Photo by Dinouk Colombage, Al Jazeera I am deeply perturbed and concerned at the large scale violence unleashed on members of the Muslim community last weekend (15th June 2014), in the Aluthgama, Beruwala, Dharga Town, Walpitiya and Welipenna areas. My thoughts and prayers are with all those affected in their time of sorrow. This violence […]
Image courtesy BBC Venerable Watareka Vijitha Thero is a Buddhist Monk and the Chief Incumbent of the Rotalawela Mahaweli Maha Viharaya in Mahiyanganaya, in the Uva province. Vijitha Thero is also an elected member of the Mahiyangana Pradeshiya Sabha (a local government council in the Badulla district, in the Uva province), representing the ruling United […]
Photo courtesy Al Jazeera On the Sunday I am suddenly getting up early in the morning. I am getting the tweetering. I am big fan of the tweetering because it is always reminding me of the birds and I am also very much into the birds. But the Sunday morning tweetering is not coming from […]
Photo by Dinouk Colombage, via Al Jazeera The horrible killings and destruction in Aluthgama on Sunday was blacked out by almost all mainstream media in Sri Lanka at the height of the violence and the morning after. However, the violence was in detail and close to real time covered extensively over social media, leading to a documentation many times greater […]
Image from Ingulfed Do not despair. It helps to try to understand the situation as it evolves, rather than crystallise your view of it in judgment. If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you […]
Photo courtesy Today There are scarier things, worse things, than Black July ’83. Aluthgama signaled the possibility of such things. The sequence of events, the lethal violence, the horror of Aluthgama were reminiscent of July ’83 –and to go by Tarzie Vittachchi’s Emergency ’58, the anti-Tamil riots of that year. That is the element of dark […]
Photo courtesy Today There is a limit to tolerance, and this is it. In its short history as an independent republic, Sri Lanka has seen more bloodshed than seems fair. Many of our citizens have been active participants in the bombing, burning, shooting, hacking and torturing of each other, and many more have supported this both […]
Photo courtesy BBC [Editors note: This was sent by the author directly to us. As a policy Groundviews does not republish what's already gone up somewhere else on the web. Making an exception in this case because of the context in Sri Lanka at present, and the need to get as many readers engaged with […]
Photo courtesy BBC Update #3: 7.05am, 176 June 2014 A video with English subtitles of the BBS speech that incited violence in Aluthgama is now on YouTube. Also uploaded to the web photos we received of the scale of violence in Aluthgama. More photos from Sri Lanka’s Foreign Correspondents Association below. Post by Foreign Correspondents' […]
I am both proud and pleased to welcome the launch of Project Galileo by CloudFlare, for which the Centre for Policy Alternatives – the institutional anchor of this site – is a global launch partner. As noted in CloudFlare’s blog post announcing the launch of the new initiative, Project Galileo’s goal is to protect free […]
Photo courtesy Sri Lanka Guardian “Finally Gramsci…. If we say – as Gramsci did—that the task of the Italian working class is to fulfil the tasks of national unification that the Italian people had posed themselves since the time of Machiavelli, and in some way, to complete the historical project of the Risorgimento, we have […]
Image from Happy Colombo “Sri Lanka” video Happy, by Pharrell Williams bills itself as the world’s first 24 hour music video. The song is extremely catchy and aired at least once a day, every day at the time of writing this on Sri Lankan radio. On YouTube, nearly 300 million have seen the original music […]
Photography by Getty Images, courtesy NY Post The Catholic Church has announced that His Holiness Pope Francis would be visiting Sri Lanka from January 13th to 15th, next year. Preceding the announcement, were visits to the Vatican by both the Sri Lankan Catholic hierarchy as well as senior government figures, both of whom extended the invitation […]
Photo by ISHARA S.KODIKARA/AFP, via The Telegraph How many of you can honestly say that you have never visited a pornography website? I don’t have the numbers, but if I had to guess, only a small number of you would be able to say that. So why pretend? Why pretend that you have never watched […]
Image from YouTube video Dr Dayan Jayatilleka’s book, Long War, Cold Peace, now in its second revised edition of 2014, is one of the few book-length attempts by a Sri Lankan scholar to make sense of our post-war condition and the policy challenges that we face. His take on all this, it can reliably be […]