Mr. Minister, my name is Sunanda Deshapriya. I am not a terrorist.

Photo courtesy JDS An Open Letter to Minister Keheliya Rambukwella Mr. Minister, I don’t know whether you have seen the film called ‘my name is Khan. In it, the main character played by popular actor Shah Rukh Khan Repeats the lines ‘My name is Khan. I am not a terrorist’ at different points in the film, in order to affirm his innocence. I too am about to tell you a similar story.  ‘My name is Sunanda Deshapriya. I am not a terrorist’.  This is my theme. The story of ‘My name is Khan’ centres around the harassment a Muslim man with the name of Khan has to endure following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, USA.  These attacks on the Twin Towers generated both fear and anger in the minds of the American people. Some extremist groups tried to unleash the feelings of anger against ordinary Muslim people living in the US.  The film’s narrative…

In conversation with Shashi Tharoor at Galle Literary Festival

As part of the Galle Literary Festival, I had the opportunity to speak with Shashi Tharoor, whose writing I’ve immensely enjoyed read since my University days in India. As the festival’s website notes, Shashi Tharoor is the prize-winning author of twelve books, both fiction and non-fiction, including the classic The Great Indian Novel (1989), India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997), Nehru: The Invention of India (2003) and The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone: Reflections on India in the 21st Century (2007). He is an elected member of the Indian parliament, former Minister of State for External Affairs and former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations. Our hour-long conversation at the Festival was anchored to The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone: Reflections on India in the 21st Century, a collection of essays on India which I noted flows naturally from his earlier collection Bookless in Baghdad. We begin our conversation with an exploration of relative truths, and whether under…

Sri Lanka’s democratic institutions have metastasized into something dangerous

Bell Pottinger and Sri Lanka: A trail of spin doctoring and whitewashing

Aside from articles appearing last Sunday in the Sunday Times and the Sunday Leader, mainstream media in Sri Lanka has been curiously silent over recent revelations in the British media on the government’s connections with the infamous British PR firm Bell Pottinger. On 6th December, The Independent ran a story on how Bell Pottinger had written the President’s speech to the UN after the end of the war in 2009. The article noted, “Senior executives at Bell Pottinger told undercover reporters that they were so influential that they had written a key speech given by the Sri Lankan President to the United Nations. During the address by President Mahinda Rajapaksa last year, which the company said was used in preference to one prepared by the Sri Lankan foreign ministry, the President suggested rules governing the humanitarian conduct of war should be re-examined. He also described his troops’ action against Tamil Tiger separatists as humanitarian. President Rajapaksa also claimed in the…

Women Left Behind: Truth Commissioning in Sri Lanka

A mother displaying the photographs of his sons which are missing during the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) session in Trincomalee, December, 3-5, 2010. Photo courtesy Centre for Human Rights The power and promise of national exercises like the LLRC lie in the way that they can access the voices of those who have not traditionally been heard, and use them to build a more representative and inclusive collective memory. Yet for Sri Lanka’s Tamil women, the LLRC simply reaffirms bad old habits, writes Jo Baker [i] In the lead up to the release of the report by Sri Lanka’s Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), strong concerns have been publicly raised about the value of a process that aims to build a clear picture of the conflict, without fully including or representing those who were most directly affected. This has led to important questions regarding who has been heard, how their concerns have been addressed, and whether they will…

Prescient

When Lasantha wrote the editorial that predicted his imminent assassination he suggested the civil war would turn steadily uglier, then move inwards, as a lizard searching for its tail, insidious in the way each institution begins to lose its independence, the machinery of the ruling family greasing every Tom, Dick and Banda—forgive my allusion to white rulers of a more genteel if not innocent nursery school— this forsaken Ceylonese child has turned monstrous now in the eyes of Whitehall and Ottawa’s Parliament Hill, betters going wild about pressures in Canberra to present a bold brief on behalf of human rights and investigation of war crimes as Commonwealth heads prepare to meet, while on the island rival thugs, from within the all-powerful ruling group, battle over drug routes and a parliamentary seat.

