The island belongs to centipede, rat, butterfly, lots of species each with their own habitats, and supervising all arable and fallow land the president king. Minorities may enjoy clean living in freshly cleared forest patches, welfare villages with amenities such as latrines and tents, gated communities. June 28, 2009 Part of the Writers Under Siege collection on Groundviews. For more information, click here. Repost This Article
Continue reading »We have a once –in-generations chance to re-found Sri Lanka, to build Sri Lanka anew. To do so, we must be both hard and soft; and vigilant as hawks and as conciliatory as doves. We must be hard enough to obliterate what is left of the LTTE as an organization and surgically pre-empt any attempts at re-emergence, be they local or Diaspora-based and originated. We must be soft and malleable enough to arrive at a consensus with the non-Tiger Tamils as to the shape of the Sri Lanka we wish to build and live in. Where do we start? With renovation, I suggest. The only available starting point is modest and realistic reform, namely the implementation of the 13th amendment to the Sri Lankan constitution, because it represents the broadest available consensus between the Sri Lankan state and a section on non-Tiger Tamils as well as the Sri Lankan and Indian states. It represents the triangular intersection of the anti-Tiger…
Continue reading »[Editors note: This article was published in The Sunday Island on 28 June 2009. Groundviews does not usually reproduce content first published elsewhere in print or online. In this case however, given that the Island's website has no mechanism to feature reader generated comments and because Rohini Hensman's article was exclusively published on this site, Malinda's response is republished with the expectation of continued dialogue between the two principal authors and comments from a wider readership. Those familiar with Malinda's initial trenchant comment to and critique of Rohini's article are also strongly encouraged to read Visit to ‘concentration camps’ in Cheddikulam published in The Nation, also on Sunday. Update - Rohini Hensman's response to this article is now featured on Groundviews here.] Rohini Hensman is absolutely right when she asserts (in an article published in www.groundviews.org titled ‘Why are the Vanni civilians still being held hostage?’) ‘If there are elements in the government and armed forces working to destroy the Democratic…
Continue reading »The end of the conventional war in the north and the east of Sri Lanka witnessed the almost total annihilation of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) including its leadership. However, the Government forces are still carrying out clearing up operations throughout the island. Tens of thousands have been slaughtered; many thousands wounded; hundreds of thousands expelled from their habitats and many hundreds of thousands interned into camps. The deaths of the militants have been celebrated by the overwhelming majority of the Sinhalese and some of the Tamils and Muslims. The Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) is allegedly engaged in destroying any incriminating evidence of its culpability in war crimes. The fate of three doctors, who were earlier praised by the UN for their heroic services to the wounded during the war, serves as an example. History The LTTE commenced as a guerilla force and over time developed its own conventional fighting capability by having a ground force, a…
Continue reading »As Paul Berman once wrote, “somewhere in the world it is always 1941”. There comes a time in the life of every society when it is faced with an existential threat or challenge. It is the social forces or elements that rise up to this challenge and successfully overcome this threat that then have the power as well as the legitimacy to place their stamp on what comes after. Those who stood on the wrong side of history, or never rose to the occasion, or who abandoned the struggle partway, or simply failed; the defeated enemy, the collaborators, the appeasers and the fence-sitters — and these are not one and the same — all forfeit the chance to place their values, ideas and programs as the leading ones of the social order that follows the great test. The truths are threefold. The truth is that the Tigers and the Tamil ultra-nationalists overestimated themselves and underestimated the Sinhalese, due to arrogance…
Continue reading »A trial takes place in a tent at the foot of the mountain. It is me, your potato farmer on trial. Accused of being an intellectual who failed to play a role in stemming the growth of nationalism; thereby contributing to crimes committed on potato soil. This is no ordinary trial. There is only one participant: prosecutor, accused, judge and jury are all the same — me. Accusing, examining, defending and passing judgment, are all going to be done by myself. Readers are invited to be spectators. No judgment please. This trial is my roadmap to nirvana. I am thirsty. There is water, hundred yards away, but between the water and I is a queue hundred yards in length. I think of the consequence of drinking water. I will need to pee. There is a stinking toilet hundred yards away. But there is a hundred yard long queue for it. Something nice about quenching thirst and the urge to pee…
Continue reading »Image courtesy IRIN Throughout the last stages of the civil war, the government of Sri Lanka claimed to be engaged in a hostage rescue mission on behalf of civilians in the Vanni who were being held against their will be the LTTE. How far are its words borne out by its actions? It is certainly true that the LTTE was keeping hundreds of thousands of civilians hostage and using them as forced labour, a source of child and adult conscripts, and a human shield from behind which they could engage in offensive operations against Sri Lanka’s armed forces. It has also been confirmed that in general the soldiers showed compassion to the escaping civilians, and some even risked their own lives to enable civilians to escape to safety. Although it was clear that for the political and military leadership, the aim of finishing off the LTTE involved sacrificing the lives and limbs of civilians, there did not seem to be…
Continue reading »Sri Lanka’s present administration is a “dictatorship masquerading as democracy” observed Prof. John Neelsen from the Institute of Sociology in Tuebingen, Germany. His judgement is not far from the truth. In this paper I shall argue that a virtual ‘Sinhala-Buddhist dictatorship’ has emerged in Sri Lanka as the outcome of the brutish military campaign that resulted in a humanitarian tragedy of scandalous proportions. Also, I shall show the colonial connection, particularly the British rule that sowed the seeds for the present political impasse in Sri Lanka. Let me start with a brief description of the war that culminated in the destruction of the Tamil Tiger leadership along with its Tamil mini-state in Sri Lanka’s Tamil habitat. Successive administrations in Sri Lanka succeeded in branding its nearly thirty-year war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as war on terrorism. This formula worked well in getting the foreign countries – to which hundreds of thousands of Tamils fled for protection…
