Armed squad attacks Tamil paper office in Jaffna setting ablaze press machines

[TamilNet, Saturday, 13 April 2013, 07:03 GMT]
An armed squad, allegedly operated by the Sri Lankan military intelligence, stormed the main office of the Uthayan Tamil daily in the city of Jaffna in the early hours of Saturday, setting ablaze the press machines and the copies of printed papers that were ready for distribution. The squad chased media workers away at gun point and poured petrol on the papers and machinery in the fourth attack to be reported on the popular Tamil daily since January this year. The pre-dawn attack, carried out Saturday at 4:45 a.m., comes 10 days after a similar attack on its Ki'linochchi office this month. Colombo's systematic attack on the Tamil daily, owned by Tamil National Alliance (TNA) parliamentarian E. Saravanapavan, seeks to destabilize the operation and dissemination of the paper in the occupied country of Eezham Tamils, especially before conducting elections to Northern Provincial Council.
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Tamil genocide framework highlighted in Slovenia Conference

[TamilNet, Thursday, 11 April 2013, 11:14 GMT]
The framework of genocide carried by Colombo on Eelam Tamils is featured in a poster presentation at the Slovenia conference on R2P being held in the Faculty of Law, University of Lkubljana, Thursday by Tamils Against Genocide [TAG], a US-UK based activist organization, the conference details reveal. More than 80 speakers and poster presenters from almost 40 states and international institutions will discuss issues regarding R2P in 2 parallel panels each day, according to the conference program.
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Colombo answers Indian political visit by simultaneously inviting Pak defence visit

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 10 April 2013, 12:00 GMT]
While representatives of a section of Indian political parties were on a fact finding mission to the island, meeting various Tamil political, civil society, chamber of commerce and former civil members in Jaffna on Tuesday and Wednesday under the aegis of the Indian High Commission and the Indian Consulate in Jaffna, the SL government in Colombo is engaging with a high level Pakistani Defence delegation comprising 19 members who are on a one-week visit to the island. The visit by Pakistani defence delegation follows the visit of the Chinese Deputy Minister of Intelligence last week.
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CHOGM heats up, Rae calls Sri Lanka a "Rogue Member"

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 10 April 2013, 00:34 GMT]
As the members of the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group [CMAG] meeting in London scheduled to be held on April 26 draws close, the CHOGM [Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting] boycott call has increased, with DMK chief M. Karunanidhi sending his emissaries to meet the CMAG envoys to demand shifting of the CHOGM venue out of Sri Lanka, Indian media reported. Meanwhile, Canada's Liberal party leader, Bob Rae, urged Commonwealth states to boycott the meeting if held in Colombo, and said "[t]he Commonwealth is too important to allow its business to be disrupted by a single rogue member’s violation of the association’s beliefs and values."
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Wild elephants deployed by Colombo's forest department claim lives of Tamils in Batticaloa

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 09 April 2013, 09:12 GMT]
Sri Lankan Forest Department, in recent weeks, has brought in a number of wild elephants from Sinhala areas into the jungles adjacent to Koa'ra'laip-pattu South Division of the Batticaloa district, where uprooted Tamil people have resettled after the end of war. The Divisional Secretary of Koa'ra'laippattu South, Mr Thanabalasundaram, when contacted by reporters in Batticaloa, admitted that two Tamil civilians have been killed within the last 30 days by the wild elephants that have gone amok on the villagers and their properties. The lives and the livelihood of 3,000 Tamil villagers are threatened by the presence of more than 50 wild elephants of the Sinhala forest department.
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Explosion claims life of de-mining worker in Mukamaalai

[TamilNet, Monday, 08 April 2013, 14:09 GMT]
A Halo Trust worker lost his life in a landmine explosion Monday morning, while he was engaged in de-mining at Mukamaalai, a former Forward Defence Line (FDL). The tragic incident, comes at a time when the occupying Colombo is bent on expelling all independent de-mining NGOs and the SL military is poised to take control of even the last-phase quality assurance being carried out by the UN agencies.
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Political interference in judicial transfers alarms Sri Lanka bar

[TamilNet, Sunday, 07 April 2013, 15:39 GMT]
The Executive Committee of the Bar Association of Sri Lanka (BASL), still maintaining some level of independence, disturbed by the sudden transfer of 44 district court judges and magistrates in the middle of their current tenure, as directed by Rajapakse lackey and new Supreme Court chief justice Mohan Pieris, has appointed a committee to look into the transfers, Colombo media reported. Contrary to the usual practice of annual transfers taking place at the beginning of the year, the Mohan Pieris directed transfers have been given four months into the year, unsettling the family lives of judges and magistrate, BASL further charged, according to the Sunday Times.
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Colombo, Shuler, new US lobby firm, cozy alliance rumored

