Archive for the ‘Colombo’

The almost forgotten LLRC report and the Sri Lankan psyche

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Publicity shot from late-2011, depicting the President of Sri Lanka ‘reading’ the LLRC’s Final Report. Comprehension and cognition remain suspect.  Some years ago while on a visit from abroad, my niece was entertained and perhaps a little shocked when she overheard comments broadcast over the loudspeaker from a nearby school. It was the day of their annual sports meet and a teacher, obviously short – tempered, screamed into the microphone at some hapless students, “Magay yakaawe aussande epaa”. When translated into English, “Don’t rouse the devil in me” it loses colour and pith but in its original Sinhala form, her words and tone of voice, packed quite a punch. Reading the newspapers today, I am reminded of the words of that teacher. It seems that it takes very little to raise the sleeping devil in the Sri Lankan psyche. Any hint of criticism directed at our fragile egos and we are ready and willing to take umbrage. Is this part…

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  • 23 Dec, 2012
  • 15 Comments
  • Colombo,
    Politics and Governance

Keynote Address at Judges’ Conference by Justice Wigneswaran

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Photo courtesy Lanka Standard Keynote Address at Judges’ Conference on 22nd December 2012 by Justice Wigneswaran. For an in-depth interview with Justice Wigneswaran, conducted one year ago, click here. Download the speech as a PDF here. Judicial Service Association of Sri Lanka Repost This Article

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Giving reconciliation in Sri Lanka a better chance: A Shadow Action Plan for the LLRC

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Image courtesy Centre for Human Rights The Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) Final Report contains many positive recommendations which merit immediate attention. Unfortunately, the present administration has given virtually no indication that it has any intention of seriously engaging with these recommendations. With the impeachment of the Chief Justice, the unwarranted arrest of University of Jaffna students and the recent murder of dozens of Welikada inmates, it’s obvious that human rights trends in Sri Lanka are still moving in the wrong direction. Furthermore, Government – TNA talks have gone nowhere; this is a political negotiation on life support that looks more like absurd theatre than a genuine discussion. All of this is extremely unfortunate, but underscores the fact that the present administration fears the political consequences of truly endorsing national reconciliation and promoting a lasting peace. Now, the present administration is seeking to strike a balance. It wants to avoid further criticism of its human rights record by pretending…

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Echoes of Cuba

Money

Photo by Kuni Takahashi/Bloomberg, via Bloomberg I walk the hills rising from an azure blue Caribbean sea, and try to envision the history that I have been told, a history of an island, green, tropical, rich in resources that fell into a despotic military aided rule. The consequence of a power drunk ruler who made it easy for his cronies to move money across its borders and legalized gambling to facilitate the Mafia to launder its ill-gotten money from the US. The underworld became the lords and the land went out of reach for ordinary citizens. This history spoke of a small group of dedicated people, who struggled through incredible odds and fuelled by a shining love for their country, won the nation back from the underworld.  Their actions confirming the observation of the Qu’ran that,  ‘ the love of country is the love of faith’. It was an impossibly small boat that arrived on the shores of Cuba with its…

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Eating properly and smiling: The evasive Valerie Amos on Twitter

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On 18th December 2012, at around 10pm in Sri Lanka, Valerie Amos, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator took to Twitter, ostensibly to answer questions related to the UN’s role, relevance and responsibilities regarding humanitarian aid and relief work. The event with Baroness Amos was announced via the Twitter account of, inter alia, UN OCHA, which also had a photo of her in front of a laptop, getting ready to face the questions. RT @unocha: .@valerieamos is now replying to questions from @alertnet and Twitter users around the world. #AskValerietwitpic.com/bn3zd4 — Groundviews (@groundviews) December 18, 2012 The event was conducted with the hashtag #AskValerie. Baroness Amos is (whether through office aides or by herself it remains unclear) fairly active on Twitter via @ValerieAmos. However, despite her own and OCHA’s familiarity with web based social media interactions, yesterday’s Twitter question time with Baroness Amos was a cogent example of how not to curate and conduct public debates…

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Writing to Reconcile in Sri Lanka

