Still Counting the Dead: A welcome first step
“We used to be a very proud people”1 – Uma, I Few years ago, during a very wintery January weekend, at a Copenhagen hotel, I was scrambling to prepare a last minute…
War Crimes
The ICG Report on Tamil Politics and the Quest for a Political Solution: The Blind Spot
Image courtesy ICG Facebook page The recently released report “Sri Lanka: Tamil Politics and the Quest for a Political Solution” by the International Crisis Group [ICG] is a timely contribution to the…
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…
The end of war in Sri Lanka, captured for posterity by Google Earth
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…
LLRC roadmap: An ‘action plan’ to suit the US, not us!
Photo credit: Daily FT The government announced (26 July, 2012) it has drawn up a comprehensive “National Action Plan to Implement the Recommendations of the LLRC” and has released same to the…
Interview with Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga: Governance and politics today, future plans and prospects
On 25th July, met with former President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga in Colombo to get her views on Sri Lanka’s present state of governance, plus a range of other issues, including – as is…
3rd Anniversary Reflections: Geneva, May 2009
Photo courtesy UN May is the month of the diplomatic success of Sri Lanka and its friends at the Special Session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in 2009. That…
Cluster bombs in Sri Lanka: From denial to discovery
Ravi Nessman from Associated Press has broken what’s perhaps the most important story on the war, since it ended three years ago. In a story published by AP a few hours ago,…
Ask Ass. Sec. Robert Blake a question on Sri Lanka over Twitter
Image courtesy Colombo Page Robert Blake is the Assistant Secretary, South And Central Asian Affairs at the US State Department and former Ambassador to Sri Lanka. The man likes cricket and our…
In conversation with Dr. Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu: The resolution in Geneva and its discontents
Dr. Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu is the Executive Director of the Centre for Policy Alternatives, the institutional anchor of , break the limbs of. Though Sri Lanka’s foreign minister distanced himself from these remarks,…
The Geneva II debacle
Photo courtesy Vikalpa, from protest against US resolution in Colombo, 27 February 2012 The US-sponsored resolution at the UNHRC had to be defeated. It was not. 24 in favour, 15 against, 8…
Geneva 2012: The signs missed, lessons unlearnt
Photo courtesy JDS Let’s learn the right lessons from the Geneva outcome, not the wrong ones. It is not the case that a small country such as Sri Lanka cannot fight a…
WHOSE MOVE IS IT ANYWAY?
The passage of the United Nations Human Rights Council Resolution on Sri Lanka raises a fundamental question: what next? When the dust settles and tempers calm, all parties concerned will be…
After the UNHRC Resolution Vote: Don’t Hold Your Breath for Truth, Justice or Reconciliation
Photo courtesy JDS/Guy Calaf, Agence France-Presse By the time this article is published, the votes on the hotly-contested UN Human Rights Council resolution on Sri Lanka will have been cast and counted.…
Counter-productive propaganda and human rights in Sri Lanka
As the three Sri Lankan human rights defenders who have come most under attack by the state media in Sri Lanka in the past week, because of our active involvement with the…
