Archive for the ‘Diplomacy’

Once more into the breach

PR1

“The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.” Milan Kundera[1] “…. Some [intellectuals] served as spokesmen for power or for a constituency, trimming their beliefs and pronouncements to circumstances and interest: what Edward Said once called “the fawning elasticity with regard to one’s own side’ has indeed “disfigured the history of intellectuals.” Tony Judt.[2] His Excellency Dr Dayan Jayatilleka has been good enough to respond to my critique of his position with regard to the merits of the current government of Sri Lanka.[3] Let me first deal with his view of my original comments on his intellectual and political practices; then I will go to the heart of his response.[4] Readers of Groundviews know, better than most, Dr Jayatilleka’s…

Continue reading »

THE NORWEGIAN STUDY: A CRITIQUE

Screen Shot 2011-11-17 at 7.35.07 AM

The Norwegian (NORAD) commissioned study ‘Pawns of Peace: Evaluation of Norwegian peace efforts in Sri Lanka, 1997-2009’, is useful and good, but analytically flawed at its very core. It is useful because it shows us how the ‘liberal peace’ discourse goes and how that constituency views the conflict in retrospect. This does not mean that this perspective has it all wrong. Indeed the study has quite a few things right. In any case it is crucial that the Sri Lankan readership sees how our contemporary history is perceived and reconstructed. It is useful to look into a mirror, while being conscious as to whether it is a slightly or greatly distorting one. Taken as a whole, the Norwegian study is a valuable and welcome addition to the growing literature on the war and our times—with the strongest part being the analysis of the International Dimension in Chapter 7. In the interest of transparency I should add that I am one…

Continue reading »

Authoritative Ethical Realist Reads Rajapaksa’s Role

news_06082009_94049

The Pope with Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith Though my political approval of and personal liking for Mahinda Rajapaksa, (certainly in relation to his competitors and immediate predecessors) are shared by nine out of ten Sri Lankan citizens (according to the Gallup poll), it is not comfortable to be alone in one’s analysis and evaluation, among one’s own social stratum, the intelligentsia, especially the English-speaking and writing urban intelligentsia. It is therefore a good feeling when you discover that your views coincide with someone who stands above the fray, and cannot but evoke respect from all rational people. Nicest of all, is when the public personage with whose views your own coincide, has achieved a status and recognition that is truly global. My perspectives on Mahinda Rajapaksa, his administration, Sri Lankan politics and the issue of accountability and international pressure have been denounced by political partisans of almost all sides. The Tamil Diaspora accuses me of Sinhala chauvinism or neo-nationalism (as Taraki put…

Continue reading »

A Kunanayakam by any other name?

Tamara Kunanayakam Right_CI

Mercenaries with misplaced consciences appear to be leading Sri Lanka’s latest band of apologists. Seldom does a hired hand leave such a damning trail as does Tamara Kunanayakam, Ambassador/Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the United Nations Office at Geneva and other International Organizations in Switzerland. During the General Debate under Item 2 at the 18th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council on 12 September 2011, H.E. Kunanayakam criticized the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay for her apparent ‘partiality’.[1] One is at a loss to comprehend what ‘partiality’ the Ambassador alludes to, except perhaps the fervency in which the High Commissioner has thus far discharged her mandate. In any event, there is no doubt that the High Commissioner will wear this curious brand like a badge of honour. The Ambassador goes on to state: I must also observe that it appears that the High Commissioner does not have the will to even acknowledge a…

Continue reading »

India “Punishing Sri Lanka”: Myth or Reality?

7029_NpAdvHover

Prof. Rohan Gunaratne- international terrorism expert- addressing the business community last week convincingly and openly cautioned that “India might ‘punish’ Sri Lanka”, if Sri Lanka leans elsewhere to India’s detriment. This is a very serious statement, especially if Indians do not intend doing so. To prove his point, he quoted a meeting with the first Research and Analysis Wing Chief who had told Gunaratne their concerns over President JR Jayewardene stepping away from the Non Alignment Movement, Jayewardene’s intentions to economically favor the USA by opening the Trincomalee Port and the intention to handover China Bay oil tanks to the USA, Voice of America eavesdropping on India etc. Gunaratne would not have had any personal antipathy or bias towards India when he emphatically quoted the past to predict future. Indo- Lanka Joint Statement (JS) The attempt here is to observe whether such punishment could be inferred from the latest hinting basing Indian approaches stated in the JS between India and…

Continue reading »

How will Delhi listen to Jayalalithaa calling Rajapaksa a ‘war criminal’?

