UNHRC resolution has failed to exert pressure on Colombo: FirstPost

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 06 November 2012, 17:33 GMT]
“If anybody thought Sri Lanka would mend its ways after the United Nations Human Rights Council resolution, they are mistaken,” writes G Pramod Kumar, a senior editor of Indian news portal FirstPost.com on Monday. In a story titled ‘Impeachment of Sri Lankan chief justice is India’s foreign policy failure’, Mr Pramod Kumar notes that “while the international community continues to put pressure on the country to improve its human rights standards and fix accountability for its alleged war crimes, it has become more defiant.”
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Sri Lanka rejects 100 recommendations at UPR

[TamilNet, Monday, 05 November 2012, 23:37 GMT]
A hundred recommendations that came out in the submissions of the member states of the United Nations at the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) on Sri Lanka have not enjoyed the support of Sri Lanka, reveal a draft document by the UPR working committee on Monday. The report also identified 110 recommendations as enjoying the support of Sri Lanka. All conclusions and/or recommendations contained in the present report reflect the position of the submitting State(s) and/or the State under review. They should not be construed as endorsed by the Working Group as a whole, said the draft report. At its 18th meeting held on Monday, the Working Group adopted the report on Sri Lanka India, Benin and Spain had been selected by the UN Human Rights Council as rapporteurs (troika) to facilitate the review of Sri Lanka.
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ICE justice means rewarding people connected to genocidal war

[TamilNet, Monday, 05 November 2012, 14:33 GMT]
Rajapaksa regime this week has approved new diplomatic appointments to generals conducted the genocidal war in the island. Conspicuously, they will be representing the regime in a new set of Establishments. People are usually named for such assignments not without prior consent by the concerned countries. Sri Lanka’s Major Generals, Shavendra Silva, Jagath Alwis and Kamal Gunaratne are named to go as Deputy Ambassadors respectively to South Africa, Israel and Brazil, media reports from Colombo said. Earlier the UN, some Western countries, Japan and Australia have received war-crimes-accused SL generals as diplomats.
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British historian questions ‘parliamentary freedom’ in Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia

[TamilNet, Sunday, 04 November 2012, 15:15 GMT]
Reputed British Marxist scholar specialised in intellectual history, Perry Anderson, interviewed by Indian magazine Outlook, opined that as regards ‘parliamentary freedom’, Jamaica and Mauritius fared better than Sri Lanka, India and Malaysia, citing respectively, disenfranchisement of Tamils, Kashmiris, and the lack of freedom during polls. He was responding to columnist Praful Bidwai who asked whether Indian democracy was a ‘unique achievement’, better than SL where “a state of war and emergency has prevailed for decades, with effective disenfranchisement of the Tamils” and Malaysia that has a “corrupt Lebanese-style ethnic power-sharing system”. Prof. Anderson’s observations were further elucidated by an Indian academic researcher writing to TamilNet that the disenfranchisement of the Eezham Tamils is a structural necessity of genocidal and unitary Sri Lanka.
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Dublin tribunal takes up genocide investigation

[TamilNet, Saturday, 03 November 2012, 01:22 GMT]
“In April 2013, a panel of international experts will be convened as Judges of the 'Permanent People's Tribunal' to examine reports submitted by many specialised working groups on the accusation of the crime of Genocide against the Government of Sri Lanka and on the accusations against various international actors who had supported and prepared the conditions for the Sri Lankan Government to implement this alleged crime,” said a joint statement issued by the 'Permanent People's Tribunal' (PPT) based in Rome on Friday. The move is supported organisationally by the 'Irish Forum for Peace in Sri Lanka' (IFPSL) based in Dublin and the International Human Rights Association based in Bremen (IMRV). Dublin Tribunal was the first independent international undertaking that recognised the need to look into the case of genocide in the island as early as in January 2010.
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ICE rewards Solheim with international position to lead development facilitation

[TamilNet, Saturday, 03 November 2012, 00:25 GMT]
The failed Norwegian peace facilitator Erik Solheim, who was recently removed from his ministerial portfolio by his party in Norway, has been rewarded by the International Community of Establishments (ICE) with an international position to lead the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation of Economic Corporation and Development (OECD), run by a group of leading developed countries in setting the agenda of development in developing countries.
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‘Independent civil society activism best tribute to Thamilchelvan’: Tamil Nadu writer

