US comments on LLRC assist Sri Lanka deflect international pressure over mass atrocities

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 13 September 2011, 23:10 GMT]
The United States and other governments must move without further delay towards an independent international investigation into mass atrocities committed during the Sri Lankan civil war, and desist from lending credibility to Sri Lanka’s sham domestic investigation, Tamils Against Genocide (TAG) said in a statement Tuesday. Pointing out that leading international human rights organisations have comprehensively discredited Sri Lanka’s government-appointed Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Committee (LLRC), TAG said comments by US officials on expectations of the LLRC’s report merely contributed to Colombo’s “duplicitous effort to deflect international scrutiny [of mass atrocities].”
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EPDP protest blocks Blake meet with Jaffna civil society, students

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 13 September 2011, 11:00 GMT]
The visiting US Assistant Secretary of State, Robert O Blake, had to cancel his appointment with civil society representatives, including student representatives of the University of Jaffna on Tuesday afternoon as EPDP paramilitary cum political party, aligned with Rajapaksa regime in Colombo, organized a protest outside the American Corner, situated on 4th cross street in Jaffna, sources in Jaffna said. Hundreds of people were brought from EPDP-controlled islets off Jaffna with placards supporting Mahinda Rajapaksa and staged the protest outside the American Corner.
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Sri Lanka's war crimes, discussion in UN rights session imminent

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 13 September 2011, 01:49 GMT]
While Colombo appeared to be spending major diplomatic effort to prevent UN expert panel war crimes report on Sri Lanka reaching the 18th session of the UN's Human Rights Council for discussions, reports from Geneva indicate imminent submission of the Report by UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to the Human Rights Council, "a move that could lead to an international investigation of the conflict," VoA report said Monday.
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Blake's bona fides to deliver Tamil justice questioned

[TamilNet, Monday, 12 September 2011, 09:12 GMT]
Robert Blake, U.S. assistant secretary of State for South Asia, and former Ambassador to Sri Lanka and India, is widely known to be the architect of the U.S. policy on Sri Lanka which has resulted in Sri Lanka's massacre at Mu'l'livaaykkaal where more than 40,000 Tamil civilians were killed. Key activists in the Tamil diaspora are increasingly convinced that Tamils are unlikely to obtain justice and accountability under Blake's tenure where Blake is forced to face challenges to provide sustenance to his Sri Lanka policy - a policy which requires accommodating Rajapakse rule amid soaring rights violations, continuing structural genocide of Tamils and an authoritarian governance where war victims are further subjected to State sanctioned military violence.
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HSZ people less likely to get their lands back

[TamilNet, Sunday, 11 September 2011, 11:08 GMT]
With the so-called lifting of emergency, a rosy picture was painted by some Colombo-based ‘peace’ groups and lawyers that the SL government cannot keep the High Security Zones anymore. But the SL government now plans to permanently ‘acquire’ private lands where the HSZs are now located. According to SL Justice minister Rauff Hakeem, if there is any need to retain HSZs in some areas, then the government would acquire the land ‘legally’ and the affected people will be relocated, Sunday Times reported.
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Haiti lawyers question impunity of SL Army rapists

[TamilNet, Sunday, 11 September 2011, 11:03 GMT]
The rape mania of Sri Lanka’s almost exclusive Sinhala military is allowed to go with impunity in the island and totally denied by a genocidal government. But the exposure comes from Haiti where the genocidal SL military went for UN ‘peace keeping’. According to officials in Haiti, the SL soldiers accused of sex crimes had systematically raped women and children, some as young as 7-years-old, Sunday Leader reported citing Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network. Recently, while reporting on the rape of a 10-year-old girl in the south of the island by a former SL Air Force officer, Colombo media said that the mania in the SL military is a result of the free licence given to them over the years to commit sex crimes against Tamils.
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Jaffna Governor interferes, disrupts administrative authority of local councils

[TamilNet, Saturday, 10 September 2011, 02:13 GMT]
Civil society sources in Jaffna accused colonial governor of Northern Province, Maj. Gen. Chandrasri, of interfering in the administrative affairs of the recently democratically elected local councils and placing barriers to smooth governance in Jaffna. During a meeting held few weeks, the Governor has allegedly ordered Government officers to follow orders given only by the Governor, and to ignore directives from the elected officials of local councils, civil sources said.
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Multilingualism, multiculturalism and Sinhala academia