14VBG_JAYA__269092f

“Declare Rajapakse a war criminal: Jayalalithaa tells Centre” was a banner headline on 13 Friday in the “Indian Express”, following AIADMK leader Jayalalithaa’s march to victory, at the Tamil Nadu assembly elections concluded last week. No analyst expected the DMK-Congress alliance in TN to be so unmercifully smothered, at this elections. Never has the DMK fallen to third place in assembly elections ever before. Not even after MGR created the AIADMK in 1972 and turned himself into a political demigod in Tamil Nadu politics. Jayalalithaa and LTTE MGR’s brightest co-star for long with a continuing run of box office hits and a popular playback singer too, Jayalalithaa Jayaram though qualified herself to lead the AIADMK, over riding MGR’s wife Janaki, after MGR’s demise in 1987 December, wasn’t beyond MGR in popularity. Yes, she took total control of the party as its revolutionary “Thalaivi”, but was never expected to drub “Kalaignar” Muthuvel Karunanidhi, the veteran and maestro in political manipulation, the…

Continue reading »

War Crimes Accountability In Sri Lanka: Is There A Liberal Democratic Alternative To International Action?

90393-lanka

Sri Lanka’s President pictured here with the Governor of the Central Bank Ajith Nivard Cabraal (L) and his brother Basil Rajapaksa, the Economic Development Minister (R) has repeatedly called the war a “humanitarian rescue operation with a zero civilian casualty policy”. Photo credit: REUTERS/Dinuka Liyanawatte The report of the three-member panel of independent experts, appointed by the UN Secretary General to advise him on the issues of legal accountability arising out of the brutal final stages of Sri Lanka’s war, has finally been published. The panel has found ‘credible’ a large number of allegations of violations of international humanitarian and human rights law committed by the military protagonists in the conflict, the Sri Lankan security forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), some of which could amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. It has also concluded that a political and legal environment conducive to the transparent investigation and prosecution of these violations does not exist in…

Continue reading »

An elephantine gestation: UN Panel’s report on accountability in Sri Lanka released

UN_panel_on_sri-lanka11-11111

Leaked versions of the UN Panel’s report found their way into The Island newspaper, where over the past week, Groundviews has contextualised the content that was published in print. Today, the Hindustan Times published an article based on the full version of the report, based on a leaked version of the full report the paper had acquired. Interestingly, the unimaginable horror highlighted in the HT’s report (body parts of babies on tree tops after shelling by the Army) is not content that was published in The Island. The UN had earlier expressed its deep regret over the leak to mainstream print media in Sri Lanka. Accusations between Palitha Kohona, Sri Lanka’s envoy to the UN in New York and UN deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq over who is responsible for the leak have been traded. The constitution of the Secretary General’s panel and its mandate was announced in June 2010. As noted on the UN website, “The Secretary-General has appointed a Panel of…

Continue reading »

The Darusman Report: Reflections on the real challenges ahead for Sri Lanka

r-SRI-LANKA-WAR-CRIMES-large570

In less than two weeks since the Darusman Report (hereinafter referred to as the Report) was handed over to the United Nations Secretary General (hereinafter referred to as UNSG), a large number of articles have been written about the report, its motivations and on its impact on Sri Lanka. Except in several exceptions, the majority of these renderings seem to have lost the plot, in their failure to provide adequate attention to several key issues surrounding the report, or the ‘leaked’ version of it published in the Sri Lankan newspaper The Island. Public reactions to the leaked sections of the Report are best glimpsed from Groundviews, where comments made by readers include rather heated debates on issues such as the number of Eelam War IV casualties raised in the Report. One such key factor is that the Report is critical of both adversaries of Eelam War IV, the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam…

Continue reading »

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…

Continue reading »

