Archive for the ‘Vavuniya’

I am one of 80,000*

Though the barbed wire, I am looking down the road of memory. Selvam, my Selvam, I am waiting for you To bring back our lost life. You grabbed my hand hard and we ran like the wind Under the shelling rain. Do you remember, Selvam? Praying, praying for life, for life with our kids? They ran with us but so many others flickered and fell Running non-stop, praying for life, till the rain of shells ended. For a moment we had thought we saw Freedom But it was a mirage. Jasmine flowers wilted, Selvam, with your failing breath. The white flag you were waving Fell over your head like a shroud. I’m looking through barbed wire Down the road of memory. Please come soon, Selvam, I want to die together. *Sri Lankan Government statistics say that are 80,000 war widows in the North and East of the country, the ex-war zones. Written by Ajantha Roshani Translated by Prasanna Ratnayake

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Google map on flood-affected areas in Sri Lanka – February 2011

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View Flood-affected regions in February 2011 – Sri Lanka in a larger map The map above identifies the main flood-affected regions, sites where relief and rescue operations have been conducted and specific DS divisions where IDP camps have been setup. Please click on the link below the map to view it on a larger screen. You may click on individual markers for detailed information and zoom in to view the location of specific shelter camps located in the east.  Please note that this map is continuously updated as soon as the Editors of Groundviews receive detailed information and reports from the ground. Between the 11th and the 18th of January, heavy rainfall led to severe floods and widespread destruction in several provinces across the island that affected over 1 million people. 43 people were killed and over 300,000 were displaced. The districts of Ampara, Trincomalee, Polonnaruwa, Batticaloa and Anuradhapura were severely affected in January and at present with heavy rainfall once again…

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Rebirth

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Photos courtesy Batticaloa Facebook Page I haven’t been reading the news much lately. I heard about the floods in the East and North Central Province and thought abstractly to myself, ‘how awful’. I watched the downpour in Colombo itself and complained about the shivering cold of that one day during which temperatures fell to 18 degrees – the lowest in over 60 years. I never really fathomed the extent of the destruction until I happened across a 3-line post on a blog, linking to some footage by the airforce of the flooding in Batticaloa. I didn’t pay much attention to the article on the airforce site, but those pictures stunned me. Water up to treetops. Acre upon acre of paddy land totally destroyed. All I could think was, ‘haven’t they been through enough?’ War. Tsunami. Floods. Would it ever stop? Would they ever have the luxury of having normal lives again? Would there ever come a time when they would…

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Archive of Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) submissions and media reports

Image courtesy Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) Groundviews is pleased to announce the launch of two archives covering media reports on and submissions to the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC). The archives are now live here. At the time of the launch, there are over 220 media reports and over 100 English submissions to the LLRC featured on the site. The archives respond to a numerous requests we got for a single-window access to this content. The content included in the archives are generated by a trusted source outside the country by going through information on the web, including the LLRC’s official website. New submissions and media reports, once sent to Groundviews, are uploaded to the archive and curated by us. Hosting this content on Google Docs makes it a cinch for readers to search for and access the submissions and reports online, print them, download them as PDFs or subscribe to updates via RSS feeds.

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The Tamil In The Room At The War’s End

On May 19th 2009 the last shots in the nearly three decade long war between the Sri Lankan state and the LTTE were fired. The end came in the form of the virtual destruction of the LTTE including its leadership, after a gruelling campaign in the northern Vanni region leading to the deaths of thousands of soldiers, LTTE cadres and civilians. There were wild celebrations in the south; President Mahinda Rajapakse was hailed as a conquering hero, a grand monarch who had delivered his country from the bane of terrorism, while hopes were expressed for a prosperous future now that the main threat to progress has been eliminated. Riding the wave of euphoria, the government scored two telling electoral victories, promising what the people wanted – a bright future. A year after the war the hopes still remain but reality is also beginning to set in. It seems there are immense hurdles still to be overcome on the road to…

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Fire and Storm: Essays in Sri Lankan Politics by Michael Roberts commends citizen journalism during war

