Archive for the ‘Jaffna’

A question Sri Lanka’s leaders keep dodging: Where are the disappeared?

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Photo courtesy Avaaz I’d been in Sri Lanka just three weeks when I first heard of someone disappearing. It was May 2009 and I got an anonymous email telling me that Stephen Sunthararaj, a human rights worker from northern Sri Lanka, had been abducted at gunpoint and taken away in a white van in the heart of Colombo. He had previously been detained by the police – on suspicion of what, it is not clear – then released for lack of incriminating evidence just before his abduction. I tried to contact one or two ministers, I think, but didn’t get through and my work once more turned to the war then still raging in the north. I bitterly regretted not following up the case. Months later I met a Westerner who had known Stephen Sunthararaj. At the mention of him at dinner, he wept. Fast forward to this year. Five weeks ago Ramasamy Prabagaran, a businessman and, like Stephen, a…

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Who really supports reconciliation in post-war Sri Lanka?

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The official media page of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) tells its own story. It’s blank. There’s literally nothing on the official website of the LLRC that provides information on public statements by the LLRC and coverage of its proceedings in the media. Furthermore, it’s impossible to find the interim recommendations or the final report of the LLRC on the official website. The interim recommendations of the LLRC were first published in full on Groundviews. The most comprehensive record of media coverage on the LLRC, from domestic and international media, is also on Groundviews. Long before the LLRC’s official website was launched, Groundviews collated and published official submissions to the LLRC. With 214 submissions, it’s far more comprehensive than the records currently on the official LLRC site (the LLRC site does have a record of field visits – more on this partial set of records later). Groundviews served as a platform to correct mainstream media misreporting and misrepresentations…

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What is the bigger lie? US resolution in Geneva or number of people in Vanni in 2009?

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Image from Wikimedia Commons “One of the rankest untruths in the public domain today is that the US resolution is innocuous and unobjectionable…” said Amb. Dayan Jayatilleka in his article THE BIG LIE ABOUT THE US RESOLUTION on 16th March 2012. It would be pertinent to question whether a bigger untruth in the public domain since 2009 is about the population in Vanni in 2009. Correct me if I’m wrong – but from my memory, Amb. Jayatilleke was a party to this lie, helped cover it up – and never offered an explanation even afterwards. Population in LTTE controlled Vanni On 30th Jan. 2009, according to official government website: 75,000 – 100,000 people (high side!) (See here) On 26th Feb. 2009 according to government website, quoting the Defense Secretary – 70,000 people (See here) Now let us compare above with what is stated in Government’s version of events in last few months of the war – “Humanitarian Operation Factual Analysis” available here -…

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Some thoughts on Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields: War Crimes Unpunished

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Like so many diasporic Sri Lankans I watched it, even staying up late (by my currently low standards that is). Did I think that the first programme was a good thing? Yes. There’s a line, a quandary, a grey area after any conflictual situation. And it’s about what we should just put behind us and forget or accept and what we need to analyse and dissect in order to learn from to move forward. There’s probably no one who would suggest that it’s wise to forget and / or accept absolutely everything, on all sides, and there’s probably no one who would think that’s it’s sensible to analyse and dissect every single thing. But the line has to be drawn somewhere and, for me, much of the positioning of the line has to do with the issue of civilian casualties (which sounds so much more PC than “civilians deaths”). Up until after the showing of the first Killing Fields documentary…

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Of Symbols, Identity and Sovereignty: The Sri Lankan flag and us

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A discussion. I thought of him as the speaker of the flag He said We Sinhalese are the people of the lion.  Our flag represents us. Every point every line has a meaning.  Look at the color of the flag it is red and yellow. Yellow is symbolic of wisdom and derives from the color of the Buddha’s robe.  The Buddha, when he attained enlightenment wrapped himself in a cloth that covered the bodies of the dead.  The bodies in those days may have been bathed in saffron, which was used as a disinfectant. The saffron dye stained the cloth that the Buddha wore and it became yellow.  The color yellow became indentified with the Buddha and his wisdom, which encompasses both life and death… And so yellow became the color of wisdom. While red became the color of life. Red for our lifeblood, our energy, our anger, our hate, our passion, our love, our revolutions, our desires, He said…

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Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields: War Crimes Unpunished: Unofficial video now online