[TamilNet, Saturday, 10 September 2011, 00:31 GMT]
‘Celebrating multilingualism’ in Sri Lanka, and delivering a keynote address in a language award ceremony in Colombo in July, Professor of Sinhala K.N.O. Dharmadasa said that Tamil came to be introduced into the island at a later time, especially after the Polonnaruva period (c. 13th century AD). According to the Mahavamsa myth he was relying upon, culture of multilingualism in the island began when “a group of settlers led by Prince Vijaya, who would have been speaking a dialect which linguists call Prakrit, came and settled down in the northern plains.” Meanwhile, delivering a lecture on Buddhism at the UN General Assembly in May and using it for campaigning Sri Lanka’s ‘reconciliation,’ another Sri Lankan Prof. Sudharshan Seneviratne said, arrival of Buddhism and other north Indian social ideologies heralded the beginnings of civilization in the island.
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Champoor power plant, an ominous threat to public health

[TamilNet, Friday, 09 September 2011, 11:20 GMT]
The signing of the agreement in Colombo Tuesday to build a 500MW coal power plant in the pristine surroundings of Koddiyaar Bay in Trincomalee District, by India and Sri Lanka marks the development of an environmentally destructive project in the east, civil society sources in the east said. A coal power plant of the magnitude planned for Champoor could produce 3,700,0000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, which is a main cause of global warming, will present great danger to the future generations of the Eezham Tamils of the Koddiyaarpuram region, civil sources in the east said.
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Using ‘grease devils’ Colombo sets next stage of militarisation

[TamilNet, Thursday, 08 September 2011, 06:36 GMT]
Citing ‘grease devils,’ Sri Lanka occupying the country of Eezham Tamils sets the next stage of its militarisation by creating a ‘civil’ paramilitary that will be formally led by SL minister Mr Douglas Devananda, but actually ‘steered’ by the commander of the occupying forces, Maj. Gen. Hathurusinghe and the colonial governor Maj. Gen. Chandrasri. Openly accusing SL government and SL military for staging ‘grease devil’ attacks on Tamils and Muslims, the demonstrating Jaffna University students on Tuesday called upon the attention of the International Community. But the kind of International Community we see sitting on the world today will only be happy to receive more military lessons from Gotabhaya and ‘Asian Nobel’ laureate Hathurusinghe on how to use devil strategy for militarisation, commented a civil rights activist in Jaffna.
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India needs foundational policy change if past is catalogue of failures

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 07 September 2011, 05:46 GMT]
“The need of the hour is for India to undertake a thorough reappraisal of its Sri Lanka policy and make the necessary changes so that it is in consonance with the traditions of Nehru-Indira Gandhi years. The international community will be watching how India will react to the situation in the UN Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly when the matter [Sri Lanka’s war crimes] comes up for discussion, writes V. Suryanarayan and Ashik Bonofer in Tuesday’s paper of SAAG. The paper catalogues Nehru-Indira Gandhi era interventions in protecting Tamils from pogroms, criticises India’s failure in protecting Tamil civilians in 2009 and argues for a policy change. Tamil politicians commented that the change should be foundational if piecemeal interventions proved a catalogue of failures and the writers treating a nation, as “Tamil minority groups in Sri Lanka” won’t help such a change.
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No foreign affairs without consulting states: India’s new foreign secretary

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 06 September 2011, 17:44 GMT]
“In our federal system, nothing is done and nothing will be done without the consultation of the State government,” India’s new Foreign Secretary Ranjan Mathai was cited saying on the issue of India and Bangladesh sharing the waters of Teesta River. No agreement on sharing the waters could be reached without West Bengal's consent, the Foreign Secretary told media in New Delhi on Monday. People of Tamil Nadu should take a special note of the consistent disparity in New Delhi’s treatment between the issues of Bengalis and Tamils. Demanded by West Bengal, India liberated Bangladesh, but acting completely opposite to the wishes of the people of Tamil Nadu, India contributed to genocide of Eezham Tamils. New Delhi has not acted on any of the resolutions of the State of Tamil Nadu, political circles in Tamil Nadu point out.
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Genocide in Sri Lanka targets Tamil women, affects fertility: TNA MP

[TamilNet, Monday, 05 September 2011, 06:17 GMT]
While talking on the past and on-going genocide of Eezham Tamils in the island of Sri Lanka, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) parliamentarian for Vanni, S. Sritharan on Sunday said in a meeting in London that Tamil women are particularly targeted now and the fertility of Tamils is systematically jeopardized. He cited the examples of ‘grease devil’ attacks on women and the plight of young widows in child-producing age group. Eezham Tamils are increasingly convinced today that a united Sri Lanka would not work, he said. Later, when a question was asked why the TNA had not raised the issues of genocide and right to self-determination in the recent meet convened by a Congress MP at New Delhi, the deputy leader of TNA Maavai Senadhiraja answered that their unawareness of the agenda of the organizers and the desire not to exhibit disunity among the invited groups had been the reasons.
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Colombo continues to ignore initial relief assistance to Paduvaankarai families

