hospitals in Sri Lanka, yet the news is all Gaza, all the time.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gVoaDFmbCYS-Usz9ACDRIengj21QD95SC4NG0

There's also Colombia, Darfur, Burma's still got stuff going on in the mountains, low-grade separatism all over Indonesia, and all the messes in Africa that we hear nothing about. I realize it's impossible to genuinely feel the empathy for all the suffering people in the world as much as is deserved, but certainly Sri Lanka should bump Pairs Hilton in the headlines.

There's no way to solve it, however. The news business is a business and needs to make money for us to have any kind of information, and nationalizing it would turn it into Pravda. I guess we'll all have to stew in our bitterness indefinitely.

Wow. I searched for the hospital shelling on wikipedia, BBC, and New York Times. I only found a brief mention of it in the NYT, after which the article continued yelling at the Tamil Tigers for using civilians as shields.

Which is very ironic indeed.

The situation in Congo is simply horrible, but no one cares. I tried to raise awareness at my school, but all I got was "oh, it's just Africa".

War, War Never Changes.

The US doesn't support Sri Lanka, it does support Israel. What are we going to do, invade? We don't really have much influence in this, nor do we have as much reason to care. We're fighting a war in the Middle East, so the Middle East gets more attention.

I'd also say that it goes back to the US just being isolationist. If it doesn't affect us, we try to leave it alone.

In fact you should care about Congo, since the US has both hands full of blood, since 1960 - by conspiring to depose and/or murder the (first and only) democratically ellected chief of state, protecting diplomatically a Belgian puppet seccessionist movement to safeguard its access to the biggest uranium mine in the world (the uranium used to make the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from the Congo), helping to put in place and supporting for decades one of the bloodiest dictators ever seen over this planet (Mobutu), supporting and helping to organize a mercenary army gathered to squash a huge and almost victorious peasant rebellion aimed at toppling the US-backed dictator ("the simbas' revolt"), and so on. Though US seem to be clean in the case of Sri Lanka, the colonial policies by the British are at the roots of the civil war there, as in many other parts of the world...

I actually did an extensive report on Sri Lanka so it interests me a lot. In 2006 there was only a VERY brief mention on BBC about a major decisive naval battle between the Sri Lankan Navy and the Tigers, in which they were driven from sea power. Thousands died in that one day. It got less sentences than I just wrote in the newscast, and no mentions in the American news media.

I haven't heard any Sri Lankan news from any news media since besides the Economist, which is part of the reason I love the Economist.

And if I remember right at the end of NBC Nightly News that same day they did a piece on Paris Hilton's dog.

you guys need to change new service providers, i read about the sri lankan civil war all the time on AL Jazeera, the Guardian, and BBC(international version). god point Fabiobaq, i didnt know about how involved the US was. but like a lot of conflicts around the world that see "far away" go behind the story and you see multinational resource/mining companies, western and russian arms manufacturers and the good old "free trade" (ie we feel free to trade away your resources) governments from the developed world.

however the civil war in sri lanka is a bit more like the balkan conflicts than an african resource grab conflict. Ethnicity and religion, centralized state power and the slow sad slide of freedom fighters turning into terrorists.

Zuzak, I don't think people in Athens and Paris are protesting Gaza because of American support of Israel. There's another reason. And I'm not just talking protests in America. Europeans are much more vocal.

People protest because of downtrodden people getting killed (and good PR). Again, doesn't matter who bought the gun, so why no protests over Congo or Sri Lanka?

The difference perhaps is that the situation in Sri Lanka is about to conclude because the Tamil Tigers (declared around the World to be a terror organisation) are about to be finally defeatead... In the end game of the conflict I think people are turning a blind eye because to shout about human rights at this stage could potentially prolong the conflict, which needs top end so this doesn;t happen in future.

sean, I think there are many points in common between Sri Lanka, Congo and other "ethnic" and "religious" conflicts. It was all the usual for colonial powers to make use of otherwise relatively peaceful ethnic and religious differences to divide a colony's population. Sometimes they would allow only one "ethnicity" to serve as traditional chiefs, would take these guys' sons and make them study in modern european schools, while the others would study agriculture or nothing at all... Then when theses people who were literate in the colonial language and were at the lower echelons of the colonial administration began to feed emancipatory ideas, colonial powers turned to one of the other ethnicities and accused the first of exploiting them and being "tribalistic"... This happened in Rwanda, in Nigeria, and as far as I know in Sri Lanka as well. In fact, the British are still there: Sri Lanka is part of the Commonwealth and there are still British military bases in the island...

We have had some reports on that the Sri Lankan civil war is seemingly in it's endphase, but nothing about the civilian deaths, as far as I could tell from the major daily newspapers (this is in Sweden).

Well, the palestine conflict has been a big issue for a lot of people for close to 40 years now. Plus Europe has big groups of both jewish and arabic descent, which probably both are more interested in that particular conflict.

You can find reports on Sri Lanka once in a blue moon, when ever the US press has a slow week. The conflict has been going on for about as long as the Arab Isreali conflicts. Stagger is right about the some reasons for disparity of interest, than there is the strategic interest in the Middle East. But the media's selective coverage, and the average American's disinterest in any thing till it hits them in face, is the primary reasons.