Archive for May, 2010

I REMEMBER – 19 May 2010

As we come together to commemorate the anniversary of the end of Sri Lanka’s long and bloody civil war, these are some of the things I remember: I remember hearing reports in late January 2009 of UN workers and their families being shelled by government forces in the Vanni while hiding in bunkers and under UN trucks. I remember not quite believing these stories. I remember the hospitals and medical centres shelled, and the patients and medical staff killed and wounded in what the Sri Lankan government was calling “no fire zones”.  I remember later on meeting some of those who survived and hearing their terrifying stories. I remember the extraordinary bravery and generosity of all the doctors, medical workers, and staff members of the International Committee of the Red Cross who served under terrifying conditions. I remember that some of them gave their lives saving others. I remember seeing Gotabaya Rajapaksa on TV in February 2009 telling an interviewer…

Continue reading »

Film premiere: The Truth That Wasn’t There

I am always wary of write-ups by filmmakers of their films. Labours of love often elicit painful diatribes. The messy, malleable margins of Sri Lanka has long been an issue that many would-be filmmakers have wrestled with yet fail to come to grips. Any attempt to filter its society and polity into a coherent hour and a half is destined to polarise and ultimately filmmakers find themselves lost within the country’s many contradictions, either seduced and tamed by its gorgeous mystery or reticent to its brutality. Films on Sri Lanka tend to be as taxing as its subject matter. This film was not a labour of love. This film was hard. Damn hard, to put together and to persevere with. The reasons why it has come this far has a great deal to do with the burden placed upon us by what we did, where we went and what we captured. Many of the people we met along the way…

Continue reading »

19th may, 2010

Killinochci-Sumathy

killinochchi town getting ready… may 2010 19th may. you have nothing to say? i can only falteringly mouth, nothing of …. nothing begets nothing, a king says, and launches a war against garrulous daughters and sulking ones; and i think of an other daughter, too too loud or too soft, of other wars and other deaths, slipped between a pillow and its case, a letter, a bomb, a whisper, slipped between the familiar and the family, the nation and its engender. on 19th may, 1991, sivaramani, took her own positive life, her cry strangled with that strenuous cord, blazing a trail of blood of the nation and its many stories; 300, 000 slipped between a miserable soul-dead wretch, who would not take his life and the dark of a storm shelling sky, a black and blue sea, dotted with doom, a king without daughters striking those ‘[trojans =delete] crushed between sea and sky’, a tale slipped between waiting and waking,…

Continue reading »

One Year On After the Guns Fell Silent at Vellamullivaikkal: Is There Foresight to Settle the Political Score?

In advising political leaders the Italian historian and political advisor Machiavelli (1469-1527) offered the   following words which have a relevance to the current predicament of the Sinhala political leadership after the war victory. “But  when states are acquired  in a province differing in language, in customs, and in institutions, then difficulties  arise; and to hold them one must be very fortunate and very assiduous…He should also take precautions to check an invasion of the province by  a foreigner  as powerful as himself. Invariably, the invader will be brought in by those who are disaffected because of excessive ambition or because of fear” [1] The North and East could be said to broadly resemble the province that Machiavelli refers to here. When regions are dissimilar in language, customs and institutions any politically astute ruler needs to understand that unless these rights to differing language, customs and institutions are recognized and respected, the political price for the state will be huge. Machiavelli…

Continue reading »

THE WAR AND MY TIMES

Fidel quotes a Cuban saying that a man is marked more by his times than his family. My times were shaped by armed conflict: wars, insurrections and counter-insurgency; successive wars in the North and East of the island, two insurrections in the South, against a backdrop of Vietnam, the Middle East, Angola, and Central America. History was driven by the dialectic of states vs. armed movements.  To simplify, my times were dominated by the long hot war in Sri Lanka and the long Cold war in the world; their endings and aftermaths. Too many friends, comrades and acquaintances died to bear enumeration. Life was dominated, distorted and to some extent determined by the conflicts and their cumulative gravitational pull. The greater the number of deaths of those one felt something for, the more difficult to walk away from it all. One then applies what one has to bring it to an end: the analytical intellect to discern, the power of…