[TamilNet, Sunday, 04 September 2011, 22:29 GMT]
Amidst claim by the Sri Lankan government that it has been implementing ‘development’ projects in war and flood affected areas in the Batticaloa district, civil society sources complain that even after representations were made by elected representatives in SL parliament, initial relief assistances meant for families affected by war and floods are yet to come. 29,827 families displaced by the war and resettled four years ago have not been paid their first relief financial assistance and other basic facilities, according to representations made by the Batticaloa district parliamentarians.
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SL military uses ‘media persons’ to film protesters in Batticaloa

[TamilNet, Sunday, 04 September 2011, 21:34 GMT]
Two Tamil-speaking Muslim media persons in Batticaloa, one in the position of district media coordinator and the other a ‘freelance journalist’, have been busy during the past weeks in Batticaloa taking video and photos of civilians protesting against SL military operated ‘grease-devils’. Based on their video recordings, the SL intelligence personnel operating from the SLA camps in Batticaloa, identify the protesters from different villages and hand them over to the so-called Terrorist Investigation Department officers who had come from Colombo to Batticaloa.
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Sri Lankan CID interrogates former LTTE members in Batticaloa

[TamilNet, Sunday, 04 September 2011, 21:13 GMT]
A team of Criminal Investigation Unit of the SL Police Terrorist Division arrived in Batticaloa from Colombo Friday and interrogated several former cadres of the LTTE who worked for the movement ten to fifteen years ago. The Sri Lankan CID officers collected information about the former Tiger members taking their fingerprints and photographing them. The investigators in SL Police uniform took the former LTTE members to the Sri Lanka Army camp in Ka'luvaangchikkudi in CTB buses for interrogation, fingerprinting and photographing. At the army camp, one officer was in police uniform and others were in civil but all claimed that they were from the CID in Colombo. In the meantime, the Officer-in-Charge of the Ka'luvaagnchik-kudi Police told media that he was not aware of such interrogation of former LTTE members.
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SL Army in Batticaloa singles out women for collection of information

[TamilNet, Sunday, 04 September 2011, 16:49 GMT]
The SL Army occupying Ka’luvaagnchikkudi in Batticaloa collects information of only women in the village and this has evoked fear in the village against the backdrop of SL Army-staged ‘grease devil’ attacks on women. Tamil National Alliance parliamentarian for Batticaloa district, Mr P Selvarasa, called upon the Colombo government to immediately stop the deployment of SL military in the collection of information on women in the divisions of the Batticaloa district. Ironically, the occupying military’s information drive started after the withdrawal of the emergency regulations.
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Sri Lanka conspires for a Sinhala division in Mullaiththeevu district

[TamilNet, Saturday, 03 September 2011, 02:22 GMT]
Occupying Sri Lanka’s Colonial Governor in the North Maj. Gen. Chandrasri and presidential sibling Basil Rajapaksa are all set to create a new Sinhala division in the Ma’nal Aa’ru part of the Mullaiththeevu district that will be delinking the contiguity of Northern and Eastern Provinces. India that has committed to the integration of the northern and eastern provinces but now collaborates with Colombo in the genocide and structural genocide of Eezham Tamils is particularly answerable to the situation, demand Tamil politicians in the island. Last week, while talking to diaspora Tamil groups, the US Asst Secretary of State feigned ignorance on the intense Sinhala colonisation that is taking place in the country of Eezham Tamils.
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Indian railway aid helps Colombo to wedge North and East

[TamilNet, Saturday, 03 September 2011, 00:03 GMT]
Sri Lanka occupying the country of Eezham Tamils proposes to lay a railway link between Mannaar and Trincomelee through Medawaachchiya in the Sinhala territory of North Central Province, while the shortest link between the two cities is through Vavuniyaa in the north. As the railway line between Thalai Mannaar and Medawaachchiya has been restored with Indian assistance, Colombo now plans to extend it to Trincomalee through the North Central Province. The link of Thalai Mannaar in the Palk Bay and Trincomalee in the Indian Ocean is strategically important to Indian interests as Trincomalee could be directly linked through land and a short ferry with the Indian railway network coming up to Raameaswaram. But the link planned through Sinhala territory aims to structurally wedge the Tamil country and Sinhalicise the Tamil port cities.
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