Photo courtesy Sri Lanka Brief The guns are silent and the bones buried beneath the sands of the beaches of Mullivaikkal are replete with a story, but the tales they must tell are drowned in a cacophony of half-truths and downright lies that block the healing of the hearts and minds of the men, women […]
Perspectives of Sri Lankans over the last decade or so makes for fascinating reading five years after the end of the war. This infographic is only a snapshot of the hope, frustration, changes and divides between communities in Sri Lanka since 2001. Looking at this makes us wonder what the future holds. Will cycles of hope […]
Photo by AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena, via The New Indian Express In its 2012 report the International Committee of the Red Cross said was is still tracing 16,090 missing people in Sri Lanka. Those are merely the cases where families have requested the ICRC’s help. Very many others are not documented. By no means all the […]
Photo via Ministry of Mass Media and Information “The sovereignty of Sri Lanka is very much intact. And we want it to remain intact. We are Sri Lankans… And we don’t want Sri Lanka’s sovereignty to be impacted upon.” R. Sampanthan (Leader of the TNA), Al-Jazeera, 26 March 2014 Sri Lanka’s post-war politics has come […]
Photo by Ishara S.KODIKARA/AFP/Getty Images, via RightsNow Since the end of Sri Lanka’s thirty year-long war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the island is often evoked internationally in relation to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva. The UNHRC remains the only supranational body where the case of Sri Lanka […]
Photo via FT.lk I read the article titled Re-visiting the Rajapaksa Hegemonic Project (Groundviews 05/09/2014) by Dayapala Thiranagama with interest. It looks at the construction of Sinhalese Buddhist supremacy model, strengths and weaknesses of RHP, and the weaknesses of the opposition and the TNA. The points made are interesting as the article is using ideas […]
Photo by REUTERS/Dinuka Liyanawatte via Channel 4 Way back in the 1970s the manner in which Anagārika Dharmapāla conflated the concepts of “Ceylonese” and “Sinhalese” in one of his public exhortations (Guruge 1965) led me to argue that this was a powerful tendency in Sinhalese nationalist thinking and that this unexamined tendency was a major problem […]
Ebrahim Ebrahim, Deputy Minister of International Relation and Cooperation Republic of South Africa meeting Basil Rajapaksa, Senior Adviser to the H.E. President and Minister of Economic development. Via Ministry of Economic Development. General elections in South Africa concluded a few days ago and the results were a resounding reelection victory for the ruling African Nation […]
Image by Ishara S. Kodikara/AFP, via FT.com The moment I think of the war it takes me to 1995. Sri Lankans had very high expectations – a new government and a new President with a lot of promise to end the war. People in the South, North, East and West were so hopeful to see […]
Photo by Pankaj Nangia/Bloomberg News, via The Japan Times The UPFA regime has accomplished an unprecedented hegemonic political power, consummated by landslide electoral victories: Presidential election, January 2010, Parliamentary Elections March 2010 and the subsequent Provincial council elections, except, crucially in the North. They have consolidated their rural voter base in a remarkable fashion. As the […]
Photo by AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena via The Star SC [FR] 97/2014 is a Fundamental Rights application currently pending before the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka. FH the Petitioner is an 11 year old Muslim girl who has named amongst others her school Principal as a Respondent for violating her Fundamental Rights by preventing her from attending […]
Image courtesy the President’s Twitter account On the occasion of the World Conference on Youth 2014, the President Sri Lanka Mahinda Rajapaksa announced over social media he would have, and not for the first time, a Twitter Q&A on Thursday, 8th May at 11.30am. We archived the entire conversation, conducted under the hashtag #WCY2014MR. At […]
Photo courtesy Pri’s blog Colombo has been blossoming under the keen watch of Defense Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse, who, in his self-appointed role as Godfather, presides over a grand plan of urban beautification that will ultimately, we suppose he believes, turn Colombo into a first-world city like any of the world’s greatest cities; high-rises crowding the […]
Photo via BBC A close look at the series of illegal steps taken by law enforcement authorities Ms. Naomi Michelle Coleman, a British Tourist with wide travel experience in many Buddhist Countries who had a large tattoo of the Buddha and of a Hindu God on a lotus flower on her right arm, arrived in […]
Image via Wikipedia By 2015 Sri Lanka will have experienced a decade of rule by the United Peoples Freedom Alliance UPFA government under President Mahinda Rajapakse. He ascended to the Presidency in 2005 after Chandrika Bandaranaike’s 1994 People’s Alliance PA transformed and returned to power as the UPFA in alliance with the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna […]