Former LTTE member reported missing in Colombo

[TamilNet, Friday, 15 July 2011, 19:24 GMT]
A former LTTE member, who was detained by the Sri Lanka Army for more than one year after the Vanni war and released 9 months ago, has been reported missing in Colombo since 08 July. The missing person, 36-year-old Nanthakumar Navaratnaraja from Koddadi in Jaffna, had come to Colombo to travel abroad. On July 08, he went out from the hotel where he was staying at around 4:30 p.m. and has since been reported missing, his father said in the complaint to the police and human rights groups.
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Genuine elections not possible in Jaffna: TNA

[TamilNet, Thursday, 14 July 2011, 15:15 GMT]
Thoroughly intimidated and prevented from making their campaign for the civic elections scheduled for next week, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) leaders on Tuesday said that genuine elections are not possible under the current circumstances. Colombo is resolved to fake the elections by hook or by crook and ‘prove’ to the outside world that it is having ‘democratic’ support of the Tamils, the TNA leaders said. Meanwhile, Sinhala officers brought into the administration of Northern Provincial Council by the SL colonial governor, Chandrasri, are now in command, making arbitrary orders and the Tamil officers have to be silent and subservient, fearing transfer if resist, Tamil civil service circles said. They are disappointed that the TNA is not highlighting their predicament at ‘proper places’.
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SL government servants in Jaffna complain political exploitation

[TamilNet, Thursday, 14 July 2011, 12:59 GMT]
Tamil public servants working under Rajapaksa Administration occupying the Tamil country, now openly complain that they are exploited in Colombo’s electioneering. The occupying government forces them to do election campaign, the civil officers accuse. Colombo particularly pressurises them to claim the development work undertaken by the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and the UN Agencies, as those of the achievements of the Rajapaksa government, the civil officers said. In this regard, they are forced to use public funds to send ads to local newspapers, they further said. Local newspapers said that everyday they receive around 10 such ads, but many of the newspapers shun publishing the ads fearing public backlash.
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SL police refuses permission to TNA to hold election meetings

[TamilNet, Thursday, 14 July 2011, 11:44 GMT]
Sri Lanka police in Jaffna refuses permission to civic election candidates of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) to conduct public meetings. Instead, the ‘advise’ the candidates to engage in door-to-door campaign. But in the meantime, presidential sibling Basil Rajapaksa and a team of 13 SL ministers are camping in Jaffna to conduct Colombo’s campaign in various ways, misusing SL government’s administration and resources, complain the TNA candidates. SL president Mahinda Rajapaksa is also expected in Jaffna to campaign for the civic elections in the guise of opening a school building and laying foundation stones for certain projects.
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Colombo plotting to reduce Tamil voters’ strength in North, East

[TamilNet, Thursday, 14 July 2011, 11:01 GMT]
Sri Lanka government has been executing a plot to reduce the voting strength of Tamil people in the north and east province by involving village level state officers who are designated as Grama Niladhari (GN), residents in the East say. Civil sources claimed that Colombo authorities have directed village level officers not to issue receipts to chief occupants when they collect application forms enrolling them as voters for the 2011 electoral register.
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USA, Sri Lanka co-host Security Conference in Colombo

[TamilNet, Thursday, 14 July 2011, 07:15 GMT]
The US Pacific Command (PACOM) and United States Center for Civil Military Relations (CCMR) conduct South Asia Maritime Conference in collaboration with genocidal Sri Lanka at Hotel Galadari in Colombo this week, from Monday to Friday. The US Ambassador in Colombo, Patricia A. Butenis and SL Navy Commander Somathilake Dissanayake were at the inaugural session on Monday. The conference on maritime security of South Asia is attended by Bangladesh, Maldives, Sri Lanka, Australia and the USA.
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14-year-old boy taken for anti-UN demonstration reported missing

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 13 July 2011, 22:45 GMT]
A 14-year-old student of Yarltan College in Kaarainakar, Jaffna, Thiruchelvan Kajeethan, who was enticed by the EPDP and taken to Colombo to participate in the anti-UN panel report demonstration that took place on May Day, is so far missing. The parents of the grade-6 student, disappointed in getting a reply from the EPDP have approached TNA parliamentarians in Jaffna to find out what had happened to the boy. In recent times, there are many instances of school children, below the age of sixteen, missing in the country of Eezham Tamils.
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Jayalalithaa should play the role like Indira Gandhi on Bangladesh

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 12 July 2011, 16:12 GMT]
Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Ms. Jayalalithaa should make it a mission to campaign for the independence of Eezham Tamils in the other states of India and elsewhere. For two years before the independence of Bangladesh Mrs Indira Gandhi quietly undertook a diplomatic campaign for it all over the world. Now there is no one except Ms. Jayalalithaa who is bestowed with the mantle to play such a role for the independence of Eezham Tamils.
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‘Flying Fox’ draws flak at home after Sri Lanka visit

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 12 July 2011, 08:10 GMT]
British Defence Secretary Liam Fox’s visit to Sri Lanka over the weekend has drawn the critical attention of the press back home. The Sun and the Daily Mail, two of Britain’s leading tabloid papers carried similar articles Tuesday questioning Dr. Fox’s penchant for foreign visits, and cited military brass as dubbing him the ‘the Flying Fox’, while The Times newspaper reported on criticisms by human rights and Tamil groups that his visit to Colombo undermined international efforts to censure the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa over war crimes in the final months of the island’s war in 2009.
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Colombo government interferes with district development: TNA MP

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 12 July 2011, 07:41 GMT]
The Colombo government has introduced a subtle method to delay the development at district level by instructing all parliamentarians to submit their allocation under the district decentralized budget (DCB) to the SL Ministry of Economic Development for approval instead of forwarding it to district secretariats. Normally all district parliamentarians submit their allocations under the DCB to district secretariats and approved by District Development Committee (DDC). Batticaloa district Tamil National Alliance (TNA) parliamentarian Mr.P.Ariyanethran has said that the deviation from several decades’ old practice has been adopted by the central authorities as a step to delay the district level development at a time all clamour for more devolution of powers at district level.
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Threats escalate on TNA candidates ahead of civic elections in North

[TamilNet, Monday, 11 July 2011, 04:54 GMT]
Following the Sri Lanka Army attack on Tamil National Alliance (TNA) meeting last month and the systematic harassment on building owners not to provide their halls to TNA for campaign meetings, the residences of various candidates of the TNA, including the former parliamentarian M.K. Sivajilingam, have been targeted by SLA-operated squads that are engaged in threatening the candidates. In the early hours of Saturday, a gang that came in two white-coloured Hiace vehicles threw dirt baskets at the residence of Mr. Sivajilingam. On the same day, the residence of Mr. Subramaniyam, another candidate of the TNA in Maanippaay constituency in Jaffna, came under attack by an alleged SLA operated squad. Earlier, similar acts of intimidation were reported in Cha'ndilippaay in Jaffna. In the meantime, the residences of various TNA candidates have been stoned in Thenmaraardchi.
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UK Defence Minister accuses Labour regime for Sri Lanka’s war

[TamilNet, Sunday, 10 July 2011, 13:14 GMT]
The visiting British Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox, while delivering the Lakshman Kadirgamar Memorial Lecture in Colombo on Saturday, accused the previous Labour government of UK for neglecting a political process he had worked out in 1997 and thus contributing to war in the island. “The incoming Labour government showed little interest in Sri Lanka or in taking forward the political process we had begun. The agreement subsequently withered on the vine, to my very great sadness, and the cycle of violence brought more misery, more violence and more death,” he said. Dr. Fox, viewed as one of the ‘friends’ the Rajapaksa regime is harping on, pinned his hopes now on the LLRC report expected in November and made only a passing remark on the need of an inclusive political solution.
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Sri Lanka holds Briton over Channel 4 documentary, as Fox meets Rajapaksa

[TamilNet, Saturday, 09 July 2011, 13:48 GMT]
Sri Lanka has arrested a Briton for allegedly helping Channel 4 television produce a documentary accusing Sri Lanka’s military of mass killings of civilians in the final months of the island’s war. Kandanam Jegadishwaram was arrested on Monday and a Colombo magistrate agreed Friday police can hold Kandanam Jegadishwaram for a month, press reports said Saturday. The British High Commission in Colombo told AFP it had no immediate information on the case. The arrest comes as British Defence Secretary visited Sri Lanka and met with President Mahinda Rajapakasa.
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Sampanthan proposes SL minister dismisses

[TamilNet, Saturday, 09 July 2011, 02:55 GMT]
Tamil National Alliance (TNA) leader R. Sampanthan, moving an adjournment motion in Sri Lanka’s parliament Thursday and speaking on it said that his objective was “to develop a just settlement within an undivided Sri Lanka,” adding that this approach has been widely endorsed by the international community, notably India. The co-chairs have clearly stated and have clearly ruled out any form of division of this country, he further said. On the same day in the SL parliament, SL minister Nimal Sripala de Silva said that his government would not offer a federal solution to Tamils. Meanwhile, Sri Lanka occupying the Tamil country is intensifying its war against the TNA as more and more of the TNA candidates and supporters are attacked and intimidated in civic elections in the north, news sources in Jaffna said.
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External sanctions needed for change in Sri Lanka - TYO

