Archive for the ‘Foreign Relations’

The Lethal, the Legal, the Legitimate: Frames of our future?

An IANS report from Puducherry, March 25 read as follows: ‘Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi Wednesday said he was not ‘particularly fond’ of Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers because they killed his father Rajiv Gandhi. He told a press conference here: “The LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) is a terrorist group. I am not particularly fond of the LTTE myself. It killed my father.”…Gandhi, however, said that India was doing its best to protect Tamil civilians caught in the conflict between the LTTE and the military in Sri Lanka’s north. “We are trying to help the situation there”, he said.’ If only the offspring of the Sri Lankan political leaders and prominent personalities, Sinhala and Tamil, who were assassinated or targeted (and wounded) by the LTTE, had the integrity and guts of Rahul Gandhi and denounced the Tigers, either on one platform, or two (Sinhala/Tamil), or even singly, the endgame of the Sri Lankan armed conflict would not loom so…

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THE TIGERS’ TICKING TIME BOMB

Velupillai Prabhakaran is about to be defeated but he has left a time bomb hidden in plain sight which must be defused if he is not to wreak a posthumous revenge. This is the time bomb placed under a strategic four lane intersection, that between the Sinhalese and the Tamils and Sri Lanka and the world.  The time bomb can be seen in the epidemic of demonstrations by the Tamil Diaspora and the statements critical of Sri Lanka that flood the international media. Prabhakaran is hoping that the time bomb will go off in time to save him, his army and his project. It is unlikely to do so, though we must not take that for granted and must crush the LTTE before external political trends especially those in the neighborhood, turn hostile. However, even if we defeat the LTTE militarily before the external turns unpropitious, we still have to defuse the time bomb. Things become clearer when we think…

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THE INDIAN REALITY IN SRI LANKA’S EXISTENCE

How do we describe our country, Sri Lanka, and how is our country described by others? As an island in the Indian Ocean, just south of or off the Southern shores of India. All descriptions of Sri Lanka are a variant of this because no other is possible. We are defined by our placing, and that placing is in relation to and proximate to India. The unique importance of the Indian factor in Sri Lanka’s external relations is best evidenced in the fact that Sri Lanka is simply indescribable without reference to India. The inevitable asymmetry inherent in the Indo-Lanka equation is similarly evidenced in the fact that India is easily describable without reference to Sri Lanka. Our relation to India is almost unique. This is most easily understood with reference to another tropical island proximate to another big power: I refer to Cuba, ninety miles from the world’s greatest power, the superpower power or hyper-power as Fidel Castro puts…

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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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