Archive for the ‘Jaffna’

Violence and accountability

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Cartoon by Albert Ashok As conflict raged, the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights had stern words for those on both sides. “All violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law must be investigated and those responsible for breaches – including deliberate targeting of civilians, indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks, the killing of injured persons and the use of human shields – must be brought to justice,” her spokesman told reporters. The year was 2004, and fighting in Fallujah in Iraq was taking an ongoing toll on ordinary people. The UN Commission on Human Rights special rapporteur on the right to health had earlier listed “extremely serious allegations” against the US-led coalition that had taken control of Iraq and called for an independent inquiry. UN investigators continued to keep a close watch on Iraq. Just last year, special rapporteur on torture Manfred Nowak – who in 2006 had condemned the US detention centre in Guantanamo Bay as a “torture camp”…

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‘National security’ in post-war Sri Lanka: Women’s (In) security in the North

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Photo from Hear My VOICE: Jalajakumari Selvarasa ~ “I could often feel the nostalgia” Resurrecting the ‘undead Tiger’[1] to secure the citizen: How the situation of women belie the dominant security narrative ‘The world should appreciate our successful anti-terrorist effort. But today we are being hounded by those who turned a blind eye to LTTE atrocities over the years, particularly its widespread use of child combatants in war against the security forces. Children are no longer at the risk of being abducted on their way to school or back. Girls are no longer forced to wear suicide jackets and throw themselves at military and civilian targets.’- President Mahinda Rajapakse in an interview to The Island, 18 April 2011. ‘We should not have to feel afraid. We should have the freedom to travel freely without fear.’-woman from Vadamaraatchi in Northern Sri Lanka The state of emergency remains in place nearly two years after the end of the war. It is renewed every…

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UNSG Panel Report on Sri Lanka: Revisiting ‘Accountability’

Displaced Tamil civilians watch

Original photo from JDS Ensuring ‘accountability’ is important, but doing so is a complex task. Who is to ensure accountability, when, where, how? – are questions which have always aroused serious debate, and will do, in the future. While there may be no ‘independent/internal’ investigations, one need not be starry-eyed about ‘independent/international’ investigations. For example, ‘Nuremburg’ was an important start, but was never a suitable model. What, for instance, is ‘international’ and who decides the form and nature of this mechanism? Can we go with Chinese/Russian investigators, and if so, would they be independent? Can we go with US/UK investigators, and would they be independent? Also, can we simply investigate the ‘last stages’ of the armed conflict? What about India’s role in the conflict, and are we to forget the manner in which India nurtured armed groups hostile to Sri Lanka? Are we to investigate only the leaders (of the present regime) who defeated the LTTE, but not those of…

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A Mother’s Call for the Re-awakening

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Photo credit: Sangam Mrs. B. Thilagamani began her non-violent resistant activism when she was 18 years old and played a key role during the 1961 Satyagraha Campaign. During the Satyagraha Campaign, Sri Lankan Armed Forces (SLAF) brutally retaliated against non-violent campaigners. In their terror campaign of 18 April 1961, Thilagamani was sprayed with SLAF tear gas and her sari was partly burnt. Today, 18 April 2011, marks her 50 symbolic years in non-violent activism. She still retains her moral spirit, but deeply worries about the current developments in the Tamil national struggle.  Almost a month ago, I tried to record her significant experience in the 1961 Satyagraha Campaign and her remarks on the current Tamil polity.  Two days after a brief discussion on the topic, her health condition became more critical, but has since recalled her memories as much as she can and hopes to record her comprehensive experiences once her health condition has returned to normal. “Since coming to…

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Debating numbers, killing lives: UN and Government differences emerge

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The Island newspaper continues to publish leaks from the report produced by the Panel appointed by the UN Secretary General to look into post-war accountability in Sri Lanka. Groundviews has covered in detail the Executive Summary and Parts 1, 2 and 3 of the leaks. The Island published today Part 4, which focusses on the significant discrepancies between the United Nations and the Government on estimating the number of civilians trapped in the Vanni during the final stages of the war, and how this numbers debate resulted in horrific ground conditions. As before, we provide context and background information to frame these highlights. In addition, we flag concern over the fact that when the Doctors reporting from the Vanni were detained, many reports suggested that the UN did little or nothing to secure their release or safety. Links to the reports filed by the Doctors to the media are included, as well as articles on the media events staged in…

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Kerosene: How does a taxi driver take the sick to the hospital when there’s no fuel around?