Continue reading »

Editorial: One year after the end of war

Logo - Large

One year after the war ended, when Groundviews invited contributors to contest and complement our understanding that peace is not just the absence of war, or the defeat of the LTTE, we did not expect the response we received. Over the next week, we will publish close to 80,000 words and content from over forty different authors, in prose, verse, photography and video. A leitmotif through all contributions is that a government supremely adept at winning a war is outrageously inept at winning peace. The authors, including former senior diplomats and civil servants, internationally renown, award-winning poets, gifted photographers, academics, economists, bloggers, novelists, human rights activists, diasporic commentators and others celebrate war’s decisive end, but flag much that risks a hard won victory, including the continued alienation of Tamil aspirations, the predominance of dynastic rule over democratic governance and the lack of progress in addressing underlying grievances that gave life and succour to the idea of Eelam and the physical…

Continue reading »

In conversation with Dr. Harsha de Silva, MP

Interview III – Dr. Harsha de Silva from Young Asia Television on Vimeo. I recently spoke with Dr. Harsha de Silva, now a National List MP from the United National Party (UNP). I first interviewed Harsha a little over a year ago, on the context leading up to and the fall out of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) bail-out package and the general state of the Sri Lankan economy. This time around we spoke about his entry into parliament, and one of the younger and more dynamic individuals entering for the first time into a chamber hitherto not known as a locus for progressive debate and policies. We spoke about Harsha vision for economic development and what he thinks needs to be done for better fiscal management. We also spoke about the UNP itself, and how as a new representative of the party, he feels about its crisis of leadership. Our discussion also centred around what Harsha feels is a…

Continue reading »

Monsoons: Another western conspiracy against Sri Lanka?

18 May 2010: Colombo, Sri Lanka: The unusually heavy rain and storm activity over Sri Lanka during the past few days could be the result of another international conspiracy against the resurgent island, a citizens’ science group says. “The timing and intensity of the inclement weather is too much of a coincidence, just when we were preparing to celebrate our armed forces’ great victory over the LTTE exactly one year ago,” said the Vidyartha Patriots’ Institute for Science and Society (VPISS). They added: “We suspect that a foreign hand, possibly a western country, may have tampered with our seasonal rainfall patterns. We ask the government to investigate if this could be the case.” While the south-west Monsoon rains are typically expected to commence in mid May over the western and southern areas of Sri Lanka, the intensity of the rain has surprised even experienced meteorologists. The Department of Meteorology said on 17 May that a storm was developing over Sri…

Continue reading »

Jaffna and the East today: Harsh ground realities, opportunities and challenges after war

Shanthi Sachithananthan, the Chairperson of Viluthu, has been featured several times on Groundviews in the past, including an interview two months ago looking at significant developments in Sri Lanka after the demise of the LTTE and her views on the July 1983 pogrom against Tamils. In this recent interview, Shanthi, who recently campaigned for political office in the parliamentary elections in April 2010 after forming an independent political party, speaks about her experiences interacting with voters from the Batticaloa district – the issues they confront, their aspirations and the extremely poor awareness of governance, representative democracy and electoral processes. Shanthi’s approach to campaigning is also revealed by her as a vehicle to prise open vital debates and issues amongst voters mainstream political parties would rather not address, or seek to underplay. I asked Shanthi whether Tamil representation in parliament now would engage in politics of antagonism or engagement with the Sinhala majority, and whether the overtures being made to the…

Continue reading »

