Travel company Kuoni specialises in the more upmarket end of mass tourism. At the moment it is advertising some special offers for September. Starting at £1129 you can have eleven nights of the Ceylon Experience. The price includes your own driver / guide, visits to sites of religious interest and a visit to the elephant orphanage. For only £785 you can have a touch of luxury at the Eden Resort and spa which offers hydrotherapy and a choice of eating places to satisfy any appetite.

Earlier this week Amnesty International reported that “hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the recent war in North East Sri Lanka and living in camps are being denied basic human rights including freedom of movement”. Spa facilities and hydrotherapy don’t seem to be available in these camps and Amnesty adds that “many people are unprotected and at risk from enforced disappearances, abductions, arbitrary arrest and sexual violence.” It wouldn’t be reasonable to expect Kuoni to put that sort of detail in the brochure but given that the Sri Lankan army was industrially murdering an estimated 20 000 Tamil civilians at about the time the company was designing its brochure they could have thought twice about billing the island as some sort of Shrangi La for the bargain hunter.

Hard evidence is not easy to come by about the numbers of dead, homeless and interned civilians in Sri Lanka. Journalists are not allowed to travel freely and the camps are not open to meaningful external scrutiny. In effect the war against the Tamil community is being carried on through other means and all reports agree that there is a huge wave of Sinhala chauvinism making any public criticism of the state’s policy or defence of the Tamil community difficult and potentially fatal. The Sri Lankan government must not be allowed to use tourism to present a false picture of the island’s reality. If these sorts of atrocities were happening almost anywhere else a boycott campaign would already be up and running and it’s time to start one on the issue of tourism to Sri Lanka.

The demands are simple ones:

· Access to the camps

· Immediate release of those held in the camps

· Freedom of movement for the refugees

· Trials and effective legal representation of Tamil political prisoners

· New homes and compensation for those made homeless by the military action

The Sri Lankan government has been responsible for murder and destruction on a scale far greater than what happened in Gaza. Putting a little bit of pressure on its tourist industry is the minimum that solidarity with the Tamil people requires.