Continue reading »It is a much analysed fact that the Tamils of Sri Lanka under the guidance of its leadership have missed many historically defined opportunities, in laying the foundation towards creating a decent future for their political aspirations and self determination. The 50 – 50 representation in Parliament instead of a federal constitution, a claim that seemed rightfully unreasonable to the Sinhalese; the vote in favour of the Citizenship Act of 1948 that deprived the citizenship of the plantation Tamils which was instrumental in conceiving the impression of the Tamils as lacking moral conviction and as being egocentric; the Sinhalese Only law of 1956; the Referendum of December 1982 leading to the subsequent 1983 racial riots and the Indo-Lanka Accord of 1987 are the most significant in terms of these irretrievable opportunities. Apart from failing to use these historical instances of importance the Tamil leadership, beginning with the Tamil Congress, the Federal Party and most importantly the TULF, were successful in…
Continue reading »Both in life and death, Veluppillai Prabhakaran divides rather than unites the Tamils in particular, Sri Lankans as a whole. Therein lie the enigma of Prabhakaran (Thambi Anna to me), whom I first met almost thirty years ago in August 1979, and the Tamil Tigers. “Assuming the LTTE finished is fantasy masquerading as fact”, exclaimed a self-styled ‘leftist’ academic (Sri Lankan born American), namely Qadri Ismail, on March 1, 2009. Qadri Ismail is not alone in fantasizing about Prabhakaran and the Tamil Tigers. Anita Pratap, a veteran Indian journalist, too fantasized about the invincibility and immortality of Prabhakaran and the Tamil Tigers in an article published on May 03, 2009 claiming that the Tiger is just “crouching”, not dying. Both Qadri Ismail and Anita Pratap are journalists by profession, though the former is a journalist turned academic lately; most journalists are very good at writing sensationalism and romanticism of the ‘other’ or the underdog. Anita Pratap also tosses some contradictory…
Continue reading »In what may be a first for a Sunday newspaper in Sri Lanka, a reference from Wikipedia is used to buttress a case for the alleged pro-LTTE bias of Canadian Liberal MP Bob Rae, recently deported from Sri Lanka after first being issued a visa to enter. The Sunday Times has a full page devoted to a rather long-winded story titled Lanka’s dual track foreign relations. My interest here is not to debate Bob Rae’s real or perceived partiality to the LTTE, but to briefly look at the manner in which a lengthy excerpt from Rae’s wikipedia entry is used to frame a flimsy argument. The Sunday Times notes that, …it was public knowledge that Rae had periodically made strong statements backing the Tiger guerrillas. So much so, there was some evidence in the cyberspace. The Wikipedia, the free, multilingual online encyclopaedia operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, among other things, has these few lines to say about Bob Rae: “………Rae…
Continue reading »Jagath Weerasinghe is one of Sri Lanka best known and most influential artists (see bio here). He was commissioned by the Sri Lankan government to design the monument ‘Shrine for the Innocent’ as a remembrance for the innocent victims of the ruthless violence that the southern part of the country experienced in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was completed in 1999. Jagath and I talked about art and politics, how for example the experience of witnessing the Tamil pogrom in July 1983 and being abducted in the late 70′s shaped his political consciousness and in turn influenced his creative output. We also talked about Sri Lankan art more generally – about new painters, the potential for art in post-war Sri Lanka and the Colombo Art Biennale, slated to be held later this year. Repost This Article
Continue reading »The warning about the risk of triumphalism came days before the 65th anniversary celebration of D Day, by the leaders of the US, UK and France. In the USA there are annual re-enactments of the battles of the American Revolution – the War of Independence against Britain —and of the Civil War against the Secessionist Confederacy. While the risk of triumphalism does indeed exist and must be cautioned against, I think there is yet another risk, an opposite one, which we must avoid. The USSR which triumphed over the bulk of the Nazi fascist army, collapsed without a shot being fired, and that collapse was preceded by an ideological surrender in which everything positive in its history was turned upside down and held up for derision. In the recovery of its self-respect under President Putin, one of the first steps was to restore pride in the wartime achievements of the Red Army. Sri Lanka must learn this lesson. We have…
Continue reading »At the foot of a mountain, in a far away land, I had a potato farm. On top of the mountain, in a cave, lived a bear. It is not of much use to debate which one of us came to the mountain first, I think I did and the bear thinks he did. Once in a while, the bear would come down the mountain, smash up part of my plantation and eat some of my potatoes. The monotonic increase in the frequency of bear attacks made me live in constant fear. What do I do? My little daughter said she had a solution. She collected a handful of little stones and was going to throw them at the bear. “That will teach him a lesson”, she said, “He will then leave us alone”. “No darling”, I protested, “An angry bear is even more dangerous”; “He is big and powerful”, “He could kill us all and wipe out our potato…
Continue reading »I think it’s stupid… To think that the trauma and suffering of thirty years can be extinguished by one bullet to the back of one guy’s head. I think it’s stupid… To celebrate the death of those who didn’t want to die; and especially those that didn’t deserve to die. I think it’s stupid… For the Buddhist flag to be seen anywhere at any time during any celebration of the end of the war. I think it’s stupid… To call for a homeland without having any inkling of moving into it. I think it’s stupid… To expect there to be no civilian casualties. I think it’s stupid… After all that’s gone on to expect Sinhalese and Tamil people to live together in peace and harmony overnight. I think it’s stupid… Not to learn the language of someone you want coexist with. It’s like not talking to your roommate. I think it’s stupid… To wilfully break the law and expect sympathy…
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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!"
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