[TamilNet, Sunday, 07 April 2013, 00:02 GMT]
Colombo has inked a lobbying and government affairs contract with the US-based "The Majority Group," after the previous lobby firm, Patton Boggs, terminated its representation of Sri Lanka in early February, sources in Washington said. While the diplomatic performance of Jaliya Wickremesuriya, Sri Lanka's President's relative and the current Ambassador to Sri Lanka in Washington, has been lackluster, Wickremasuriya-mooted relationship with North Carolina Congressman, Heath Shuler, is rumored to have played a role in the selection of the lobby firm, even while the Congressman's nexus to the Majority group has raised questions on the "revolving door" ambitions of Shuler, political sources in Washington said.
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Sri Lanka is Sinhala to Colombo film industry, media and academics

[TamilNet, Saturday, 06 April 2013, 19:57 GMT]
Responding to the protest waged by the Actor’s Guild of the Tamil Nadu Film industry in Chennai against the genocide of Tamils in the island of Sri Lanka, a Colombo media Ceylon Today on Thursday came out with a feature written by a “special Correspondent,” titled “A friend turned foe.” The feature detailed the long and two-way connections between the film industries of Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka. The implied message, against the backdrop of ‘economic embrace’ contemplated in the corporate circles of India, is that ‘business should not be affected.’ Whether India’s economic embrace of the Sinhala State should take place over the annihilation of the nation of Eezham Tamils, and whether the Indian Establishment and corporatism are unable to conceive anything alternative, are the questions righteously raised by the protest coming from the Tamil artists, writes an academic in Jaffna.
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Indian housing aid programmed for exploitation by Colombo agents in East

[TamilNet, Thursday, 04 April 2013, 23:53 GMT]
Disregarding the repeated requests by the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) politicians in the Batticaloa district to include local community leaders such as the heads of the Rural Development Societies (RDS), representatives from women groups and trustees of temples in the committees to select the beneficiaries of the Indian housing scheme, the SL government has handed over the selection process in the Batticaloa district to its paramilitary and the political outfits of SL President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s ruling party, civil sources in the district say. Despite their rapport with New Delhi, the TNA has failed in making India to deliver the aid directly to the affected people without the exploitation of genocidal Colombo, the civil sources in the district further said.
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New Buddhist shrine built at Trinco Saiva sacred site

[TamilNet, Thursday, 04 April 2013, 22:47 GMT]
A Buddhist shrine has been built at the precincts of Kanniya Hot Wells a Saiva sacred site in a traditional Tamil village in Trincomalee district. A fifteen-acre land has been appropriated by the SL Government Agent Major General (retd.) Ranjith de Silva on the instruction of Colombo. The Buddhist shrine has a signboard giving the name of the place of worship as ‘Unuthiya Lin Rajamaha Viharaya’, meaning the ‘Royal Great Temple of the Hotwater Wells’. The term ‘Viharaya’ used in the board implies that a Buddhist Sangha (monastery) has been established there. The local Saiva myths associate the place with pre-Buddhist times of the King Ravana of the Ramayana epic. For centuries, the Hindu population of the region used to come to this site to perform rituals to the deceased and ancestors like the Hindus in India go to Gaya and Varanasi.
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China's vice minister of intelligence finds Jaffna a place to visit

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 03 April 2013, 23:41 GMT]
Following US, UK, Indian, Japanese, Australian and Canadian diplomats, a vice minister at China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) too finds Jaffna a ‘must to be visited’ place, political observers in Jaffna commented on the visit of the Chinese Vice Minister Zhou Qing, on Wednesday. The Chinese deputy minister's visit was marked by intense security arrangement to him by the occupying genocidal military of Sri Lanka. China's assistance to the Sinhala military in building permanent cantonments and camps in the country of Eezham Tamils is well known. The MSS is China's primary agency for internal and external intelligence.
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Relatives of detainees expecting post-Geneva release get no answer

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 02 April 2013, 23:35 GMT]
Following the recent UNHRC process in Geneva, hundreds of kith and kin of the missing people in the occupied country of Eezham Tamils have again started visiting the Sri Lankan military camps, the so-called human rights commission offices and the offices of the Tamil politicians to locate the details of their loved ones. Some reports that appeared in the Tamil press in recent days, citing information obtained in Geneva by the Colombo-based Committee for Investigation of Disappeared, provided a list of 35 names saying that a section of Tamil prisoners, whose whereabouts were hitherto unknown, were to be produced in the courts by the Sri Lankan authorities. However, none of the relatives of the 35 names leaked in the report have managed to locate details of their missed ones, human rights activists in Jaffna told TamilNet.
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Prof Gamlath passes away