Small Country Diplomacy

Colonel-Gaddafi

Bosom buddies, Libya’s Qadaffi and Sri Lanka’s President, courtesy Sunday Times Of late there have been several critical comments levied against the manner in which Sri Lanka has conducted her diplomatic relations.  Traditional alliances with the Western world have become somewhat stilted, new alliances have been forged, while fortunately the tempo of our relations with the SAARC countries, our regional neighbours, have remained stable.  The shifts in the balance of power relations have created a certain amount of suspicion and hostility among the Western Powers.  The entry of China, the bête noir of India, has also introduced heightened alertness, but not disharmony into the Indo- Lanka relations.  Sri Lanka needs to fine tune her diplomatic skills as we are dependent on the West for much of our trade, financial aid and investments as much as we are on India, especially with the need to keep the regional balance. Some of the charged atmosphere in Sri Lanka’s international relations, have not…

Continue reading »

Speaking lies to power: Sri Lanka’s PM and the LTTE in India

25.02.11. Divaina (P9) - Small

India’s mistake was to take our Prime Minister seriously. Ours is to allow him to continue in office. Few in Sri Lanka care to know what is said in Parliament, and it is only when India vehemently denied the Prime Minister’s claim that there were LTTE training camps operating in India that most realised he had actually said it. The first media reports of the PM’s statement in Parliament noted that he had expressly said ” the LTTE has three training centers in Tamil Nadu and one is where the Tigers are being trained to assassinate VIPs” and that “intelligence information regarding this has been confirmed and warned that the Tigers may attempt to carry out small scale attacks in Sri Lanka as well.” Emphasis ours. The UNP questioned this assertion, noting that “this information regarding the LTTE being trained in Tamil Nadu seems to have been shared with the PM by the Defence Ministry in Colombo” and that “it…

Continue reading »

The ‘Godayata magic’ of Oxford

Occidentalism: in the thrall of the “West“ The “Godayata magic“ of Oxford There is a storm engulfing this country “ not the incessant rains and consequent floods that have brought much suffering especially to the rural poor and urban slum dwellers. Rather, it is a storm over the failure of our Head of State (somehow “President“ seems inadequate to describe Our Great Leader) to gain access to the podium of a student debating society in a distant foreign land “ a debating society that does not even speak our languages at that! This comment focuses on the cultural contradiction we are seeing being acted out in this reversal of Orientalism: the plague of Occidentalism. All the hue and cry and Parliamentary fisticuffs currently on-going seems to be about expressing outrage at this humiliating exclusion, condoling the Great Leader for his great loss, probing the causes of this huge debacle, identifying the operational lapses that led to it, and finding and…

Continue reading »

Getting lost in The Hague: UN, Sri Lanka and an ICJ-Advisory Opinion

Dr. Lakshman Marasinghe (Emeritus Professor of Law, University of Windsor) in an article titled ‘Some Random Thoughts on the UN International Advisory Panel’ (Daily Mirror, 14 July, 2010), makes a serious suggestion to the Government; i.e. to obtain an Advisory Opinion (AO) from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague, to determine “whether it was within the power of the Secretary-General to appoint an Advisory Panel mandated as he has when appointing it.” He admits that he is “unable to suggest a political solution” to what he considers to be a matter which raises an “interesting point of international law.” Dr. Marasinghe’s suggestion, in turn, raises greater problems, and is a risk that Sri Lanka cannot afford to take at this stage. The unresolved ‘problem within a problem’ An AO from the ICJ, even if it is to be ‘favourable’ to Sri Lanka, would not be one which addresses the root of the problem; the problem of accountability…

Continue reading »

Eelam War and the Long Arm of the Indian Rearguard Across the Palk Straits

Indo- Sri Lanka relations made a dramatic and unprecedented change with the beginning of the Eelam war. This change   contributed to bringing about   far reaching military and political consequences within Sri Lanka and its two destructive wars. The JVP led anti-devolutionary Sinhalese rebellion had been the direct result of the changed Indian policy. The most destructive Eelam war was the other. These developments have fundamentally shaped the future course of Sri Lankan politics. Since 1983 India had begun supporting the Tamil militant groups to train and arm its cadres for military confrontations with the Sri Lankan state. Their bases in Tamil Nadu provided a rearguard and they could retreat safely to these bases after mounting deadly attacks to the Sri Lankan security forces. The current Indian policy has changed positively as India has become pragmatic but Sri Lanka needs political investment in the form of political devolution and inclusiveness of ethnic minorities in order to effectively de-activate the rearguard in…

Continue reading »
Page 1 of 212

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!"

cezarneaga.eu