Archive for the ‘Politics and Governance’

Northern Provincial Council Election and the Future of Lankan Tamil Politics

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This year promises to be a decisive one for Lankan Tamils. Events that take place this year will considerably determine the future trajectory of Tamil politics. It is only a beginning where the end of the LTTE’s totalitarianism gives the Tamils opportunity to evaluate their nationalist politics that has brought only tragedy so far. Failure to do this would have tragic consequences. The concluded UNHRC sessions and the proposed CHOGM make up the list of key international fixtures. Efforts of the TGTE – like the formation of Tamil Eelam Freedom Charter – and other such diaspora groups will provide much entertainment, all to no avail. Apart from these events, the continuing struggle between Tamil Nadu and the Indian Central Government will also be of significance for India’s need to wake up from her long slumber in trying to wish away an explosive situation on her doorstep. However, local political (and economic) developments are what matter most. The climax, no doubt,…

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The Fashion Bug case: A turning point for Muslim rights in Sri Lanka

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Buddhist monks on the rampage at Fashion Bug as Police just look The judicial case related to the violent attack on Muslim owned Fashion Bug head office and warehouse in Pepiliyana, 10 km away from Colombo, is destined to be a turning point in Muslim Rights in Sri Lanka. Following is a brief recap of the incident in order to get the context right. As the darkness descends around 8.00 p.m. on 28th March, the mob, which has been there for some time, came out form the Sunetradevi Pirivana Temple nearby. The mob was led by Buddhist monks. Their first target was the Emerald Trading, a Muslim owned heavy vehicle yard. According to its owner Mursi Ahamad Sadoon, all the vehicles and equipment in the yard were stoned and the office was set on fire by the mob.  He estimates the damage to exceed 10 million Rupees. Then the mob turned their wrath against the Fashion Bug warehouse and its outlet.  By…

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Strengthening innovation in Sri Lanka: In conversation with Anushka Wijesinha

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Anushka Wijesinha is a Research Economist at the Institute of Policy Studies of Sri Lanka and is one of the most prominent voices in Sri Lanka today championing innovation. We begin by Anushka explaining what innovation means to him in a Sri Lankan context, and why it is so important to support it in post-war Sri Lanka. In talking about innovation as a system, he talks about the differences between Research and Development and innovation. Anushka is then asked whether he sees enough of that which he champions and sees as innovative policies, products and practices in Sri Lanka today. We then talk about the nature and indeed crisis within Sri Lanka’s tertiary education system – from ossified curricula to outdated pedagogy – as stymieing the growth and potential of innovation. Anushka then looks at how failure can be instructive for innovation, and whether cultures and countries that embrace failure are more innovative than those, like Sri Lanka, which censure…

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Questions the public must ask in Sri Lanka

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Photo courtesy BBC In the few days following the UNHRC meetings in Geneva, we have witnessed several act of blatant criminality by mobs on people and property- in greater Colombo, Killinochchi and elsewhere. A common factor has been the passivity of the Police. They have looked the other way (reminiscent of July ’83) and suppressed video evidence of the culprits responsible for such violence. We have also witnessed, in a single day, the Attorney General interfering in court cases involving politicians and their family members. The justifiable outrage over groups like Bodu Bala Sena  must not distract us from asking fundamental questions such as: Whom does the Police come under, and who has the power to silence them? Who has the power to use the Attorney General to overturn due process and the rule of law? Why does the Bodu Bala Sena only protest about animal slaughter and not about anti-Buddhist practices like casinos and the money-laundering, prostitution and human…

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‘Where every prospect pleases, man alone is vile’

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Image courtesy Aaron Joel Santos The title of this article is a line from a beautifully haunting hymn written by Bishop Heber of Calcutta who, clearly, had an imperialistic mindset.  He visited our island in 1825, and the hymn must have been written around that time.  The next line reads, ‘The Heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone’.  Because of the racism implicit in it, this hymn is no longer sung in most churches.  But in the light of the extended anti-Muslim hysteria sweeping the country, we may need to pose the question, ‘are we vile?’ Are Sri Lankans a nation?  Are we one people? Are we a law abiding democracy?  Are we a model of friendly co-existence?  Till a few decades ago the answers would have been a resounding no to the first question and an emphatic yes to each of the others.  But now there are some fanatical groups claiming be Buddhists who seem determined to…

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A Tolerant Sri Lanka: How far will we go?

