Archive for the ‘Politics and Governance’

Keeping Up with the Times: Old Men, Power and Values

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The man with the highest power does not reveal himself as a possessor of ‘power’.  Therefore, he keeps his ‘power’.  Tao Te Ching I was wondering how Deepa Mehta would put to the screen Salman Rushdie’s Midnights Children and then heard from her at the Ottawa premier that he wrote the screen play.   The movie did not disappoint and was graphic in showing us how emotionally charged us South Asians can be and how deeply divided we can stay – it left me wondering whether we can get above all these racial, religious and cultural constructs that we swirl around in.   The story line depicts how intertwined the Muslim, Hindu and Christian communities are in the subcontinent and how political leaders create wedges between them causing so much pain and suffering. It was even more alarming when Mehta said, in the post movie chat, how Iran had forced the Sri Lankan government to stop the production for 5 days.  The…

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Why devolution of power should be on linguistic basis

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Image courtesy Sify Sinhala nationalists who deny that the Tamils have any grievances are now campaigning for the abolition of the Provincial Councils under the 13th Amendment. But S.W.R.D the western educated liberal who introduced the Sinhala Only Law realized that an injustice was done to the Tamil people for it was not only an instrument to discriminate against Tamils in State employment but also to force them to deal with the State and its agencies only in Sinhala which the large majority of Tamil people did not know. How could the Tamil people give voice to their problems to the powers that be unless they learn Sinhala for, given the Sinhala as the only medium of education, future political leaders would know only Sinhala. ? Even then the Tamil people suspected rightly that the Sinhalese wanted to exercise power only for their benefit and since most Sinhala leaders believed in a zero sum game in the economic sphere thought…

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  • 16 Nov, 2012
  • 1 Comment
  • Colombo,
    Constitutional Reform,
    Peace and Conflict,
    Politics and Governance

Appeal to the Executive and the Legislature to Guarantee Respect for the Judiciary and the Chief Justice and to Guarantee the Independence of the Judiciary

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Image courtesy Colombo Telegraph The statement below has been put together by some academics in Sri Lanka. It has been written to communicate a widely held concerns about threats to the independence of the judiciary in the country. The statement has been signed by over 60 academics from different universities in Sri Lanka. Statements such as these are attempts to shape public opinion on matters of national significance and urgency. They also communicate to the government the views and opinions of concerned citizens. For reasons explained in the statement, the signatories call on the Executive and Legislative arms of the government to defend the independence of the judiciary and, among other things, to withdraw the motion to impeach the Chief Justice of Sri Lanka. ### The varied types of attacks on the judiciary in Sri Lanka have risen to alarming proportions over the last few weeks and suggest that the very institution of the judiciary is under serious threat in the…

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Give Full Force and Effect to the Separation of Powers & Unity in Diversity

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Photo courtesy Sri Lanka Guardian On the 19th day of May 2009, with the end of the military conflict that had divided the country for over thirty years, Sri Lanka entered a new era. The next step that Sri Lanka has to face is also extremely sensitive due to nationalistic feelings of the various ethnic groups. A durable peace can be built only if all these groups that go to form the Sri Lankan society feel that they are a part of the same nation. Building a nation had always been somehow a difficult task in Sri Lanka. Susil Sirivardana in his article titled “Paradigms and Foundations in Nation Building: A Way of Understanding” underlines that Sri Lankan leaderships believe in illusions that historically we were already a nation and hence, nation building as such, was not the central challenge of national politics. The articles mentioned in this paper appear in the book “Nation Building:Priorities for Sustainability and Inclusivity” edited by…

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On Critiquing of UN Failures: Missing the Wood for the Trees

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Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon receives Independent Review Panel on Sri Lanka report from ASG Charles Petrie. UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe. Courtesy UN News Centre. The BBC’s revelation on the leaked “penultimate” draft report of an internal UN review on UN’s handling of humanitarian crisis during the last stages of Vanni war in 2009, has justifiably invoked immense interest – on its content and implications – among Sri Lanka watchers and Tamil activists globally. Charles Petrie, former UN employee, led the review panel and he is expected to handover the final report to the UN Secretary General (UNSG) Ban Ki-Moon, in next few days. Despite the widespread excitement about this report, in this note, I would like to draw a rather depressing and different picture about UN’s legacy in peacekeeping and peacemaking, since the end of Cold War. That will demonstrate that the UN’s failure in Sri Lanka was not the first-one and definitely not the last-one, in the bloody history of UN….