Shyam Selvadurai 2012-13

Image courtesy Green College I interviewed over email the award-winning author Shyam Selvadurai on a new initiative called Write to Reconcile, of which he is Project Director. Groundviews featured an in-depth interview with Shyam in mid-2011, when he was the curator of the Galle Literary Festival. Write to Reconcile is his brainchild, and I was curious to find out what drove him to think of it, and the challenges around doing this kind of work in a country post-war, but very far removed from a just peace. ### What gave rise to this idea? I first began to think of the project during the last Galle Literary Festival. While I enjoyed many aspects of my job as Festival Curator, the thing I enjoyed most this year was taking the children’s author and story teller, Jeeva Ragunath, to Jaffna to do storytelling workshops there. The response of both students and teachers there really moved me and made me want to do something…

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Canadian Senator Hon. Hugh Segal on impeachment of Chief Justice in Sri Lanka

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Image courtesy Flickr Debates of the Senate (Hansard) 1st Session, 41st Parliament, Volume 148, Issue 130 Wednesday, December 12, 2012 Hon. Hugh Segal: Honourable senators, the recent and further steps by the Government of Sri Lanka to impeach their Chief Justice should concern all Commonwealth citizens and governments. Clear Commonwealth values around the rule of law and democracy as expressed in the Harare Declaration and the Latimer House Principles embraced by all Commonwealth heads of government in 1991 and 2003 are being violated by this present and unconstitutional impeachment effort. Commonwealth Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma was in contact with the Sri Lankan Foreign Minister on this issue on December 10. We appreciate that contact very much. Today, President Rajapaksa announced that he would appoint an independent panel to review the findings of the parliamentary report. There is much to review in terms of the questionable way in which the investigation was handled, the lack of time for defence preparation by Chief…

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  • 13 Dec, 2012
  • 36 Comments
  • Colombo,
    Features,
    Politics and Governance

The Parliamentary Select Committee is a mistrial: Annul the impeachment report

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Photo courtesy The Hindu “Bonaparte throws the whole bourgeois economy into confusion, violates everything that seemed inviolable to the Revolution of 1848, makes some tolerant of revolution and makes others lust for it, and produces anarchy in the name of order, while at the same time stripping the entire state machinery of its halo, profaning it and making it at once loathsome and ridiculous.”   (Karl Marx in Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte, 1852) We need an independent committee or a panel of judges not to evaluate the report of the Parliamentary Select Committee report but to examine whether its conduct is consistent with the law and the accepted national and international norms about impeaching judges. The impeachment proceedings so far should be declared a mistrial (i.e. a trial rendered invalid through improper and prejudicial errors in the proceedings leading to a leading to the impossibility of an impartial resolution) because in any civilized society a person cannot be tried twice…

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Reflections on ‘Widows’ and ‘Unearthed’

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Work and travel kept me from writing about two significant theatre productions in the past month. Ariel Dorfman’s ‘Widows’ directed by Feroze Kamardeen and produced by Sirraj Abdul Hameed was staged at the Wendt from 23-25 of November. ‘Unearthed’, billed as a site-specific theatre and dance journey through a private home, was directed by Ruhanie Perera (from Floating Space Theatre Company) and Sally E. Dean, performed on 1st and 2nd December in Kotte and produced by Iromi Perera and Silke Arnold. The staging of ‘Widows’ can be appreciated through two distinct lenses – the text in the context of post-war Sri Lanka, and the actual performance on stage. A review by Charles Isherwood in the New York Times of a production in 2008 in the New York Times ends by noting that though, “many have suffered (and continue to suffer)…cruel treatment”,  ‘Widows’ “signally fails to bring the horror of it home.” Karmardeen’s production doesn’t fare any better in communicating the…

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Will the Tamils Lose the Plot Again?

Jaffna Sri Lanka

  Photo courtesy Christian Science Monitor Chaos and Fear Much has happened in the space of three months. Soon after the Eastern Provincial Council election came the Divi Neguma bill and the subsequent calls for the abolition of the 13th Amendment. The impeachment motion against the Chief Justice and the recruitment of Tamil women to the military followed before the Maveerar Naal (Heroes’ Day) incidents in Jaffna. It would seem that the government is bent on creating chaos and fear. The Present State of Affairs In response to the negative Supreme Court verdict on the Divi Neguma bill, the government did two things: it unleashed a strong call for the abolition of the 13th Amendment to the constitution and set the wheels in motion to impeach the Chief Justice. It is highly unlikely that the company of Gotabaya, Wimal and Champika made a spontaneous decision to go public with a demand that strikes at the very heart of power devolution:…