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Channel 4′s new documentary on Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields: War Crimes Unpunished aired for the first time in the UK last night. Before it is even available on Channel 4′s official web based on-demand service, it’s now up on YouTube. It is likely that the video is soon taken down by Youtube over copyright violation claims, and Channel 4 notes the video will be officially available soon. In a series of tweets to Channel 4, we informed that the Adobe Flash based on-demand service of the channel, not just because it won’t play on any Apple iOS device, is far less suitable for the viral dissemination of the video than featuring it, like this unofficial version, on YouTube or Vimeo. Not doing so, and not making the video more easily downloadable, we said severely limited its access within Sri Lanka. We also asked Channel 4 to take a page out of the viral dissemination of KONY 2012. Finally,…

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New censorship of SMS news in Sri Lanka

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A fax issued by the Media Centre for National Security today commands that “any news related to National Security and Security Force, the Police should get prior approval from the Media Centre for National Security before dissemination. Therefore, please be kind enough to follow the above instructions with immediate effect.” See large image of the fax sent to media institutions here. Groundviews was told that these measures were most likely taken after SMS news updates on the recent killing of two soldiers in Jaffna, by another soldier. Among other SMS news alerts, Daily Mirror’s SMS alerts covered the story in three updates, also reflected in their Twitter feed. 3 soilders shot dead in Jaffna bit.ly/AaYyvZ #srilanka #lka — Daily Mirror (@DMbreakingnews) March 9, 2012 The first update was at 8.16am, followed by two more at 8.46am (via a Daily Mirror journalist’s iPhone) and 9.19am. The reason for the death of 3 soldiers in Jaffna was due to a personal dispute…

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Rights, Return & Resettlement: A Critique of the TNA Report on Resettlement

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TNA delegation in Washington DC, 2011 The ‘Resettlement Report October- December 2011’, available on the Tamil National Alliance’s (TNA) temporary website, DBS Jeyraj’s blog and Sangam.org, is the second report of the Tamil National Alliance Research Series, and claims to provide an ‘overview of the return or resettlement of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) who were displaced during the final stages of the war in Sri Lanka’. The report states that its intention is to ‘examine the status of selected groups of resettled or returned persons in the Vanni region’, in this instance the village of Santhapuram in Kilinochchi. It also focuses on two ‘special issues’- plans to relocate those remaining in Menik Farm to Kombavil, and returns to the released High Security Zones in Jaffna. The initiative taken by the TNA to prepare reports on issues of concern such as resettlement is commendable.  The document is also useful in that it provides information on different villages in each report. Yet,…

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Forging a Culture of Mutual Tolerance among Sri Lankans: A Path to Reconciliation?

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Photo courtesy Reuters Alertnet “You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist” – Friedrich Nietzsche I recently learned that intervening in favor of a “[...] modernist, inclusive Sri Lankan nation that transcends narrow, parochial ethno-cultural identities” (cf. Asanga Welikela’s recent intervention) may unfortunately present you as a Jacobin; especially if you happen to be educated in France; which is apparently by essence revolutionary. One can only imagine my Great Terror after reading such a comment. I still wonder whether Welikela’s approach would have been different had I not been a Sorbonne/Sciences Po educated Sri Lankan. By focusing on the question of “sub-state nations” and by his dismissive position towards secularism, Asanka Welikela’s argumentation displaces my “original position” which has primarily to do with a culture of mutual tolerance and the emergence of Tomorrow’s Sri Lankan, that is to say  “[...] the one who builds…

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Why Sri Lanka must ‘win’ at UNHRC

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Image courtesy Vikalpa from rally held in Colombo on Monday, 27th February. Unclear what the poster means, but the general thrust of it seems to gel with Chaminda’s submission. The following is an excerpt from a statement recently made by Ambassador Eileen Chambarlain Donahoe JD PhD, top US diplomat to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC): The case of Sri Lanka is different and difficult. It is essentially dealing with large-scale civilian casualties, allegations of government involvement in large-scale civilian casualties during a civil war that took place over many years, but ended in 2009. It’s not an ongoing crisis. And for that reason, it’s slightly more challenging. In the circumstances of the world today the fact that it’s not a crisis makes it slightly more difficult. The comment was of particular interest to this writer, as it corresponded to what he noted in a short presentation made at a Sri Lanka-related conference at the Eidgenössische Techniche Hochscule (ETH) in…

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JAYATISSA, JEYARAJ AND JACOBINISM: DEBATING ‘SRI LANKAN-NESS’ IN POST-WAR SRI LANKA

