Yearly Archives: 2013

Arrest of Azath Salley

“Azad Sally’s arrest, and the harassment he has faced over the past weeks, is indicative of the climate of fear government critics in Sri Lanka are forced to live under. He must be released immediately or charged with an internationally recognisable criminal offence,” said Polly Truscott, Amnesty International’s Deputy Asia Pacific Director.

“He has been campaigning to end oppressive practices against minorities in Sri Lanka, in particular Muslims and Tamils, for which he has faced the ire of the Sri Lankan government.

Returning to Mulliyawalai

While in Mullaitheevu (and in Vavuniya too) tension over land between Muslims and Tamil returnees are building up to the point of burning down poor returnees’ temporary huts in Mulliyawallai and blaming each other, in Weli Oya (Mullaitheevu) and Thalapogaswewa (in Vavuniya) Sinhala settlers are being brought by the government in bus loads for colonization. To date there have been about 4800 Sinhala families brought to Weli Oya and about 2000 families to Thalabogaswewa.

Buddhist Violence in Burma

In Sri Lanka, Buddhism is a faith that defines society for the Sinhalese, and it becomes the identifying characteristic when they feel threatened. That still doesn’t entirely explain how it became the rallying call of the modern Sri Lankan military, or large segments of it, and how its nonviolent, introspective teachings were so easily abandoned not only in time of conflict—perhaps understandable given the brutality of the Tamil Tigers—but also when time came to make a just peace with the civilian population of the Tamil north.

Discourse on the NPC Elections

From T.K. The 13th Amendment has been discussed in great length here and elsewhere as nowhere near  power devolution of any kind for Tamils. However, the insertion of it in Tamils’ path TODAY cannot be termed as about ‘nothing’. Even the parliament and judiciary cannot withstand the Sri Lankan presidential system, so why do we make much ado about the… Read more »

Grounding the Struggle

They constitute the systematic transfer of private land from Tamils to Sinhalese, with the associated intent to permanently dismantle the Tamil economy (farming and fishing), alter irrevocably the ethnic demography of the North-East and thus further weaken Tamil political mobilisation…

International ambitions for ethnic reconciliation as the basis for the peace, would be better served by attention to the drivers of everyday insecurity, disenfranchisement and oppression, exemplified by the state’s forcible appropriation of Tamil-owned land, rather than elections to impotent local assemblies.

Land Grabs In The North And East

Recent weeks have seen a steep rise in the number of land grabs in the North and East…

These land grabs by the military, together with activities relating to colonization of the North and East are part of the attacks on the democratic rights of the Tamil People in the North and East. These attacks are clearly carried out with the active support, sanction and collusion of the Sri Lankan government. They are part of the many vain and counterproductive attempts to suppress and persecute Tamils for their political aspirations. The Tamil National Alliance has called on the Sri Lankan government to immediately cease these acts of violence directed against the Tamil People. In order to prevent a non-recurrence of the past, Sri Lanka must expeditiously commence a meaningful and genuine process of reconciliation.

Dharmaratnam Sivaram

Sivaram had succeeded in bringing the Tamil struggle into the light in a world dominated by big media. This was a sensational achievement in a world dominated by media spin, where the voice of the oppressed had no chance of being heard.

The Sri Lankan (Unitary) Mindset

I wanted to write a quick post as a corollary to the recent exchanges between Guru and Dayan in Colombo telegraph.  I was glad to read that exchange.  I was also very happy to see Justice Wigneswaran’s  speech. Hopefully more and more discussions will follow on the nature of Sri Lakan state. I had been arguing that the Sri… Read more »

UNHCR Overview: IDPs in Sri Lanka

  UNHCR Overview 2012: People internally displaced by conflict and violence – Sri Lanka Publisher Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) Publication Date 29 April 2013 Cite as Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), Global Overview 2012: People internally displaced by conflict and violence – Sri Lanka, 29 April 2013, available at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/517fb0516.html [accessed 30 April 2013] Disclaimer This is… Read more »

