Tamil diaspora doctors prepared to enter Vanni, demand access

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 18 February 2009, 15:13 GMT]
Doctors organised in charity and aid organisations in Australia and Norway have urged their foreign ministries, United Nations Secretary General and the ICRC to secure urgent permission from Sri Lankan authorities to facilitate safe passage of their convoy of doctors and medical supplies. Dr. V. Manomohan, the president of Australian Medical Aid Foundation (AMAF) and Dr. T. Sivakanesan, the coordinator of Norwegian Tamils Health Organistaion (NTHO) said Wednesday that their organisations that have rendered medical aid for a long time, especially in the aftermath of Tsunami, have the necessary skills, manpower and resources to engage immediately in the medical aid, given that a safe passage is provided to their medical units.
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8 Tamils arrested in Katunayake

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 17 February 2009, 20:08 GMT]
Eight Tamil civilians, all are residents of North East provinces were taken into custody in a cordon and search operation conducted in the high security zone of the Katunayake international airport Monday. The police said they were arrested as they failed to prove their identity and justify their presence in the location.
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Sampanthan accuses Sri Lanka of genocide of Tamils

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 17 February 2009, 19:21 GMT]
"A news black-out of Sri Lanka Government's slaughter of Tamils through indiscriminate artillery barrage and bombings prevails, while the International media is publishing false information spread by Colombo," said Tamil National Alliance (TNA) parliamentary group leader, R. Sampanthan, in a press meet attended by a large number of local and international journalists Tuesday afternoon in Sri Lanka parliamentary complex, sources in Colombo said.
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SLA bans re-telecast of Tamil Nadu TV in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 17 February 2009, 00:03 GMT]
Sri Lanka Army (SLA) officers in charge of their camps in Jaffna peninsula have ordered the cable TV operators not to re-telecast programs of Makkal TV from Tamil Nadu, civil society sources in Jaffna said. The recent news reports in Makkal TV on the present Vanni situation, and the TV's political analysis segments have irked the SLA hierarchy resulting in the ban, sources added.
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Indian historian intends well but slips in historiography

[TamilNet, Monday, 16 February 2009, 23:21 GMT]
Indian historian Ramachandra Guha intended well in saying if the defeat of the LTTE at the hands of the Sri Lanka army leads to a consolidation of Sinhala chauvinism it will be impossible to defend that. But the categorical statements he makes such as ‘ the Sinhala almost certainly migrated there (to the island of Sri Lanka) from eastern India, Tamil and other cultures influenced the island in later centuries, the LTTE is a terrorist organization, the civil war in Sri Lanka nears its end’ etc are not in accord with historiographical etiquette, says a Tamil academic based in Colombo.
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SLA, SL Police arrest 100 civilians in Colombo

[TamilNet, Monday, 16 February 2009, 22:43 GMT]
More than one hundred civilians, majority of them Tamils, and residents of North-East were taken into custody in combined cordon and search operations conducted by the Sri Lanka Police and Sri Lanka Army (SLA) in suburbs of Colombo from early morning till evening on Sunday. The arrested are being detained in police stations in the district and are being interrogated. The armed forces also took about three hundred motor bikes into their custody, police sources said.
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UN sheds responsibilities - NGO official

[TamilNet, Monday, 16 February 2009, 18:01 GMT]
The UN said 15 of its local staff and 75 of their dependents were not allowed to leave the conflict area by the Tamil Tigers, who had forcibly recruited one of the UN staffers, reported AFP on Monday. "The UN for the first time openly acknowledges its agenda of withdrawing even the remaining few local staff from the conflict zone, completely shedding its responsibility of caring for the civilians trapped here," said Velupillai Sivanadiyar, the president of the Tamils Rehabilitation Organisation (TRO), the only NGO working in Vanni. The latest UN stand implies that the apex security system of the world has written off the fate of more than 250,000 civilians to the discretion of Colombo’s hostile and encircling army of 50,000, a ratio of 1:5.
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Verbal shows fail to save lives in Vanni

