Archive for the ‘Peace and Conflict’

AFTER A LONG JOURNEY HOME: SOLITUDE IN JAFFNA AND THE SILENCE OF A CITY

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[Editors note: Dr. Rajini Thiranagama (née Rajasingham), was a Tamil human rights activist and feminist murdered in 1989 by the LTTE. She was one of the founding members of the University Teachers for Human Rights, Jaffna, which during the war, published some of the most hard hitting critiques and exposes of Government as well as LTTE atrocities and human rights violations. Since 2009, Dayapala Thiranagama's insightful articles to Groundviews have been amongst the site's most read and shared]. ### This summer, after 23 long years, I drove to Jaffna from Galle with my eldest daughter. We travelled through the heart of Sri Lanka on the A9 road, passing Kandy, Matale, Dambulla and Kekirawa. We drove past areas where I had worked in 1986 as a member of the Vikalpa Kandayama (Alternative Group), laying down an underground political structure. At the time, I had left my academic job in the university to do fulltime political work and was confronted by two great dangers: increasing political repression from the…

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The end of war in Sri Lanka, captured for posterity by Google Earth

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When in early 2009, UNOSAT released satellite imagery of what later turned out to be the final weeks of Sri Lanka’s 27-year old war with the LTTE, the images were met with vehement Government condemnation, and counter-analysis by the Ministry of Defence. During this heady, hellish time, the subject of The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lankan & The Last Days of the Tamil Tigers by former UN spokesman Gordon Weiss and the recently released Still Counting the Dead: Survivors of Sri Lanka’s Hidden War by the former BBC correspondent Frances Harrison, while the President assured Sri Lankans and the world that heavy weapons weren’t being used, the satellite images from UNOSAT added to the confusion, showing clear and widespread indications of heavy shelling. The question then became when the shelling occurred. From the report by the UN Panel of Experts, appointed by the UN Secretary General to the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report, the trading of allegations…

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Video on Mediated: Hard data on Sri Lanka, through art

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Mediated is an art project that essentially seeks to create greater awareness around and engagement with aspects of post-war Sri Lanka’s ideational, constitutional, economic, social and religious challenges. Four individuals – a researcher, an economist, a constitutional theorist and an award winning novelist – were invited to give submissions that were anchored to issues vital to a greater and deeper social and political understanding of Sri Lanka today. Four artists were invited to engage with this primary resource material and interpret it so that it through what they produced, attention was focused on the inconvenient, critical engagement expanded and public apathy challenged. The Gallery is open daily from 18:00 – 20:00 and the exhibition closes on 15 September 2012. Young Asia Television was present to cover the opening of Mediated. This segment is from their Connections programme of 10 September 2012, which can be viewed here. Mediated – Opening Night from Centre for Policy Alternatives on Vimeo. Repost This Article

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Mullikulam: The continuing occupation of a school by the Sri Lankan Navy

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[UPDATED: 2200hrs, Colombo: A keen reader, Mike Horgan, flagged the erroneous positioning of Mullikulam on Google Maps. The correct location is now shown.] “This is my home, this is my sister’s home, this is my neighbour’s home…and now we’re not even permitted to enter our own land,” says *Rajan, a villager living at the Malankaadu temporary resettlement camp, pointing to their homes, where Navy families currently reside. Since their eviction by the Sri Lanka Navy (SLN) in 2007, people like Rajan have been made into “strangers” looking at their beloved homes and farmlands from afar. “We don’t want anything else from the Government, we just want to go back home,” is the recurring lament[1] of the Mullikulam people from June, 2012, when they were resettled just outside their village, which is currently home to the SLN’s sprawling North Western Command Headquarters. View Larger Map When the Navy first occupied the village, following the eviction of its villagers by the Army…

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  • 10 Sep, 2012
  • 73 Comments
  • Colombo,
    Features,
    Peace and Conflict

A tasteless cartoon, Twitter and Indo-Sri Lanka relations (Updated)

