As we reflect on Sri Lanka’s 71st Independence Day, many things that have political currency come to mind. Free education and healthcare, a reduced cost of living, and anti-corruption are usually among…
Politically, it may appear that we are not one people. We have a long history of ethnicity-based politics within a small island with a measure of ethnic diversity unrivalled in countries of…
Editor’s Note: Delivered at the Open University on November 30th 2018 Throughout the world today we bemoan the lack of values. No one quite knows what that means and a good post-modernist…
On October 2, Director of the documentary film “Demons in Paradise” Jude Ratnam issued a press release, noting that his documentary had been pulled from the programme of the Jaffna International Cinema…
Much has been said across various media over the years, and recently too, on the subject of ‘patriots’ and ‘traitors’. Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary (1755) defined a patriot as “one whose…
A puff of wind shifts the piece of cardboard dangling from the tent. ‘541’ it reads. Over one year later, the tent housing the families of the disappeared in Vavuniya has become…
“When we talk of the 1983 unrest, the word ‘riot’ is used very often,” M Mayuran of the Mass Movement for Social Justice says. “But that word is quite complicated. A riot…
“If the majority thinks that a minority community is posing a threat to them or are developing in a manner that creates fear among them, then it is a problem for the…
“There is no proper record of what happened, or how the killings took place during that time. We do not have any information or documentation to pass it on to our future…
The violation of the language rights following the enactment of Official Languages Act No. 33 of 1956, started the process of human rights violations of the Tamils of Sri Lanka which eventually…
We stand today with our collective consciousness bruised almost beyond repair. We feel devastated by the chaos, anarchy and culture of impunity. As someone recently said, the beast rides again. What is…
We can feel diminished by the tragic events that happened in Sri Lanka when our neighbours were targeted in the anti-Muslim riots or we can consider it an opportunity for everyone to…
It happened on the morning of March 7, almost two days after the initial attacks in the Theldeniya and Digana areas. The elderly woman I first spoke to said that a Sinhalese…
‘I rode back home that day watching fires burn the places I knew and loved. I watched mobs hunt for petrol. A curfew on the streets meant some areas were deserted, by…
The term ‘painfully slow progress’ has become a standard descriptor for Sri Lanka’s overall pace of implementation of UNHRC resolution A/HRC/30/1 in Geneva. It has been two years since Sri Lanka cosponsored…