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  • 9 Dec, 2012
  • 6 Comments
  • Colombo,
    Development

Re-imagine Development: Where Nobody Gets Left Behind

Cartoon by W R Wijesoma - Development that leaves some behind

Cartoon by W R Wijesoma – Development that leaves some behind [Note: This was originally written as part of the When Worlds Collide Sunday column in Ceylon Today, and published on 9 December 2012] Paul Hermann Müller (1899 – 1965) was a Swiss chemist. He won the 1948 Nobel Prize in physiology (medicine) for his 1939 discovery of DDT’s insecticidal qualities and its use in controlling disease carrying mosquitoes. That knowledge was soon put to wide use. DDT was sprayed during the latter part of World War II to contain malaria and typhus among troops and civilians, and then adopted as an agricultural insecticide. Christopher William Wijekoon (CWW) Kannangara (1884 – 1969) was Lankan lawyer, legislator and effectively the country’s first minister of education during the pre-independence era. In the mid 1940s, he introduced far reaching reforms in that sector, enabling children from all levels of society to study from kindergarten to (and including) university level for free. It’s unlikely…

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On the felling of trees

Photo courtesy Dushiyanthini “The trees being cut-down on Reid Avenue are the perfect example of the kind of ‘development’ that Colombo, and some other parts of Sri Lanka, are now facing.” (http://groundviews.org/2012/12/03/the-felling-of-a-tree/)  The author summaries eloquently the malaise that affects Sri Lanka today. The idea that modernism and consumerism must be used as the drivers of so-called ‘Economic Development’ and that concern for nature is irrelevant to the engine of growth, is not new, the bureaucrats and politicians who pushed us along this path continue to do so still. It was twenty years ago , in October 1982, when I wrote the following in the national newspapers :  RAPE OF THE GIANTS Do you remember what a large tree looked like? Once they were all around us, not just the forest giants like the Hora or Palu, but the fine old Mango and Jak trees that would have taken at least four or five men to girdle. The next time…

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The Felling of a Tree

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Photo courtesy Dushiyanthini When I heard that the large, beautiful trees that pave Reid Avenue in Colombo were being felled, my heart broke. I was so stirred inside – and it was hard to explain to anyone else why this particular incident had moved me so much. When I came to Bangalore, my first thought was that this was another city that was home to large, beautiful, old trees – trees that had stood for decades, centuries perhaps, trees that had seen change, seen families come and go, people grow old; trees that had seen governments topple and others take their place, many of these trees probably saw the end of colonial rule and the beginning of the life of Independent India. It made me miss Colombo just a little less. It has been hard to imagine returning to Colombo and seeing the grand old trees on Reid Avenue uprooted and chopped up, lying sadly on the side of the…

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A-Z of Sri Lankan English: W is for will and would

daily mirror

Will and would have a habit of changing places in Sri Lankan English. Sometimes will is used where standard British or American English would prefer would (“I knew the car will be there”), and sometimes it’s the other way round (“We would inform you as soon as we hear”). The former (will for would) tends to happen in reported speech where the main verb is in the past tense (“He said he will be late”), and in conditional sentences where the verb in the if clause is in the past tense (“She’ll come if you asked her”). In both cases, the sequence of tenses in standard grammar means that an English teacher is likely to underline the word will with a red pen. But the following quotes from contemporary fiction suggest that the “error” is a common one: … and I knew the paddy field will soon come into view … (Bringing Tony Home, by Tissa Abeysekara, page 44) It…

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The ICG Report on Tamil Politics and the Quest for a Political Solution: The Blind Spot

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Image courtesy ICG Facebook page The recently released report “Sri Lanka: Tamil Politics and the Quest for a Political Solution” by the International Crisis Group [ICG] is a timely contribution to the international community’s understanding of current Tamil politics, and reiterates a number of useful recommendations for all parties concerned. Its prescient analysis of the prevailing tensions within Tamil politics; its recounting of the failure on the part of the government to reciprocate the Tamil National Alliance’s reasonable demands; and its description of the military juggernaut unleashed in the North and East of the country point to the urgent nature of the problem at hand. Yet, the ICG sound caution where caution is due, urging Tamil leaders to speak directly to the Sinhala and Muslims people and find common cause with them. These are good, meaningful and sensible observations. Despite the unfortunate timing of the release, which coincided with the impeachment saga, the report will eagerly be read by Sri…

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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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