Nambiar, India's proxy in UN, complicit in white flag killings?

[TamilNet, Saturday, 12 January 2013, 23:55 GMT]
While the International Community which, blinded by the 9/11 terror, architected the annihilation of Tamils' primary safeguard, the LTTE, is left to savor the resulting horror state and the autocratic dystopia in Sri Lanka, Rights groups have accused the U.N. of being derelict in its duty to protect civilian lives. Vijay Nambiar, the Chef de Cabinet, who was a key official in shaping UN's Sri Lanka policy, is also accused of complicity in the "Whiteflag" incident where several surrendees were executed by the Sri Lanka military after being given assurances of safety by International actors. Nepotism and family connections between Ban Ki Moon and Nambiar, with personal links to India and Colombo, may also have contributed to the U.N.'s unwillingness to stop the Mu'l'livaaykkaal massacre, observers say.
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Pro-Sri Lanka UK parliamentarians cite Sampanthan in debate

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 09 January 2013, 23:54 GMT]
The UK Parliament on Tuesday debated the question of participating the CHOGM meet in Hambantota in the island of Sri Lanka in November this year. Even as many voices among the parliamentarians urged the UK government to consider boycotting the CHOGM meet, there was however a section that argued for a conciliatory approach towards Colombo, despite the worst ever genocide of this century it committed and continues to commit against Eezham Tamils. This section cited the TNA leader Mr R Sampanthan in support of their argument. Obviously the intention of the pro-Sri Lanka section in citing Sampanthan was malicious, but Tamil politicians should take a note of it in guarding against providing undue space for adversaries through infirmity in political fundamentals, commented new generation political activists in the island.
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Peace activist grilled by terrorism department in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 09 January 2013, 10:24 GMT]
Sri Lanka’s Terrorist Investigation Department (TID) grilled Rev. Fr. Praveen OMI, Director of the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation (CPR) in Jaffna, for 7 hours on Tuesday, news sources in Jaffna said. TID personnel who went to the office of the centre at No 8, Grousseault Road in Jaffna by 8.30 am, subjected the priest to intense investigation until 3.30 pm. The entire office was searched and files and documents were scrutinized. In addition, Fr. Praveen has been ordered to go to the ‘Fourth Floor’ (CID headquarters) for further investigations on Friday. The CPR, an organization affiliated to the Catholic Church in Jaffna was actively involved in dealing with cases of abductions and disappearances of people in Jaffna.
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Nepalese war criminal faces torture charges in UK

[TamilNet, Saturday, 05 January 2013, 13:54 GMT]
Colonel Kumar Lama, a 46-year-old Nepalese officer, currently seconded to the UN, was held at his East Sussex home by Metropolitan Police officers on Thursday, charged with intentionally "inflicting severe pain or suffering" as a public official on two separate individuals, BBC reported. "This encouraging development puts on notice persumptive war-criminals from Sri lanka who have participated or commanded extra-judicial killings, torture of civilians, and killings of surrendees, all qualifying as war-crimes during a State sanctioned massacre that comes perilously close to genocide, on visiting UK, or other European Countries where the Courts exercise Universal jurisdiction for such crimes," a spokesperson for Tamils Against Genocide (TAG) said.
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Colombo ventures to coach New Delhi on ‘Counterinsurgency’

[TamilNet, Saturday, 05 January 2013, 10:42 GMT]
After spearheading an internationally-coordinated counterinsurgency (COIN) operation against the LTTE which resulted in an internationally abetted genocide of the Eezham Tamils in May 2009, in which India played no small a role, Sri Lanka now claims that it can offer training to Indian and other military forces in COIN operations. The commitment of General Bikram Singh, the Chief of Army Staff of the Indian Army, to Sri Lanka’s security and his implicit appreciation of the Sri Lanka model of COIN by his statements at the passing out parade at Sri Lanka Military Academy on 22 December should be a cause of concern for progressive civil society activists in India, for while the ‘Sri Lanka solution’ was possible in its specific case only by a combination of geo-political factors and genocidal intent, it holds out lessons that could threaten democratic traditions in any country.
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Brian says Aussie FM was with Rajapaksa during his Singapore deportation

