Post War Politics of Sri Lanka

[TamilNet, Thursday, 15 September 2011, 17:13 GMT]
The conclusion of the 18th session of the UNHRC will reveal whether there is anything left to rely on the International Community of Establishments, writes TamilNet Economic and Geopolitical Analyst in the Asia Pacific. While the Eezham Tamils are the worst affected by the war, they are also at the receiving end of the post war Sri Lankan Politics which is indeed continuation of the war by other means or to put it bluntly the continuation of the Genocide. We should always hope for the best but be prepared for the worst. That preparedness is the Solidarity we develop with our Natural Allies. The Natural Allies will certainly include those in the Sinhala society rising up against the Family Rule provided they recognize the Right of Self Determination of the Tamil Speaking Nation, a recognition (including the right to secede) adopted by the Ceylon Communist Party in 1944, he further said.
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Mu'l'likku'lam villagers left to languish, resettlement denied

[TamilNet, Thursday, 15 September 2011, 16:47 GMT]
Amid claims by the Sri Lankan government that all displaced persons in Mannaar district have been resettled in their own villages, uprooted residents of Mu'l'likku'lam in Musali DS division of the district, who were evicted from their homes in 2007, are still refused entry to their village by the Sri Lanka Navy, which has changed their village into a military cantonment. The uprooted Tamils of Mu'l'likku'lam agitated on Tuesday demanding resettlement. More than 300 families of uprooted villagers, most of whom are fishermen and daily wage earners, have been living without proper housing and their children have been deprived of schooling, said Rev. Fr. Rasanayagam, the parish priest of the area.
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Tamil Nadu Chief Minister has say in appealing to Commonwealth

[TamilNet, Thursday, 15 September 2011, 04:59 GMT]
The Tamil Nadu Chief Minister has a say in appealing to New Delhi and other Commonwealth countries, especially where Tamils live, to decide not to hold the Commonwealth Heads of Government meet in Sri Lanka in 2013, Eezham Tamil political circles told TamilNet. The decision will be taken in the Commonwealth Heads of Government meet in Perth in Australia in October. The Canadian Prime Minister has already announced that he would not take part in the meet in Colombo, if Sri Lanka doesn't make progress on the question of human rights in the island. The Indian Prime Minister may not attend the meet in Australia this year, but Tami Nadu should register its opinion with the head of Indian delegation against deciding on holding the next meet in Colombo, Eezham Tamil politicians requested.
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Sri Lanka aims to get more time to complete genocide

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 14 September 2011, 16:46 GMT]
The primary aim of Sri Lanka in the UN human rights council is to buy some more time to complete its genocide of Eezham Tamils through structural means and militarisation so that the question of war crimes would eventually lose its importance and would become acceptable means of contemporary world polity. The more time is given to a virtually Sinhala military to occupy the country of Eezham Tamils with impunity, the more the world will be contributing to a dangerous paradigm. If the existing State system in the international organisations is going to repeatedly prove its incapability in delivering criminal and political justice, the global Tamils have to be prepared to undertake an international struggle in appropriate ways. 70 million global Tamils cannot be taken for ride by the Sinhala polity just because it has a State and Tamils don’t have a State.
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Sinhala prisoners attack Tamil political prisoners in Welikade

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 14 September 2011, 12:10 GMT]
18 Tamil political detainees were wounded Tuesday night when Sinhala extremist inmates attacked them, sources at the Welikade prison told TamilNet Wednesday. The attack has taken place when 250 Tamil political prisoners were suddenly transferred to a Ward I cell where convicted criminals from South have been imprisoned.
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Colombo recalls Dias over war crimes prosecution fear

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 14 September 2011, 00:49 GMT]
Maj. Gen. (retd.) Jegath Dias, deputy Counsel in Sri Lanka’s embassy in Germany, and commander of Sri Lanka Army's (SLA's) 57th division during the last phase of the Sri Lanka war, was recalled by Colombo "in response to accusations he was involved in war crimes," Swiss media reported today. Spotlight on Dias's alleged war-crimes began when Swiss Council of Eelam Tamils (SCET) and Tamils Against Genocide (TAG), a US-based activist group, first filed a case in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) against Germany for accepting Dias to the diplomatic post. Two other legal efforts by Swiss-based advocacy groups, Society for Threatened People and TRIAL, and by Germany-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights further hindered Dias's ability to function as a diplomat, sources said.
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TNA slams Samarasinghe’s UN statement

