Gota silent, Mahinda belatedly responds, Silva evokes Buddhist sentiments with SL Chief Justice

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 19 February 2020, 23:44 GMT]
Acting SL Chief of Defence Staff and SL Army Commander Shavendra Silva, subjected to a travel ban along with his immediate family members by the US State Department on Friday, was gracing a “mammoth multifaceted Anuradhapura ‘Swarnamali Thupabhivandana’, meritorious programme” on Saturday, said SL Army website on Sunday. In the meantime, SL President and Commander-in-Chief Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a US citizen, remained silent without commenting anything on the travel ban. Meanwhile, SL Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa has issued a statement, attacking the report of the 2011 UN Panel of Experts as “unofficial” and the 2015 OHCHR report and the UNHRC Resolution 30/1 as being based upon the 2011 “unofficial” report, which he described as the source of “unfounded allegations”.
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Mike Pompeo slammed, Mahinda Rajapaksa praised over China comments

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 11 February 2020, 16:59 GMT]
China’s Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Geng Shuang was commending SL Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa for ‘positive’ remarks on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) during his recent visit to India. Mr Shuang, who is also the deputy director of China’s Foreign Ministry Information Department, was praising Mr Rajapaksa, although the latter had prioritised India as a “relation” over China, which he described a “friend” during his recent trip to India. Mr Shuang, in his daily briefing online, was responding to questions from journalists on matters ranging from the epidemic caused by novel coronavirus pneumonia in Wuhan to Indo-Pacific geopolitics. China was firmly opposed to US State Secretary Mike Pompeo's recent speech, which “fraught with Cold-War mentality and political prejudice,” the Chinese spokesman said.
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China, Vietnam block joint statement against genocidal Myanmar in UN Security Council

[TamilNet, Thursday, 06 February 2020, 20:12 GMT]
The Republic of China, one of the five UN Security Council (UNSC) permanent members and Vietnam, one of the ten nonpermanent members for the 2020-2021 term, were opposing a joint declaration on Myanmar earlier this week. The proposed statement was seeking Myanmar to comply with the recent provisional judgement delivered by the International Court of Justice at a closed-door meeting of the UNSC. Meanwhile, all the permanent members of the UNSC, except China, seem to be backing India on the status of the occupied Kashmir. However, UNSC’s EU member states, France, Estonia, Germany and Belgium issued a joint statement urging Myanmar to “comply with the provisional measures indicated by the ICJ.”
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US Report: Washington needs New Delhi to pose military dilemmas for China

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 28 January 2020, 22:25 GMT]
Washington, D.C.-based national security think-tank Center for a New American Security (CNAS) that carried out a Congressionally mandated study on US strategy in the Indo-Pacific to the Pentagon has recommended the US to pay particular attention to supporting India’s efforts to pose military dilemmas for China, thereby providing relatively low-cost means to complicate the ability of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to concentrate attention and resources on U.S. strongholds in East Asia and the Western Pacific. The study, titled “Rising to the China Challenge: Renewing American Competitiveness in the Indo-Pacific—to the Department of Defense,” which was handed over to the US Department of Defence in December 2019, has been released on the Internet on Tuesday. Interestingly, there was no reference to “Sri Lanka” in the 64-page long report.
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IC accountable for Gotabaya reneging on justice commitments: TNA MP

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 21 January 2020, 22:24 GMT]
Several countries in the International Community (IC) supported the Sri Lankan State that waged a genocidal war against the Tamils. The Tamil national liberation struggle and its taproot [the LTTE] were wiped out through a genocidal war by the SL State with the backing of other states in the IC. It was Gotabaya Rajapaksa who commanded the genocidal war in 2008 and 2009. Now, what are these countries going to do to enforce international justice, especially after Mr Rajapaksa pronouncing all the missing as dead, asked Tamil National Alliance Parliamentarian S Shritharan at the SL Parliament on Tuesday. Today, we are voicing for justice as a nation subjected to genocide. We are not merely speaking from a suppressed situation or a coated environment of so-called development, Mr Shritharan said adding that Tamils were no longer begging for justice, but demanding international justice.
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US-India ‘think-tankers’ advise New Delhi to put Tamil concerns on the backburner

[TamilNet, Thursday, 16 January 2020, 21:34 GMT]
Indian Prime Minister Narendra has been successful in culminating a two-year-long “silent background work” to rebuild relations with Rajapaksa siblings, observes Constantino Xavier, a research fellow at Brookings India in New Delhi. In an interview to Rediff, the Portuguese academic, who specialises foreign policy and defence in South Asia says, however, India was risking that Mr Gotabaya could repeat the game Nepal’s Prime Minister KP Olie played with India during the last three years. Mr Oli “gave in to all of Indian protocol demands and political optics, visited Delhi first, proclaimed India first, then waited for India to forget about him, and went on to do more business with China,” the US-India think-tanker told Rediff.com on Thursday.
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Putting Russian abetment of Tamil genocide in proper context

