Archive for the ‘End of war special edition’

The end of war: Framed reflections by Deshan Tennekoon

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[Editors note: Deshan Tennekoon is one of Sri Lanka's best, young photographers. We are ardent fans, and requested Deshan to send photos that amongst the hundreds taken by him, resonated most with the end of war and the enduring challenges for peace in Sri Lanka.] December 01, 2006. A response to the failed attempt by the LTTE to assassinate Defense Secretary Gotabaya Rajapakse. The Ministry of Defence commissioned Triad Advertising to create the graffiti. It was removed in early January 2007 once the owners of the house repaired their wall. Feb 21, 2009. Tracers over Colombo. Two LTTE Air Tiger planes were shot down over Colombo and Katunayake. One plane crashed into the IRS building and the other crashed in a field near Katunayake Air Base. Below are some photos from a documentation of Swiss/Austrian Red Cross post-tsunami housing projects over 2006 and 2007. I coordinated the work of a writer and a photographer who were gathering data for a book,…

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I REMEMBER: 19 May 2010

As we come together to commemorate the anniversary of the end of Sri Lanka’s long and bloody civil war, these are some of the things I remember: I remember hearing reports in late January 2009 of UN workers and their families being shelled by government forces in the Vanni while hiding in bunkers and under UN trucks. I remember not quite believing these stories. I remember the hospitals and medical centres shelled, and the patients and medical staff killed and wounded in what the Sri Lankan government was calling no fire zones”.  I remember later on meeting some of those who survived and hearing their terrifying stories. I remember the extraordinary bravery and generosity of all the doctors, medical workers, and staff members of the International Committee of the Red Cross who served under terrifying conditions. I remember that some of them gave their lives saving others. I remember seeing Gotabaya Rajapaksa on TV in February 2009 telling an interviewer…

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Film premiere: The Truth That Wasn’t There

I am always wary of write-ups by filmmakers of their films. Labours of love often elicit painful diatribes. The messy, malleable margins of Sri Lanka has long been an issue that many would-be filmmakers have wrestled with yet fail to come to grips. Any attempt to filter its society and polity into a coherent hour and a half is destined to polarise and ultimately filmmakers find themselves lost within the country’s many contradictions, either seduced and tamed by its gorgeous mystery or reticent to its brutality. Films on Sri Lanka tend to be as taxing as its subject matter. This film was not a labour of love. This film was hard. Damn hard, to put together and to persevere with. The reasons why it has come this far has a great deal to do with the burden placed upon us by what we did, where we went and what we captured. Many of the people we met along the way…

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19th may, 2010

Killinochci-Sumathy

killinochchi town getting ready… may 2010 19th may. you have nothing to say? i can only falteringly mouth, nothing of …. nothing begets nothing, a king says, and launches a war against garrulous daughters and sulking ones; and i think of an other daughter, too too loud or too soft, of other wars and other deaths, slipped between a pillow and its case, a letter, a bomb, a whisper, slipped between the familiar and the family, the nation and its engender. on 19th may, 1991, sivaramani, took her own positive life, her cry strangled with that strenuous cord, blazing a trail of blood of the nation and its many stories; 300, 000 slipped between a miserable soul-dead wretch, who would not take his life and the dark of a storm shelling sky, a black and blue sea, dotted with doom, a king without daughters striking those ‘[trojans =delete] crushed between sea and sky’, a tale slipped between waiting and waking,…

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One Year On After the Guns Fell Silent at Vellamullivaikkal: Is There Foresight to Settle the Political Score?

In advising political leaders the Italian historian and political advisor Machiavelli (1469-1527) offered the   following words which have a relevance to the current predicament of the Sinhala political leadership after the war victory. “But  when states are acquired  in a province differing in language, in customs, and in institutions, then difficulties  arise; and to hold them one must be very fortunate and very assiduous…He should also take precautions to check an invasion of the province by  a foreigner  as powerful as himself. Invariably, the invader will be brought in by those who are disaffected because of excessive ambition or because of fear” [1] The North and East could be said to broadly resemble the province that Machiavelli refers to here. When regions are dissimilar in language, customs and institutions any politically astute ruler needs to understand that unless these rights to differing language, customs and institutions are recognized and respected, the political price for the state will be huge. Machiavelli…

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THE WAR AND MY TIMES

Fidel quotes a Cuban saying that a man is marked more by his times than his family. My times were shaped by armed conflict: wars, insurrections and counter-insurgency; successive wars in the North and East of the island, two insurrections in the South, against a backdrop of Vietnam, the Middle East, Angola, and Central America. History was driven by the dialectic of states vs. armed movements.  To simplify, my times were dominated by the long hot war in Sri Lanka and the long Cold war in the world; their endings and aftermaths. Too many friends, comrades and acquaintances died to bear enumeration. Life was dominated, distorted and to some extent determined by the conflicts and their cumulative gravitational pull. The greater the number of deaths of those one felt something for, the more difficult to walk away from it all. One then applies what one has to bring it to an end: the analytical intellect to discern, the power of…

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Editorial: One year after the end of war

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One year after the war ended, when Groundviews invited contributors to contest and complement our understanding that peace is not just the absence of war, or the defeat of the LTTE, we did not expect the response we received. Over the next week, we will publish close to 80,000 words and content from over forty different authors, in prose, verse, photography and video. A leitmotif through all contributions is that a government supremely adept at winning a war is outrageously inept at winning peace. The authors, including former senior diplomats and civil servants, internationally renown, award-winning poets, gifted photographers, academics, economists, bloggers, novelists, human rights activists, diasporic commentators and others celebrate war’s decisive end, but flag much that risks a hard won victory, including the continued alienation of Tamil aspirations, the predominance of dynastic rule over democratic governance and the lack of progress in addressing underlying grievances that gave life and succour to the idea of Eelam and the physical…

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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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