Power, Religion and Impunity
I ordered, he says, as if those two words would suffice. Perhaps they do, in his eyes. ‘I’m the state,’ Louis XIV declared, according to Carlyle. Mahinda Rajapaksa sees himself as the…
I ordered, he says, as if those two words would suffice. Perhaps they do, in his eyes. ‘I’m the state,’ Louis XIV declared, according to Carlyle. Mahinda Rajapaksa sees himself as the…
Photo by Dominic Sansoni Some moons back, in the course of a conversation with an overseas-based Sri Lankan academic who was then in Colombo on a short vacation, I was struck by…
Fake news became a buzzword around the 2016 US Presidential election campaign. However, it’s something we have been grappling with in Sri Lanka for years. Fake news, is news created with the…
The 15th of June 2017 marks the 3rd anniversary of the orchestrated anti-Muslim violence in Dharga Town, Aluthgama and several other areas in the south. After a steady buildup of hate sentiment…
President Donald Trump’s senior counsellor Kellyanne Convey came up with a superb Orwellian term when she dubbed Presidential spokesman Sean Spencer’s outright lies about inauguration crowds as ‘alternative facts’. ‘Alternative facts’ are…
Former Minister, Speaker and National List nominee Parliamentarian A H M Azwer along with a few other Mahinda loyalists claim that . Azwer claims that there are 38 complaints from Muslims about damage to…
Introduction The past decade produced two critical moments of transition in Sri Lanka. On 19 May 2009, a 30-year war came to a brutal end with the defeat of the Liberation Tigers…
Justice and Buddha Sasana Minister Wijedasa Rajapaksa is seen as a blatant liar by the Muslim community. He has become Yahapalanaya’s unofficial patron of Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) and its controversial leader…
Photography by James Morgan has continued to be a necessary space for discussing the cold peace that arrived with the conclusion of the war in May 2009. It was only in late-2009…
Photo courtesy Abdul Halik Azeez In September 2013, I lost my mother. 8 months after that, in May 2014, I lost my brother. They were significant people, in more ways than one. There…
Photograph courtesy Joanna Eckersley 2006: The Seeding Year Sri Lanka entered 2006 on the cusp between a failed peace process and a looming war. The year began with a murder. The killing…
Sri Lanka is on the cusp of history, in several months it will be presenting to the people its third constitution in the space of four decades. Abolition of the Executive Presidency,…
Featured image courtesy The Star Ven. Ampitiye Sumanaratne Thero of Mangalaramaya temple in Ampara walks in to the residence of the Chief Minister of the Eastern Province, Nazeer Ahamed and threatens him…
Featured image courtesy FT.com The so-called ‘radicalisation’ of the Sri Lankan Muslim community has been the subject of a number of opinion pieces that have appeared in both print and social media…
Featured image courtesy Yahoo News President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s decade long era of governance saw unprecedented racism and hate against the minority communities in Sri Lanka. The Bodu Bala Sena and other Buddhist…