[TamilNet, Monday, 13 January 2020, 23:55 GMT]
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has given an email-interview to Colombo-based Daily News before his visit to the island on Monday. The long-serving Russian FM was stressing a set of principles such as “indivisible security” and “non-interference in the internal affairs” of the states in the Indian Ocean. Mr Lavrov also mentioned “peaceful settlement of disputes and non-use of force or the threat of force”. As far as the Eezham Tamils are concerned, they will never forget the use of lethal weapons deployed by genocidal Sri Lanka’s military. Much of those were supplied by Russia, particularly the OFAB-500 cluster bombs deployed by the SL Air Force and the thermobaric infantry weapons such as RPO-A Shmels used by the SL Army against Eezham Tamils.
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Sampanthan indirectly implicates India, US, EU, UK, Japan, Norway for Tamil predicament post-2009

[TamilNet, Friday, 10 January 2020, 23:10 GMT]
Despite all the valid criticisms against the revisionist TNA hierarchy, which has misled the occupied nation of Eezham Tamils by deviating from the fundamentals of the democratically mandated aspiration after 2009, one should appreciate TNA Parliamentary Group Leader R. Sampanthan for strait-forwardly reiterating, especially in recent times, the names of the regional and international formations ultimately responsible to crush the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The countries and the alliances mentioned by Mr Sampanthan include India, USA, Japan, Norway and the European Union with the UK. Sampanthan refers to the block of countries excluding India as the “international community”, and these countries were formally represented by identifiable individuals who served the formation of Tokyo Co-Chair Donors. A troika of diplomats was representing India at the height of the war.
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Gotabaya backtracks on Colombo’s assurances to New Delhi: Sumanthiran

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 07 January 2020, 23:31 GMT]
Tamil National Alliance (TNA) Parliamentarian M.A. Sumanthiran has said that SL President Gotabaya Rajapaksa was regressing from the assurances made by his predecessors, including his brother Mahinda Rajapaksa, to New Delhi on three occasions about the full implementation of the 13th Amendment. When India intervened in 1987, Colombo turned towards the “right direction” and started to “acknowledge the diversity of its peoples,” by amending the Constitution, the TNA parliamentarian said. The equal status between the peoples in the island is not dependent on their respective numerical strength. “This principle must be acknowledged if our democracy is to survive and indeed flourish, and not regress into naked majoritarianism. Regretfully, in his address to Parliament on 3rd January 2020 the President has articulated such a regressive position,” he said.
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Sinhalese have right of return to North, says lawyer from South rejecting Tamil rights

[TamilNet, Monday, 30 December 2019, 22:03 GMT]
The North is “just as much the historical habitation of the Sinhalese as it is of the Tamils”. And, the Tamils “do not have a right to sovereignty and self-determination adverse to the rights of the Sinhalese and other groups in the island,” writes Attorney-at-Law Dharshan Weerasekara, a Sinhalese, in an article ‘clarifying’ a judgement delivered by the SL Supreme Court in 2014. The denial of Tamil homeland and Tamils right of self-determination comes as the cabinet led by SL Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa also refused to allow the Tamil version of the SL ‘national anthem’ at the forthcoming ‘independence day’ celebrations on 04 February 2020. “Sinhalese have moral and historical rights in the North and East of the country, and this would include the right of return,” the Sinhala lawyer claimed in his response.
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SLAF Chief attends US Air Force meet while Gota claims not taking sides in great power rivalry

[TamilNet, Monday, 16 December 2019, 22:59 GMT]
The Commander of the SL Air Force (SLAF) Air Marshal Dambure Liyanage Sumangala Dias has taken part in the Pacific Air Chiefs Symposium (PACS 19) at the invitation of Commander of the United States Air Force Pacific Command Gen. CQ Brown, Jr. The participation has taken place while his Commander-in-Chief, SL President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a US citizen was waging propaganda to the effect that the Indian Ocean must be kept as “a zone of peace free of any conflict”. The SLAF Commander was attending a series of panel discussions on regional security, domain awareness, multi-domain operation, interoperability and humanitarian assistance/disaster relief, according to the news reports from the US Air Force.
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Correlating ‘optics’ of TNA is the need of the hour

[TamilNet, Saturday, 07 December 2019, 23:19 GMT]
The global and regional powers engaged in their geopolitical access negotiations with the sitting regimes in Colombo would continue to advise the leaders of Tamil National Alliance (TNA) to regard the Tamil national question as an internal affair of the ‘Sri Lankan’ state. The personalities at the helm of the TNA affairs have also succumbed to this advice, particularly after 2009. The Tamil civil society and the grassroots must address this ‘optical nerve problem’ of the TNA. The disease cannot be allowed to continue even after the Rajapaksa brothers coming to power in the South, commented Tamil activists for alternative politics in Jaffna. The Rajapaksa siblings have vowed to consolidate the unitary state, which is already illegitimate as far as the nation of Eezham Tamils is concerned, they said.
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New Delhi appeases Colombo as Eelam Tamil leaders fail to demand international mediation

