Archive for June, 2011

Sri Lanka’s Diplomatic Offensive Won’t Make Killing Fields Disappear

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Screen grab from Channel 4′s Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields (New York) – The Sri Lankan government continues its diplomatic offensive, denying and dismissing the growing evidence of war crimes during the final bloody battles between the Sri Lankan armed forces and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) that ended in May 2009. Last week, at a panel presentation of the Channel 4 film, the ‘Killing Fields of Sri Lanka’, Sri Lanka’s United Nations Ambassador Palitha Kohona said, “To suggest that the Sri Lankan military was so foolhardy as to deliberately target the civilians, I think is a blatant lie… We had no intention of creating martyrs, we had no intention of creating more volunteers for the LTTE.” If the killings of civilians were not deliberate, the Sri Lankan army attacks were clearly indiscriminate, which is no less a war crime. The recent findings of the panel of experts set up to advise UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon concluded that…

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Two years after the end of the war in Sri Lanka

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Photo courtesy Deshan Tennekoon, Groundviews The UN panel report or the Darusman report was condemned and rejected. The stand taken by the government was that “not a single civilian was killed during the last stages of the war. If some of those dead were found to be in civilian clothes, they were Tigers in disguise, even if they happened to be children or elderly women. No one can say we committed war crimes because no one saw what happened during the last stages of the war. Therefore we don’t have to answer any questions raised by UN or the international community.” In a way this is true – no one saw what happened at Mullivaikal, Pudukudiyiruppu and Nandikadal in May 2009. There were no witnesses. The UN and the international community actually abandoned those 300,000 civilians, who were left alone to face the LTTE on the one hand and the Sri Lankan army on the other, and God knows who…

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The war that confronts us: Looking at Sri Lanka’s official responses to Channel 4 video

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Image courtesy Channel 4 Channel 4’s Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields is anything but understated. It is designed to shock, even if you are the most hardened of viewers. Images of blood-soaked bodies assail you from every angle. As a cellphone camera jerks around, you see the bulging eyes of a man-turned-killing machine. He appears to be enjoying himself. You feel disoriented. When you think you cannot take it anymore, there it is: Another body eviscerated, another child screaming for her mother, another man’s eyes tied shut, another gunshot through the head, and still another naked body piled atop a truck laden with violated human flesh. And then you are left with nothing but darkness. And silence. That silence lingered as the lights went up on the UN Church Center, where NGO workers and UN staffers, reporters and diplomats attended a subdued screening of Channel 4’s controversial (and at times sensationalist) documentary, Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields. Though the screening was punctuated…

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Provoking, persecuting and pushing Sri Lanka: Enough!

Special Forces Combat soldiers ride in a parade during a war victory ceremony in Colombo

Photo credit REUTERS/Dinuka Liyanawatte: Special Forces Combat soldiers ride in a parade during a war victory ceremony in Colombo May 27, 2011. Sri Lanka holds a military parade and memorial for fallen soldiers on Friday to mark the second anniversary of the defeat of the Tamil Tigers, which ended a quarter-century civil war in the Indian Ocean nation. “Revolution is not a dinner party, not an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be advanced softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly and modestly”. – Mao Ze Dong The matter is rather simple really. What do you do, or more correctly, what does a state do, and what does a leader at the helm of state affairs do, when faced with a situation of a heavily armed movement dedicated to dismembering the country through secession; a movement which has repeatedly resorted to terrorism; has repeatedly returned to war after episodes of ceasefires and negotiations with successive…

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  • 26 Jun, 2011
  • 5 Comments
  • Colombo,
    Language,
    Poetry

The ‘coolest’ publisher of English books in Sri Lanka: In conversation with Sam Perera

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Sam Perera, along with Ameena Hussein (see interview here) began the Perera Hussein Publishing House, a niche publisher based in Sri Lanka known to publish some of the most compelling contemporary writing in English. Sam, who thinks of all things, he is a farmer at the beginning of the programme opens up the conversation with reforestation. The link to the world of publishing lies in that fact that, as a private initiative, PH Publishing House plants at least one tree per book they publish in Puttalam. Noting that PH Publishing House was established to publish stories by Sri Lankans for Sri Lankans, Sam’s rather interesting take on what he does is that the local consumer / reader doesn’t necessarily want literature, but stories that are written well – of course judged by none other than Sam himself. When pressed on what he considers good or great literature, Sam points to Randy Boyagoda’s writing, and says that even though he is…

