SLA collects particulars only from Tamil traders in Colombo

[TamilNet, Saturday, 10 October 2009, 09:32 GMT]
Sri Lanka Army (SLA) soldiers have been distributing forms in Sinhalese language only to Tamil traders in the city of Colombo since Thursday calling for particulars for the purpose of special registration, according to an urgent letter sent by Deputy Minister, P. Rathakrishnan to Prime Minister, R. Wickremanayake, requesting him to instruct SLA to explain as to why such details are being collected from Tamil traders only, sources in Colombo said.
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2 Tamils, a Muslim arrested in Chilaw

[TamilNet, Friday, 09 October 2009, 15:47 GMT]
Chilaw Police took three youths, two Tamils and a Muslim, in a surprise cordon and search operation, conducted in the Tamil suburbs of Chilaw town Wednesday night around 10:00 a.m. The arrested youths are detained in Chilaw police station for interrogation as they failed to prove their identity.
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Indian strategic analyst writes on 'lost leverage'

[TamilNet, Friday, 09 October 2009, 11:58 GMT]
“Today, India stands more marginalized than ever in Sri Lanka. Its natural constituency—the Tamils—feels not only betrayed, but also looks at India as a colluder in the bloodbath. India already had alienated the Sinhalese majority in the 1980s,” writes Professor Brahma Chellaney of the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, in a forthright article appeared in Forbes, Friday. Welcoming his admissions and responding to him, Tamil circles said that who ever now addresses the national aspirations of Eezham Tamils, holds the key to the region of South India-Sri Lanka- Maldives, but India is yet to learn the lesson and may continue forfeiting leverage even with its own people, by blunting the national question.
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Eastern Province CM unable to stop Sinhalese colonization – Ariyanenthiran

[TamilNet, Friday, 09 October 2009, 08:41 GMT]
Batticaloa district Tamil National Alliance (TNA), P. Ariyanenthiran who was able to visit his constituency after three years Friday said that Sinhalese families from the South have been colonized in Choaliyaamadu village in Paddiruppu Regional Secretariat division in Batticaloa district. He told media that the Chief Minister of Eastern Province, though a Tamil, cannot stop traditional home lands of Tamils being colonized with Sinhalese families.
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Tamils facing “cultural annihaliation” by SL Government: Australian Politician

[TamilNet, Thursday, 08 October 2009, 05:10 GMT]
“It may be argued that the Tamil people have a legitimate right to self-determination but what is essential now is that we must see an end to the oppressive and discriminatory policies of the victorious Sri Lankan Government” urged Greens MLC Ian Cohen in an address to the Australian Parliament on September 24th. Highlighting the “potential humanitarian catastrophe” faced by almost 300,000 refugees who “despite their desire and capacity to return home they are being held prisoner”, Cohen described the Governments treatment of Tamils as “a litany of injustice, cultural annihilation and human rights atrocities”. Meanwhile, a Tamil NGO official in Vavuniyaa, while welcoming the interest of Australian politicians, said they should also come forward to "first address the question of double standards, employed by their government, between issues such as East Timor and Eezham.”
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'India follows Sri Lanka in waging civil war'

[TamilNet, Thursday, 08 October 2009, 05:01 GMT]
India, in consultation with US counter-insurgency forces, is planning an unprecedented military offensive against ultra-Marxist rebels that is going to hit mainly the Adivasi (indigenous) peoples of India in the states of Andra Predesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal and Maharashtra, warns a protest document drafted by Arundhati Roy and a group of progressive intellectuals. India plans to deploy its paramilitary forces, anti-rebel militias organized and funded by government agencies and possibly Indian Armed Forces including the Air Force in this war, the stated objective of which is to ‘liberate’ areas under the influence of Maoist rebels, but the real aim is to exploit land and resources of the deprived people, the document points out.
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Colombo has plans to colonize North with Buddhist Sinhalese – Suresh Premachandran

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 07 October 2009, 17:06 GMT]
The government of Sri Lanka is actively engaged in colonizing Ki’linochchi, Mullaiththeevu and Jaffna district with Sinhalese Buddhists in order to crush the demand for Eelam in the traditional homelands of the Tamils in the North, Suresh Premachandran, Tamil National Alliance (TNA) Jaffna parliamentarian, said in a press meet held Monday in his Jaffna office. He further accused the government for not accepting help from International Community in de-mining Vanni as it does not want the persons from foreign countries to see the mass graves of civilians killed by its armed forces in the Vanni during the war. The MP also said that though the government says that it had resettled 40,000 IDPs from Vavuniyaa internment camps, 95% of them have been again detained in new internment camps in their respective home districts under the direct control of Sri Lankan forces.
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Tamil youth arrested in Colombo

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 07 October 2009, 15:32 GMT]
Sri Lanka Army (SLA) and police arrested a Tamil youth travelling in a government transport bus Tuesday morning at Ediyawathe in Colombo in a joint search conducted from 7:00 a.m until 11:00 a.m, sources in Colombo said. The arrested youth is detained in Kotahena police station.
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250,000 Tamils in dire humanitarian need, says British Minister

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 07 October 2009, 04:56 GMT]
Mike Foster, a British international development minister, said after visiting Menik farm, the internment camp where Sri Lanka holds more than a quarter of million displaced Tamils, that the internees "are in dire humanitarian need of being allowed out of internment camps which face flash floods in Sri Lanka's monsoons," the British paper Guardian reported. "Although conditions have improved the tents are basically disintegrating. With the monsoons we will have sewage floating around – water-borne diseases will be rife," the paper said quoting Foster.
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CID arrests 3 Tamil youths at Medawachchiya

