Living with HIV in Sri Lanka: Reflections from ICAAP10 in Busan, Korea
World AIDS Day, 2010, One Voice – SARYN We were in Busan, Korea last week, where S, a young man living with HIV, and I were presenting at the International Conference on AIDS…
Colombo
Searching for Sri Lanka’s Anna Hazare
Anna Hazare, courtesy Injustices.in Foundation It was just last week that the BBC featured a documentary describing the post war atrocities committed against vulnerable Tamil women in the north and east who…
Joshua Roman in Sri Lanka
I met Joshua Roman, a TED Fellow, at TED 2011. TED audiences are very hard to please. Because of the nature of the TED Fellows, speakers and performers, the bar for any…
State of Emergency in Sri Lanka, with or without it
Photo courtesy JDS The decision of the Sri Lankan government to lift the Emergency Regulations (ER) is received in good faith by many. For example, the International Community has expressed its pleasure…
Why The Diaspora Must Return To Sri Lanka
Image from Himal Southasian, Sri Lanka’s alternatives abroad, December 2010 | By Sworup Nhasiju [Editors note: Also read The Disillusionment of the Diaspora and Two years after war’s end in Sri Lanka: What can the…
Crossing Red Lines: The New Tamil Consensus in Sri Lanka
R Sampanthan is a Member of Parliament and leader of the Tamil National Alliance and Illankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi. Photo from vivatamils.2009 on Flickr. A visit to the Mayan exhibition in Paris…
SEC must safeguard credibility of CSE to build investor confidence in Sri Lanka
Photo courtesy JDS We understand that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is planning to compound undisclosed securities fraud by some billionaire investors. Media reports have begun to circulate that Environmental Resources…
Should Sri Lanka’s Youth Get Ready To Confront Armed Intervention Two Years After The War?
Image from Radio Netherlands Worldwide The proposal (decision?) made by President Mahinda Rajapaksa to repeal the Emergency Regulations (ER) was a hopeful one. It was a significant proposal (decision?) which marked a…
The ‘Grease Devil’ Phenomena in Sri Lanka: A Brief Collation of Reports
A ‘snapshot’ visualized version of the ‘Grease Devil’ phenomena that emerged in Sri Lanka from the 7th of July 2011 to the 29th of August 2011. Incidents concern; sightings of Grease Devils,…
Libya, Sri Lanka and Responsibility to Protect (R2P)
Muammar Qaddafi, Libya’s leader, speaks at an equestrian show at the Tor di Quinto cavalry school in Rome, Italy, on Monday, Aug. 30, 2010. Italy’s 2008 apology to Libya for three decades…
Forbidden Fruits: Niromi de Soyza’s “Tamil Tigress”, Noumi Kouri and Helen Demidenko?
The literary world is now poised on the brink wondering if the Tamil Tigress (Allen & Unwin, 2011) is going to join Forbidden Love (Random House, 2003) and The Hand that signed…
War Crimes Investigations in Sri Lanka: An Unpopular View
“In trying to do good, we have been living beyond our moral resources and have fallen into hypocrisy and self-righteousness” — William V. Cannon, commenting on the Vietnam War, New York Times,…
Modern Dictatorships through the Mirror: Time for us to be Conscious
In legal and political literature, the term ‘dictatorship’ includes authoritarianism and is synonymous with traditional terms such as absolutism, absolute governments, despotism and tyranny. In political and constitutional legal theory, a dictatorship…
You Can’t Catch A Bogeyman
Image courtesy Amber Much of the recent discussion of the ‘Grease Yaka’ in the Sinhala and English language media or ‘Mystery Man’ as it is referred to in Tamil discourse has been…
How can society protect vulnerable women from post war atrocities?
I just viewed a documentary produced recently by Al Jazeera titled ‘Civil war leaves Sri Lankan women vulnerable’. The film has left me deeply disturbed, shocked and ashamed particularly because as a…