Archive for the ‘Colombo’

Examining Sri Lanka’s Diplomacy Machine

Lankan Human Rights Minister, Mahinda Samarasinghe

Photo courtesy JDS As promised, the Sri Lankan government made the final report of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) public last month. It has also recently released its “National Action Plan for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights: 2011-2016.” The Action Plan was developed in accordance with a commitment the government had made in 2008, the last time Sri Lanka participated in the UN’s Universal Periodic Review. Both documents are part of the Sri Lankan government’s strategy to placate international observers and convince people that there is no need for any kind of international assistance because the country’s domestic institutions are working just fine. Like the LLRC report, the National Action Plan contains some decent ideas and recommendations, but it is replete with missing and false information. For example, the section on the Prevention of Torture is laughable and worrisome. The Sri Lankan government claims that it “maintains a zero-tolerance policy on torture.” This sweeping assertion directly contradicts…

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Examinations Department should pass the Integrity Test

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Image courtesy Asian Mirror Basic Questions to Answer In the late 1970s, a Deputy Commissioner of Examinations was prosecuted for interfering with the results of a son of a Minister and a son of a school principal. He was jailed.  It was possible to  prosecute him because the then Commissioner got wind of this illegal activity and moved for prosecution of this officer. Is this possible now? Can an officer who extends favours to a politician in power be ever prosecuted presently?  This is the question before you and me today. Let me also raise few other questions.  When credible foreign universities offer places to Sri Lankan students for undergraduate studies, they presume that the Advanced Level results reflect the genuine talent of the student concerned.  What would happen if the main foreign universities have doubts about the credibility of the A/ L examination results issued by the Department of Examinations?  If a list of students is given by a…

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Is Power Sharing in Land Administration Practical in Sri Lanka?

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Editors note: The author informs us that this Long Reads article is the result of many months of research, and aimed at promoting reconciliation. It is a dispassionate take on a vexed issue, and the author has in recent weeks shared it on a personal basis with selected political figures in the Government and Opposition. It is published on Groundviews with just a few edits. The author predicts that sooner than later negotiators in Government will come to terms with power sharing in land administration. The article is especially timely given the statement to media yesterday by Hon. S.M Krishna, the Indian Minister of External Affairs, that President Mahinda Rajapaksa has promised the full implementation of the 13th Amendment plus, and that the Sri Lankan Government would deliver on its promise. The hope of the author is that his article lays the foundation for a progressive dialogue on this vital issue. Austin Fernando is the author of My Belly is…

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Curated updates from Indian Foreign Minister’s official visit to Sri Lanka

Tweets from Syed Akbaruddin, Official Spokesperson, Ministry of External Affairs, India & other media reporting on Indian Foreign Minister’s official visit to Sri Lanka in January 2012. Note in particular the reference to the implementation of the 13th Amendment Plus by the Sri Lankan government. [View the story "Updates from Indian Foreign Minister's official visit to Sri Lanka" on Storify] Repost This Article

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Killing us slowly

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When we ask the question, who uses pesticides?  Followed by the question who promotes pesticides? It is relatively simple to see who gains and who looses by the promotion and use of these poisons. In Sri Lanka the farmers are asked to indulge in prophylactic spraying i.e. spraying in advance of any pest appearance. Such practices have to be held responsible for a sinister malaise that affects almost everyone; the malaise of Pesticide Accumulation. Pesticide Accumulation refers to the tendency of some biocides and heavy metals used in these biocides to concentrate along the food chain. The biocide residues that are diluted as they are washed by rainfall are slowly taken up by simple plants, which are eaten by small animals, which are in turn eaten by larger animals. The toxin concentrating more and more as it rises in the food chain.  This is particularly evident in aquatic systems, so producing or consuming fish from areas that have a large…

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Defending Sri Lanka: Response to Michael Colin Cooke

