Image courtesy Wallaad The most exiting academic course I have ever taken was “Conflict and Strategy” taught at Harvard University by Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling, one of the most brilliant persons I have known. After I took that course in late 1984, and another that he taught in early 1985, he invited me to stay […]
Image courtesy the Sunday Leader The recent elections to three provincial councils, namely the Northern, North Western and Central and the consequent results together with the general political expectations that several more provincial elections would be held next year followed by national, presidential and general elections, make the opposition or non UPFA political landscape a […]
The President’s recent and wide-ranging interview on Al Jazeera is interesting on a number of counts (download the episode in HD here). For starters, our President is clearly grossly uninformed or deliberately seeks to misinform. Take for example his assertion, around 8:50 into the interview, that European Union election monitors said the recently held Provincial […]
Image courtesy Simon Fraser University On September 21, 2013, Sri Lankans Without Borders in partnership with Groundviews launched the De Zoysa-Sivanayagam 2014 Fellowship in Digital Journalism. As noted on SLWB’s website, Lasantha Wickrematunge led the fight for press freedom in Sri Lanka, “unbowed and unafraid,” for a number of years before he was assassinated in […]
The Lasantha Wickrematunge Memorial Lecture held recently featured, as noted on the website of Sri Lankans Without Borders (SLWB) website, “…leading journalists from Canada and Sri Lanka [in] a panel discussion to examine press freedom in Sri Lanka in commemoration of the life and times of leading Sri Lankan journalist and human right activist Lasantha […]
I read with great interest this article in the Guardian about nearly quarter of men in Asia-Pacific admitting to committing rape according to a new UN study. As Sri Lanka was one of the countries that were a part of the study I looked around a little more and came across a few articles in […]
As with every war the silencing of the guns or the signing of a treaty are often only a small step in a long journey of reconciliation. The true progress in rebuilding a society or country fractured through years of conflict can only happen when the people of that country are able to heal within […]
Screen capture from video of President’s address to the 68th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on September 24, 2013, New York, posted by the Embassy of Sri Lanka in Washington D.C. In what would have been an unprecedented engagement with Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa during his visit to the UN in […]
Photo by Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images The Northern Provincial Council Elections has concluded amidst various challenges. While WAN welcomes the conclusion of these elections the need for the full devolution of powers so as to ensure the rights of historically subordinated communities remains. The women who contested the elections faced several additional challenges to their male counterparts […]
Image courtesy Mind Adventures Theatre Company We may applaud Mind Adventures’ Paraya for many things. We may celebrate it for its visual mastery, its bold dialogue and the intensity and physicality in the acting. We may perhaps hail the innovation in its mode of presentation as brilliant. We may even call the message it offers […]
Photo by Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images The elections to the North Western, Central and Northern provincial councils are over and the results have been largely as many political analysts predicted. The UPFA won in both the North Western and the Central provinces, while the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) romped home in the North. The political landscape […]
Image courtesy AFP The TNA has swept the polls in the North. More importantly, the Tamil people have voted courageously, convincingly, and clearly. It was an expected outcome, but as President Rajapaksa took off to New York, he would have known that numbers and statistics on paper, more than just mind-made presumptions, can have a […]
Image courtesy The Sri Lanka Guardian The TNA victory has shown that Sri Lanka remains a functioning democracy; that it functions when there is competition; and that with or without the 17th amendment and even under the tightest military supervision, the government can be electorally defeated. Having won the war, the Government has lost the […]
On 25th September 2012, the Menik Farm camp in Vavuniya, which at its peak, housed close to 300,000 internally displaced persons, was officially closed down when the Government of Sri Lanka relocated the last batch of IDPs. This formally marked the closure of all post-2009 IDP camps in the North of Sri Lanka. Termed ‘welfare […]
Photo by AFP, via Al Jazeera No, not in Sri Lanka, as readers may have hoped, but in Chile. In Chile, last week, on the fortieth anniversary of the military coup by General Pinochet which overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, the Chilean Judges Association issued an anticipated but unprecedented apology for the […]