Thank you for the opportunity to address the Tamil Writers Guild on the 10th Anniversary of its founding by Mr CJT Thamotheram. I have been asked to talk on the ‘Future of the Tamils’. I am conscious of the weight of the topic. And of the impossibility of doing it justice in the time available…. Read more »
Yearly Archives: 2014
The Search for a Political Solution Five Years after the War
“The sovereignty of Sri Lanka is very much intact. And we want it to remain intact. We are Sri Lankans… And we don’t want Sri Lanka’s sovereignty to be impacted upon.” R. Sampanthan (Leader of the TNA), Al-Jazeera, 26 March 2014 Sri Lanka’s post-war politics has come to be defined by her inability to… Read more »
US Commission on International Religious Freedom 2014 Report
Sri Lanka report at http://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/Sri%20Lanka%202014.pdf USCIRF is increasingly concerned about the religious freedom situation in Sri Lanka. In the last year there have been numerous attacks against religious minority communities, including Muslims, Hindus and Christians, by extremist Buddhist monks and laity affiliated with Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist groups such as Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) and Sinhala Ravaya…. Read more »
The Plight of Presidential Pet Macaws
by Sachi Sri Kantha, May 4, 2014 Last month, South American Macaws kept by President Mahinda Rajapaksa made news, due to their surprising escape from high security territory. I have received exclusive details about the current plight of these macaws, from my source ‘Colombo Crow’. For four days (from April 16th to 20th), this news… Read more »
Freedom of the Press 2014
http://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/freedom-press-2014#.U2JHiyhXguN Sri Lanka’s press labeled ‘not free.’ “Sri Lanka’s score also slipped by another 2 points, from 74 to 76, marking a dramatic decline of 20 points over the last decade. Increased harassment of both local and foreign journalists trying to cover protests and sensitive news stories, as well as attacks on printing and distribution… Read more »
Asian Buddhism’s Growing Fundamentalist Streak
* In Sri Lanka, where about 70 percent of the population is Theravada Buddhist, a group of monks formed the Bodu Bala Sena or the Buddhist Power Force in 2012 to “protect” the country’s Buddhist culture. The force, nicknamed BBS, carried out at least 241 attacks against Muslims and 61 attacks against Christians in 2013, according to the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress.
Sri Lanka to be Investigated for War Crimes
If seeing is believing, then what brought Sri Lanka to international attention was the Britain’s Channel 4 expose of war crimes. From that time onwards Sri Lanka has been back-peddling on the war crimes charges. Then the international community took an interest and it ended up in the UNHRC, which decided the case against Sri… Read more »
100 Most Influential – Muruganantham
Arunachalam Muruganantham TIME’s 100 Most Influential People : The entrepreneur who is an unlikely health crusader TED talks: How I Started a Sanitary Napkin Revolution BBC News Magazine: The Indian sanitary pad revolutionary
MGR Remembered – Part 17
by Sachi Sri Kantha, April 29, 2014 Part 16 As I had mentioned at the ending of the previous part, to celebrate the memory of MGR, Kannadasan Pathippagam (publishers) had released MGR’s autobiography on January 17th of this year – to coincide with MGR’s 97th birthday. Thus, it is opportune to offer a review of… Read more »
Sea Change
By IAN MORRIS APRIL 17, 2014 This is the latest in a series of insightful books, like “The Revenge of Geography” and “The Coming Anarchy,” in which Robert D. Kaplan, the chief geopolitical analyst at the global intelligence company Stratfor, tries to explain how geography determines destiny — and what we should be doing about it. “Asia’s… Read more »
National Existence and National Oppression
In Sri Lanka, there is a long political tradition of denying the national existence of Tamils and to delegitimize or criminalize their national mobilization…
The framing of Tamils as being a minority contains their political rights and national consciousness within the unitary state of Sri Lanka…
The Sri Lankan state and its ideologues are relentless in their denial of and efforts to deconstruct the Tamil nation.
The Autumn of a Patriarch
Reading from a prepared script, Mr. Karunanidhi spoke for an hour, discussing at length the state of Sri Lankan Tamils and his dedication to the Tamil language.
These issues, emotive in the past, are now largely symbolic, of little electoral currency in this parliamentary election, and his speech was remarkable mostly for its omissions. Mr. Karunanidhi refrained from addressing the defining themes of this election: widespread disenchantment with corruption and dynastic politics. The audience heard him in respectful silence, but his remarks drew few cheers.
It was unusual to see a veteran politician like Mr. Karunanidhi straying so far from the popular pulse. But it was understandable, too, for the issues of corruption and dynastic politics are ones on which Mr. Karunanidhi and his party have long ceded the moral ground.
Spare the Advice
“The technocratic approach ignores what this book will establish as the real cause of poverty — the unchecked power of the state against poor people without rights,” he writes.
Why Sri Lanka is Severing Ties Between Tamils at Home and Abroad
Colombo’s move to list organizations and individuals in the Tamil diaspora as financiers of terrorism has one motive: to silence Tamil voices both within the government’s jurisdiction and overseas. By doing so, the government hopes to prevent them from contributing to the international inquiry and thereby avoid accountability.
How Strategic is Sri Lanka?
Editor’s note: Parag Khanna is a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and author of The Second World (2008), How to Run the World (2011), and Hybrid Reality (2012). The views expressed in this commentary are solely his. (CNN) — Five hundred years ago as the Spanish and Portuguese empires were carving up the Western hemisphere into… Read more »
Political Instability & Genocide in the Asia Pacific
Sri Lanka is something of an anomaly as the only institutionally democratic state to have committed genocide.
‘Making It to Semany’
There are very few books written in English so far about what happened in the Tamil areas of Sri Lanka during and after the war years. We are still waiting for ‘The Thin Red Line,’ ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ or ‘Bridge Over the River Kwai’ to be written about this time. In the meantime, the novels are… Read more »
Where Genocide Is Most Likely To Happen Next
Twenty years after the horrors of the Rwandan genocide, researchers at The University of Sydney have created a model predicting which countries will experience targeted mass violence across the globe. Known as the Atrocity Forecasting Project, the model plugs in more than a dozen “instability variables,” which include statistics on civil wars, regime changes, assassinations, neighboring state conflicts,… Read more »
CPJ: Impunity Index 2014
4 Sri Lanka
Impunity Index Rating: 0.443 unsolved journalist murders per million inhabitants
Last year: Ranked 4th with a rating of 0.431
Deciphering the Enemy List of Gota
I love lists of all kinds. Thus, it is not unusual that I had a treat that The Honorable Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Secretary for the Ministry of Defence in Sri Lanka, under his capacity as the Competent Authority, released his ‘Enemy List’ on March 20th. The description about this particular list appears only in one sentence…. Read more »