A.HRC.27.CRP.2 OISL #1 oral update Human Rights Council Twenty-seventh session Agenda item 2 Annual report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and reports of the Office of the High Commissioner and the Secretary-General Oral update of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on promoting reconciliation, accountability and human rights in Sri Lanka 1. On behalf… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Geopolitics
From Glasgow to Kashmir
by Jonah Blank, ‘Foreign Policy,’ New York, September 20, 2014 In Thursday’s vote, the people of Scotland did not opt for independence. But they may well have lowered the bar for separatists all around the world — not least among the countless ethnic groups of Asia. The Caledonian contest came down to the very end,… Read more »
Sri Lanka: Was It a Genocide
“The credible allegations support the finding of the crime against humanity in so far as the conditions imposed on civilians in the final months in the NFZ’s (No Fire Zones) were calculated to bring about the destruction of a significant part of the civilian population.”…
Whether the victims can expect any “remedial justice” might be speculative at this stage but it is clear from the facts given to us by the U.N. and relevant international laws that the government of Sri Lanka can be found guilty of genocide and war crimes.
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 »
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 »
Years After Obama Hailed Warming Ties With India
by Gardiner Harris, ‘The New York Times,’ March 31, 2014 NEW DELHI — When President Obama visited India in 2010, he called the warming relationship between it and the United States the “defining partnership of the 21st century.” Decades of disagreements, from Cold War ideological battles to squabbles over the United States’ close relationship with India’s archrival,… Read more »
UNHRC Resolution Promoting Reconciliation, Accountability and Human Rights in Sri Lanka
Human Rights Council Twenty- fifth session Agenda item 2 Annual report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and reports of the Office of the High Commissioner and the Secretary-General Albania,* Austria, Belgium,* Bulgaria,* Canada,* Croatia,* Cyprus,* Denmark,* Estonia, Finland,* France, Georgia,* Germany, Greece,* Hungary,* Iceland,* Ireland, Italy, Latvia,* Liechtenstein,* Lithuania,* Luxembourg,* Mauritius,*… Read more »
Demilitarisation, Human Rights and Indo-US Interests
by Dr. Parasaran, Rangarajan, ‘Eurasia Review,’ Oregon, USA, reprinted from South Asia Analysis Group, March 25, 2014 The United States is reported to have requested a military installation in Sri Lanka as part of its “Pivot Towards Asia” where the Pentagon has stated that approximately 60% of U.S. Navy assets will be in the Asia… Read more »
Spreadsheets and Global Mayhem
Using machine-learning tools to draw inferences about the effects of each piece of information they analyzed, the researchers compiled a list of 15 countries facing the highest risk of genocide between 2011 and 2015. Central African Republic, which had been on no one’s radar at the time, came out at the top, followed by the Democratic Republic of Congo and Chad. Also on the list were some obvious contenders with continuing strife: Somalia, Afghanistan and Syria. They didn’t get everything right: Sri Lanka was on the list, but has witnessed no outbreaks of mass violence since 2011 — not yet, anyway.
Sovereignty vs. Self-Rule
by Peter Barker, ‘The New York Times,’ March 8, 2014 WASHINGTON — They wanted to break away from a country they considered hostile. The central government cried foul, calling it a violation of international law. But with the help of a powerful foreign military, they succeeded in severing ties. The Kosovars’ secession from Serbia in… Read more »
Channel 4’s ‘No Fire Zone’
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/no-fire-zone/4od ABOUT THE PROGRAMME The team behind the Nobel Peace Prize-nominated Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields tell the story of the 138-day-long final offensive in Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war Available for a limited time only at Channel 4 site. —————— Channel 4 Nov. 9 blog on interview with Isaipriya’s mother and sisters http://blogs.channel4.com/miller-on-foreign-affairs/sri-lanka-tamil-familys-distress-footage-daughter/430
Sri Lanka’s Unfinished War
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
India’s PM Under Fire For Boycotting Commonwealth Conflab Under Tamil Pressure
He had a summit with President Obama in the White House, and he saw China’s President Xi Jinping in Beijing and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in Moscow all in a period of a few weeks. Yet Manmohan Singh, approaching the end of a decade as India’s prime minister, won’t be hobnobbing this week with the leaders of the… Read more »
Transnational Security and Postinsurgency Issues
From from “Issues for Engagement: Asian Perspectives in Transnational Security Challenges,” published by Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, 2010 Posted on Academia.org & only available for online reading at http://www.academia.edu/4740547/Sri_Lanka_Transnational_Security_and_Postinsurgency_Issues Key Findings • sri lanka’s quarter-century civil war may be over, but many of the underlying causes of the war continue to linger. • the international network of… Read more »
Sri Lanka: COIN or Civil War?
Ambassador (Ret.) Edward Marks, a veteran of 40 years in the Foreign Service and currently a Distinguished Senior Fellow at George Mason University, contacted Joint Force Quarterly with comments about “Understanding Sri Lanka’s Defeat of the Tamil Tigers” by Niel A. Smith, which appeared in issue 59 (4th Quarter, 2010). Ambassador Marks believes that MAJ Smith misreads the context… Read more »
A Violent Non-State Actors Reading List
About Daveed Gartenstein-Ross Visiting research fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT)–The Hague; senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; Ph.D. candidate in world politics at the Catholic University of America; etc. In the introduction to her edited volume Violent Non-State Actors in World Politics, Klejda Mulaj notes that, while political science scholarship has… Read more »
Understanding Sri Lanka’s Defeat of the Tamil Tigers
After three decades of conflict, Sri Lanka’s government defeated the ethnic separatist insurgent group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), popularly known as the Tamil Tigers, in May 2009. The violence and brutality employed by both sides in the final years of the conflict drew significant interest from the global civilian and military communities, especially… Read more »
Collateral Damage
At the time of the crackdown in East Pakistan, President Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, were trying to establish relations with the People’s Republic of China…Yahya, its military leader, became Nixon’s secret liaison with the Chinese leader Zhou Enlai. Yahya helped lay the groundwork for the visits to China by Kissinger and then Nixon….
With the White House averting its eyes, the largely Muslim Pakistani Army killed at least 300,000 Bengalis, most of them Hindus, and forced 10 million to flee to India. Bass lays out his indictment of the White House: Nixon and Kissinger spurned the cables, written by their own diplomats in Dacca (the capital of East Pakistan), that said West Pakistan was guilty of carrying out widespread massacres. Archer Blood, the counsel general in Dacca, sent an angry cable that detailed the atrocities and used the word “genocide.” The men in the White House, however, not only refused to condemn Yahya — in public or private — but they also declined to withhold American arms, ammunition and spare parts that kept Pakistan’s military machine humming.
London Conference on Accountability for Genocide
The Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam (TGTE) organised a conference on accountability for genocide against the Tamils on 28 & 29 September in London. During the conference, many speeches were delivered. Four of those speeches on YouTube are below. The speakers presented their views on whether Sri Lanka can be held accountable for committing genocide. Geoffrey Robertson… Read more »
Establish a Syrian War Crimes Tribunal
Smith: Switch gears, Mr. President. Fight to establish Syrian war crimes court &hold both Assad and the rebels who commit egregious crimes accountable There is a non-lethal way to help ensure that Bashar al-Assad and other perpetrators of atrocities in Syria are held to account not someday far in the future but beginning now. The… Read more »