USJP Students’ Union: Harassment and Gender Discrimination over clothing
Many believe that women in Sri Lanka are in a better place compared to its counterparts in South Asia. This is true up to a certain extent where women enjoy a high…
Human Rights
A homophobic Editorial: Professional negligence or genuine belief?
Photo courtesy the Daily Mirror’s febrile imagination On the 29th of July 2010 I read a strange and badly written editorial that appeared in the Daily Mirror newspaper. To put it mildly,…
CELEBRATING PRIDE IN SRI LANKA
11th June 2010 – 11th July 2010 marks PRIDE month in Sri Lanka. Historically stemming from the watershed Stonewall riots in 1969, which broke out when police raided a gay bar in…
Compilation of special edition on the end of war in Sri Lanka
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…
Human rights: Hackneyed or heightened in post-war Sri Lanka?
My conversation with Lakshan Dias, Programme Manager, Centre for Human Rights and Development, was pegged to the issue of human rights in post-war Sri Lanka. Lakshan was in the news recently when…
Should we prosecute crimes against humanity?
It must be acknowledged that international law, both customary and humanitarian, is undergoing significant changes with regard to crimes committed during armed conflicts. Thus it is difficult to assert that international legal…
Ground realities in Jaffna and its environs: Two key perspectives
From the psycho-social trauma and destruction of the social fabric in Jaffna after close upon three decades of brutal war to the challenges of post-war development, entrepreneurship and economic revival, these two…
People in glass houses…
“Where you from” asked the precocious teenager from Jane, a World Bank official I was escorting to a remote hillside community in the middle of Sri Lanka to show a community based…
Mass Graves: Nothing new to Sri Lanka
The recent discovery of mass graves at Ganeshapuram in Kilinochchi and at Nachchikuda in the Mannar Districts has been very much in the news during the past weeks. Such finds need not …
Learning Old Lessons from a New ‘Lessons Learnt’ Commission: the ‘Home-Grown’ Way?
One year after the war, President Mahinda Rajapaksa has established another commission; known as the ‘Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission’. Eight eminent members have been appointed. The Commission is chaired by a…
SRI LANKA’S POST-WAR FUTURE: A RADICAL PLURALIST RESPONSE TO THE ETHICAL REALIST VIEW
I had not intended contributing to Groundviews’s commemoration of the first anniversary of the end of the war, for the simple reason that there having been no movement whatsoever on post-war constitutional…
The latest Commission of Inquiry in Sri Lanka: Another Exercise in Deception
Louise Arbour of the International Crisis Group is reported to have said during an interview in the BBC that the government violated the laws of war by blurring the line between combatants…
Vanni in the year after war: Tears of despair and fear
About six months after the end of the war, in November 2009, the government of Sri Lanka relaxed restrictions on travel to the Vanni[1] and started to allow some of the displaced…
Post-war Sri Lanka: Challenges and opportunities
This Government, as it commences to address the many challenges facing post – war Sri Lanka, stands today at a watershed of major, unprecedented and possibly never to be replicated, opportunity. Wherever…
Will ‘Peace’ Arrive Before Death?
It was, unfortunately, a necessary war, for terrorism had to be defeated, eliminated. After some thirty long years, on or around the 19th of May 2009, Sri Lanka gained liberation; liberation from…