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UPDATE, 1600hrs, Colombo: Despite the acting editor of Lakbima noting via Twitter the following, #The lakbima cartoon is a matter of artistic expression and therefore of freedom of expression. #lakbimacartoon — Ranga Jayasuriya (@RangaJayasuriya) September 9, 2012   as of 1600hrs, the cartoon is no longer displayed on the newspaper’s website. Where the cartoon was, there is now a large white space. See the link below for the original image and page. Also, Women and Media Collective, one of Sri Lanka’s leading women’s rights groups, has protested against and condemned the cartoon, noting inter alia that, The cartoon violates all ethical principles of journalism and media expression not only in Sri Lanka but globally. There is an accepted form of visual journalism in commenting on current social, economic, cultural and political issues within and between countries. In this cartoon, however, the newspaper has allowed for gross sexism and crudity to override any form of civility in journalistic communication. WMC urges…

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Provincial Council Election: Real-time updates

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@mhmhisham is turning out the best updates on Twitter. #PCelectionsLK and #ep2012 are key hashtags aggregating all the tweets on the September 2012 Provincial Council elections. See below for aggregation and real time updates. Tweets about “#PCelectionsLK “ Tweets by @mhmhisham Tweets about “#ep2012″ Repost This Article

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In conversation with Chandraguptha Thenuwara: Art, politics and education in Sri Lanka

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Chandragupta Thenuwara is one of Sri Lanka’s best known artists. As noted online, he is the director of the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts in Colombo, a not-for-profit art school which he founded in 1993 as an independent alternative to state-run art institutions, with the aim of teaching young and marginalied artists the basic tenets of fine art practice under the instruction of practicing artists. In this programme we start by discussing the enduring ethnic divides and identity politics in Sri Lanka through the frame of Thenuwara’s son, and his naming. We use this as an entry point a discussion about the artist’s own identity and how it developed, growing up as he did in the East of Sri Lanka, having being born in the South and after his studies, returning to live in Colombo. Thenuwara’s speaks about his father’s early influence in becoming an artist, and how even from a very modest household, he always had the opportunity to…

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A disappearance every five days in post-war Sri Lanka

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Photo courtesy WSWS On 21st at 2.31pm, August 2012, 32 year old Vasanthamala sent a sms from her mobile to her relatives saying she had been taken by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in Vavuniya. Around 8pm the same night, she made short phone calls to her mother and father, and said she was alright. When her parents had tried to find out where she was calling from, the call had been cut off and has been switched off thereafter, to date as her parents are still unable to get through to her. When her father tried to complain to the Vavuniya Police, they had refused to accept the complaint stating that she must have eloped with a man. The complaint was only accepted once her father visited the Police station the following day along with his wife. Prior to the arrest, on the 19th of August, some persons claiming to be from the CID, had called Vasanthamala’s mother and…

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Open letter to Mark Davis, presenter of SBS Dateline on ‘Sri Lanka’s New Wave’

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[Editors note: Watch SBS Dateline's Sri Lanka's New Wave, broadcast first in Australia on 28 August 2012, here.] Dear Mark, I am intensely troubled by the tenor of your report on Sri Lankan Tamil refugees on today’s Dateline. The picture you painted of the country doesn’t accord with any of the accounts I’ve heard, nor with well documented reports by international and local sources (eg. the Commission for Justice and Peace of the Diocese of Jaffna, Sri Lanka report). The government’s refusal to implement the findings of its own Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission and the reception of the subsequent U.N Resolution alone should tell you something about the triumphalism and arrogance with which the state approaches the process of rebuilding. The program of Sinhalisation and militant Buddhism now underway in Sri Lanka (including recent attacks on a Mosque) were not even mentioned, nor was the corruption within the ruling family and the sense of impunity with which it operates, as…

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Public Perceptions of the LLRC in Trincomalee

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Photo credit JDS President Mahinda Rajapaksha appointed the Lessons learnt and Reconciliation commission in May 2010 and after 18 months of sittings, the commission submitted its report to the President in November 2011. The report is not only about the effects of war but also about the need to depoliticize state institutions and foster good governance. However, at the time of writing, the report is not yet accessible in Sinhala or Tamil, even though it was reported in the media that Sri Lanka’s Central Bank had commissioned the translations. As Kishali Jayawardena argued, many commissions of inquiry in Sri Lanka have been political exercises rather than genuine attempts to reconcile a traumatized nation.[i] While there are many national level civil society discussions on the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), there seems to be very little discussion on what citizens say about the LLRC and its recommendations. However, there is widespread hope that public demands will create the space to implement…

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Mediated: Portraying hard data on Sri Lanka through art

