Archive for July, 2011

Resource book for historians, researchers and media: A year of tweeting from Groundviews

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Visualisation of our Twitter followers. See larger version here. We used the web service Tweet Book to capture all our tweets over the past year in a single PDF. We’ve tweeted thousands of times over the past twelve months and have covered, The media fallout of the farcical fast of senior government Minister Wimal Weerawansa in front of the UN HQ in Colombo. Praise for our model of journalism on C-SPAN video in the US, captured from an event at the United States Institute of Peace. Key statements by world leaders like Desmond Tutu on post-war reconciliation and accountability for war crimes Bell Pottinger’s sickening relationship with the incumbent government, largely hidden from public scrutiny Key reports on Sri Lanka from, inter alia, HRW, AI, ICG and the US State Department, including responses from senior Ministers and the Foreign Ministry Foreign relations and the tussle in Sri Lanka between India and China The court proceedings on Sarath Fonseka The UNP’s perennial…

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  • 4 Jul, 2011
  • 7 Comments
  • Colombo,
    Education,
    Peace and Conflict

University Students, Military and the Leadership Programme: Observations on the First Session

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[Editors note: Groundviews exclusively published the full syllabi of the leadership training course. Access them here.] The highly contentious compulsory leadership training programme for university entrants was inaugurated on the 23rd of May. The programme provides a three-week residential training for over 20,000 university entrants in military camps, and the training for the first batch, which consisted of 10,000 students, was completed on the 11th of June. This programme was designed and implemented within a very short time and was made a pre-requisite for university entrance. Students were not aware of this programme when they applied to universities in January and the training started even before the University Grants Commission (UGC) released its cut off marks (which determines the eligibility) for university entrance. The letter sent out to students by the Ministry of Higher Education did not precisely state for which course or what university the students were selected; but this was used as a pretext to secure the participation…

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Photographic evidence of war crimes in Sri Lanka, or not? (Updated)

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“The resulting carnage, photographed by Harun, was indescribable, but worse was to come.” The Living Scotsman’s review of The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers by former UN spokesperson Gordon Weiss flags, inter alia, photos taken by Ret. Col. Harun Khan when his UN convoy came under attack in the final days of the war. The so-called Convoy 11 incident is covered in detail in Gordon’s book. As our review notes, “Weiss speaks of photographic evidence of the carnage taken by Col. Khan, but there is none to be found in the book itself. Dismembered babies may have been too gruesome to include in the tome, but are photographic evidence of the deliberate targeting of civilians. Weiss does not say who has these photos, but we can assume, amongst others, the UN does.” Referring to the Living Scotman’s review, we asked Weiss, via Twitter, whether Col. Khan’s photos would be publicly released….

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Subsidizing Addiction?

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‘Ware the mesmerizer he gives you flowers with his right hand and steals your gold with his left’ It was with this that I opened my article on ‘wildlife conservation’ in 1979. I was being confronted to a national extinction of the in-situ wildlife populations within anthropogenic ecosystems. In other words,  the huge diversity of our native wildlife that shared our gardens, ranging from the large Papilionid butterflies to the flycatchers, from the Osbekia bushes to the Vanda clumps, were doomed to extinction from our gardens by the indiscriminate use of agro-toxins promoted by companies, whose leaders were advising the nation on wildlife conservation. The result lies before us; our gardens are bereft of the biodiversity that they once contained. At that time sodium arsenate was the preferred weedicide, DDT was the preferred insecticide; not only did they it destroy the biodiversity in the areas applied, but over time grew to become toxic to humans. The danger of biological magnification…

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  • 1 Jul, 2011
  • 0 Comment
  • Jaffna,
    Peace and Conflict,
    Poetry

For those who have missed out and want to know humanity

Belated, but worth it. I read through this collection of Sinhala poems by a Sinhala “creative activist” friend, who moves the reader across the large canvass of responsible humanity, very solemnly holding the reader, in a spell of “silent guilt”. She does not talk politics. But she does, in a different tone and spirit. She does not blame the reader straight and hard. Yes she does, in a piercing whisper, right into the conscience. She does not talk of an ethnic conflict. But she does talk of a human tragedy, that tells the reader, there is somewhere a ‘divide’ that stalks the fate of these people. This collection of poems, titled by her as “For Ears That Had Not Heard” (No-asu Kan Walata), by itself is a subtle, nuanced allegation against the Sinhala reader, for not being, if not sensitive enough, then observant of the tragedy that unfolded around us during the war. She thus picks up hardly noticed incidents…

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On the government’s political solution and ‘Southern Suaveness’

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Photo courtesy Amal Jayasinghe | Agence France-Presse The stage is set to appoint a Parliamentary Select Committee in order to formulate a political solution to the north and east crisis. During a meeting with the print and electronic media heads on Tuesday at Temple Trees, President Mahinda Rajapakse had stated that he would accept any solution that will be outlined by the parliament. In an interview with a weekend newspaper last week the Foreign Minister Prof. G.L. Pieris revealed that the government will carry out a dialogue with all the political parties parallel to the ongoing discussions with the TNA. Ultimately, according to the minister, these discussions will be intersected at a certain point. Therefore, the ‘point of intersection’ will be the provenance of the ‘political solution’ of the government. Can this be termed as a bona fide attempt? This is, of course, an important question. The track record of the government in this regard would provide a reasonable answer…

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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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