JVP to decide on its stand in supporting extending emergency

[TamilNet, Sunday, 06 September 2009, 16:48 GMT]
The politburo of the Sinhala Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) is to decide this week whether to support the Extension of Emergency in the country any more in view of the arrest and detention of three journalists working in its official paper “Lanka” under the Emergency Regulations (ER) and Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), JVP parliamentary group leader Mr. Anura Kumara Dissanayake told media in Colombo. Police arrested three journalists of JVP in Deniyaya on 2nd September while they were taking pictures and videoing Bewarali estate bungalow.
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Colombo evicts UNICEF official

[TamilNet, Sunday, 06 September 2009, 13:34 GMT]
Chief of Communications for UNICEF in Sri Lanka, James Elder's visa to continue to remain in Sri Lanka was refused by Sri Lanka's Department of Immigration, BBC reported Sunday. Mr Elder, a spokesman for the UN children's agency regularly spoke to the media on the plight of children caught up in the conflict, but Sri Lanka spokesperson was quoted by BBC as saying "James Elder's visa has been cancelled over his propaganda in support of the Tigers."
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Sri Kantha meets fellow MP Kanagaretnam in detention

[TamilNet, Sunday, 06 September 2009, 03:07 GMT]
N.Sri Kantha, Jaffna district Tamil National Alliance (TNA) parliamentarian Friday met with the fellow parliamentarian Mr. Sathasivam Kanagaretnam who is currently being detained under the Emergency Regulations (ER) in the sixth floor of Sri Lanka's Criminal Investigation Department (CID), sources in Colombo said. Mr Kanagaretnam was arrested from a camp in Omanthai by CID officiers when the MP sought refuge after fleeing from Mullaitheivu in the last leg of military operation against LTTE. The TNA MP was trapped for several months in Mullaitheivu due to military operation.
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Blackcaps cower in silence, says NZ peace group

[TamilNet, Saturday, 05 September 2009, 12:49 GMT]
Global Peace and Justice in Auckland (GPJA), an activist group in New Zealand, said Saturday that New Zealand cricket team has "cowered in silence, complicit in the oppression of the Tamil population," for reneging on an agreement where "Blackcaps would publicly and symbolically facilitate the transfer of milk powder products from Fonterra in Sri Lanka to World Vision for the victims of war in the military camps." NZ Television channel TVnz said that GPJA's spokesperson John Minto told the station that the Blackcaps pulled out "after team manager Dave Currie refused to allow his team to take part in any humanitarian gesture."
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2 Up-Country Tamils found dead in Maskeliya

[TamilNet, Saturday, 05 September 2009, 07:08 GMT]
A 24-year-old Tamil man from Maskeliya in Up-Country was found dead Friday hours after he had gone to collect firewood in the nearby jungle, Police said. Meanwhile, another Up-Country Tamil was found dead inside a public passenger coach in the same area on Saturday.
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Economist: EU report places Sri Lanka's GSP+ concession in jeopardy

[TamilNet, Friday, 04 September 2009, 02:06 GMT]
"Its [Sri Lanka's] alleged wartime and other abuses make a grim catalogue: thousands of Tamil civilians allegedly killed by army shelling during the rebels’ last stand; scores of Tamils disappeared; nearly 300,000 Tamil war-displaced callously interned; murder and intimidation of journalists—including J.S. Tissainayagam, sentenced to 20 years hard labour on August 31st for criticising the army’s tactics," says an editorial in The Economist in its 3rd September edition, and points to a damning 130-page report by the European Union which concludes that "Sri Lanka has failed to honour important human-rights commitments, and is ineligible for GSP Plus."
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Arrest Sri Lankan state racism to meet norms of International governance - paper

[TamilNet, Friday, 04 September 2009, 00:13 GMT]
A future peace in Sri Lanka rests on the international community being willing and able to contain and constrain the now rampant, but long-embedded, Sinhala chauvinism gripping the island, the Tamil Guardian said this week. “Racism, especially when entrenched thus [in the state], cannot be effaced by suasion and engagement, but by making it utterly impossible for it to hold sway,” the editorial said. “In short, as in the case of [past] racist regimes in other parts of the world, the international community must be prepared to isolate and exclude the Sri Lankan state until it is prepared to adhere, no matter how reluctantly, to international norms of governance.”
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Obama extolled Sri Lanka Journalist given prison term, says NYT