A Never Ending Struggle

Provincial Councils were created at India’s insistence and the Indo-Lanka accord, and the 13th Amendment to the Sri Lanka Constitution. While it may have been conceived in the likeness of Indian states, it is but a pale imitation of that model. Unlike in India, in Sri Lanka, the President is the one who will, directly or indirectly, control the destiny of provinces through the Governor appointed by him…
The Governor is also the executive head of the province, and public service. He appoints the Chief Minister, and on his advice, the other members of the Board of Ministers. Decisions of the Board of Ministers are presented to the Governor who, at his discretion, has the power to accept or reject them. In other words, the decisions of the Board of Ministers, the elected representatives of the people, mean nothing!

Funds are allocated by parliament, on the advice of the President. Also police and land powers are outside the purview of the provinces, but the President can direct them through the bodies that exercise them. In effect, it is the President who decides everything for the provinces, through his Governor.

Thatcher, the ‘Freedom Sniper,’ and Tamil Refugees

The editor and the cover designer of the Economist weekly (April 13, 2013) have a load of gall and a crooked sense of humor to tag, late Margaret Thatcher as a ‘freedom fighter’ in its homage to ‘The Lady’. If Thatcher was a ‘freedom fighter’, where does one place the likes of Nelson Mandela and… Read more »

What Is the Narrative?

A fundamental question is: Why do terrorists attack the U.S.? The Narrative implies, rather overtly, that terrorists attack America because Allah told them to. (If this reminds you of Flip Wilson’s “The Devil Made Me Do It” you’re on target.) …

As far back as 2005, Scott Horton, writing on Antiwar.com, noted, “for his book [Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism], Pape started with the bombings themselves – every documented case between 1980 and 2004 – and noticed some suggestive common threads. Foreign occupation, it seems – not religion – is the core motivating factor behind suicide terrorism. From Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank to Sikhs in India, from the jihadists of 9/11 to the secular Marxist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka – for all of these, it is ‘a nationalistic response.’”

Torture of Tamils Continues

Tamil Refugee Council Australia Statement on Kumar torture April 25 2013 The Evil Ways of Sri Lankan Regime Exposed on One Man’s Back by Tamil Refugee Council, Australia, April 25, 2013       Torture Claims Emerge from Sri Lanka by Heather Ewart,  Australian Broadcasting Corporation, April 24, 2013

Review of ‘The Cage’

The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers In early 2009, during the closing weeks of the Sri Lankan civil war, the Tamil Tigers—a militant group that had waged a bloody, decades-long campaign to win independence for Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority—herded 300,000 Tamil civilians into a shrinking redoubt… Read more »

Land Deeds Distributed to Over 3000 Mahaweli Farmers

  Pres. Rajapaksa distributing deeds in pop-up tentPresident Mahinda Rajapaksa distributed land deeds to  3,000 farmer families in the Mahaweli L Zone under the theme of “Farmland Rights for you who give Golden Harvest to the Nation”, at a ceremony held at Sampath Nuwara Mahaweli grounds in the former conflict-affected Weli Oya on Saturday. Addressing… Read more »

Did the British Divide & Rule Ceylon?

It is no coincidence that the Tamil sense of justice was shaped by dissenting and nonconformist puritans of the newly emerged America…

In 1938, Tamils held 19.4% of the various government department jobs as a result of this investment in education and not because of favor from the British. This is not necessarily an outrageous percentage worthy of legislative level correction

HRW: Burma, Ethnic Cleansing

Burma: End ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ of Rohingya Muslims by Human Rights Watch, New York, April 22, 2013 (Bangkok) – Burmese authorities and members of Arakanese groups have committed crimes against humanity in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims in Arakan State since June 2012, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today. The 153-page… Read more »

Leahy Amendment Stronger on Paper Than in Practice in Pakistan

The law is sound in theory, but in practice the real impact on curbing human rights abuses is often tempered by the desire of the United States to advance its own security interests, even if at times it requires overlooking questionable human rights records.