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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SL Navy continues to obstruct resettlement of displaced Muslims of Musali

[TamilNet, Sunday, 04 November 2012, 23:47 GMT]
Displaced Muslim residents of Musali divisional secretariat division in Mannaar district are being prevented by the occupying Sri Lanka Navy under the pretext that the area has been brought under the high security zone. Rishard Badurdeen, a cabinet rank SL minister, who has been working with the Colombo government to appropriate lands of Tamils in Mannaar district, is now being accused by his own community for his inability to stop Colombo's appropriation of lands that belong to Muslims from Musali division, according to representatives of displaced people from Musali.
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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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Colombo plans to appropriate Trincomalee campus of EUSL for Sinhalese

[TamilNet, Thursday, 01 November 2012, 09:29 GMT]
Tamil undergrads in the Trincomalee Campus of the Eastern University of Sri Lanka (EUSL) are coming under continuous physical attack by Sinhalese students who have now become the majority of the campus in the country of Eezham Tamils. Attacks on 'minority' Tamil undergrads are being carried out with the hidden agenda of the chauvinist administration of the SL University Grants Commission (UGC) to convert the EUSL as fully fledged Sinhala campus, Tamil academic sources say.
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War-displaced without housing assistance now stranded roofless by heavy rains in Batticaloa

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 31 October 2012, 23:50 GMT]
Batticaloa district Tamil National Alliance parliamentarian Mr Pon Selvaraja has said that the Sri Lankan state has not taken any step till today to provide permanent housing schemes for people affected by war and natural disasters in the Batticaloa district. In 2006, all civilians fled from their houses to elsewhere for safety when the occupying Sri Lanka Army launched multi-barrel artillery attacks (MBRL) towards Paduvaan-karai. The displaced only received Tarpaulin roofing sheets from NGOs. The SL government omitted the names of the victims from the list of displaced families disabling them from receiving cash relief or dry rations. The argument put forward by the Colombo government at that time was that the occupying Special Task Force (STF), a notorious commando unit under the SL police deployed in combat operations, was providing protection to the displaced people.
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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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‘Resettled’ people stranded by heavy rains in Vanni

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 30 October 2012, 23:31 GMT]
Heavy rainfall, reported amidst cyclone warning, has stranded thousands of people living along the coastal stretch of Mullaiththeevu and Vadamaraadchi East without shelter and food. The people of Keappapulavu, recently left under the trees by the SL military that has occupied their lands, are the worst affected in Mullaiththeevu district. In the meantime, the occupying Sri Lankan military has hijacked the assistance that was supposed to be provided by the civil authorities to the affected people. The SL Government Agent of Mullaiththeevu, Mr N. Vethanayakam, hesitant to to disclose the details of the displacement, has been instructed by Colombo to receive humanitarian assistance through the SL military, informed sources at the District Secretariat told TamilNet on Wednesday.
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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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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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‘Reject LLRC based solutions, work with nations without states’: Tamil Nadu activist

[TamilNet, Monday, 29 October 2012, 04:07 GMT]
Arguing that LLRC based political solutions were a trap of International Community of Establishments (ICE) to let Sri Lankan state escape prosecution for the charges of genocide and war crimes, environmental activist from Tamil Nadu, Srinivasa Rao, accused the ICE and India for abetting the genocide of the Eezham Tamils for geopolitical interests in an interview on Palak’ani. Conversing with the presenter V. Kohulan, he further appealed to activists in the Eezham Tamil diaspora to work beyond the structures of establishments to build solidarity with nations without states facing similar oppression. “Without struggle we cannot achieve our goals,” he said, urging the Eezham Tamils to join hands in struggle with other nation without states.
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