Titus Thotawatte: The Final Cut

Titus Thotawatte, 1929 – 2011 Emmanuel Titus de Silva, better known as Titus Thotawatte, was the finest editor in the six decades long history of the Lankan cinema. He was also a great assimilator and remixer – a veritable ‘builder of bridges’ across cultures, media genres and generations. Titus straddled the distinctive spheres of cinema and television with a technical dexterity and creativity rarely seen in either one. Both spheres involve playing with sound and pictures, but at different levels of scale, texture and ambition. Having excelled in the craft of making movies in the 1960s and 1970s, Titus successfully switched to television in the 1980s and 1990s. There, he again blazed his own trail in Sri Lanka’s nascent television industry. As a result, my generation remembers him for his television legacy whereas my patents’ generation recall more of his cinematic accomplishments. Titus left an indelible mark in the history of moving images. The unifying thread that continued from 16mm…

Forbidden Fruits: Niromi de Soyza’s “Tamil Tigress”, Noumi Kouri and Helen Demidenko?

The literary world is now poised on the brink wondering if the Tamil Tigress (Allen & Unwin, 2011) is going to join Forbidden Love (Random House, 2003) and The Hand that signed the Paper (Allen and Unwin, 2000) in the house of literary infamy. Has the Tamil lady who uses the nom de plume Niromi de Soyza[i] woven an autobiographical tale of lies that match those coined by Norma Toliopoulos and Helen Darville who wrote their memoirs as Norma Kouri and Helen Demidenko? When Kouri’s book was challenged by the Jordanian National Commission for Women on the ground that it contained 70 exaggerations and errors, Random House Australia indicated that “they were satisfied with the veracity of the story, [though] names and places had been changed to protect the identities of those involved.”[ii] Their defense did not hold up for long as Malcolm Knox spearheaded the media questioning in Australia. Random House pulled the book from the shelf [iii] –…

Women and Media Collective Press Conference on Violence Against Women

The Women and Media Collective held a press conference last week to address the incidence of violence against women with regard to the ‘grease devil’ phenomenon. The Collective also stressed that it wanted a ‘clear dialogue’ on the matter in order to militate against sensational reportage as well as further trivialisation of the issue. The main points expressed by the Collective were the following: – The State has an obligation to ensure the protection of women, to set about establishing impartial investigations and strengthen law enforcement, particularly with respect to the ability of the police to maintain law and order. – “If women are insecure, it is also an indictment on the community and our society at large. We want law enforcement to work closely with communities and strengthen mechanisms that would ensure safety of communities”. – It is necessary to avoid the “policing of women in the guise of dealing with this issue”, particularly to prevent restriction or confinement….

“I want to continue to highlight the activities against the humanity” | Gnanasundaram Kuganathan

“It’s a miracle that I survived. I was beaten almost to death. Many attempts have been made to kill me, so that my writing will come to an end!. I did not think that, I will survive. The God has saved me to serve the people through journalism. I am slowly recovering. Today, I am blessed to be alive. I have highlighted many issues in my writing. I want to continue to highlight the activities against the humanity, but I am not sure whether I will be able to hold the pen again, because my right hand fingers are frozen” emotionally shares Gnanasundaram Kuganathan (59) while tears filled his eyes. The News Editor of Uthayan ~  Tamil language daily newspaper Gnanasundaram Kuganathan (59) was brutally assaulted by unknown men on 29th of July 2011 at night at 7.30pm on Kasthuriyaar road in Jaffna, as he was walking back home for dinner from work. I met him in Jaffna recently, as…