[TamilNet, Friday, 04 January 2013, 19:35 GMT]
Sharing with TamilNet more details of his deportation from Singapore on 14 December, 81-year-old Australian human rights activist of Sinhala origin, Dr Brian Seneviratne said that the Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr was in Colombo, meeting Mahinda Rajapaksa, at the time of his deportation. Reminding the Australian Prime Minister that what had happened in Sri Lanka was genocide, and the regime is a set of pathological liars, Brian said: “Mr Carr has enhanced the ability of this murderous regime to commit gross violations of human rights by doing what he has just done in Colombo – saying that Australia will help the Sri Lankan Navy to stop people fleeing from the murderous regime in Sri Lanka.”
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UN's Syria dead count questioned

[TamilNet, Thursday, 03 January 2013, 04:03 GMT]
Pointing to the published figure of number of Syrians dead at 60,000, as released by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) the day after the New Year, Innercity Press (ICP), an organization that covers United Nations, questioned the source of the figure. ICP said the figure was from an outside contractor, Benetech, allegedly paid by the OHCHR, and added that funders of Benetech included the U.S. State Department, and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). ICP questioned if Benetech is also involved in a similar study on Sri Lanka where the UN refused to disclose its own numbers-dead fearing that the exposure will backfire on the UN strategy to allow Sri Lanka to continue with the assault on civilians that led to more than 80,000 dead (Petrie Report).
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Takasu, Tamils' adversary in UN Security Council?

[TamilNet, Friday, 28 December 2012, 00:15 GMT]
Yukio Takasu, the 2009 President of the UN Security Council (UNSC) on the critical month of February, was one of the key UN officials who allegedly prevented Sri Lanka from being dragged into the UNSC for the unfolding mass scale killings in Mu'l'livaaykkaal, public statements made by UN officials during media stakes reveal. While some UN Security Council (UNSC) permanent members may have agreed with Takasu'a views, in a media stake out, Takasu lays out his "own" critical view of the "terrorist LTTE," and the primacy of political and security need to "defeat" the Tigers over imminent large scale civilian casualties. Political observers believe that Japanese cultural views on refugees, asylum seekers may provide clues to Takasu's approach and conduct in the UNSC that led to the disastrous outcome for the Tamil refugees trapped in Sri Lanka's civil war.
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Sri Lanka’s TID summons Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam

[TamilNet, Thursday, 27 December 2012, 18:51 GMT]
Sri Lanka’s Terrorist Investigation Division (TID) has sent summons to Tamil National People’s Front (TNPF) President, Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam, asking him to be present at its investigating office in Colombo on Saturday for inquiries. The summon note, entirely in Sinhala language, was served at Gajendrakumar’s residence in Colombo by a TID officer on Thursday afternoon. Mr. Gajendrakumar is currently outside of the island, informed sources told TamilNet. Meanwhile, notices in Sinhala and English, viciously implicating TNPF Secretary and former TNA parliamentarian, Selvaraja Kajendran as one of the key persons behind the ‘pro-LTTE and TNA/ TNPF network’ in the Jaffna University, is being circulated in the south of the island.
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Gotabhaya appropriates whole village in Mannaar