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The past few weeks have seen a rise in incidents and publicly expressed sentiments against the Muslim community by groups who claim to represent the rights of Sinhala Buddhists in Sri Lanka. Expressing concerns of undue place given to Muslims in Sri Lanka – from entrance to the Law College to issuing Halal certification to even increase in Muslim population and property ownership by Muslims, groups such as the Bodu Bala Sena and Sinhala Ravaya have taken it upon themselves to educate the Sinhala Buddhists on these concerns. While these groups declare to be non-violent, speeches given by them at various rallies, defamatory references to individuals and the attacks on Muslim owned businesses in the past few weeks give the impression of a situation of vigilante groups gathering strength. It is in this context that Social Indicator, the survey research unit of the Centre for Policy Alternatives created this online questionnaire. How seriously should we take the anti-Muslim sentiments being…

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Impeachment of Sri Lanka’s Chief Justice and its impact: Poll results

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Photo courtesy Euronews From 6 – 21 March 2013, Groundviews ran an online poll to ascertain opinions on the lasting impact of the unprecedented impeachment of Sri Lanka’s Chief Justice. The online poll was hosted on Typeform.com. 177 responses were generated. The questionnaire can be downloaded as a PDF here. The full poll results, for statistical analysis and verification, can be downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet here. Excerpts to the answers given to Question 1 and 7 are reproduced below, which some language edits. Unedited responses to these questions can be downloaded as plain text files (Question 1 and Question 7). Select quotes from the responses generated by Question 9 are also embedded in the infographic below. Unedited responses to this question are included in the Excel spreadsheet above. Clicking on the heading of any chart will take you to infogr.am and allow you to share and embed the specific infographic across a range of leading social media sites and…

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Colonizing Childhood and Zionist Pedagogy: Interview With Prof. Nurit Peled-Elhanan

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Nurit Peled-Elhanan is a professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, peace educator and activist and co-laureate along with late Prof. Izzat Gazzawi of the 2001 Sakharov Prize for Human Rights and the Freedom of Speech awarded by the European parliament. Peled-Elhanan has translated Albert Memmi‘s Le Racisme (1982) and Marguerite Duras‘ Écrire (1993) into Hebrew. In 1997, her daughter Smadar, aged 13, was killed in a suicide bomb attack in Jerusalem. “Terrorist attacks like this are the direct consequence of the oppression, slavery, humiliation and state of siege imposed on the Palestinians”, she told reporters in the aftermath of Smadar’s death. She and her family work with the Palestinian and Israeli Bereaved Families for Peace. Professor Peled has critically dissected the ideological content of Israeli schoolbooks for the past five years. She considers children as victims of Israel’s militaristic, settler-colonial culture. Her radical views have exacted a professional cost. “University professors have stopped inviting me…

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Taking old friends too seriously: Sri Lanka, Burma and Buddhist extremism

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People collect pieces of metal from the rubble of a neighbourhood in Pauktaw township that was burned in recent violence October 27, 2012. REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun (Caption and content from Reuters) Sri Lanka’s long relationship with Burma is something that anyone who has even a nodding acquaintance with Sri Lankan history is aware of. In both nations, Theravada Buddhism has been a vital political idea that has cemented the legitimacy of monarchs. Both Burma and Sri Lanka saw a Buddhist revival as a response to colonial occupation, a revival which has allowed Buddhism to fuse with nationalism as both countries achieved their independence. With such a similar and connected past, it should come as no surprise that the Bodu Bala Sena’s manifesto echoes that of the 969; an extremist Buddhist organization in Myanmar that seeks to ethnically cleanse Myanmar of Muslims, who make up 4% of the country’s population.  The 969 take their title from Buddhist numerology and have styled themselves…

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Helping the Police arrest brutish “monks” in Sri Lanka

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Apparently the infamous Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) has condemned the attack on Fashion Bug warehouse a few days ago and asked the Police to arrest those involved in it, even if they are monks. A Daily Mirror news report suggests BBS thinks the individuals captured on film destroyed private property were actually impostors. Prima facie, this then begs the question as to why dozens of Police failed to arrest any of these “impostors” on the scene. This is not the first time Police have stood idly by as militant and racist “monks” have gone on the rampage. As we noted on Twitter, So response of BBS suggests that mob was really in fancy dress dailymirror.lk/news/27442-bbs… Does anyone believe them? #lka #SriLanka — Groundviews (@groundviews) March 29, 2013 No arrests had been made, says Police. No arrests will EVER be made globalpost.com/dispatch/news/… #lka #srilanka — Groundviews (@groundviews) March 29, 2013 Here are two images to help the Sri Lankan Police in…