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How does a taxi driver take the sick to the hospital when there’s no fuel around? How does a newspaper publish news of bombs and deaths without newsprint? And how does a community with leprosy survive despair and isolation? Koothu, kerosene and paper: portraits of resilience, expression and survival about the people of Jaffna, Sri Lanka. Watch Kerosene in full here. Shot and cut by Kannan Arunasalam. A trailer for Kannan’s stunning three short films can be seen below.

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  • 20 Apr, 2011
  • 33 Comments
  • Jaffna,
    Peace and Conflict,
    UN Panel Report,
    Vavuniya,
    War Crimes

Shelling hospitals ‘packed with children, babies and the elderly’: Continuing leaks from the elusive UN report

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The Island newspaper continues to publish leaks from the report produced by the Panel appointed by the UN Secretary General to look into post-war accountability in Sri Lanka. Groundviews has covered in detail the Executive Summary and Parts 1 and 2 of the leaks. The Island published today Part 3, which focusses on the shelling of hospitals. As before, we provide context and background information to frame these highlights. Please be warned that some of the following highlights are graphic in their descriptions, and make for difficult reading. “Throughout the final stages of the war, virtually every hospital in the Vanni, whether permanent or makeshift, was hit by artillery. ” “PTK hospital was packed with hundreds of injured civilians from the NFZ. More than 100 new patients were arriving each day, many from the NFZ. Many had severe or life-threatening injuries caused by artillery fire or burns. The casualties, many of them babies, young children and the elderly, were packed…

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New leaks of UN war crimes report: Shelling civilians, horrifying medical conditions and failure of the UN system in Sri Lanka?

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The Island newspaper continues to publish leaks from the report produced by the Panel appointed by the UN Secretary General to look into allegations of war crimes in Sri Lanka. Groundviews flagged key points and placed in context what is widely acknowledged to be the executive summary of the report, published in The Island newspaper on Saturday. On the 17th and 19th of April, the newspaper published two more excerpts from the body text of the report. Going by the newspaper’s introduction to Part 1, we can expect much more content in the future, which begs the question as to why the UN itself hasn’t yet officially released the report into the public domain. As with our first story, we provide context and background information to frame these highlights. Part 1 deals with civilian casualty figures. Highlights include, “There is no authoritative figure for civilian deaths or injuries in the Vanni in the final phases of the war. Several actors…

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Tamil National Alliance statement on the leaked UN report: An irrefutable confirmation of events

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We reproduce in full a statement by the Tamil National Alliance that responds to a large excerpt from the report of the UN Panel of Experts looking into allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Sri Lanka leaked to and published in The Island newspaper on Saturday. ### We have read the disclosure made by the media, said to be the Executive Summary of the Report submitted by the Advisory Panel to the United Nations Secretary General (UNSG). The Tamil National Alliance (TNA), as the democratically elected representatives of the Tamil People of the North East, who have been the worst affected victims of the recently concluded war, we consider it our duty to respond to same, while reserving a fuller response to the full Report after it becomes available to us. We recall here with deep anguish, that for over the past half a century, we have consistently urged an acceptable and reasonable political solution to address…

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The Right to Respond

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NGO: The numbers do not add up. Census says 430,000 people resided in the Vanni mid-2008. A year later, 290,000 are shepherded by the Army into “welfare centers” where one hundred men, boys, girls, women shared one latrine, but that is another dirty subject; we are speaking here of brute numbers and mass disappearance. Govt: I understand Tamil Net will jump to spread the pernicious bleeding heart report from those pesky fellows at Channel 4, so we must follow our Leader and enact his plan to send teams to like-minded, non-aligned countries to show how governments can eliminate terror, following our way or the highway, of no return, but we won’t use that crude phrase. We believe we are among friends here in the poem without a need to camouflage. Yet, we must practice to win the diplomatic battle now in the third and fourth worlds where we are very much at home.