[TamilNet, Thursday, 27 December 2012, 15:53 GMT]
An entire Eezham Tamil village, Mu’l’lik-ku’lam in the Musali division of Mannaar district, has been declared out of bounds for its uprooted residents by SL defence Secretary and presidential sibling Gotabhaya Rajapaksa visiting the village on Wednesday. The entire village will be used for a military base of the occupying Sinhala forces and to serve as a hub for the Sinhalicisation and Colonisation process of the land and waters of the strategic locality in the Mannaar district. Nobody would be allowed to resettle within a perimeter of 750 meters of the Mu’l’likku’lam village, Gotabhaya said at a meeting held at the SL Naval Base established there on Wednesday between 10:30 am and 1:30 pm.
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Sri Lanka’s terror abductions, arrests, summons mark Christmas Eve in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 25 December 2012, 22:43 GMT]
28-year-old Mrs Soundararajan Sivamalar, wife of an LTTE member killed in the war, and presently working at SL government’s Uduvil divisional secretariat, was abducted at midnight at her house recently. Sri Lanka’s Terrorist Investigation Department (TID) now informally acknowledged to the SL Human Rights Commission office in Jaffna that the ‘arrest’ was their act. Complaints of such abductions and ‘arrests’ of around 45 people have been registered in recent days at the SL human rights office in Jaffna, officials acknowledged on Monday. Many more abductions and arrests in the north have gone unregistered as the family members have been sternly warned by the occupying SL forces, not to register complaints at the SL human rights office. Meanwhile, many girl students of the Jaffna University have been ‘summoned’ over telephone by the TID in Vavuniyaa.
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100,000 remain internally displaced, says UNHCR

[TamilNet, Sunday, 23 December 2012, 18:46 GMT]
In a report on the international protection needs of asylum seekers from Sri Lanka, UNHCR identifies several risk profiles including persons suspected of links with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), journalists, human rights activists, witnesses to rights violations, and vulnerable children and women, and notes while "there is an ethnic dimension to their vulnerability," in each of these risk groups, "members of the minority Tamil and, to a lesser extent, Muslim communities are reportedly more often subjected to arbitrary detention, abductions or enforced disappearances." Tamil activists including the New Zealand Tamil Action Front was consistently canvassing for this and there was a response in this regard from the Australian representative of the UNHCR in a regional meeting held at Auckland on 19 November.
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Holmes, UN's smokescreen to Mu'l'livaaykkaal killings?

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 19 December 2012, 02:16 GMT]
Public statements made by UN officials during media stakeouts and briefings, Wikileaks exposures, and the testimony of twelve UN field staff reported earlier in TamilNet provide a blue-print to the strategy adopted by the UN to allow Sri Lanka to defeat the Tigers, and to ignore the mounting numbers of civilian casualties. This feature catalogues the statements from UN's former humanitarian chief, John Holmes, as he attempts to provide diplomatic cover to the slaughter taking place in Mu'l'livaaykkaal, repeatedly relying on Colombo's assurances on not using heavy weapons, and hesitating to provide casualty figures, a conduct comport with the "internal" strategy revealed by the then President of the United Nations Security Council, Yukio Takasu, that gave primacy to the need to eliminate the “terrorist LTTE …which had broken several ceasefire agreements."
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HR Day event in Toronto brings Tamils closer to global progressive networks

[TamilNet, Friday, 14 December 2012, 00:03 GMT]
More than twenty social, economic, and environmental justice groups in Canada that joined together in Toronto on the eve of International Human Rights Day to forge a common forum against military occupation, apartheid, genocide and political imprisonment, have voiced against the SL military detention of the students of the University of Jaffna. The event gains significance as the recently formed Coalition for Tamil Rights was invited to represent the perspectives of Eezham Tamils along with other progressive forces. On the occasion of the event, activists of socio-political organizations in Canada condemned the arrests and detentions of Tamil students of the University of Jaffna in the SL military occupied country of Eezham Tamils. The activists demanded immediate release of the students and called for an end to the Sri Lankan military occupation of the Tamil homeland.
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HR group alerts on plight of Tamil women coerced by SL military