[TamilNet, Monday, 16 February 2009, 15:09 GMT]
“War is also theirs, peace is also theirs; therefore the solution also should be theirs. Why don’t they come out with that and end the suffering?” asked a sulking school teacher in Vanni, frustrated at the diplomatic games and dilly-dallying of world powers in protecting the life and dignity of civilians, neither by themselves nor allowing the UN to do it. But the solution some of the powers envisage in what they call the ‘post-LTTE era’ goes back to the concentration camps of the Nazi times.
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India in duplicitous, murderous collaboration with genocidal regime - SA Post

[TamilNet, Sunday, 15 February 2009, 15:00 GMT]
Noting that the "shelling of safe areas, the genocide massacre of the elderly, innocent women, and children," are war crimes "on a par with the worst of Nazism," an article in South Africa's popular daily, The Post, accuses India that it "has revealed a duplicitous and murderous collaboration with the genocidal regime in power in Colombo. Not only deaf to the pleas and cries of its own Tamil population to intervene in this murderous onslaught, it actively assists the regime in the supply of military hardware, the training of strike-aircraft pilots, the supply of military expertise, and the provision of military advisors on the ground."
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'Electoral victories of Mahinda government justify partition'

[TamilNet, Sunday, 15 February 2009, 12:32 GMT]
The frame of mind of Sinhala majority in the island of Sri Lanka reflects unequivocally in the impressive electoral victories secured by Mahinda Rajapasa’s government in the elections for the provincial councils of Central and North-West Provinces. The electoral victories endorse the ongoing brutal war, aiming total subjugation of Tamils. In the process, the Sinhala majority virtually concedes the need for partition in the island, if any polity acceptable to human civilization should prevail there, said an expatriate Sinhala academic commenting on the reports of 'record victory' for Rajapaksa's ruling UPFA in the provincial elections.
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Genocide in Sri Lanka - Boston Globe

[TamilNet, Sunday, 15 February 2009, 12:28 GMT]
Comparing the recent bombing of hospital and training artillery barrage on a demarcated safety zone, where most of the 350,000 Tamil refugees were huddled, slaughtering hundreds of them to the "Bosnian Srebrenica genocide of more than 7,000 Muslims," an op-ed article written by former Associate Deputy Attorney General under President Reagan, Bruce Fein, Sunday said only a "genocide indictment" would "deter Rajapaksa and Fonseka from their ongoing atrocities against Tamil civilians." Pointing to US's actions against Serbia for noncooperation in apprehending genocide defendants Slobodan Milosevic et.al., Fein says, "[t]he United States should be no less scrupulous in prosecuting suspected genocide by its own citizens or permanent residents."
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Journalist Sathiyamoorthy killed inside Safe Zone

[TamilNet, Saturday, 14 February 2009, 19:08 GMT]
Puniyamoorthy Sathiyamoorthy, journalist and political analyst, well-known and highly respected by the Tamils in Eelam and among diaspora Tamils, sustained serious injuries in the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) artillery barrage Thursday on Theavipuram in the 'safety zone' declared by Sri Lanka government in Mullaitheevu district in Vanni, and succumbed to his wounds. Lack of proper medical attention contributed to his death, according to relatives who cared for him after the incident.
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Poignant acts of self-immolation

[TamilNet, Saturday, 14 February 2009, 10:45 GMT]
It may sound good to say that there is no place for feudal expressions in a 'postmodern' world. It may be true that there can be no second word about resolving issues on a democratic plane. But the first warnings have come pointing to the flaws in the handling of the situation by democratic powers and calling for effective rectifications. They have come from non-combatants and have come spontaneously. The extreme expression of self-denial, openly denouncing injustices perpetrated on a people by ganged-up authority, has come from educated people of ordinary walks of life committing self-immolation.
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Teen fasts to publicize Tamils plight - Boston Globe