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Image taken from ‘Interrogating a public intellectual: Noted bloggers and youth activists engage Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka‘, published on Groundviews The phrase ‘a man for all seasons’ being a compliment -which is clearly not the writer’s intent- I find Mr Michael Colin Cooke’s sense of irony rather leaden (read A Man for all political Seasons: Dr Dayan Jayatilleka). No matter. I have two options in responding. One is to enter a slugfest of quotations and ideological polemic, for which I simply do not have the time, and nor I suspect, do most readers. The other route is to address the substance, with a view to advancing clarity and political discussion. MCC accuses me of “idealisation of the current government of Sri Lanka”. That’s plain silly, and he would find it impossible to back it up with a single quotation or example, while none of those he has furnished amount to anything remotely approaching idealisation. I do defend the Sri Lankan state, its…

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A Man for all political Seasons: Dr Dayan Jayatilleka

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  “… I remain passionately committed to the notion of universality and universal values which derive from our common human condition. The values of humanism are part of these universal values”. Dr Dayan Jayatilleka[1] “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” Julian Barnes [2] On first reading Dr Dayan Jayatilleka one is seduced not only by his prose but by the battery of great names he uses to support his arguments: Edward Galeano, Mao, Gramsci, Che, Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre (and the list does not end there).[3] His political examples are drawn from Serbia, Rwanda, Burma, Pakistan and Mubarak’s Egypt.[4] He does not spare his opponents and their causes – “Red fascists,”[5] he cries; others are deemed: “Orientalist Western critics and their Sri Lankan spear bearers”.[6] When the occasion demands, he brings to the fore an incident where he was either a bystander or an active participant in the…

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Review of ‘Right of Way: A journey of resettlement’

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I was delighted when asked to review Right of Way: A journey of resettlement by Sharni Jayawardena and published by the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA). Sharni’s skill in photography is enviable, and was the co-creator of Walkabout: Slave Island, supported by Groundviews. At the time of review, the publication was not in the public domain, and given what I had seen of Sharni’s previous work, I expected it to be a largely photographic record, in a coffee table book format, of the human displacement that occurred as a result of the E01, Sri Lanka’s first highway. And yet the book features few photos. 72 pages long, the book has just 8 photos included in it. I’ll come back to why I think this makes for a less compelling way of grappling with what the book sets out to do. Thousands, since E01 opened late last year, have taken the highway to Galle from Kottawa. The focus when on the…

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Silva’s Report, Role of International Community and Reconciliation in Sri Lanka

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GV caption: Three terrorists, two terrorists, former terrorists, patriots or a hero? How one sees this image is  measure of how much Sri Lanka remains divided post-war. Image shows Secretary of Defense Gotabaya Rajapaksa speaking during the inaugural National Conference on Reconciliation in Colombo November 24 ,2011. REUTERS/Dinuka Liyanawatte, courtesy MSNBC. One of the most fundamental challenges of peacemaking and peacebuilding is confronting the past while building a just foundation for the future. Fighting impunity and pursuing peace are not incompatible objectives – they can work in tandem, even in an ongoing conflict situation.  – Ban Ki -moon, The Secretary General, UN [1] Background of Silva’s report Since the brutal war in Sri Lanka came to an end in May 2009 with the violation of International Human Rights Law and Humanitarian Law, the International community called for an International Independent Investigation [III] into war crimes and crimes against humanity. Due in part to this pressure, the UN Secretary General appointed a Panel…

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Can Rationalists Awaken the Sleep-walking Lankan Nation?

Keepers of Rationalist Flame L to R - Abraham Kovoor, Carlo Fonseka, Dharmapala Senaratne

Assorted charlatans and religious zealots across the island of Sri Lanka must have heaved a collective sigh of relief when they heard that Dharmapala Senaratne was no more. He had made it his business to make life difficult for those preying on the gullible public. Rationalist and myth-buster Dharmapala made his final exist a few days before 2012 dawned. At 67, he still had a few more years of the good struggle left in him. He would surely have enjoyed countering the false prophets of doom — and their credulous followers — who predict the end of the world on 21 December 2012. Although Dharmapala was also a teacher and lawyer with decades of experience, he was best known for his public activism as a rationalist. His was a determined and sceptical voice questioning fanatical peddlers of all kinds of dogmas, faiths and (mutually exclusive) brands of ‘salvation’. Even more importantly, he fearlessly took on confidence tricksters hoodwinking superstitious people…

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The Final Report of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission: A Response

