Archive for the ‘Diplomacy’

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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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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Compilation of special edition on the end of war in Sri Lanka

Special Edition Logo

Download the 162 page compilation of content as a PDF in high quality (25.4Mb), or low quality (3.7Mb). The low quality version is good enough to read, but the photos will look and print much better in the high quality version. From 19 – 27 May 2010, Groundviews ran a special edition on the end of war in Sri Lanka. Over this week alone, the site received over forty thousand readers and exclusively featured over eighty thousand words of original content, one video premiere, over a dozen photos, generating over one hundred and fifty thousand words of commentary. Tens of thousands more have read and commented on this content since, making the special edition a sui generis archive of intelligent debate, incisive critique and vital perspectives that mainstream media in Sri Lanka, even post-war, is too fearful to feature. For example, one memorable and particularly hard-hitting comment inspired by the content in this special edition came from Tathagata Bose, an Indian…

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In conversation with Dr. Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu

Dr. Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu is the Executive Director of the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I begin this interview with a pointed question, asking Dr. Saravanamuttu to flag anything the government has done well since it assumed power in 2005, in the domains of governance and human rights. I go on to ask Dr. Saravanamuttu why it is that what he sees as enduring challenges to human rights, peace, development and governance are not issues the majority of voters agree with, or are able to discern. We also talked about the nature of economic activity and development in the North and the East, where Dr. Saravanamuttu noted that “economic development by itself cannot be the sole instrument of national unit, reconciliation, integration”. Sri Lanka’s political culture and the growing intra-party violence within the UPFA, the future of Tamil politics, reconciliation, the role of the international community, prospects for dissent and democratic debate post-war and modes of progressive engagement between the Tamil diaspora…

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  • 22 Jan, 2010
  • 8 Comments
  • Colombo,
    Diplomacy,
    War Crimes

Is Sri Lanka in danger of being held accountable by the International Criminal Court?

There has been much debate about the issue of war crimes in Sri Lanka.  Both major political parties contesting the elections have used the issue for political leverage, each accusing for the other of betraying the country and the armed forces to the international community. (I will not speculate on what may or may not have happened during the last stages of the war.) There has also been much debate about the authenticity of Channel 4 video footage. There have been many versions of what transpired during these last few weeks–some have been favorable to the armed forces and some have not. This article will attempt to assess whether Sri Lanka is in fact in danger of being held accountable by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for its conduct during the last stages of the war. Members of the Sri Lankan military who were engaged in the war against the LTTE, members of the Ministry of Defense, and the Sri…

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Standing the world on its head!

I can’t understand this, so will someone explain it –please. It is being reported in the local press and local electronic media that the Rajapakses have gained popularity among Sinhala voters in recent days because the UN Special Reporter Philip Alston, the UN Secretary General, and the Western press, have reinforced their accusations of human rights violations and war crimes against the Rajapakse regime. UN and other agencies and officials, and the press, in many countries, now say that the Channel-4 execution video is authentic, and that it conforms to a larger pattern of violations. The accusers are not LTTE extremists and only the mentally retarded will suggest that these parties and persons are in the pay of the LTTE, or that they are motivated and impelled by the Tamil diaspora. I just don’t get it! The world seems to be standing on its head! How do you become more popular when criminal accusations against you are reinforced? Shouldn’t it…

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A brief response to a charge of mercenary intellectualism

[Editors note: This is a response by Dayan Jayatilleke to a recently published article by Prof. Peter Schalk of Uppsala University, Sweden, who identified four western educated individuals hired by the Government of Sri Lanka to defend Colombo's decisions and criticisms from the West, labelling them "mercenary intellectuals". In the spirit of engagement, Groundviews invited two of the four mentioned in the article, no strangers to regular readers of this site, to respond. One politely declined. Prof.  Schalk's article on Tamilnet is here. If you are in Sri Lanka, where Tamilnet continues to be blocked by all ISPs, click on the proxy here to read the article.] Prof Schalk should spend his time analysing how the armed movement and the leadership he thought were militarily so superlative as to be undefeatable by the Sri Lankan state’s armed forces, were decimated earlier this year. When we last met at breakfast at the faculty club of Georgetown University in late 2005 I had just told…

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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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