[TamilNet, Friday, 08 July 2011, 11:55 GMT]
Welcoming Sri Lankan star cricketer Kumar Sangakkara’s assertion Monday that “cricketers [have] bigger responsibilities than merely playing on the field,” and that “the spirit of cricket can and should remain a guiding force for good within society,” the Tamil Youth Organisation said Thursday these were the very beliefs that inspired the call for an international boycott of Sri Lanka cricket until Colombo agrees to an independent investigation into mass atrocities in the final months of the war in 2009.
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Teachers forced to conduct SL military’s census hiding war deaths

[TamilNet, Thursday, 07 July 2011, 17:08 GMT]
While the Nazi-style registration of people in the north by the occupying SL military is challenged in the SL courts by Tamil politicians, the SL Army is now engaged in another way of registering people by a census it is conducting on its own, forcing Tamil school teachers and through them exploiting school students. Earlier the military tried the registration through village officers and in some instances military personnel directly conducted it. The forms now distributed by the military to teachers have no column on the cause of the death of family members and the teachers are embarrassed in facing people in taking the ‘census’. The SL Army is trying to bury facts through statistics, while it is estimated that more than 200, 000 Tamils have directly been killed in the war of 3 decades in the north alone, politicians in Jaffna allege.
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Norway’s deafening silence on Sri Lanka is wrong: Aftenposten

[TamilNet, Thursday, 07 July 2011, 00:24 GMT]
Sri Lanka is in the middle of a power-game played by India, China and the USA. Norway’s interests in Sri Lanka are insignificantly few. There is no reason why Norway should maintain a deafening silence over the need for an international tribunal on the war crimes that took place in the island. The silence is due to a line of thinking in the Norwegian foreign ministry and especially in Mr Erik Solheim, that it would ‘normalise’ Norway’s relationship with Colombo. Rather than being in the driver’s seat in demonstrating how concerned Norway is about human rights, it is wrong on the part of Norway’s government to stand along the roadside with a mouth full of dust, says Kristoffer Rønneberg, a foreign affairs journalist of the prominent newspaper Aftenposten, in a commentary column published on Tuesday.
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Professor Sivathamby passes away

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 06 July 2011, 19:43 GMT]
Professor Karthigesu Sivathamy, an Eezham Tamil legend of Tamil Studies passed away on Wednesday 8:20 p.m. local time at his home in Dehiwala, Colombo. He succumbed to heart attack at the age of 79. The funeral rituals are scheduled to be held on Sunday at his residence in Colombo and the cremation will take place at Kanatta crematorium by 4:00 p.m. TamilNet joins the millions all over the world in paying tribute to the scholar who has been providing academic leadership to Tamils. He is survived by his wife Rupavathy Sivathamby and three daughters, Mangai, Kothai and Varthani.
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Legal action against Colombo for torture imminent: TAG

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 06 July 2011, 01:13 GMT]
Tamil prisoners who have managed to reach the West, by either bribing their way out, or released due to lack of evidence after being incarcerated and tortured inside Sri Lanka's Boosa, Magazine and Welikade prisons, have been providing details of torture suffered under Sri Lanka's intelligence wing of the military. Tamils Against Genocide (TAG), a US-based activist group, said Sunday that a project documenting torture and white-van abductions, supported by a list of nearly 30 affidavits, video depositions, and graphical footage of the abduction-torture sequence adopted in Colombo and in Vavuniyaa, Trincomalee internment camps, are near completion and that a Europe-based legal action is imminent.
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Civil administration becomes Sinhalese in the country of Eezham Tamils

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 05 July 2011, 06:45 GMT]
140 Sinhala Sri Lanka Administrative Service (SLAS) officers who have come initially for a ‘training’ programme to Jaffna on Monday are eventually expected to be appointed to Sinhalicise the civil service of the country of Eezham Tamils. By not recruiting Tamils and Muslims to the civil service for many years now, Colombo has schemed a situation so that only the Sinhalese could be appointed to key administrative positions even in the north and east. The process that has started in the east has now come to Vanni and Jaffna. While artfully delaying urgently needed action for the national question by reducing it into an endless debate on war crimes that has no reference to genocide, the powers that abet state in Sri Lanka commit more crimes of a permanent nature in allowing Colombo on its structural genocide and extermination of Tamil nation, political circles in Jaffna said.
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