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Howling

What shall I do, living in Peru, with this report of systemic failure in U.N. monitoring in Sri Lanka, how bureaucrats drove away from the disaster to come, buried hard- earned stats about civilian deaths and allowed themselves to be brow-beaten, harassed, shouted into silence while 40,000 humans died , mostly from battering shells rained from fighter jets? I belong to the family of nations. I have a vote in one democracy, dream of serving humanity, in the Secretariat of the United Nations. of inside influence, reform within, extracting the worm, of keeping a job close to the Secretary General, speaking into his ear, saying fix your flank, Man. Souls are howling. Repost This Article

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The Challenge of Opposing the Impeachment Motion

Opposition activists hold up placards during a protest in Colombo

Photo courtesy Euronews The clash between President Mahinda Rajapaksa and Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayake, popularly (and wrongly) perceived as a battle between the executive/legislature and the judiciary, does not provide much hope for the latter. Both parties are presently engaged in a drive to convince the people of their narrative, their case. President Rajapaksa’s publicity campaign, as well as the manner in which some of the charges against CJ Bandaranayake have been framed (with prominence given to matters of financial impropriety) has had an effect among the people. That CJ Bandaranayake has understood this is reflected in the response issued by her through her lawyers, denying these serious charges; implying further that the rest of the charges are so flimsy that the trouble need not be taken to even refute them. The immediate outcome of this personal rift may not be surprising. 14 ‘impeachable’ charges have been leveled, with a minimum of 1 charge being needed to be proved. 11…

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Challenges for a Sustainable Economic Development in Sri Lanka

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Image courtesy Norwegian Embassy, Sri Lanka First of all, I would like to define sustainable development.  According to the Brundtland report it is “a development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” But it is important to go further in the definition: “Sustainable development has 2 concepts: the first one is the needs, particularly the needs of the poor, to whom priority should be given. The second is the idea that the actual state of technology and social organization impose limitations to the capacity of the environment to satisfy present and future needs.” This definition is an invitation to think differently. Sri Lanka has to thrive by following this path for a sustainable development, which is taking care of poverty, and economic development while taking into account environmental constraints. Sri Lankan growth rate is high (8%), true story, but if we dig a little further, we can see…

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Post-war Sri Lanka’s media landscape: In conversation with Frederica Jansz

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Before she was forced to flee Sri Lanka, before the Sunday Leader started to edit submissions by long-standing and senior columnists critical of government and in particular, the ruling family and before the paper strangely started to apologise for articles published six years ago, Groundviews caught up with its erstwhile Editor and senior journalist Frederica Jansz. Because Groundviews suffered serious technical issues, this video interview wasn’t published earlier on the site. Recorded shortly after Frederica was fired from her post as Editor of the Sunday Leader, the interview touches on her time at the newspaper and taking over its helm after the murder of its previous Editor, the significant challenges she faced to keep the newspaper financially viable as well as maintain its journalistic integrity, the deeply divisive partisan politics that often inform Editorial decisions and how they impacted the newspaper’s functioning and perception, the larger problem of mainstream media economics that lead to owners of media overpowering Editorial control,…

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Impeaching Sri Lanka’s Chief Justice: A primer

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Image courtesy Read Sri Lanka [Editors note: The Supreme Court ruling on the Divineguma Bill presented to Parliament just before this article was published noted that the Bill has to be passed with 2/3rd majority in Parliament and that Clause 8 has to be approved at a referendum. See original tweet by Daily Mirror here.] The current battle between the Judiciary and the Executive/Legislative, culminating in the ongoing attempt by the government to impeach the Chief Justice, has received a lot of attention in the traditional media, and on Facebook and Twitter. People who don’t usually bother keeping abreast of the goings on in the country have been activated enough to post messages and share articles on FB. However, most of them don’t seem to be aware of the context to this crisis and how it has developed in relation to two other important current issues, the Divi Neguma Bill and the debate about the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. Here’s my…

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Many Shades of Accountability: The UN and Sri Lanka