Sri Lankan Defence Ministry Secretary Go

Photo courtesy JDS The concluding report of Sri Lanka’s Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) was finally made public in mid-December, after multiple delays and an interim report that went mostly unnoticed. The Commission’s report has sparked considerable debate within an increasingly stifled public sphere, rejuvenating conversations in Sri Lanka about governance, human rights, and a permanent political settlement. Unfortunately, because the Report was only released publicly in English, a substantial number of Sri Lankans are excluded from these conversations. We also note that in a true democracy, a free press holds government to account: Sri Lanka needs—and clearly does not have—a strong fourth estate to track the Government’s implementation of LLRC recommendations. We welcome the Report’s contributions to political discourse, but even its most critical conclusions reveal its irredeemable limitations: like the many commissions of inquiry before it, it is neither a truly investigative body, nor empowered to hold political elites to account. Nevertheless, the Report, which contains the…

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WILL THERE BE A REGIME CHANGE IN SRI LANKA?

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Image courtesy New Security Beat A regime change takes place only if the majority of people in a country want a change. In Sri Lanka today not many people would want it. After 30 years of war and terror, people are able to get about without fear, safe in the knowledge that the LTTE has been annihilated. It is this regime, the Rajapakse regime that made it possible and so the sense of gratitude is very strong among the people. It is this feeling that makes the people vote for the Rajapaksas time and time again. All other feelings of frustration simply evaporate, when they remember the bomb explosions of the past in contrast to the peace and security they enjoy today. There is also no opposition waiting in the wings to take over power. Slowly but steadily a merger is taking place before our very eyes, in parliament. The UNP which is still the largest opposition party has more…

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A-Z of Sri Lankan English: O is for our people

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Boys will not always be boys! Photo credit: National Geographic The possessive pronoun “our” is deceptively simple. But who are the “we” that it refers to? The expression our people is a remarkably high-frequency term in Sri Lankan English. On a search of the Groundviews website, the phrase gets around 400 hits, compared to just 331 in the 100-million-word British National Corpus. In British English, the phrase most often refers to members of a particular organisation (“I’ll get one of our people to call you back”). With reference to nationality, it is rarely used to refer to the whole population of the country, except perhaps in a political context with nationalistic overtones – for example, an anti-immigration tirade bemoaning the plight of “our people”. More often it would be used in the context of a specific group such as Irish Catholics, the Bangladeshi community, etc. In Sri Lankan English, the expression can convey a sense of patriotism, but it is…

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Agricultural Madness

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(Photo credit: Claude Dupuis, IDRC-CRDI) The current  ‘development’ madness that affects agriculture also prevails over agricultural research and does not bode well for this nation.  It begins with the fact that, young agricultural scientists have to find support for the projects that will ensure their career from the only available source, the ‘chemical agriculture’ companies. Thus they are forced to carve out their futures supporting the only system that they have been trained in. In this way agricultural science in Sri Lanka has largely ignored the knowledge and wisdom that had guided our agricultural traditions for the last three thousand years or more.  Although politicians and bureaucrats, in search of money or foreign jobs, have been insensitive to this destructive process, farmers have regularly questioned this approach to agriculture: For instance, in 1998 a meeting of farmers convened by the CGIAR (Consultative Group in Agricultural Research) to ascertain the farmers viewpoint of agricultural development, submitted the following statement. “We, the farmers…

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PROBLEM & SOLUTION: PARAMETERS OF POSSIBILITY

A supporter of Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapakse holds up a poster of him in Anuradhapura

Photo courtesy JDS The New Year brought a valuable gift in my email. It was a dossier entitled ‘Seeking Space for State Reform’ and carried an even more beguiling subtitle, ‘Consensus and Contradictions in Public Perceptions’.  A publication of the ICES (the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, from and of which I hadn’t heard for quite a while), it was a product of the Politics of State Reform Project. What made it compelling reading was that it was nothing less than a ‘National Survey of Grassroots Perceptions of State Reform’, which, translated, meant that it was a recent survey of public opinion across all communities, about the ethnic conflict and the  various reform proposals to address or resolve it. Once you’ve dispensed with the layers of very proper titles, you realize what the report contains. It tells you what Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims think, today, over two years after the war, about the most contentious issues that have divided us…

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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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