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Fire and Storm: Essays in Sri Lankan Politics is the latest book by Prof. Michael Roberts. Michael was trained in history and the social sciences at Peradeniya University in Sri Lanka. Read a fuller description of the author on his blog and watch a recent interview, produced for broadcast TV and featured on Groundviews here. Referring to the bloody end of war in Sri Lanka, when original content and debates on Groundviews interrogated stark ground and political realities, Michael has this to say of the site and citizen journalism in Sri Lanka in the introduction to the tome: “It is to the credit of the Centre for Policy Alternatives website, Groundviews…. that it raised this Catch-22 situation in full-frontal style on 3 May 2009: “would killing 50,000 civilians to finish off the LTTE bring peace?” When, predictably, this question was misunderstood, the Groundviews editors clarified the issue thus: “This post intends to interrogate extremism. The numbers in the quote are…

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At Your Service

Islanders always like to baila, party, party, nibble the ear whispering, pump themselves with arrack and go courting on the Green, but in these holidays at year’s end dedicated to forgetting the war and all those gadflies buried in graves, some families mourn their heroes away from the headlights’ glare of vans without license plates that remain in service waiting to be summoned when necessary.

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A tragi-comedy? The UN Advisory Panel and war crimes in Sri Lanka

UN SG Panel

Photo courtesy Inner City Press There is nothing to scratch heads for, to find the reason why Moon at the UN and Mahinda in Colombo agreed to have the UN Secretary General’s Advisory Panel on Sri Lanka, make a sudden visit to Colombo and meet SL President’s “Lessons Learnt & Reconciliation Commission” (LLRC). Its simple logic. They both could wash their hands off mounting international pressure for an independent investigation on war crimes and crimes against humanity accusations, international organisations now seem to feel, have enough evidence piling up for investigations. “WikiLeaks” with its dump of US diplomatic cables in the public domain has added substantial supplementary documentation for a renewed stronger call to investigate war crimes in Sri Lanka, with the British Channel 4 airing more video clips on gory killing of suspect, unarmed LTTE cadres, though not authenticated. There is also the case of  a murdered woman seen in the clips, claimed by some as the TV announcer…

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Interview with Michael Roberts

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Prof. Michael Roberts, in addition to his academic writing and research, is well-known political commentator in Sri Lanka. He is also a regular contributor to this site. In the incredibly violent days of the war in early 2009, two of Michael’s submissions (Dilemma’s at war’s end: Thoughts on hard realities and Dilemmas at wars end: Clarifications & counter-offensive) provided some of the most explosive analysis and discussions on the politico-military as well as humanitarian options at the time. As noted on Thuppahi, his blog, although Michael can be called ‘a historical anthropologist, the fact remains that all his work engages the political relations of power and that he straddles the disciplines of Politics, Sociology, Anthropology and History’. In this interview, we talk about Michael’s corpus of research and in particular the issue of caste politics in Sri Lanka. We also speak of what he called the Ashokan Paradigm, and the politics of co-opting critical voices by the Rajapaksa regime. In…

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  • 20 Nov, 2010
  • 1 Comment
  • Arts and Theatre,
    Colombo,
    Features,
    Vavuniya

The Gaza Monologues: An interview with Ruhanie Perera and Jake Oorloff

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[Editors note: Also see A review of the Gaza Monologues for video footage from and a review of the production.] Ruhanie Perera and Jake Oorloff co-created Floating Space in 2007. Gaza Monologues was their latest production, running to packed houses and good reviews recently in Colombo. As noted on the  group’s blog, Floating Space a theatre company that is committed to experimentation, Floating Space is inspired by the unconventional and shared experiences in performance. Its focus is to create and produce performance, with the objective of exploring the possibilities of theatre in terms of form, style, space, approach and purpose. Groundviews interviewed Ruhanie and Jake to find out more about the production, their future and theatre in Sri Lanka. A review of the production will be posted on Groundviews soon. Stills from a video recording of the performance.

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A Just War or was it just war?