[TamilNet, Thursday, 03 September 2009, 04:09 GMT]
Noting that J.S. Tissainayagam was picked by President Obama on World Press Freedom Day as a “symbol of oppression of the media,” the New York Times (NYT) Tuesday reported that this editor of a crusading magazine in SriLanka was sentenced by the island’s court for writing critical articles on the Sri Lanka government’s offensive against Tamils. The NYT, quoting two prominent staffers at the Colombo-based think-tank Center for Policy Alternatives (CPA), said that the sentence was a very serious blow [to journalism], that the law under which the sentence was passed “ is so vague that practically any speech could be prosecuted,” and that it is unacceptable that the Court would give maximum sentence to a journalist for simply doing his job.
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UK Tamils welcome Conservatives’ concern for Tamils in Sri Lanka

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 02 September 2009, 10:00 GMT]
Tamils in Britain have welcomed the statement last week by the main opposition Conservative Party highlighting the ongoing suffering of over 280,000 Tamils held in barbed-wire ringed, militarised detention camps in Sri Lanka. Noting the Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague’s expressions of “serious concern” over the confinement of Tamils in the camps, and those by the Shadow Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox, during his recent visit to Sri Lanka, the British Tamils Forum (BTF) said Wednesday it will continue to engage with all political parties and others in Britain to bring a permanent end to the suffering of the Tamil people in their traditional homeland.
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Return of 3,800 detained Tamils cancelled – TearFund

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 02 September 2009, 02:29 GMT]
TearFund, a Christian relief and development agency, this week renewed its call for hundreds of thousands of Tamils detained in Sri Lanka’s concentration camps to be allowed home. A scheduled return of 3,800 detained Tamils to a region being assisted by TearFund was cancelled two days ago - even after detainees had packed to return home, the agency said. TearFund also called for an international commission of inquiry into possible war crimes committed by both sides during the armed conflict in Sri Lanka after viewing Channel 4 video footage, allegedly showing Sri Lanka army soldiers executing Tamil men in January of this year.
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Ban under fire, Sri Lanka performance said key failure – Washington Post

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 01 September 2009, 18:22 GMT]
Amidst controversy surrounding Ban Ki Moon’s visit to Norway, Washington Post, in a critical article, published Tuesday, critiquing Ban’s performance, said, “halfway through his first term, Ban is facing a leadership crisis as U.N. civil servants and diplomats here increasingly portray him as an ineffective administrator whose reluctance to hold outlaw leaders to account for bad behavior has undercut the United Nations' moral authority.” Faulting Ban’s approach to quiet diplomacy with “despots and dictators,” the paper pointed to the engagement with Sri Lanka as a major failure of Ban’s tenure, for “not pressing hard enough to hold Sri Lanka accountable for its actions,” and for dropping “U.N. push for an independent investigation into war crimes, leaving it to Sri Lanka to determine whether its military was responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians in the final offensive.”
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Sri Lanka's cynical technique of rebuttal - Aussie Don

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 01 September 2009, 04:24 GMT]
Commenting on the recently exposed execution video, Professor Jake Lynch, Director, Centre for Peace and Conflict at Sydney University writes: "the Sri Lankan authorities assiduously kept journalists from international media away from the conflict zone, having, in the previous few years, terrorised local editors and reporters with arbitrary arrests, imprisonment and beatings, while many were mysteriously killed amid persistent rumours of official complicity. Now, the same authorities who have treated journalism with such contempt are seeking to keep information in the realm of contestability, through the cynical technique of rebuttal."
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Sentence to Tissainayagam extra-judicial: HR lawyer

[TamilNet, Monday, 31 August 2009, 23:42 GMT]
The sentence of 20-year rigorous imprisonment to J.S. Tissanayagam on Monday mark a sad day for journalists and those who believe in the ’freedom of expression’ all over the world, says Deputy Chairperson of Northeast Secretariat on Human Rights (NESoHR), K Sivapalan, an Atterney-at-Law from Trincomalee, in whose opinion this is an extra-judicial way to punish people. ”The provisions of the PTA are not in conformity with the International Criminal Law especially the ’confession’ being admitted in evidence agaist the accused and with regard to the burden of proof.UNHRC requested the GoSL to repeal or amend many of the provisions which were not in conformity. However this was not followed by them on the basis that it was an erosion of the sovereignty of Sri Lanka,” Mr. Sivapalan, now exiled in Norway, said.
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Tissainayagam wins international award for ‘courageous and ethical journalism’