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Responding to Geneva by Exemplary Restitution

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Robert O. Blake has once said, “International mechanisms can become appropriate in cases where states are either unable or unwilling to meet their obligations.” After Geneva March 2013, US officials have reiterated this in stricter terms. TNA MP Suresh Premachandran has said the final Geneva Resolution will not relieve the affected Tamils and reminded the UNHRC wish (2012) to implement the LLRC recommendations, which allegedly has been defaulted. TNA Leader R Sampanthan has said that if Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) complied by implementing the LLRC recommendations, a second resolution could have been avoided. However, Japan’s Yasushi Akashi has made a favourable statement for Sri Lanka, quoting his visits to North Sri Lanka and how “the whole country coped with the challenges” In Geneva Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe described positive developments.  Later, Minister Wimal Weerawansa exhorted that Sri Lanka is unshaken by Geneva resolutions, while Minister DEW Gunasekara feared worse befalling by government defaulting. Is this confusion due to different viewer notions?…

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#unlk: Archive and visualisation of tweets on Sri Lanka at HRC’s 22nd Session

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The 22nd regular session of the Human Rights Council was held from 25 February to 22 March 2013 at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. As Groundviews did with conversations on Twitter over Sri Lanka during the UPR sessions last year, we archived every single tweet from Thursday, 21st February 2013 to Tuesday, 26th March 2013 with the #unlk hashtag. After tossing around several options for a good hashtag over email, #unlk was circulated globally by leading websites, activists, local and international HR organisations, journalists and others before the start of the HRC’s 22nd Session, to facilitate the creation of this archive. We used Martin Hawskey’s new TAGS v5 template with Twitter’s Developer API and Google Docs to archive every single #unlk tweet. There are 6056 tweets in the archive, which include retweets as well. The peaks correspond to the times and dates which either the #unlk hashtag was promoted globally as a means to capture conversations around sri Lanka…

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Interview with Nimalka Fernando: The UN HRC resolution and beyond

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Nimalka, now we’ve seen that the council voted for the resolution on Sri Lanka. What is your initial impression? It’s a serious voting pattern. Because if you look at the resolution, the resolution has very substantial  concerns raised by civil society for a period of time. From holding elections in the North, addressing issues of impunity, collapse of rule of law, the unaddressed issues of accountability, the failure of Sri Lankan Government to address issues of reconciliation for a long time, and also the selective manner in which the LLRC action plan has been constructed and also the inadequacies in the national human rights action plan. So if you take all those subjects one by one, if you look at the voting pattern one by one, I feel very serious in terms of the resolution. If you take for instance the statement made by Thailand; Thailand voted against the resolution. But Thailand made a very significant statement calling on to…

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Inter-Religious Integration in Sri Lanka—Inclusion not Intrusion

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Image courtesy Maliban Biscuit Over the past months Sri Lankans have been educated on two Arabic words: halal and haram (that which is permissible and not permissible). Unfortunately the circumstances of learning have been an unprecedented antagonism towards the Muslim community much deeper than the halal issue. This trend must be addressed without delay by the government and all religions before it spirals into a much wider conflict, which the country can ill afford. The government’s responsibility is to do what all governments are mandated to do: ensure the prompt implementation of law and order without fear or favour to any. This should include steps to curb the provocation of religious animosity and ensure the security and dignity of the Muslim community; an intrinsic part of the nation from well before the Ninth Century. That this has not happened is worrying since the government is more than capable of restoring order. It consequently suggests that there is an anticipation of…

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Geneva and Bodu Bala Sena: Two Dimensions of a Crisis

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  Original image by Azzam Ameen, on Twitter There are tensions and schisms erupting, there is a crisis in the making. One dimension of this crisis is the unfolding diplomatic debacle: the Geneva-crisis. The group Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) represents, and gives expression to, another dimension. The emergence of both was to be expected; both, however, were avoidable. Geneva-crisis After Sri Lanka’s sui generis performance in 2009, the Geneva-story has been a depressing one to a lot of people. Sri Lanka’s support-base has dwindled drastically. India which, in 2009, opposed a Western-sponsored resolution against Sri Lanka, stood up to remind the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillai, where to get off. Today, India is endorsing Western or US-sponsored resolutions, and acknowledging in the process reports produced by Ms. Pillai. The contrast couldn’t have been more damaging than this. In the face of such developments, Sri Lanka’s message (articulated especially by her political envoys), both at the UNHRC as…

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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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