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Mediated, an exhibition around a new aesthetic that seeks to communicate constitutional theory, hard data from economics and social polling and writing on religious identity through compelling art, runs till the 15th of September at the Saskia Fernando Art Gallery. As noted on the exhibition’s website, four individuals – a researcher, an economist, a constitutional theorist and an award winning novelist – were invited to give submissions that were anchored to issues vital to a greater and deeper social and political understanding of Sri Lanka today. Four artists were invited to engage with this primary resource material and interpret it so that it through what they produced, attention was focused on the inconvenient, critical engagement expanded and public apathy challenged. Read Asanga Welikala’s background note in full here, around power-sharing in pre-British Sri Lanka as a viable model for devolution of power post-war. See Sunela Jayewardene’s architectural sketch on it here and the final set of drawings here. Read Ameena Hussein’s text here, focussing on…

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Do women play a role in Sri Lanka’s ‘reconciliation’?: Gender dynamics in the transition from war to peace

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A mother displaying the photographs of her sons who are missing during the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) session in Trincomalee, December, 3-5, 2010. Photo courtesy Centre for Human Rights Introduction In order to understand the ‘role’ of women in such a vital process of social transition, we have to understand the place of women in our society – their position, their status, their condition.  This conference is being held at a time when the country is shaken by a spike in reports of sexual violence against women and girls in the South of the country. Over the past few years there has been a phenomenal rise in civilian acts of violence specifically against women:- Incidents of ‘grease yakkas’ that sexually terrorised women were reported from right across the country, including the supposedly heavily controlled North and East; Half-burnt bodies of raped and battered and murdered women are being found mostly in one district alone, Ratnapura; Adolescent girls are being…

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Re-imagining Lakshman Kadirgamar in Contemporary Sri Lanka: A Different Reading

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From 2003, Lakshman Kadirgamar addressing a press conference with the Mahinda Rajapaksa (before he was President) and Sarath Amunugama are also seen. Photo via Tamilnet.com Ever since his brutal assassination in 2005, those of us who have admired Lakshman Kadirgamar have often imagined what Sri Lanka would have been like, had he remained at the helm of Sri Lanka’s foreign policy making. In this imagination, Kadirgamar re-appears as a hero, almost super-man like, to save us from the diplomatic ignominies that have struck Sri Lanka on the international stage. This is what our deep attachment to the man does. We had an idea as to how he operated, we know that the current operation looks hopeless, and in comes Kadirgamar who shakes up the system, makes it work, makes it look wonderful. This sort of imagination has been well articulated by many of Kadirgamar’s admirers and friends in the recent past. Mr. Tissa Jayatilaka’s ‘In Remembrance of Lakshman Kadirgamar’ (Colombo…

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Feeding cats on a public road risks arrest in Sri Lanka

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My husband and I have established a cat café at the back of the Cinnamon Grand Hotel where we have been feeding the cats every day for the last seven years. A cat café is basically an area where cats are fed at a regular time each day. Usually a cat café is set up at a hotel, school or other public place where cats would otherwise be attracted by a steady supply of food and become a public nuisance and, in countries like Sri Lanka which still has endemic rabies, a health hazard. Feeding them away from areas where people congregate while at the same time sterilizing and vaccinating them removes the nuisance and public health risk and allows cats and humans to coexist peacefully. We feed eight cats at the cat café and have sterilized all but one of the females and vaccinated all but that one particularly timid female. Over this last school holiday period we have…

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Swimming against the tide: Australia’s new asylum-seeker package

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Photo courtesy Sydney Morning Herald Though launched with much fanfare and media acclaim, Australia’s new raft of proposals embodied in the Houston package to handle the surge in asylum-seekers is simply treading water and will get the country nowhere. The flow of migrants to Western countries by both legal and illegal paths has increased steadily over the years. The large pool of migrants then encourages kinfolk and friends to migrate through information, good-luck tales and remittances. Thus one has a snowballing process of increased migration. In brief, I assert that the main reason for the increased flow of illegal asylum-seekers is the impact of snowballing chain migration. It is an educated surmise on my part from anecdotal evidence from the Sri Lankan situation and my explorations of this topic in the recent past. Logically, this argument would apply to both the Afghan, Iranian, Iraqi migrant situations as well. Indeed, it is supported vividly by the opinions expressed in such a…

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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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