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Photo courtesy United Nations In the last stages of the war in Sri Lanka tens of thousands of civilians were killed and no one has been held to account to date. This article though is not about the accountability of the Government of Sri Lanka(GoSL) for the killings. Hundreds, if not thousands, have already discussed, written and produced documentaries demanding GoSL for action on this count.  The UN Secretary General’s Panel of Experts (PoE) put GoSL on the dock and recommended independent and credible investigations. Though little has changed in Government’s position on the issue, ‘accountability’ has continued to remain a thorn and has forced the Rajapakses to steer away from the ludicrous defense of ‘zero casualty’, ‘gun in one hand and human rights charter in the next’ and other such denial theatrics. It has compelled the Government to appoint ‘Lessons Learnt Commission’ (LLRC) and Military inquiry panels to buy time and to hope that things will fade away. But…

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Impeachment of Sri Lanka’s Chief Justice: An Unconstitutional Witch-hunt

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Image courtesy AFP and via The Express Tribune The Rajapaksha Regime, through its parliamentarians, handed over an impeachment motion to the Speaker, the elder brother of the President Rajapaksha against the first woman Chief Justice of the country. It appears that the Government of Sri Lanka is in a mighty hurry to “get rid of the Chief Justice” so that a major obstacle for government’s capricious track is removed.  With the handing over of the impeachment, the government has signalled to the entire public service and judiciary   two rules – that the Regime is superior to the Law and that Rule of Law does not exist in the country. This short article is written to bring out several vital issues that the  public should not lose sight of, in relation to  the present impeachment attempt. Background The events leading to the impeachment demonstrates that the move to impeach the CJ  is nothing but a political witch-hunt. The tension between judiciary…

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Which way forward in post-conflict Sri Lanka? Lessons from the so-called ‘powerless’ women of the North

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Image courtesy Sri Lanka Brief Introduction Before the war, we were all together. Now, we are widows with no security, and no one sees what we have to live through. But we go on, try to find some money to get us through the day…we have to eat, no? The cooking and cleaning needs to be done, the children have to go to school…that’s how life goes.[1] What must have seemed to 36-year old Rina[2] like nothing more than a statement of unavoidable realities is laden with meaning for social scientists studying representations in postwar contexts of‘vulnerability’ and ‘marginalisation’ – and perhaps even more interestingly, the meanings of‘survival’and‘endurance’ in such settings. Tragically, although an intriguing subject for study, Rina’s circumstances are relatively ‘ordinary’ in the north of Sri Lanka: she is one of the estimated 40,000 female heads of households (“FHHs”) in that region[3], most of them born from the three decades of civil war. Given the oppressive environment of…

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#UPRLKA: Complete tweet archive and related visualisation around Sri Lanka’s UPR review

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Image courtesy Sydney Morning Herald On 1st November 2012, Sri Lanka was taken up for discussion as part of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) at the UN Human Rights Council (HRC). The last UPR was in 2008, and under scrutiny was Sri Lanka’s human rights record over the past four years, that significantly, saw the end of the country’s 27 year old war. A number of leading Sri Lankan and international human rights organisations, independent media including Groundviews and Vikalpa, as well as other leading voices on Twitter agreed to use #UPRLKA and #UPR14 hashtags in tweets around Sri Lanka’s case at the UPR. Since #UPR14 was a generic hashtag, #UPRLKA was encouraged as the primary hashtag to use when tweeting on Sri Lanka. Groundviews started to archive every single tweet (and retweet) with #UPRLKA on 29th October (Monday). At the time of writing, we have archived 3,592 tweets, the majority of which were posted on 1st November, leading up…

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Impeachment of the Chief Justice: The Sword of Damocles over Democratic Governance?

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In happier days. Photo courtesy Times of AP Accounts, claiming varying degrees of authenticity abound of the impending impeachment of the Chief Justice.  This is not the first time this has been attempted. Denizens of Hulftsdorf within its ranks stopped the UNF government in its tracks from attempting to do this.  A third of the members of parliament are required to sign a motion to this effect, which once entertained by the speaker will go to a select committee. The findings of that committee are reported back to parliament, which votes after a debate on whether to impeach the Chief Justice. All that is required is a simple majority. There is considerable speculation as to why the Rajapajsha regime would want to even consider this and as to the charges that will be made in the impeachment motion.  The consensus in general public discourse is that this has everything to do with the initial Supreme Court determination on the Divineguma…

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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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