[Editors note: This short article responds to, in part, the submission made by someone called 'Maverick' on the Ada Derena website in response to a previous article by the author. Maverick's comment is well-written and thought-provoking, and reproduced in full at the end of this article. The Wikipedia entry on Just War can be found here.] How could the LTTE’s call to war be ‘just’ when the first criterion of a Just war according to the founding theologians is its declaration by ‘rightful authority’? A democratically elected government – this includes the federal secular democracy of India (which deployed the IPKF) – is surely far more of a rightful authority than a terrorist movement which furthermore never had the kind of internal political process that the ANC, PLO or Sinn Fein did? The Just War doctrine argues that for a war to be just there must be no alternative to it. As for Just cause, what just cause could there…

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LLRC: Interim report to Government

Though there have been a few reports anchored to this report, we do not know of any place it was published in full. Unsurprisingly, this document looks more at long-term systemic change and does not reference controversial testimony by survivors of the last leg of the war. For more coverage of the submissions given to the LLRC, including on two occasions corrections to mainstream media coverage of the submissions made to the Commission by leading civil society representatives, click here.

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LLRC submission: The Citizens’ Commission on the Expulsion of Muslims from the North by the LTTE in October 1990

[Editors' note: Submission to the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission, 4th of November, 2010.] Northern Muslims in Post Conflict Sri Lanka The entire Muslim community of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province – numbering approximately  75,000 persons, were expelled by the LTTE in a systematic and organized manner during a two week period in October 1990. Northern Muslims were 5% of the Population of the Province and hailed from the five districts  of  Jaffna Mannar Kilinochchi Mulaitiwu and Vavuniya Today, many of them remain displaced in dire conditions in areas outside the war zone.  A 2006 UNHCR survey claims that there are 63,145 individuals living in 141 separate settlements in Puttalam district alone. October this year marks twenty years since the expulsion.  And over one year since the war ended.  Today the Northern Muslims are anticipating return after twenty years in displacement and the time that has passed  since the expulsion has created conditions that are unique to the Northern Muslim experience. Given that…

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Parallel Governments: Living between terror and counter terror in northern Lanka (1982-2009)

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Authors note: Article derived from paper first presented at the conference, Globalizing Religions and Cultures in the Asia Pacific, University of Adelaide, 1–5 December 2008 and developed version published in Journal of Asian and African Studies. Download this paper as a PDF here. Introduction It was Thomas Hobbes (1651) who first pointed out that behind the veneer of states is the spectre of vio­lence and threat of terror that is used to control and rule the subject populations; for example, through the police or, increasingly in the modern ‘security states’, through intelligence agencies and other covert operations. When this control and rule is challenged, comes under question or is weakened, the covert violence becomes more overt, manifesting as techniques of terror. When the power to rule is contested by other parties, they may vie for control, loyalty and legitimacy through terror and counter terror tactics on the populace. The ongoing ethnic war in Lanka was a good example of the…

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  • 19 Oct, 2010
  • 42 Comments
  • Colombo,
    Peace and Conflict,
    Post-War,
    Reconciliation,
    Vavuniya

Reconciliation through ‘Rehabilitation’ & ‘Reintegration’ of Ex-LTTE members in Sri Lanka: Separating Fact from Fiction

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Photo courtesy Northern Provincial Council ‘They should learn that there is a better world beyond waging war’- Gotabaya Rajapakse[1] Once in a while you may have seen local media reports about persons referred to as former combatants or members of the LTTE. These reports were probably either based entirely on content sourced from a state official or written by apparatchiks. Or you might have read one of several interviews given by the Commissioner-General of Rehabilitation (CGR), the self-styled patriarch/paternal figure Brigadier Ranasinghe. If you are an ardent follower of the reports, musings and creative pieces on the Ministry of Defence (MOD) website, you might have noted regular updates on the progress of the rehabilitation programme of supposed ex-combatants along with colourful descriptions of the ways in which the programme is laying the foundation for reconciliation and a united (and of course unitary) Sri Lanka. On the other hand, international human rights organisations such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the…

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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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