Archive for November, 2007

Buying Onions From India & China

Jaffna onion cultivators are unable to market their produce, but it is sad that Sri Lanka imports onions from India and China. In Colombo onions are selling for Rs110 per kg. But in Jaffna onions sell at Rs30.00 per kg. One month ago Jaffna onion cultivators sold their produce at Rs7.00 per kg by going house to house on bicycles and land master small tractors. A news item in the Daily Mirror 17th November said Sri Lanka importers will buy 30,000 tons of onions from India to augment supplies in the domestic market. Agents are waiting at Tutricon and Chennai ports in India to buy the bulbs on the hope of a lifting of restrictions and will import 30,000 tons of onion by Decmber, the Essential Service Commodities Importers Association Spokesman said. Sri Lanka had recently imported 20,000 tons of onion from China. If Colombo traders could purchase onions from Jaffna, Jaffna onion cultivators could earn their investment and be…

Continue reading »

Poll: How do you think we can end the war and attain peace in Sri Lanka?

Register your opinion in our poll here Poll closes on 31st December 2007. Repost This Article

Continue reading »

A friend of the regime

The first Rajapakse I knew, closely related to the current President, was from over ten years ago, in a different country at a time when the Executive of the day had begun a “war for peace” campaign that was also sold as the only way in which peace could be achieved and soon. We were both undergraduate students in the same University though in different colleges. He kept an immaculately clean apartment, tastefully furnished with a well appointed kitchen which always harboured the delicious promise of homemade Sinhalese food. We worked closely together on many projects. He was precise, sensible, quick witted and reflecting back on his nature, essentially a political animal in training. I realize now why I was then attracted to that which he embodied and represented. At its most basic was an effortless Southern hospitality that he exuded, the equivalent of xenia (ξενία), the Greek concept loosely translated as hospitality, or generosity and courtesy shown by a…

Continue reading »
  • 21 Nov, 2007
  • 2 Comments
  • Peace and Conflict

The Art of Forgetting by Lisa Kois – Director’s Introduction and Previews

About the Film Filmed in Sri Lanka between 2002 and 2005, the art of forgetting attempts to shatter the silence and statistical anonymity that characterizes dominant discourses of war by highlighting the personal stories of the people whose lives have been altered by war and political violence. The film is structured around a journey from the northern-most tip of Sri Lanka to the southern-most and uses this journey to loosely trace Sri Lanka’s overlapping histories of conflict in both the North and South of the country through the stories of people met along the way. The film is not intended to explain, analyze or provide a comprehensive history of Sri Lanka’s recent past. Volumes of written text have been produced that seek to do just that. There are many stories that are not overtly told… the story of the East, the story of the IPKF, the story of 1983, the story of Colombo, the story of the border villages, to…

Continue reading »

(Mis)-apportioning the Public Money

By Muttukrishna Sarvananthan Ph.D The government has tabled the Appropriation Bill for the fiscal year 2008 in the Parliament on October 10th. This short note is intended to highlight the apportioning (or rather mis-apportioning) of the public expenditure for year 2008. The overall public expenditure will increase by 15% to LKR.925 billion in 2008 from LKR.805 billion earmarked for 2007. Similarly, the defence expenditure would increase by 19% to LKR.166.5 billion (USD.1.5 billion) in 2008 from LKR.140 billion (USD.1.4 billion) earmarked for 2007. The actual expenditures would be greater than the foregoing earmarked figures going by the past experience. Besides, the total public expenditure for 2007 and 2008 indicated in Table 1 does not include public debt repayments, which is huge. Public debt repayment was 41% of the annual total public expenditure in 2005 and 45% in 2006. The twelve ministries catalogued in the table account for about 90% of the total public expenditure based on the actual expenditures incurred…

Continue reading »

What happened to Karuna, really ?

Today, Karuna Amman is in the police custody of British authorities, charged with entering Britain on a forged passport. As reported in last week’s Sunday Leader, this forged passport used by Karuna had been issued under a name Kokila Gunawardana by the Department of Emigration and Immigration in Colombo. This is not a normal passport that we civilians usually use but a diplomatic one especially issued to diplomats, high-ranking government officials, heads of governments and parliamentary members and ministers etc. If under special circumstances such a passport is issued to a person not holding some important position in the hierarchy of the state, a written request from the Presidential Secretary is needed. It was with this passport with all privileges of diplomatic immunity that Karuna has landed in Heathrow airport in London on last 18 September. How did Karuna obtain a British visa for this forged passport? It is on the strength of a Third Party Note furnished by our…

Continue reading »

News Flash: I was not visited by a pink elephant

Yesterday, the front pages of several English papers the Daily Mirror and the Daily News amongst them carried an intriguing news flash: “British will not de-ban LTTE”, and “British government will not revoke LTTE ban”. Readers all over Sri Lanka could be pardoned for scratching their heads, furrowing their brows, and saying “Eh?” It is often joked that only strange stories get selected for news: “dog bites man, not news; man bites dog, news”. The principle behind the “dog bites man” phenomenon in journalism is that something is news only when it changes or challenges the status quo of facts, norms or prevailing beliefs. That grass grows on ministerial lawns is not news, but if a Minster was paid a visit by a pink Elephant, that would be news. Conversely it would not be news to say that a Minister was not paid a visit by a pink Elephant. Such a story would certainly have had the readers saying “Eh?”…

Continue reading »

A requiem by Karuna: The death of sub-regionalism?