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Photo courtesy Sri Lanka Guardian Much is being written nowadays about post-war Sri Lankan identity and the challenges of unity in diversity, among which are well-meaning interventions extolling the virtues of building a modernist, inclusive Sri Lankan nation that transcends narrow, parochial ethno-cultural identities. Given the fact that we completely and calamitously muffed the first opportunity to do so at the postcolonial historical moment, and fought a thirty-year ethnic conflict as a result, it ought to be strange that we should once again be resorting to this grand idea with such alacrity. That it is trotted out so uncritically and so often by patently well-intentioned, politically moderate and open-minded people – from the authors of the LLRC report to many political commentators and citizen journalists – demonstrates not only the pervasiveness of this idea in our political imagination but also the limits of that imagination. One such intervention is the recent article by Kamaya Jayatissa, in which a fervent argument…

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Thank you, Madam Navi Pillai

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Photo courtesy JDS Thank you madam, for being the voice for the voiceless. The poverty stricken, wounded, displaced and marginalized Muslim and Tamil victims of the brutal thirty year war in our country have been forced into submission by the ruthless and racist Rajapakse regime which has gained a stranglehold over power through a deliberate and well planned conspiracy which was plotted out with impunity and arrogance to deny its citizens of democracy and justice. The regime is firmly entrenched through constitutional amendments passed in stealth and haste despite objections raised by an educated few for extended public debate and discussion warranted of significant changes. The Sinhala majority have also been hoodwinked with the glorification of the war and masking of human rights violations through the regime’s uniting call for patriotism against international conspirators who wish to destroy the country’s onward path to progress – which no one dares question why? The truth is that only a few have the…

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Youth unemployment in Sri Lanka: The foundations of violence?

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In an interview broadcast on public TV recently, Dr. Harini Amarasuriya, Senior Lecturer, Department of Social Studies at the Open University of Sri Lanka and co-author of Rethinking the nexus between youth, unemployment and conflict – Perspectives from Sri Lanka looks into what is a real and growing problem in Sri Lanka – youth unemployment. As the report by International Alert notes, Likewise, youth unemployment cannot be looked at as an isolated problem: Its roots lie deep in social, cultural, economic and political structures and dynamics, as illustrated by some of the issues emerging from the district-level research. Enhancing young people’s skills, while necessary in countries where educational curricula and job market requirements do not match, will not be sufficient to overcome these barriers. In the interview. Dr. Amarasuriya speaks of a National Action Plan for Youth Employment, an initiative from a few years ago under the present government that no one now seems to recall, leave aside implement the…

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  • 27 Feb, 2012
  • 2 Comments
  • Colombo,
    Jaffna,
    Politics and Governance,
    Post-War

Doing the wrong thing for the right reasons: Plagiarism and the fate of LTTE surrendees

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Photo courtesy Deccan Chronicle When I first read Shamila’s piece posted on 24 February (Female ex-combatants of LTTE in post-war Sri Lanka), I had the strange feeling that I had read it before as it seemed very familiar. A moment later I realized that not only had I read it, I had actually written much of it. Shamila has both paraphrased, and quoted verbatim, a section of my piece titled Jaffna and the Vanni today: The reality beneath the rhetoric, posted on 17 March 2011, without giving due acknowledgement. Although Groundviews is a citizen journalism website, and not an academic journal, all those who contribute are expected to abide by accepted rules relating to due acknowledgment of sources and refrain from engaging in plagiarism. For ease of reference, I shall list below the striking similarities between the two pieces. It is the first section of Shamila’s piece that has been ‘borrowed’ from my article while it appears the second half…

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History after the War: Challenges for Post War Reconciliation

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[Editors note: Also listen to podcast by author here.] The end of the war is certainly not the end of the conflict that led to the military confrontation between the military forces of Sri Lanka state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). This conflict surfaces in different guises, the military episode being only one. It is well-known that conflicting interpretations of the past of the island by conflicting parties is a major factor in the conflict.[1] When the military confrontation was the dominant form of the conflict, the importance of other forms were less evident. With the military episode completely over, non military aspects of the conflict are again coming to the fore. It is in this context that the renewed role of “history” in the Sri Lanka ethnic conflict has to be discussed. In the collective imagination of the ‘Sinhala-Buddhist South’, the ‘Tamil North’ occupies a very special place. In short, it is a place to be conquered and…

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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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