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  • 26 Jun, 2011
  • 0 Comment
  • Arts and Theatre,
    Colombo,
    Language

In conversation with Neluka Silva, Professor in English, University of Colombo

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Neluka Silva is the Head of the English Department and Professor in English, University of Colombo. Given the recent agitation amongst University staff and the general crisis over tertiary education, I first asked Neluka why she has taught at Colombo University for decades and what drives her to do this. Referring to an article by Prof. H.L. Senevirtane published in the Lanka Monthly Digest (June 2011) on restoring English as a language of teaching, I ask Neluka what, if any differences in pedagogy and the perception of the English language there was from the time she was an undergraduate student to what she teaches today in Colombo University. We talk about Neluka’s manuscript novel The Choices We Make which was shortlisted for the Gratiaen Prize in the late 90′s and will be published later this year under the title The Iron Fence. I ask her why she changed the titled of the book and how she went about writing it. We talk…

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“War Crimes” and Democracy in Sri Lanka

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Photo courtesy Online Focus Lieutenant William Calley of the Charlie Company was a confused man. It was just two months ago that his company and others took a heavy toll when the Viet Cong  attacked during the Tet festival and television screens around the world showed the carnage they wrought. So when Calley’s CO Colonel Oran K. Henderson advised his officers to “”go in there aggressively, close with the enemy and wipe them out for good.”Calley must be thinking whether or not he should spare unarmed men, women and children. However Calley and his men had already taken their decision when they descended on the hamlet of My Lai on that fateful day of March 1968 ostensibly to wipe out remnants of Viet Cong units after the devastating US counter attack, supposedly harbored in that village following the grisly Tet Offensive. By the time Calley and his men were finished 504 Vietnamese men, women and children were dead or dying….

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Future of Farming in Sri Lanka

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Original photo from asianews.it Farming in a sustainable, productive manner has been a hallmark of every human tradition that has endured history. There are many traditional farms existent today that have been productive for hundreds of years. Agrarian societies with long histories, posses the credibility of having sustained themselves successfully under the rigor of survival in a natural world. Having no access to fossil fuel driven technologies, they relied on renewable agriculture based upon energy sources internal to that society or region.  Expansion of farming was constrained by the environment and ecosystem of each area. The advent of fossil fuel changed all this.  The gasoline to power tractors, the biocides and fertilizer salts produced by fossil oil enabled agricultural productivity to transcend environmental constraints. It was not that movement to fossil fuel went unquestioned, when a display of the new ‘ agricultural tractor’ was done in Sri Lanka around 1933. A race was set up between the traditional buffalo drawn…

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Sri Lanka ‘Killing Fields’: Will there be progress and what does that mean?

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‘Killing fields’ can be a phrase used to describe a most mundane fact known to humanity, or it could be a most provocative phrase to an ethnic majority or minority group. When viewed from the standpoint of a human being, one need not try hard to realize that the moment one factors in the number of killings that may have taken place, the amount of brutal wars that have been fought by man against man in the past, the kind of death and destruction that resulted in policies and practices of various states, such as colonialism etc., all of us belonging to the human race belong to one large ‘killing field’. But we are sentient beings with a lot of dust in our eyes, we are easily provoked and even enjoy being provoked at times, and we often view things from a narrow ‘ethnic’ or ‘nationalist’ lens (merely conventional truths or sammuti-sacca, as a great philosophical teacher has stated; or,…

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Thoughts on a documentary: We are complicit in Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields

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It was the most gruesome of visual feasts and it when it ended, the most disorienting sense followed. One is struck, not by the extremity of human suffering; but by stillness, by the insouciance of the pools of blood. They appear on screen as almost as if they are the everyday aftermath of one of the island’s heavier monsoon rains. Excepting, of course, the fact that happy children do not float paper boats in these pools, nor is the water that comfortable colour of milky tea. The children are dead; the water runs red with blood. And it is simply, understatedly there. “Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields” is a damning indictment of the various parties involved in the last few months of the civil war. It must be watched critically, and to do so, it is necessary to separate Jon Snow’s narration and open your eyes to the story that you must yourself piece together. Image upon images plays towards you,…