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 12 December 2012, 13:22 GMT]
The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) on Tuesday forwarded a statement coming from the Women’s Action Network, expressing concern on the plight of Tamil women coerced into joining the SL military, The AHRC-forwarded statement for immediate release said that the Women’s Action Network (WAN), as a collective of 11 groups from the North and East, is deeply concerned by the recent efforts to recruit women into the SL military in the districts of Ki’linochchi and Mullaiththeevu. The statement details how the women were deceived and were taken by the SL military and thereafter intimidated not to leave.
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SL military ‘rehabilitation’ for detained University student leaders

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 11 December 2012, 22:50 GMT]
After releasing 7 of 13 students of the University of Jaffna, the Sri Lankan ‘Terrorist’ Investigation Department has handed over detained students, comprising President of the Jaffna University Student Union (JUSU) V Pavaananthan, Secretary of the JUSU P. Tharshananth, President of the Arts Faculty Students Union K. Jenemajeyamenan and S. Solomon of the Science Faculty, to the headquarters of the SL military in Vanni, which placed the students at the torture chamber of the notorious Joint Services Special Operations (JOSSOP) camp in Vavuniyaa and later transferred them to Sri Lankan military ‘rehabilitation’ detention at Welikanda in Polonnaruwa - Batticaloa border, where ex LTTE cadres and members are detained under a brutal ‘rehabilitation’ programme. In the meantime, SL military has stepped up threats against civil protests in the North.
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Canadian youth mobilises global community in showing solidarity with Jaffna students

[TamilNet, Saturday, 08 December 2012, 06:34 GMT]
The rally organized in Canada showing solidarity with Jaffna University students by the York University Tamil Students Association was participated by Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA), Middle Eastern Students Association (MESA), Indian Cultural Association (ICA), York University Graduate Students Association (YUGSA) and the York Federation of Students (YFS). “We condemn in the strongest possible terms the attack on our brothers and sisters at Jaffna University. What is necessary in order to ensure the safety and democratic rights of the Tamil people is for the IC to immediately recognize the nation, territoriality and right to self-determination of the Tamils,” said Tanya McFadyen, Vice President of the Graduate Students Association of the York University.
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Sri Lanka's alleged war-criminal inspects UN Lebanon mission

[TamilNet, Friday, 07 December 2012, 01:35 GMT]
Sri Lanka's Acting Permanent Representative to the United Nations, and ex-Major General in Sri Lankan Army (SLA), Shavendra Silva, under whose command the SLA's 58th division allegedly committed war crimes during the last months of Sri Lanka's civil war, is "visiting and even inspecting the UN Mission in Lebanon UNIFIL from November 28 through December 4, 2012," Inner City Press (ICP) reported. While the recent Petrie report accused the UN of "massive and system wide failure to prevent the slaughter of an estimated 40,000 ethnic Tamils in five short months," the UN continues to allow an alleged criminal to penetrate and to engage in UN's official affairs, ICP said.
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Rice's silence on Sri Lanka may hurt cabinet appointment - paper

[TamilNet, Saturday, 01 December 2012, 13:57 GMT]
While the accusation that Dr. Susan Rice, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, intentionally mislead the public by saying that the Bengazhi killings of four Americans was a spontaneous attack in response to a film mocking prophet Mohammed, appears to have damaged her chances of being appointed as the U.S.'s Secretary of State after Hilary Clinton, Rice's human rights record in the U.N., including her inaction on Sri Lanka killings, has also come under closer scrutiny, Washington Post said in an article this Friday, quoting comment from an official of the Human Rights Watch.
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Canadian organizations condemn attack on students in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Friday, 30 November 2012, 09:41 GMT]
Condemning the brutal assaults on the students of University of Jaffna by the occupying Sri Lanka’s police and military apparatus that has been happening with intensity since Tuesday, the Canadian Peace Alliance (CPA), the York Federation of Students (YFS), the Scarborough Campus Students’ Union (SCSU), and the Tamil Youth Organization-Canada (TYO-Canada) have issued statements supporting both the civil and political liberties of the Eezham Tamil students in the homeland as well as the democratic right of the Tamil nation to self-determination.
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