By Shanthi Sachithanandam Vakarai division, largely jungle tracts crisscrossed with 14 or so villages and little hamlets, situated along the northern border of Batticaloa District. The people of Vakarai are engaged in subsistence farming and fishing, with a small element of those who are traditionally hunter-gatherers. It was somewhere in December 1995; I was in the middle of conducting a meeting at a village called Paalchenai, in Vakarai, when suddenly a visibly distraught man from the same area burst into our meeting with a tiny transistor in his hand. “Amma, the army has entered Jaffna town,” he blurted out. All of us, the Paalchenai villagers and I, exclaimed in horror. We quickly gathered round him to listen to the news of the conclusion of the first leg of the Riviresa operations that captured Jaffna town. Nationalism Whenever I recollect this incident, I cannot help but marvel at the power of the idea of nationalism that is able to mobilise such…

Continue reading »

Sri Lanka – Killing for Peace

Channel 4′s recent programme on Sri Lanka broadcast recently in England. As noted here, … the team making a documentary for Channel 4 was ordered to leave Sri Lanka’s embattled Jaffna peninsula on the orders of the country’s military [even though] reporter Sandra Jordan, camerawoman Siobhan Sinnerton and producer Dushiyanthini Kanagasabapathipillai had received permission from defence authorities in Colombo before flying into Jaffna. It was not clear why the Channel 4 crew were made to leave, but the private Daily Mirror newspaper quoted a military official as saying they were sent back for their own safety. “Around 100,000 British tourists holiday in Sri Lanka every year, but thanks to a clampdown on the international media, few realise that away from its famous beaches, a new chapter in the country’s 30-year civil war has opened, in which innocent civilians are paying a bloody price.” Repost This Article

Continue reading »

Reflections One Year On: The Commission of Inquiry and the International Independent Group of Eminent Persons

Introduction It is more than one year since the appointment of the Commission of Inquiry (CoI). The warrant for the CoI dates to 3 November 2006. The updated TOR for the International Independent Group of Eminent Persons (IIGEP) dates to 12th January 2007. On 13 November the CoI and IIGEP were informed of their mandate being renewed. The renewed mandate is valid till 2 November 2008. The CoI and IIGEP were appointed by the Government of Sri Lanka in response to calls for international monitoring on human rights. The warrant mandates the CoI to investigate and inquire into 16 past cases. Therefore it is clear that the CoI only has the power to investigate and inquire into past cases and do not have a role in addressing present and future violations. The TOR for the IIGEP states that they are to observe investigations and inquiries conducted by the CoI. One year after the appointment of the CoI, several questions need…

Continue reading »

Was the Death of Thamil Chelvam a Feast or a Funeral to the South?

Last week Thamil Chelvam’s death was celebrated in the South by lighting firecrackers. About one and a half decade ago, the SLFP supporters in the South did the same on the tragic death of President Premadasa. Then, the assassins of President Premadasa were from the same stock of the person assassinated now. Yet, the common perception of the South at that time amounted to a sort of implicit gratitude towards the perpetrators of the crime, for they did, in the Southern psyche, an invaluable favor in eliminating an alleged despot, on behalf of the South. In that sense, the LTTE was considered a savior in disguise. Today, when that savior was assassinated by an armed force under the command of another person sitting on the same chair as Mr. Premadasa occupied in the past, same partisans in the South celebrated as before with much fanfare. In relation to these two assassinations, how that former Messiah became a traitor to be…

Continue reading »

The persuasive power of numbers and the mystery “8.5%” figure

Having decided to write in to Bloomberg.com for including what looked like a clear underestimation of the proportion of Tamils in its news items and to highlight the sensitive nature of a country’s ethnic make up (particularly of course Sri Lanka’s), I wanted to check for myself the veracity of what I was saying. I also wanted to find out where the figure of “8.5%” that Bloomberg routinely refers to derives. A search on Google threw up some interesting material. The mysterious figure of “8.5%” kept cropping up again and again, in very different contexts and without explanation. I was struck by how the figure was being used, seeking to link the viability of a community’s grievances with its proportion in the country’s population and to question the validity of its collective claim for greater autonomy. Starting with the numbers, the estimate of “8.5%” came up most recently in this Bloomberg.com article: “Any peace settlement must be based on a…

Continue reading »
  • 6 Nov, 2007
  • 46 Comments
  • Anuradhapura,
    Colombo,
    Peace and Conflict,
    Politics and Governance

The Killing of the ‘Always-Smiling Face’ LTTE Political Head and the Anuradhapura Airbase Attack Bring an Already-Futile Peace Process to the Edge of Chaos

By Satheesan Kumaaran The LTTE’s two-pronged attack on the Sri Lankan airbase, located at Saliyapura, in Anuradhapura, which is a north-central province of Sri Lanka, on Monday, October 22, 2007, and the air raid of the Sri Lankan air force on November 02, 2007, which killed six LTTEers, including the their political wing chief, have created panic among the Sri Lankans and anxiety among the global community. This mounting panic could push Sri Lanka intent on crushing the LTTE prowess and the LTTE in turn to to launch military operations aim at dividing the country into two nations within one island. The profile of the LTTE has risen, both militarily and politically, following the aerial and land attacks on the Sri Lankan airbase. The LTTE victory has put the Sri Lankan government into a grave political predicament for the Sri Lankan government, since Mahinda Rajapaksa coming to power, has not faced such a massive military defeat. But, in swift retaliation,…

Continue reading »

About Groundviews

Located at the Centre for Policy Alternatives in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Groundviews is a citizen journalism website that uses a range of genres and media to highlight critical perspectives on governance, reconciliation, human rights, the arts and literature, democracy and other issues. The site has won two international awards, including the prestigious Manthan Award South Asia in 2009. The grand jury's evaluation of the site noted, "What no media dares to report, Groundviews publicly exposes. It's a new age media for a new Sri Lanka... Free media at it's very best!"

cezarneaga.eu