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21 Years of Hopeless Existence

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Image credit PaperMag For about 21 years, more than 100,000 Internally Displaced People from the Northen Province of Sri Lanka have been languishing in camps.  Mainly from the Muslim community, these people were forced out by the LTTE for crimes of not being Tamil.  In the wake of post conflict debates about reconciliation and rehabilitation, there are now challenges for future resettlement and rehabilitation of this affected community. June 20th was World Refugee Day.  For many it is about remembering the plights of many people the world over, who today are without rights, a state and an identity.  You can picture the Palestinians or the Rohingas or the Kurds.  Over the past week, in Sri Lanka, international attention has turned once again to the 300,000 refugees (or internally displaced people) after the end of the conflict in 2009.  Despite all this attention, very little is said about the plight of the other major victims and refugees of the 30 year…

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Exclusive interview with Callum McCrae, Director of ‘Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields’ produced by Channel 4

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Groundviews caught up with Callum McCrae, Director of the highly controversial and very disturbing film by Channel 4, Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, in New York, a day before the film was due to be screened for senior diplomats, UN staff and others at the Church Centre, in front of the UN Headquarters. Callum was joined by Marion Bentley, Channel 4′s Publicity Manager. The interview is around 43 minutes. Download the MP3 (~51Mb) of this interview here to listen offline. This podcast is anchored to the following questions. General What was your objective in doing the C4 video now, more than 2 years after the end of the war? Killing of unarmed civilians, collateral damage, has occurred in other wars, other contexts British troops have been involved in? Has C4 covered them in as great detail? What is accountability for you? Do they think the video will help in achieving accountability in the SL case? How so? Who is your primary…

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The Story of the Hypocrite in a Tamil Man

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Reaction to the recent programme by UK’s Channel 4, Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, has great variety, ranging from “Ah, didn’t we tell you all along, the Sinhalese and their army are nasty people,” from the side of a vast majority of ethnic Tamils, to, “Oh no, such horrors never happened, this is all just manufactured propaganda from the residuals of that terrorist outfit and its sympathisers,” from the Sri Lankan government and its supporters. The build up to the broadcast, in which the producer brilliantly increased the size of her viewer population by appealing to a kind of negative psychology: “please don’t watch my programme,” however, was too much to take for a particular Sri Lankan Tamil man, because, from simple back-of-the-envelope calculations, he already knew exactly what was in it. This Sri Lankan Tamil Man, whose story I am about to tell you, is a peculiar character whom we have met in the pages of Groundviews before, and is…

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Spirtuality, Religion and Human Conflict

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Image credit NowPublic Spirituality The desire for the triumph of good over evil is an inherent human spiritual need and consequently it is the underlying theme of all religious teachings. It is a universally accepted truth that the propagation of good leads to happiness while the propagation of evil leads to suffering. The concept of Good can be defined as human thoughts, words and deeds which benefit and sustain the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual wellbeing of humanity without compromising all other life and non life which supports and sustains human survival. It follows that the definition of Evil is the exact opposite of Good. A feature common to all religions is the personification of good and evil primarily through icons such as God and the Devil portrayed as super natural beings. The purpose of it could be that personification of abstract concepts serves to facilitate better understanding of same. Religious belief is further reinforced by unique faith based doctrines…

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Groundviews blocked in Sri Lanka (Updated)

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Update, 7.40pm: As we note in our tweet, we wish the Sri Lankan government made up its mind! This site, Vikalpa and even Transparency International’s site are now unblocked on SLT ADSL. The technical information below still stands, and can in the event of any future block, be used to access site content easily. ### Update, 12.10am, 22nd June: The following was sent out by email today to our local and international readership. On 20th June, for a number of hours in Sri Lanka, Groundviews was completely inaccesible over Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT) ADSL broadband connections. Since it began operations in 2006, this was the first time the site was completely inaccessible over an ISP in Sri Lanka. Reader reports from across Sri Lanka confirmed the site could not be reached, as well as the fact that over ISPs like Dialog and Etisalat, the site continued to work fine. The founder and co-editor of Groundviews, in New York at the…

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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!"

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