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 14 September 2011, 00:02 GMT]
Leader of the Tamil National Alliance, R Sampanthan, in a press release issued to the media today, took exception to Head of Sri Lanka delegation to the UN and Minister in Rajapakse government, Mahinda Samarasinghe’s statement which said that his “government’s approach to reconciliation has been predicated on building trust and amity between communities." TNA retorted that the experience of the Tamil people does not support this claim and that “Tamil people of the North and East continue to be subjected to violence even after the end of the war.”
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US comments on LLRC assist Sri Lanka deflect international pressure over mass atrocities

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 13 September 2011, 23:10 GMT]
The United States and other governments must move without further delay towards an independent international investigation into mass atrocities committed during the Sri Lankan civil war, and desist from lending credibility to Sri Lanka’s sham domestic investigation, Tamils Against Genocide (TAG) said in a statement Tuesday. Pointing out that leading international human rights organisations have comprehensively discredited Sri Lanka’s government-appointed Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Committee (LLRC), TAG said comments by US officials on expectations of the LLRC’s report merely contributed to Colombo’s “duplicitous effort to deflect international scrutiny [of mass atrocities].”
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Sri Lanka's war crimes, discussion in UN rights session imminent

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 13 September 2011, 01:49 GMT]
While Colombo appeared to be spending major diplomatic effort to prevent UN expert panel war crimes report on Sri Lanka reaching the 18th session of the UN's Human Rights Council for discussions, reports from Geneva indicate imminent submission of the Report by UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to the Human Rights Council, "a move that could lead to an international investigation of the conflict," VoA report said Monday.
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Blake's bona fides to deliver Tamil justice questioned

[TamilNet, Monday, 12 September 2011, 09:12 GMT]
Robert Blake, U.S. assistant secretary of State for South Asia, and former Ambassador to Sri Lanka and India, is widely known to be the architect of the U.S. policy on Sri Lanka which has resulted in Sri Lanka's massacre at Mu'l'livaaykkaal where more than 40,000 Tamil civilians were killed. Key activists in the Tamil diaspora are increasingly convinced that Tamils are unlikely to obtain justice and accountability under Blake's tenure where Blake is forced to face challenges to provide sustenance to his Sri Lanka policy - a policy which requires accommodating Rajapakse rule amid soaring rights violations, continuing structural genocide of Tamils and an authoritarian governance where war victims are further subjected to State sanctioned military violence.
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‘Grease devil’ episode develops into standoff at Tholpuram in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Sunday, 11 September 2011, 13:06 GMT]
An standoff that erupted between the residents of Paa'naaveddi village and the occupying Sri Lanka Army soldiers of 51-3 brigade Saturday night was contained in the last minute from deteriorating into a blood bath by the intervention of community leaders and politicians, after the residents caught two armed SLA soldiers. While the residents of the village situated in Tholpuram in Valikaamam West were chasing two alleged ‘grease devils’, two armed SLA soldiers emerged from the place where the ‘grease devils’ vanished. The two SLA soldiers were captured by the villagers and kept inside a house bound to ropes.
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SL embassy in US canvasses Congress staff

[TamilNet, Sunday, 11 September 2011, 11:12 GMT]
Sri Lanka’s Ambassador and embassy staff held a ‘reception’ for top US Congressional staff members in Washington on Friday to brief them on ‘post-conflict development’ in the island and to discuss US policy towards Sri Lanka, a press release of the embassy said. Showing a brief film on Sri Lanka’s reconciliation, redevelopment and economic development efforts, amidst Sri Lankan dance and food, ambassador and SL president Rajapaks’s close pal, Jaliya Wikramasuriya told the chiefs of staffs of the key departments including the House Foreign Affairs Committee, “we want you to have the information to tell others the correct story of Sri Lanka, and not necessarily the one you read in the media.”
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Haiti lawyers question impunity of SL Army rapists

[TamilNet, Sunday, 11 September 2011, 11:03 GMT]
The rape mania of Sri Lanka’s almost exclusive Sinhala military is allowed to go with impunity in the island and totally denied by a genocidal government. But the exposure comes from Haiti where the genocidal SL military went for UN ‘peace keeping’. According to officials in Haiti, the SL soldiers accused of sex crimes had systematically raped women and children, some as young as 7-years-old, Sunday Leader reported citing Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network. Recently, while reporting on the rape of a 10-year-old girl in the south of the island by a former SL Air Force officer, Colombo media said that the mania in the SL military is a result of the free licence given to them over the years to commit sex crimes against Tamils.
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21st anniversary of Chaththurukko'ndaan massacre remembered