[TamilNet, Monday, 31 August 2009, 19:56 GMT]
J. S. Tissainayagam, a Tamil reporter sentenced Monday to 20 years in prison, has been named the first winner of the Peter Mackler Award for Courageous and Ethical Journalism. Tissainayagam was selected for the awrd, by the US branch of RSF and Global Media Forum (GMF), a company founded by Mackler to train journalists and non-profit organizations to use the media as a tool for social change. The Peter Mackler Award, named for a 30-year veteran of Agence France-Presse (AFP) who died last year, rewards journalists who fight courageously and ethically to report the news in countries where freedom of the press is either not guaranteed or not recognized.
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Liam Fox meets Mahinda Rajapakse, Sampanthan

[TamilNet, Sunday, 30 August 2009, 11:35 GMT]
The government of United Kingdom (UK) is seriously involved in finding a political solution to the legitimate aspirations of Tamils in Sri Lanka and the early resettlement of the hundreds of thousands of internally displaced as well as ensuring a better future for them, Mr. Liam Fox, British Conservative Party parliamentarian, is reported to have told President Mahinda Rajapakse when he met the latter on Saturday.
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SC directs AG to expedite inquiry into Tamil detainees in prison

[TamilNet, Saturday, 29 August 2009, 17:01 GMT]
The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Friday directed the Attorney General to prepare an emergency plan to expedite the inquiry of the hundreds of Tamils now being detained in prisons without any inquiry under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) and Emergency Regulations(ER) in consultation with the Justice Ministry Secretary. “It is unjust to keep them indefinitely in remand. As a result of this delay the number of fundamental rights violation petitions challenging the detention without inquiry is on the increase hampering the smooth functioning of the judiciary,” said Chief Justice Asoka de Silva.
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British Conservative party MP Liam Fox visits Jaffna

[TamilNet, Saturday, 29 August 2009, 05:44 GMT]
Liam Fox, British Conservative Party shadow Defence Secretary accompanied by his advisor W. Adams, visited Jaffna Friday where he met the representatives of civil and religious societies at Jaffna Bishop House around 2:15 p.m. “A just political solution to Tamils’ problems should be the first concern and not development,” the representatives told the visiting emissary, sources in Jaffna said. Liam Fox later met Jaffna Government Agent, K. Ganesh at Jaffna Secretariat. The representative who met Liam Fox said that he showed a keen interest in finding out the true situation of the Tamils, the sources added.
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Chauvinism and greed 'naked' in Sri Lanka

[TamilNet, Saturday, 29 August 2009, 04:07 GMT]
It was frightening to see the combined effect of naked chauvinism of Sri Lanka and naked greed of powers, writes TamilNet political commentator in Colombo responding to the video clip displayed Tuesday. “Such a trend in the establishments is a challenge to every lay human being of the civilized world. While rising up to free people in the internment camps is a spontaneous response, what is of paramount importance is independent political organisation of Tamils in order to meet the challenge of the same forces that are now coercing or enticing them to drop righteous aspirations. Tamils are not asking for other’s land or for empires. They only ask for their own land and there is nothing to get scared or to feel ashamed of. As people of classical heritage, if Tamils fail, they fail not merely their cause but an entire human civilization,” he writes commenting on current Tamil affairs.
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2 Tamil political prisoners killed in Welikada

[TamilNet, Friday, 28 August 2009, 14:42 GMT]
Two Tamil political prisoners have died under 'questionable circumstances' inside the Sri Lankan Central Prision at Welikada in Borallea this week, civil sources in Colombo revealed on Friday. One of the prisoner's wife, a native of Vaddukkoaddai, was informed by Jaffna police that her husband, 30-year-old Sinnaiah Devendran, had died three days ago while he was under going treatment at prison hospital.
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Switzerland ‘deplores’ block on Tamils’ movement, donates essential drugs

[TamilNet, Friday, 28 August 2009, 01:05 GMT]
Announcing its third donation of essential drugs of the Tamils confined in Sri Lanka’s militarised camps, Switzerland Thursday “deplore[d] the continued lack of freedom of movement” for those in the camps and appealed for Colombo to cooperate with the international community and allow humanitarian actors access to the people “rapidly and without hindrance.” Although the press release by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) referred to the people held in the barbwire ringed camps as "Sri Lankan civilians," they are in fact all Tamils - comprising the population of the northern Vanni region.
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