[TamilNet, Friday, 02 November 2012, 23:20 GMT]
Arguing that Sri Lanka’s genocidal war on the Eezham Tamils and the protracted genocide post-2009 was possible only due to the system of global injustice, Tamil Nadu based writer, poet and civil society activist Meena Kandasamy urged the Eezham Tamils in the island, the people of Tamil Nadu, the Tamil diaspora and other solidarity groups to form a ‘global civil society’ so as to politically and ideologically counter the designs of the establishments, in a commentary sent to TamilNet. Writing on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the assassination of S.P. Thamilchelvan, Ms. Kandasamy opines that such activism would be the best tribute to the legacy of the late political leader of the de-facto state of Tamil Eelam.
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Sri Lanka demands ‘time and space’ to complete genocide

[TamilNet, Friday, 02 November 2012, 16:53 GMT]
“What we ask our friends in the international community is to acknowledge the progress that has been made and at the same time give us the time and space to work towards further progress,” said Rajapaksa regime’s minister Mahinda Samarasinghe in his concluding remarks at the UPR session in Geneva on Thursday. The progress that has been made by Colombo in militarisation, colonisation, genocide, structural genocide and annihilation of the identity of the nation of Eezham Tamils in the island is explicit in the last few years. The regime’s audacity in asking for more time and space to complete the process stems from the continued failure of the International Community of Establishments (ICE) in addressing the issue as one that of genocide and national question, writes TamilNet political commentator in Colombo.
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Colombo leases Tamil islet in Puththa’lam for one billion to Canadian affiliate

[TamilNet, Friday, 02 November 2012, 09:53 GMT]
An islet of Eezham Tamils, called Uchchi-Munai (meaning the top point) off the Katpiddi Peninsula in the Puththa’lam district, has been leased to Sapphire Bay Resorts (Pvt) Ltd for 99-years by Colombo. The genocidal regime in Colombo will get 1070 million rupees as upfront payment from the transaction of the 450-acres islet. The leaseholder, started operating in the island of Sri Lanka only since 2010, is an affiliate of a Canadian Development Group, media reports said.
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Aarachchi-kattuwa, Udaiyaar-kaddu

[TamilNet, Friday, 02 November 2012, 03:47 GMT]
The dam/ tank of the village official

The dam/ tank of the landlord or village chieftain
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Sinhala academic condemns ICE’s manipulations of Eezham Tamils at Italy conference

[TamilNet, Friday, 02 November 2012, 01:39 GMT]
“Today there is a psychological and political warfare waged against the Tamil Diaspora not only to forget the past but also to abhor the whole project of a Tamil state. Domination under the Sinhala dominated unitary state has been justified as a rational and realistic choice,” Sinhala academic Dr. Jude Lal Fernando said at a conference held in Lecce, Italy last Friday. Criticizing the West for tilting the parity of status against the LTTE, he added that “what has been committed is genocide with full international endorsement. It is approved simply to protect the unitary state of the Sinhalese.” The conference titled “We demand our land” was also addressed by TNPF leaders Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam and S. Kajendran, besides Italian EU politician Adriana Poli Bortone, and human rights activist Klodiana Cuka and lawyer Italo Porcaro.
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Rajapakse depends on U.S. to defend War Crimes charges

[TamilNet, Friday, 02 November 2012, 00:48 GMT]
Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapakse filed his reply brief at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Thurdsay in response to the opening brief filed by the three Tamil Plaintiffs-Appellants in the case, Kasippillai Manoharan versus Percy Mahendra Rajpakse, attorney for the appellants Bruce Fein said. "Rajapakse attorneys again appear to depend on the Department of Justice of the United States to reassert the "suggestion of immunity" and for the Appeals judges accept, as did the trial court, to defend Rajapakse on the charges of war-crimes," legal sources in Washington said.
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Kurds’ protests in Turkey intensify in solidarity with demands of hunger-strikers

[TamilNet, Thursday, 01 November 2012, 03:48 GMT]
While more than 650 Kurdish political prisoners in Turkey’s prison have been on a hunger-strike more than 6 weeks, thousands of Kurds in Turkey have taken to the streets in solidarity with the incarcerated protestors, resulting in clashes with the Turkish police in many places. The worst clashes were at Diyarbakir prison, in south-eastern Turkey, but they also took place in Istanbul, the BBC reported on Tuesday. The hunger-strikers, who have been on a fast since September 12, have been demanding an end to the solitary confinement of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan as well as the right to use the Kurdish language in Turkey’s legal and educational systems.
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ICE orchestrates once again to deviate from crux of the matter