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 06 October 2009, 19:24 GMT]
The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of Sri Lanka has arrested three Tamil youths, two of them on Sunday and the third on Monday at Medawachchiya check point while they were on their way to Colombo from Vavuniyaa, according to their relatives.
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Sri Lanka's internment camps for Tamils: experience of an inmate

[TamilNet, Monday, 05 October 2009, 09:37 GMT]
South Asia has never witnessed such a large scale, state-organized crime as one committed on Eezham Tamils by the government of Sri Lanka. Perhaps the world has never witnessed hitherto that such a crime of internment camps for civilians could be initiated collectively by all the powers of the world and the UN, and could be left like this without anyone being able to do anything about it. A civilian woman who was a captive in the Zone 3 of the internment camp of Menik Farm for four months, and managed to come out by ‘other means’ a month ago, writes on her experience in the camp – an indelible shame for the so-called civilised world.
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Duplicitous Colombo bereft of excuses on holding internees - ICG

[TamilNet, Saturday, 03 October 2009, 22:25 GMT]
Andrew Stroehlein, International Crisis Group's Communications Director, during his testimony to the European Parliament Subcommittee on Human Rights on the situation in Sri Lanka Thursday, noted the poor and deteriorating conditions in the internment camps where more than 264,000 Tamils are being held by Colombo, and said, "[t]he worst kind of duplicity was seen just a few weeks ago, when the [Sri Lanka] government announced it had released 10,000 displaced persons. In fact, we know at least 3,300 people had been moved from an internment camp to another detention facility," and added, "Sri Lankan government has run out of excuses for continuing to keep these hundreds of thousands of innocent people prisoner."
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Clinton's rape bombshell

[TamilNet, Saturday, 03 October 2009, 00:17 GMT]
US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, chairing the United Nations Security Council meeting Wednesday, on the last day of US's turn of the rotating presidency of the 15-member body in September, on violence against women in warfare, dropped a bombshell on Sri Lanka by including Sri Lanka in the company of Congo, Sudan, and Mayanmar, saying Sri Lanka has used rape as a weapon of war [against Tamils], thereby adding another incriminating legal element to mounting woes of the Sri Lanka Government from allegations of war-crimes for slaughtering more than 20,000 Tamil civilians, and incarcerating more than 300,000 Tamils with little freedom of movement in military supervised internment camps.
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Eezham Tamil filmmaker’s debut reaches international film festival

[TamilNet, Friday, 02 October 2009, 18:46 GMT]
Vancouver International film Festival’s Canadian Images session this year opens with a Tamil film ‘1999', made by Lenin M. Sivam, an Eezham Tamil of Canada and a software architect by profession. The film, featuring violence-affected Eezham Tamils struggling to adjust their lives in Canada, is the first full-feature production of the largely self-made filmmaker. Sivam, 35, born in Jaffna and migrated to Canada in 1991, earlier produced successful short films in Tamil. His father V M L Sivam was playwright, director and actor in his home country.
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British MP urges boycott of Sri Lanka goods

[TamilNet, Friday, 02 October 2009, 12:14 GMT]
Siobhain McDonagh MP, Mictham & Morden, UK, during the Labor Party conference held Thursday appealed to the delegates, and to the millions of live TV viewers, to shoulder their own commitment on the Sri Lanka issue, urging that a boycott of goods and avoiding holidays in the unsavory state would ensure their money would not “prop up that government.” During the event, the sitting government party passed a resolution condemning the treatment of Tamils in the island by that government.
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Internment, poisoning hopes of reconciliation - Economist

[TamilNet, Friday, 02 October 2009, 05:29 GMT]
"The fate of a quarter of a million interned Tamils is poisoning Sri Lanka’s hopes of ethnic reconciliation....So long as Tamils feel abused by a racist Sinhalese state, the conflict may resume. Economic development of their shattered regions, which the government is planning, is unlikely to change that. Hence the government’s continued war-footing—but this is in turn also reinforcing Tamil grievances," a feature in the 1st October edition of The Economist said,
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5 Tamil youths arrested in Colombo

[TamilNet, Thursday, 01 October 2009, 04:57 GMT]
Special Task Force (STF) commandos took into custody Wednesday morning five Tamil youths in a search operation conducted in Wellawathe, Mount Lavinia and Dehiwella in the suburbs of Colombo city.
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JVP demands Tamil political prisoners to be produced in courts

[TamilNet, Thursday, 01 October 2009, 02:43 GMT]
The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) Tuesday issued a statement demanding the government to subject all Tamil political detainees held in Anuradhapura prison and other prisons in the country for several years to judicial inquiry or release them. Parliamentarian Ramalingam Chandrasekaran issued the statement on behalf of his party JVP.
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Tamil, Muslim party leaders call for end to forced detention

[TamilNet, Thursday, 01 October 2009, 02:23 GMT]
Five Tamil and Muslim party leaders in a joint communique issued Wednesday stated that "the forcible detention of hundreds of thousands of Tamil citizens of Sri Lanka in camps for Internally Displaced Persons is illegal, without basis in the Constitution and in gross violation of international human rights norms," and called for immediate action to "end to military administration and restrictions placed on civilians, and we urge the restoration of full civilian administration to facilitate return to economic and social normality."
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UN warns Sri Lanka of Tamil ‘bitterness’

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 30 September 2009, 01:20 GMT]
Sri Lanka’s failure to rapidly resettle nearly 300,000 Tamils who survived the government’s final onslaught against the Tamil Tigers and their further suffering under harsh conditions in militarised camps could result in growing bitterness, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickramanayake Tuesday - the same day, the UN issued its strongest criticism yet of Sri Lanka’s continued internment of the hundreds of thousands of displacedTamils. Mr. Ban also stressed the need to expedite “a serious, independent and impartial accountability process to look into alleged violation of international law during the conflict as a critical part of moving forward and building peace in Sri Lanka,” a UN statement said.
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