A is for Adhi Vesak

A-Z Sri Lankan English

An adhi poya is an extra poya day inserted into the Buddhist lunar calendar to ensure that it stays in sync with the western (solar) calendar. In December 2009 there were two poya days, Unduvap on the 1st and Duruthu on the 31st (much to the dismay of New Year’s Eve revellers, who weren’t officially allowed to drink alcohol until the strike of midnight!). This meant that Duruthu poya fell in December instead of January, Navam in January instead of February, and so on until Adhi Vesak on April 28th. The extra poya day means that Vesak itself will be celebrated (as always) in May. The following explanation appeared in The Island on April 28th (Adhi Vesak day) under the heading “The significance of Adhi Vesak Full Moon Poya Day” by Premasara Epasinghe: Although the recognised Vesak Full Moon Poya Day falls on Thursday 27 May 2010, there is an additional Vesak Poya called “Adhi Vesak Full Moon Poya Day”…

Continue reading »

Images from a flooded capital

IMG_4026

After reading Colombo goes under water, and not for the first time, Deshan Tennekoon sent these images of Colombo’s flooding yesterday.

Continue reading »

A clueless regime’s parade for glory with a bumpkin polity

While a victory parade with military highlights is on to commemorate the war victory, that provides occasion for this regime to revel on its own pride in defeating the LTTE, what is the most important need of the 19 million people, right now ? In a more direct way, does the Sri Lankan polity know what they most urgently need ? The whole pugnacious crisis in Sri Lanka lies in the answer to this simple question. The bumpkin Sri Lankan polity knows not, what they most urgently need. This was aptly demonstrated and proved in the two most historically important elections held in post war Sri Lanka. The presidential elections in January 2010, announced in November 2009, just 06 months after the war was declared victorious with the defeat of the LTTE and thereafter the parliamentary elections held in April 2010, within 01 year of the conclusion of the war, discussed nothing of importance in terms of Sri Lanka’s future….

Continue reading »

Colombo goes under water, and not for the first time

Colombo Lady trying to make it through floods.JPG

These pictures were taken between 10.00am and 11.30am on the 14th of May 2010 after Colombo experienced rains for about 2 hours. It speaks volumes of the continued failure of the CMC to deal with drainage and flooding issues for the last 20 – 30 years. Furthermore, I was trying to get from my house to work and the following roads were blocked due to flooding, Duplication Road Reid Avenue Horton Place Both Viharamahadevi – Museum Roundabouts Thurstan Road Thunmulla Junction It continues to rain and Colombo continues to flood! View Colombo flooding in a larger map Update, 15 May 2010: Taken by Deshan Tennekoon, more photos of the flooding published on Groundviews here.

Continue reading »

On Commission and Omission

Editor’s note: An edited version of this article appeared in the Daily Mirror today. A section of the last sentence of the article had been omitted. The original article appears below. The first anniversary of the end of the war approaches and we are into a celebratory heroes’ week.  Whilst the regime will not fail to remind us ad infinitum of the great service it did us in defeating the fascist and ferocious LTTE and continue to accrue political capital on account of it, there is no denying the widespread relief felt over the defeat of the LTTE and the end of the war.  There is no denying either, that this was achieved through military victory by the armed forces and accordingly, there will be gratitude and appreciation expressed to the armed forces and the political leadership for this and the celebration of victory, year in and year out. It was a bloody, costly war.  Soldiers and civilians alike lost…

Continue reading »

Who Guards the Guards? – The Need to Move Swiftly on Removing the ER/PTA from the Sri Lankan Constitution

A year after the defeat of the LTTE the Sri Lankan government announced that it will be relaxing some of the Emergency Regulations (ER) that have been in place during the conflict. This is a welcome move by the government. However, there are signals from the government that the ER and the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) will continue in some form or the other. There is little doubt that both the PTA and ER have significantly improved the physical security of Sri Lankans in the past and continue to be a mechanism where law enforcement agencies help reduce the threat level. There is also evidence that there is a threat posed by LTTE elements here and abroad to the national security of the country. However, it is hoped that the ER and the PTA will be removed from usage as soon as possible. Sri Lanka will have to come up with more innovative security measures in the future, that…

Continue reading »
Page 4 of 512345

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