[TamilNet, Monday, 01 April 2013, 21:57 GMT]
Veteran Professor of Sinhala, Dr Sucharitha Gamlath passed away at the age of 79 in Colombo on Saturday and the funeral took place on Monday. Prof Gamlath was righteously anti-Establishment throughout his career and for nearly 15 years, the governments in Colombo kept him unemployed, which he faced heroically without compromising on his principles and convictions. To the end he steadfastly stood for the Tamil right to self-determination in the island of Sri Lanka. He was the first Professor of Sinhala at the University of Jaffna, appointed in 1975 (then the Jaffna Campus of the University of Sri Lanka) and his penalisation by the JR Jayawardane government took place in 1980 while he was serving at the University of Jaffna. TamilNet pays tribute to the scholar of a rare genre and expresses condolences to bereaving family members, friends and comrades.
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Maa-eliya, Patti-eliya, Pul-eliya, Kala-eliya

[TamilNet, Monday, 01 April 2013, 06:26 GMT]
The big open space or plain
The open land to graze cattle
The open grassland
The open space serving as threshing floor

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TN resolution needs to be legally and politically binding: SP Udayakumar

[TamilNet, Saturday, 30 March 2013, 02:53 GMT]
Recognizing the significance of the resolution passed in Tamil Nadu state assembly recently calling for a UN referendum among the Eezham Tamils, TN grassroots activist SP Udayakumar emphasised that the resolution needs to be made politically and legally binding. “Tamil Nadu resolutions are only resolutions right now. We need to make them legally binding,” he said in a video interview to TamilNet from Idinthakarai. Likewise, speaking on the student protests in Tamil Nadu, Mr. Udayakumar, who is at the heart of the peaceful struggle against the nuclear reactor in Koodangku’lam, further said that it was too early for the students to give up the protests unless “the Tamil Nadu resolution is accepted by the Indian parliament and if the India government is willing to act on it”.
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SL military launches intelligence operations to monitor Muslim youth of Mannaar

[TamilNet, Friday, 29 March 2013, 13:43 GMT]
While the Sinhala Buddhist organizations, with alleged backing from certain sections of Colombo government, have stepped up attacks on places of worships of the Muslims in the South and a hate campaign against Halal meet is being whipped up, the Sri Lankan military intelligence operatives in Mannaar district have started to ‘observe’ Muslim youth under a military operation termed as ‘preventive measures’. The SL police sources in Mannaar said Muslim youth who might contemplate on armed resistance against the Sinhala extremist elements in South are being monitored in recent days, both day and night.
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SL Forest Department lets loose wild elephants on resettled Tamils in Ampaa'rai

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 26 March 2013, 12:28 GMT]
Wild elephants in large numbers are systematically driven into villages where Tamils predominantly live in the Ampaa'rai district by a section of Sinhalese connected to the Sri Lankan Forest Department, presumably to prevent the uprooted Eezham Tamils from returning and resettling in their places of origin, sources in Ampaa'rai said. The Colombo government that exploits the poverty status of these people, while not providing them with the basic amenities, sponsors Sinhala colonisation schemes that also include settlement of SL military men in the area. So far, after 2009, seven new Sri Lanka Army camps have been established in Ampaa'rai district.
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Queen to skip CHOGM - paper

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 26 March 2013, 11:34 GMT]
Quoting officials from the Commonwealth Secretariat, Sunday Guardian, an Indian English paper, said that the November scheduled Commonwealth Head of States Meeting (CHOGM) in Colombo will "most likely go ahead," several heads of government will boycott "in protest at Sri Lanka's human rights record," and that Queen Elizabeth, is "almost certain to skip the meeting". Former UK Foreign Secretaries Malcolm Rifkind and David Miliband had jointly called the Queen's scheduled attendance at the Colombo CHOGM "grotesque", a sentiment apparently shared by the David Cameron government, the paper said.
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Colombo's land appropriation to be accelerated in North

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 26 March 2013, 00:09 GMT]
Aiming to alienate lands from the people of North and East and to enable the colonial governors and SL government agents to abet an accelerated land appropriation, circumventing even the legal challenges posed by Tamil activists and NGOs, the Sri Lankan Minister of Lands and Land Development, Janaka Bandara Tennakoon, has set forth parameters for a land programme with the participation of the Sri Lankan military in the North this month. But, the projection given to the world during the Geneva session was that the SL State was establishing two offices in Jaffna and Ki'linochchi, to hand over thousands of acres of lands back to civilians. When questioned where these lands are situated and under which GS areas they come in, the minister or the military commander had no specific answer to provide, news sources in Ki'linochchi and Jaffna said.
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