[TamilNet, Saturday, 14 February 2009, 05:17 GMT]
A 17-year-old Bostonian is the "youngest of eight ethnic Tamils in the country who are fasting to call attention to the plight of their countrymen in Sri Lanka, an island nation off the coast of India where some 300,000 members of the Tamil minority are trapped in the fighting between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil rebel army," reported Boston Globe. The "group plans to fast until they have forfeited 10,000 meals cumulatively - each meal representing 30 of the estimated 300,000 Tamils trapped in the war zone," the paper said.
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Eezham Tamil immolates himself to death in front of UN office in Geneva

[TamilNet, Friday, 13 February 2009, 16:17 GMT]
A 26-year-old diaspora Eezham Tamil from UK has self-immolated himself to death in front of the United Nations Office at Geneva (UNOG) in Switzerland Thursday night around 8:20 p.m., according to police spokesman Eric Grandgean. The man has identified himself as Murukathasan in a letter left behind by him 10 meters away from the scene, the Police officer said when contacted by a Tamil journalist in Switzerland on Friday. The copy of the letter in English and Tamil, received by Tamil journalists, with the identical name, said: "I believe the flames over my body, heart and soul will help the world community to have a deep human look over the great sufferings of the Sri Lankan Tamils.
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Silent prayer, fast observed in Jaffna University, for the suffering Tamils in Vanni

[TamilNet, Thursday, 12 February 2009, 16:03 GMT]
“The people in Vanni are undergoing unprecedented suffering and pain without any food, medicine, clothes and places to seek shelter, in the unrelenting attacks on them and we urge the concerned parties and the International Community to help stop the war on the Tamils immediately,” Jaffna University Students Union (JUSU) said in a media report Thursday.
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British ex-defence secretary appointed special envoy to Sri Lanka

[TamilNet, Thursday, 12 February 2009, 15:44 GMT]
Britain named a special envoy to Sri Lanka on Thursday to help bring about a political solution to the island’s long-running conflict and to ease hardships to Tamil civilians trapped in the Vanni warzone, UK press reports said. "I've asked Des Browne, our former defence secretary, to be an envoy for Sri Lanka," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told a parliamentary committee. Brown said the priorities were to achieve a ceasefire and to get a political settlement, Reuters reported. Meanwhile, US Ambassador to Sri Lanka, Robert Blake was quoted by the Washington Post as saying the Sri Lankan military’s capture of the Vanni region – which he expects within weeks – will not end the LTTE’s armed struggle and that Colombo must reach a political settlement with the Tamils.
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Singapore Tamils protest newspaper misreporting

[TamilNet, Thursday, 12 February 2009, 13:57 GMT]
Singapore Tamils have protested misreporting of a news in the headlines of the country's Tamil daily Tamil Murasu last Thursday, which read that the LTTE had claimed they would even attack Tamil Nadu, media circles in Singapore said.
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Civilian refugees imprisoned in internment camps in Vavuniyaa

[TamilNet, Thursday, 12 February 2009, 11:55 GMT]
The civilian refugees who either fled the war zone or caught by the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) are denied not only the freedom of movement to go out of the buildings in which they are detained under 'near-prison' conditions, but are also denied freedom of movement inside the camp itself after 6:00 p.m. by the SLA, even for the call of nature, on grounds of condemnation that they were linked to the LTTE, said NGO activists on condition of anonymity.
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'Tamil Nadu needs to go beyond demonstrations'

[TamilNet, Thursday, 12 February 2009, 08:49 GMT]
If at all there is any positive impact of the unprecedented uprising and demonstrations, staged spontaneously by the masses of Tamil Nadu and the diaspora, it is the inward awakening of global Tamils to the forces of oppression and to the defiance of the oppressors, whether domestic or international. A historic responsibility lies on the leaders of Tamil Nadu and on those who uphold the struggle of the oppressed, to channel the positive energy generated from the uprising to achieve its goals rather than allowing it to be carried away by the machinations of the oppressors, writes opinion columnist Chivanadi.
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