Bruce Haigh says in this article <tragically Australia has taken sides in the Sri Lankan Civil War. Instead of offering humanitarian assistance to those in the camps it sent the deputy chief of the navy Rear Admiral David Thomas to Colombo in June 2009 to urge that young Tamils be prevented from coming to Australia.>
It has taken writers of these kind of articles in the West a long time to finally get the fact that when you go into a country on a peace keeping mission you will in affect be taking one side against the other.

That’s why we had the BLACK HAWK DOWN scenario in Somalia because the West thought that you could just go into a country and stand in the middle of a conflict without taking sides. Inevitably when the situation reaches massacre, refugee slum camp stage one side is clearly in control and it is them who see you as being on the other side and as such an enemy ,when you go in and defend the other side that they are symstematically killing.

I have seen the West take one side or the other quite a few times not seeming to realize that one minute they see the rebels against the government as being in the right and the next minute they take the side of a government being attacked by rebels.

It is a deadly business taking sides in these civil wars, you may end up with planes being used as bombs to destroy buildings a la 9/11. A couple of the plotters who planned to storm our army bases and kill all our soldiers were from Somalia. A bit of payback there perhaps , I wonder who’s side they were on when the civil war broke out in Somalia?

BRUCE HAIGH <Addressing poverty, racism, the disproportionate distribution of power and the debilitating effects of corruption would enable the causes of terrorism to be addressed before violence is embraced as a course of action to address injustice.>

The disproportionate distribution of power, is probably the main cause of poverty experienced by large segments of people(racism), it also is the cause of corruption in these troubled countries.
Democracy is not immune from this threat either, because democracy is set up so that the majority rules. There is no trouble while the dominant group that has always ruled has the numbers but it can turn ugly pretty quickly when another group with entirely different ideas of governance gets the voting numbers to take the reigns of power. This is what we witnessed in Fiji.

So Bruce feels sad for the Tamils in the camps and he wants the Australian government to move them to Australia. We can all put ourselves in the awful situation of living in these camps in our minds and feel sadness for the situation that exists but remember the horror of the conditions and the camps that the Jews were put in, in Germany. Did it solve the problem when they were moved to a nicer area after the war, namely Israel? No, the problem has just shifted to another area. Now the slaughter continues between the Jews and the Palestinians.

This is one of those OLO articles that is so well executed, it's difficult to add anything that hasn't been already covered.

Perhaps all I can say is that another strategy for addressing terrorism would be for the UN and other international bodies to develop a more definitive policy in dealing with struggles for self-determination of dispossessed cultures contained within national boundaries. So far, international laws and conventions on dispossessed sub-cultures are merely token and seen as merely internal disputes - unless of course they have strategic importance to various superpowers. Inevitably, struggles for self-determination spill over into terrorism when ignored by the world for too long.

Also, the advent of global communication and the internet is creating an unprecedented body of information that enables ordinary people to question the strange hypocrisies and moral duplicities that befuddle the foreign policies of the powerful nations - particularly the Western US-led alliances. This in itself could well be an agent for change.

The Insight programme I watched last night on the ABC Channel verified what I said about the American peacekeeping intervention in Somalia above.
The audience was made up mostly of Somalians and when they were asked about that conflict, they said the Americans had supported the Ethiopians and they felt hotility to the Americans for not supporting the Somalian freedom fighters. So now we have Somalian immigrants arrested for plotting to attack Australian army bases.