[TamilNet, Saturday, 10 September 2011, 16:29 GMT]
Local residents of Chaththurukko'ndaan village in the Batticaloa district held the 21st anniversary remembrance of the 184 Tamil civilians massacred by soldiers of the Sri Lanka Army at the village on 9th September 1990, civil sources said. 184 Tamil civilians including infants, children, women and men were pulled out of their homes and were bludgeoned to death or extra-judicially executed by SLA soldiers from the Chaththurukko'ndaan 'Boys Town' army camp. Five of the dead were infants under year one, 42 children under years 10, 09 pregnant mothers and 28 adults over 68 years of age. 38 were from Chaththurukko'ndaan village, 37 from Panichchaiyadi, 62 from Pi'l'laiyaaradi and 47 from Kokkuvil.
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Batticaloa civil authority pressures relatives to declare missing persons dead

[TamilNet, Saturday, 10 September 2011, 12:16 GMT]
Civil authority in Batticaloa district has been forcing kith and kin of persons missing after arrest or abduction to obtain death certificates stating that the missing victims are dead, according to the relatives. With the end of the war intelligence wing of the Sri Lanka Army, paramilitary groups of Karuna and Pilliayan had abducted and disappeared several Tamil civilians in Batticaloa district. Batticaloa District Secretariat has been now begun issuing death certificates to the abducted persons with the declaration by the aggrieved parties that the missing were dead.
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Tamil student abducted near SLA camp in Batticaloa, escapes

[TamilNet, Saturday, 10 September 2011, 12:07 GMT]
Ajanthan, a 11-year old Tamil student was abducted by an unidentified group of six persons came in bicycles while he was riding a bicycle to attend evening class in Kallady Vivekananda Girls Maha Vidiyalayam in Batticaloa town Thursday around 5.30 p.m., sources in Batticaloa said. The abduction took place near the camps of Sri Lanka Navy and Sri Lanka Army are located and where civilian movement has been prohibited. But the student escaped from the abductors the following day while being held in a casuarinas jungle along sea coast.
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Jaffna Governor interferes, disrupts administrative authority of local councils

[TamilNet, Saturday, 10 September 2011, 02:13 GMT]
Civil society sources in Jaffna accused colonial governor of Northern Province, Maj. Gen. Chandrasri, of interfering in the administrative affairs of the recently democratically elected local councils and placing barriers to smooth governance in Jaffna. During a meeting held few weeks, the Governor has allegedly ordered Government officers to follow orders given only by the Governor, and to ignore directives from the elected officials of local councils, civil sources said.
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Multilingualism, multiculturalism and Sinhala academia

[TamilNet, Saturday, 10 September 2011, 00:31 GMT]
‘Celebrating multilingualism’ in Sri Lanka, and delivering a keynote address in a language award ceremony in Colombo in July, Professor of Sinhala K.N.O. Dharmadasa said that Tamil came to be introduced into the island at a later time, especially after the Polonnaruva period (c. 13th century AD). According to the Mahavamsa myth he was relying upon, culture of multilingualism in the island began when “a group of settlers led by Prince Vijaya, who would have been speaking a dialect which linguists call Prakrit, came and settled down in the northern plains.” Meanwhile, delivering a lecture on Buddhism at the UN General Assembly in May and using it for campaigning Sri Lanka’s ‘reconciliation,’ another Sri Lankan Prof. Sudharshan Seneviratne said, arrival of Buddhism and other north Indian social ideologies heralded the beginnings of civilization in the island.
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UN inaction responsible for ‘grease devil’ phenomenon, NZ Tamils tell Ban

[TamilNet, Saturday, 10 September 2011, 00:16 GMT]
In a letter routed through the Mayor of Auckland to UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon visiting New Zealand, the Tamil Action Front in New Zealand on Monday urged the UNSG to stop the post-war disaster the Eezham Tamils have been going through. “[The UN panel] report was released in April 2011. It is September now. There is no indication that you have done justice to the report – not even sent a copy to the UN Human Rights Council for discussion and action. Your inaction has emboldened Sri Lanka to order the Security Forces to menacingly intrude into homes of the peace loving Tamil and Muslim peoples of the traditional Tamil speaking areas – the North and East of Sri Lanka, the Front said in its letter.
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