I see much of extremist fundmentalism and hatred in views expressed by both Sinhalese and and Tamils here and in any internet blog. Can we reconcile and heal the wounds after a long drawn conflict in this manner?

Yes we can.If we let us have an approach which makes common sense (most scarce of all senses). Let us consider, poverty hunger, disease, shelter, education, skills, dignity, and economic stability as key challenges.

Sinhalse, Tamils, Muslims and others all have human blood. Pain, hunger, sickness are common to all. Where does race count here?

I still havent met anyone who has attained nibbana, or any other eternal bills preached in any religion. What has religion done to us? Unite or divide? Let us learn to live in harmony before we could follow any religion today exploited by many selfish men for own ends.(This is true with all religions)

Let us consider every humn being is a human being and sink all our petty differences including all our narrow thoughts on race and religion which lead to silly actions.

”No,please, NO. We’re likely to be shot by ”unknown” groups.
When we go to the camps or banks, strangers showing ”CID” cards come and question us for hours and days. Our mouths and hands are tied. We hear stories that the Army is drilling the IDPs for overseas tel numbers and call the expatriates and ask them to deposit money in the bank accounts in the South.
They have shops in camps. The shop owners are from the South. As aid agencies are restricted, IDPs are forced to buy things at exorbitant prices, AND the money goes South. We hear stories about IDPs leaving the camps by bribing the Army enormously.”

This is genocide:
1. detaining IDPs in camps compulsorily behind barbed wire and heavily guarded by army.
2.restricting food, water and medicine by restricting access to aid agencies
3.selling things in shops inside the camps at exorbitant prices
4. raiding Vavuniya houses in the pretext of ”CID examining households”
5.robbing and killing ordinary people in public places in Vavuniya.

Central Bank says its foreign reserve is increasing. Certainly the diaspora are sending money to bribe the army to release their kith and kin.

What else is being hidden by banning the media?

Billions of dollars and Rajapakses have moved the ”frontier.”

Post-LTTE state terror is worse than the pre-LTTE state terror?
Terrorist states have given the go-ahead for more state terror in the Northeast.

This century is going to be worse than the last one for ethnic minorities around the world.

UDHR and R2P.cannot subdue the combined state terror. Only conscience can.

People without conscience will go on defending their terror.

It is all too evident in the columns of Groundviews.

How much better are you than the naive and impressionistic rookie foreign correspondent who parachutes in for a few days or weeks?

In another country,
a Prime Minister
(who had nothing against ‘people of colour’)
wore a rose and
did the Pirouette in Buckingham Palace.
He put a stop to separatism
and told the non-believers:
just watch me”!

In his country,
and that of his neighbor’s,
only war heroes receive
a hero’s welcome.
As Omar Khadr languishes in
Guantanamo Bay,
the talk of the poor in “other countries”
gets that much louder.

Don’t get me wrong,
he had nothing to do with Khadr,
and like our President
he was never into drawing lines in the sand.

I only hope the dandies
of our country
who are now in “other countries”
find the courage
to tell it like it is:
“Thank you Mr. President,
the war is finally over” !

Elie Wiesel, Buchenwald Concentration Camp in Weimar, Germany, 5 June 2009:

”Mr. President, Chancellor Merkel, Bertrand, ladies and gentlemen, as I came here today it was actually a way of coming and visit my father’s grave — but he had no grave. His grave is somewhere in the sky. This has become in those years the largest cemetery of the Jewish people.

The day he died was one of the darkest in my life. He became sick, weak, and I was there. I was there when he suffered. I was there when he asked for help, for water. I was there to receive his last words. But I was not there when he called for me, although we were in the same block; he on the upper bed and I on the lower bed. He called my name, and I was too afraid to move. All of us were. And then he died. I was there, but I was not there.

And I thought one day I will come back and speak to him, and tell him of the world that has become mine. I speak to him of times in which memory has become a sacred duty of all people of good will …”

“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”

”Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.”

A great man, Camus, wrote at the end of his marvelous novel, The Plague: “After all,” he said, “after the tragedy, nevertheless…there is more in the human being to celebrate than to denigrate.”

Elie Wiesel, Buchenwald Concentration Camp in Weimar, Germany, 5 June 2009:
‘’ We must continue believing in a future, because the world has learned. But again, the world hasn’t. Had the world learned, there would have been no Cambodia and no Rwanda and no Darfur and no Bosnia.
Will the world ever learn? I think that is why Buchenwald is so important — as important, of course, but differently as Auschwitz. It’s important because here the large — the big camp was a kind of international community. People came there from all horizons — political, economic, culture. The first globalization essay, experiment, were made in Buchenwald. And all that was meant to diminish the humanity of human beings.
You spoke of humanity, Mr. President. Woe unto us, in those times, it was human to be inhuman. And now the world has learned, I hope. We must continue believing in a future, because the world has learned. But again, the world hasn’t. Had the world learned, there would have been no Cambodia and no Rwanda and no Darfur and no Bosnia. The time must come. It’s enough – enough to go to cemeteries, enough to weep for oceans. It’s enough. There must come a moment – a moment of bringing people together.
And therefore we say anyone who comes here should go back with that resolution. Memory must bring people together rather than set them apart. Memories here not to sow anger in our hearts, but on the contrary, a sense of solidarity that all those who need us. What else can we do except invoke that memory so that people everywhere who say the 21st century is a century of new beginnings, filled with promise and infinite hope, and at times profound gratitude to all those who believe in our task, which is to improve the human condition.”

As for those who seek to excuse SL by citing other countries’ bad behaviour, I wonder if they will suggest that SL should drop an A-bomb somewhere just because America has done it in the past. Perhaps SL needs a “homegrown” sense of ethics as much as it needs a “homegrown” solution to the Tamil issue.

US freed the Japanese-Americans as soon as the war ended, when there was no reason for them to be afraid of Japanese aggression any longer (though of course this doesn’t excuse the internment). SL incarcerated innocent civilians AFTER the war ended and keeps them even when the Tigers have been entirely vanquished and their arms confiscated. As for British internment without trial of people in Northern Ireland, they did not incarcerate just anybody, innocent civilians, but those suspected of involvement with IRA. At any rate, the British did not hide what was happening from the international media.

Speaking of notorious, would the antithesis be your hero Stalin’s Gulags or Chairman Mao’s enlightened economic insights?