Archive for November, 2011

Desire, Violence and Leadership

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Image courtesy Canadian Lawyers Abroad’s Blog It is the human being that should be the primary concern of any development programme.  After all, it is for the benefit of humanity that all development programmes are mooted.  Although often portrayed as an economic and social entity, the human being  is primarily a biological entity composed of myriads of interconnected cells and organs. The ideal state of this biological entity is when it is free from any harmful or injurious input, provided with nutrition and deemed ‘healthy’.  Both tradition and science have identified many inputs that are harmful or injurious to the biological being.  Since the ideal conditions for biological organisms are being free from these negative inputs and since development must be a movement towards the ideal state; we can summarize that ‘Any process or activity that leads to the reduction of the biological quality of life cannot contribute to real development’ or that ‘any process or activity that produces physical or…

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Destroying monuments for those killed & disappeared: The Catholic Church and the Sri Lankan Government

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On the evening of 26th October 2011, Fr. Srilal Manoj Perera (appointed by Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith to be in charge of land issues for Archdiocese of Colombo), Fr. Prasad Perera, Parish Priest of St. Cecelia’s Church, Raddoluwa (in the Colombo Archdiocese), members of the Parish Council and a lawyer representing them, took the  unprecedented step of requesting that the Police destroy a nationally and internationally recognized monument for disappeared persons situated in the Raddolugama-Seeduwa junction in the Gampaha district in Sri Lanka. This was on the eve of the 21st annual commemoration for disappeared persons held annuallyon the 27th of October at the site of the monument, with the participation of families of disappeared persons, religious leaders, political leaders, human rights activists and concerned citizens. This request to destroy the monument was preceded by several attempts by Fr. Prasad and the Parish Council to disrupt and discourage the use of the monument and the commemoration. These attempts included the construction…

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CHOGM-2011: HOW DIPLOMATIC VICTORIES END IN DISGRACE

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[Editors note: As noted by the author below, an example of the distressingly bad propaganda of the Sri Lankan Government, attributed in some websites to the Director General of the President's Media Unit, Bandula Jayasekera. It's not the first time an airbrushed image of CHOGM involving the President has been published in Government controlled media. This image appears on the website of the state owned newspaper, and may have appeared in print as well. The original URL is www.dailynews.lk/2011/10/31/news00.pdf, but it may be taken down anon. Download the PDF here.] ### The 2011 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) raised renewed concerns about the ability of the Commonwealth to tackle human rights problems concerning its 54-Member States. CHOGM-2011 is being hailed by Sri Lanka as another diplomatic victory. Amnesty International slammed the Commonwealth, calling it an ‘absolute disgrace’ that the countries agreed to hold the next CHOGM in Sri Lanka. There was a particularly interesting human rights issue which came up during…

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Facades of Development: Of Commonwealth Games and Drag Racing at Green Path

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We woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of screeching tires, booming exhausts and the smell of burning rubber recently. My cousin’s children had nightmares and could not get back to sleep when the test runs were done. Calls to police emergency numbers were ignored: there seemed to be official patronage for speedsters and noise polluters – including of course the daily Presidential convoys in the area. Residents of Green Path and its environs, one of Colombo’s posh residential neighbourhoods, are worried about the latest sports extravaganza planned by the ever entrepreneurial Rajapaksa Bros Inc. Earlier this year they ran a weekend “Hawkers Street” there with loudspeakers blaring till the wee hours, but that was not a commercial success, so drag races are planned to bring in the crowds in November. Drag racing, however, can drive local communities up the wall, and there have been several fatal accidents recently in high profile races. Why inconvenience and…

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Does the present regime encourage lawlessness & promote political thuggery?

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Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity (The second coming – by W.B. Yeats – 1865 – 1939) Considering the far too many incidents of violence and thuggery carried out recently with such impunity, one cannot blame the people if they raise this question. The government seems to rely heavily on thuggery and lawlessness to win elections and once in power to hold on to it. Any kind of protest or dissent is put down ruthlessly. The election commissioner has complained that the police had ignored his orders issued just before the recent elections. Among those who violated election laws were several government ministers and officials he has said. Had the election laws been strictly enforced, perhaps Bharatha Lakshman Premachndra would be alive today and Duminda…

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Peace, Military and People: Are non-military engagements of the military valid?

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Sri Lankan Army selling vegetables. Photo: Ministry of Defence – Sri Lanka War or internal armed conflict in the North and East was over; Emergency is no more; but still the military is everywhere. The military is now engaged in peacetime police-work, whale watching, selling vegetables, agriculture,  cleaning, constructions and many other non-military activities. Yet why isn’t there sufficient public debate on this? In this article I endeavor to briefly analyze some of the issues that need attention in the public interest. Engaging the military for non-military duties is regulated under the law. For example s.23 of the Army Act authorizes the President to order all or any of the member of the Regular Forces to perform certain non-military duties, provided the President is satisfied that there is an immediate threat of action to deprive the people of Sri Lanka of essentials of life by interfering with the supply and distribution of food, water, fuel or light or with means of…

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Australia’s Tamil Eelam Lobby and CHOGM

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Photo credit AFP via Haveeru Online Introduction The war on the battle field may be over, but the propaganda war is alive and well. The Australian news media, particularly the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, were in an uncontrollable frenzy two weeks before the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) by the predictable lobbying against Sri Lanka. There are legitimate issues that Australia must and did raise with Sri Lanka during CHOGM 2011. Unfortunately, these publicity stunts risked derailing and overshadowing those conversations and hardening the stance of some of the non-Western members of the Commonwealth. The first was John Dowd’s submission of a brief of evidence to the Australian Federal Police. It was timed conveniently just prior to the questioning by the Greens Senator, Lee Rhiannon, at the Senate Estimates hearings. The other was the war crimes charges by Arunachalam Jegatheeswaran, also known as Jegan Waran, against Mahinda Rajapaksa. The latter is frivolous and vexatious, but the…

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WE REMEMBER after 21 years…

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No. 1, Jesuit Street, Batticaloa, September 24, 2011. The Editor, Groundviews. 21st Year Commemoration Dear Sir, At the last general meeting of the Batticaloa Peace Committee our talks led us to the conviction that we should speak out. We commemorated then the grouping of tragic events in our vicinity 21 years ago that proclaimed the vast gap between the aspirations of the Tamil people and the blindness of national leaders. With this short list of violent events, the die was cast, setting the nation on a continuous confrontation that ended only with the annihilation of any hope of equality of status for Sinhalese and Tamil people of the country. Our civil war has now been fought, and both sides, in fact, all sides have lost lives uncountable and decades of years. There have been no winners. All have been losers. Far more lives were lost than we can enumerate. The tragic cases we choose now to highlight were the trend…

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A-Z of Sri Lankan English: M is for monitor lizard

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Sunimal Fernando, speaking from the audience at my presentation on Sri Lankan English at the recent conference on Language and Social Cohesion (Colombo, 17-19 October), confirmed my own conclusion, that while the “English as a Life Skill” programme continues, Sri Lankan English has been quietly dropped from the agenda. This may be welcome news to those who feel Sri Lankan English has no relevance to English language teaching in Sri Lanka, but I argued in my presentation that without a recognised “standard Sri Lankan English” as a model, there is a danger that “English our way” will mean abandoning standards altogether, which is exactly what the critics feared in the first place. One of the reasons why Sri Lankan English became sidelined (and this was also confirmed by Sunimal Fernando) was resistance from academics and ELT professionals in Jaffna, who felt that it was a Colombo-centric concept which did not take adequate account of the way English is used by…

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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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