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 31 October 2012, 10:29 GMT]
Following deliberations by Norway’s Erik Solheim, International Crisis Group’s Alan Keenan and the UNSG panel member Yasmin Sooka at Frances Harrison’s book launch in London earlier this month, the Emeritus President of the ICG and former foreign minister of Australia, Gareth Evans on Friday was harping on war crimes of both sides, accountability of the remaining side and post-mortem on the UN, but omitting the ultimate culprits and deviating from the crux of the matter– the genocide and the national question in the island. He is now advisor to International Crimes Evidence Project, a recently established outfit in Australia. While Dr. Radha D’Souza exposes the deviatory tactics of such orchestrations of International Community of Establishments (ICE), Tamils have to think of alternative international mobilisation of opinion.
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Tamil went to Oman 20 centuries ago

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 30 October 2012, 07:49 GMT]
A potsherd inscription in Tamil language and in Tamil-Brahmi script, dateable to first century CE, has been found in the remains of the ancient city of Sumhuram in Oman. The potsherd with inscription, found in 2006 in the excavations at Khor Rori area in Oman by an archaeological team of The Italian Mission to Oman (IMTO), was deciphered when the piece came for a pottery exhibition in Kerala in September this year, The Hindu reported on Sunday. In earlier instances, Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions dateable to the dawn of the Common Era had been found in archaeological sites ranging from Mediterranean Sea coast of Egypt in the west to Thailand and Vietnam in the east.
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North-East experience heavy rains with strong winds

[TamilNet, Monday, 29 October 2012, 13:46 GMT]
Normalcy has been completely disturbed in North-East following heavy rains with strong winds since Sunday. 187 mm rain fall was recorded in Trincomalee and 41.2 mm in Jaffna and Batticaloa for the last twenty four hours at 8:30 a.m. Monday, according to SL Department of Meteorology. The depression in the Bay of Bengal was centered about 250 km east of Mullaithivu coast at 02.00 a.m. on Monday. It is likely to move in westward direction and deepen in to a deep depression.
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Colombo surveys commanding coast of Gulf of Mannaar for appropriation

[TamilNet, Monday, 29 October 2012, 06:36 GMT]
The genocidal state in Colombo has started surveying a strategically located coastal strip along the Gulf of Mannaar in the occupied country of Eezham Tamils, for appropriation initially in the guise of mineral cum economic exploitation by external firms, but ultimately for the genocidal-military purposes of sealing off Eezham Tamils, wedging them from Tamil Nadu at the closest contact points and to effectively check the Indian coast in any eventualities in the future. The current moves in the Mannaar coast follows the appropriation of the northern coast of the Jaffna Peninsula for the SL military and for the activities of a Chinese firm.
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SL military, paramilitary embark on ‘legal intimidation’ against Tamil media

[TamilNet, Sunday, 28 October 2012, 15:28 GMT]
Sri Lanka's military establishment and EPDP paramilitary opt for new ways in recent times to suppress media critical of the SL defence ministry and its paramilitary operatives. Sri Lanka's military commander Lieutenant General Jagath Jayasuriya has reportedly filed a defamation case against Jaffna-based Uthayan daily and SL minister Douglas Devananda, who is also the leader of EPDP paramilitary, has filed a similar case in the courts in Jaffna demanding a huge sum of compensation against a WikiLeaks-based story filed by the paper, media sources in Jaffna told TamilNet. Sri Lankan Defence Ministry, led by SL presidential sibling Gotabhaya Rajapaksa has found ‘legal operations’ more effective than ‘white van operations’ in silencing critical media, journalists in Colombo said adding that the role of ‘registered’ media in the island has now come to almost an effective end.
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Church vandalized in Trincomalee, mosque burnt in Anuradapura

[TamilNet, Saturday, 27 October 2012, 12:13 GMT]
Unidentified gangs, believed to be Sinhala extremists, have destroyed a statue at a Catholic church located at Paazhaiyoottu in the Trincomalee Divisional Secretariat division Friday night. In the meantime, Thakka Mosque has been put on fire Saturday early morning around 2:30 a.m. on Hajji festival day at Sinha Hanuwa in Malwathu Oya at Anuradhapura district, news sources in Trincomalee said.
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Colombo’s genocide-stabilizing approach to diaspora patronized in London

[TamilNet, Saturday, 27 October 2012, 04:23 GMT]
A meeting of the diaspora with a group of cross-party parliamentarians of the genocidal regime in Colombo is hosted in London on Saturday to discuss the recommendations the group has presented to the Colombo government and political parties after its earlier meeting with the diaspora in London in last December. The report lamenting lack of highlight on the positive actions of the Colombo regime, recommends for a diaspora ministry or department in Colombo. The report confines preservation of Tamil identity to local administration mechanism and demilitarisation only to the level of allowing day-to-day activity of Tamil civilians. The recommendations were envisaging foreign investments besides urging implementation of the LLRC recommendations.
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