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Sinhala and Tamil New Year in Jaffna, Sri Lanka: Ground realities

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Sinhala & Tamil New Year when I was growing up was always a much-awaited annual event in our neighbourhood. We’d have card tournaments and badminton tournaments leading up to the “Big Day,” and when the day actually came, it was always a flurry of activity. People rushing all over the place, kids laughing, games being set up or organised and other activities. Having just experienced my second New Year in post-war Jaffna, with the State sponsored ‘celebrations’ being one of the few public events to be seen, yet again I find that the people still hold the same hopes and aspirations as they did last year, only more fervently now. Speaking to a few youth from diverse backgrounds in Jaffna, I was able to get a sense of their hopes, fears and expectations for the New Year. “Since the end of the war I’ve not celebrated any of our festivals. How can I celebrate when young people in the Vanni…

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A brief impression of ‘My Other History’

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Life span of one hour, four people performed excellently at a renovated warehouse down Park Street Mews. I was rooted to my seat and watched and listened in careful concentration to capture every syllable of the dialog. The play is low cost and high quality and gave a poignantly strange message of displaced people that we are gradually and conveniently beginning to forget. It is not only the man, woman and child who got corralled in Menik Camp that lost their ‘home.’ There is a whole lot more who are harnessed and weighed down and up rooted by the racial yoke. These then too are people of the soil, who are now geographically scattered and emotionally disorientated and carry totally or partially valid reasons to feel that they belong to an unequal second race.  The count among them is considerable, each looking in his or her moral compass to find a route that could guide him or her to a…

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Launch of Moving Images: Stunning documentaries and photo essays from Sri Lanka

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Moving Images is a series of stunning short-form documentary and narrated photographic portraits on facets of life in post-war Sri Lanka. These high-definition productions, the country’s first, range from portraits of resilience from the war ravaged Jaffna and reflections on the Eurasian community by the last surviving Eurasians themselves to fascinating lives in Colombo invisible even to most who live and work in the city. Produced for and supported by Groundviews, this unique content is will be progressively uploaded to the Moving Images website over April and May. Trailers for the productions follow along with the flyer announcing the launch of the content.

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  • 31 Mar, 2011
  • 53 Comments
  • Colombo,
    Jaffna,
    Peace and Conflict,
    Sport

World Cup cricket aiding reconciliation in Sri Lanka: Fact or fiction?

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Groundviews is running a poll on its Facebook page (direct link to poll here) on whether its readers feel that the current interest in cricket can help reconciliation in Sri Lanka over the long-term. The visit of the Sri Lankan cricket captain, our beloved spin-bowler Murali and Ian Botham to areas most ravaged by the North was heavily covered by the media. Kumar Sangakkara’s statement after visiting the North resonated with many and was very widely featured across Facebook and Twitter, “[The people of the north] have been deprived for 30 years of everything that we’ve taken for granted in Colombo. Sometimes Colombo seemed a world away from the war. We’ve never felt it as much as the communities in the North and East did. And sometimes we have to understand that we owe them our very lives and all the comforts we enjoy,” said Sangakkara.” As was noted at the last World Cup, Sri Lanka’s cricket team is “…is a…

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Jaffna: Moments of Nostalgia

"Let's unite to celebrate Sri Lanka Cricket" reads the hoarding in Tamil

“I worked hard for that FIRST KISS And a heart don’t forget something like that Like an old photograph Time can make a feeling fade But the memory of a FIRST KISS Never fades away!” ~ Samuel Timothy McGraw ~ American Country Musician and Actor I always feel enchanted, whenever I travel to Jaffna by bullock cart, bicycle, car, foot, helicopter, jeep, motorbike, plane, ship, train or even through Kilali lagoon during difficult times. Journey to Jaffna ~ may it be before the war, during the war or after the war, I always cherish the memories of Jaffna which is closer to my heart. Jaffna which is beautifully called “Yaazhpaanam” in Tamil. It is famous for its unique architecture, tradition, cuisine, rituals and festivals. According to 2007 statistics, Jaffna district’s population was 650,720 (1,85,405 families). Jaffna district is geographically divided into Valikaamam, Vadamaraatchchi, Thenmaraatchchi and Jaffna Islands. It has an area of 1,025 square kilometres (approximately 395.8 square miles). Jaffna…

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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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