Abuse, violence and bullying: Post-war Sri Lanka is indeed a peaceful place

Photo courtesy JDS The idea of writing this note came to mind after watching the recent interview between an Indian media personality and Sri Lanka’s Secretary to the Ministry of Defence, Public Security, Law and Order. A lot has been said about the information exchanged during this relatively short interview. A surface look at comments made by readers on articles on this interview, especially in places like Transcurrents, amply demonstrate what members of the Tamil community (especially the Tamil diaspora) think about the content of the interview and the interviewee. The present article does not intend to focus on the interviewee or the content proper of the interview as such. Instead, this writer views it essential to look at the bigger picture surrounding some facts exchanged, facts that could be deemed controversial or questionable in many a quarter. This writer distinguishes three main points over which the interviewee was apt at commenting: Firstly, Sri Lanka’s national sovereignty as a non-negotiable…

The Role of Writers and Artists during Turbulent Political Times

I was requested to speak about the important role writers and artists play in the struggle against oppression and in the protection of democratic and human rights of the oppressed. We all know that writers and artists hold strong views on political matters, though they may not be vocal at times. Some of them are fighters. They are not afraid to make choices and decisions if they are popular or not. In Sri Lanka, some have had to sacrifice their lives and some had to go into exile, because of their dedication to certain causes, with which we may or may not agree. We had lived long enough to have experienced periods of the total abuse of democracy. In these periods we have witnessed writers, artists and intellectuals who try to push the envelope and make the world a better place. They are usually branded as troublemakers. Let us consider a recent example in the post-apartheid South Africa. Lebogang Mashile,…

In conversation with Chandana Sirimalwatte

Chandana Sirimalwatte is the Editor of the Lanka newspaper, and recipient of this year’s Sepala Gunasena Award for Defending Press Freedom in Sri Lanka, awarded by the Editors Guild. The interview was conducted a day before Gnanasundaram Kuhanathan, News Editor of Tamil Daily Uthayan was attacked with iron rods in Jaffna. Chandana’s been arrested, interrogated by the CID and has had his press sealed. In October 2009, he was arrested for ‘arousing the general public against the Government’. A day after the Presidential election in January 2010, he was again arrested because he and his newspaper backed Gen. Sarath Fonseka during the campaign. This was the basis for a question asked, whether media should be so overtly partisan. We talk about the freedom of expression, how Chandana started in journalism, what keeps him going and despite serious threats, in Sri Lanka, what he sees as the future of journalism including the publication of critical material online and how what role…

Resource book for historians, researchers and media: A year of tweeting from Groundviews

Visualisation of our Twitter followers. See larger version here. We used the web service Tweet Book to capture all our tweets over the past year in a single PDF. We’ve tweeted thousands of times over the past twelve months and have covered, The media fallout of the farcical fast of senior government Minister Wimal Weerawansa in front of the UN HQ in Colombo. Praise for our model of journalism on C-SPAN video in the US, captured from an event at the United States Institute of Peace. Key statements by world leaders like Desmond Tutu on post-war reconciliation and accountability for war crimes Bell Pottinger’s sickening relationship with the incumbent government, largely hidden from public scrutiny Key reports on Sri Lanka from, inter alia, HRW, AI, ICG and the US State Department, including responses from senior Ministers and the Foreign Ministry Foreign relations and the tussle in Sri Lanka between India and China The court proceedings on Sarath Fonseka The UNP’s perennial…

Exclusive interview with Callum McCrae, Director of ‘Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields’ produced by Channel 4

Groundviews caught up with Callum McCrae, Director of the highly controversial and very disturbing film by Channel 4, Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, in New York, a day before the film was due to be screened for senior diplomats, UN staff and others at the Church Centre, in front of the UN Headquarters. Callum was joined by Marion Bentley, Channel 4′s Publicity Manager. The interview is around 43 minutes. Download the MP3 (~51Mb) of this interview here to listen offline. This podcast is anchored to the following questions. General What was your objective in doing the C4 video now, more than 2 years after the end of the war? Killing of unarmed civilians, collateral damage, has occurred in other wars, other contexts British troops have been involved in? Has C4 covered them in as great detail? What is accountability for you? Do they think the video will help in achieving accountability in the SL case? How so? Who is your primary…