[TamilNet, Friday, 29 November 2019, 18:45 GMT]
While Eelam Tamil political parties, particularly the TNA, are yet to place their demands to the geopolitical actors of an internationally mediated settlement to the national question in the island, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has offered a $450 million line of credit to Colombo, which includes $400 million for developing infrastructure and $50 million for anti-terrorism, media reports from India said on Friday. The move, announced during the new SL President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s maiden visit to India, is seen as a bid to outdo or reduce the influence of China in the strategically located island. In the meantime, New Delhi-based Hindustan Times reported that Gotabaya’s government wants to undo the previous regime’s move to lease the southern port of Hambantota to China. Rajapaksas were citing “national interest” as the reason, the paper said.
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University students, Shivaji brave SL restrictions on veneration of Tamil Eelam Heroes in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 27 November 2019, 10:46 GMT]
The Tamil student community forcibly opened the gate of the University of Jaffna and entered the memorial site for Tamil Eelam Heroes inside the main campus on Tamil Heroes Day braving the official ban against entering the University premises on Tamil Eelam Heroes Day. The mobilisation took place around 10:00 a.m. two hours ahead of the scheduled time. More than three hundred students entered the premises and paid tribute to the fallen Tamil Eelam Heroes at Maaveerar memorial and lit the morning flame. In the meantime, former NPC Councillor and ex-TNA parliamentarian M.K. Shivajilingam braved the harassment by the SL Army officers at the entrance to the Tamil Eelam Heroes Cemetery at Kodikaamam in Thenmaraadchi, Jaffna.
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Colombo attempts to officially block students from marking Heroes Day at Jaffna University

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 26 November 2019, 23:28 GMT]
The occupying unitary state of genocidal Sri Lanka has instructed the Competent Authority at the University of Jaffna to declare the premises of the University out of bounds to the student community on Tamil Eelam Heroes Day and the day after. Professor K Kandasamy has issued a letter to this effect on Tuesday. In the meantime, the student leaders of Jaffna University Student Union have been instructed not to stage any event inside the university premises on 26 and 27 November, also by the Competent Authority, Prof Kandasamy. However, the students have vowed to proceed with the remembrance event on Wednesday as planned.
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Demand Tokyo Co-chairs, India to bring international mediation between Tamils and GoSL

[TamilNet, Sunday, 24 November 2019, 19:59 GMT]
Unlike during the genocidal onslaught in 2009, the US and India are now more tightly intertwined in their foreign policy approach on the maritime affairs of the states in the Indian Ocean. There is a joint Indo-Pacific outlook, especially after the 2013 launch of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). There would be no different approaches or nuances between the two powers, as it was the case in the previous decade. The US and India, along with two other key partners in the region, Japan and Australia, would be acting en bloc. The Rajapaksa establishment is very well aware of this reality. It is time that Tamils muster their historic courage and articulate a joint demand for international mediation. It is also the time that the foreign actors who were pulling the wrong strings during the 2009 genocide and its aftermath now take account of their earlier practices.
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Reject engagement with genocidaire Gotabaya

[TamilNet, Monday, 18 November 2019, 23:10 GMT]
Newly sworn-in SL President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has denounced the existence of Eezham Tamils as a nation in the North and the East of the island. The wartime genocidaire Defense Secretary wants Tamils to become ‘Sri Lankans’ capitulating to the Sinhala Mahawansa doctrine, which possesses the requisite intent for Tamil genocide. The Tamils and their political leaders must unambiguously state now that there would be no engagement with genocidaire SL President and the SL State unless he openly and publicly declares Eezham Tamils as a nation entitled to the right of self-determination. The foreign state actors upholding the engagement paradigm are ultimately responsible for the continued crimes against Eezham Tamils in the island.
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Forest officials from Ampaa'rai intervene to free land encroachers in Batticaloa

[TamilNet, Friday, 15 November 2019, 17:00 GMT]
Sinhala officials of the SL Forest Department attached to the Ampaa'ari office seem to have released the Sinhala encroachers who were initially detained by the forest guards from Batticaloa on 05 November. The Sinhala officials from Ampaa'rai had taken the encroachers from the Tamil officials to avert legal action. There has been no legal against them in Ampaa'rai, and the encroachers are still seen engaging in various activities in Periya-maathava'nai and Mayilaththai-madu, particularly in Ea'raavoorpattu (Chengkaladi) division, Tamil dairy farmers who have been fighting against illegal encroachment.
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Shivajilingam responds to Sampanthan: no withdrawal without written assurance

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 13 November 2019, 09:13 GMT]
If the TNA Leader negotiates with Sajith Premadasa and secures a written assurance in which the SL presidential candidate commits to fulfil two specific demands, Tamil presidential candidate M.K. Shivajilingam was prepared to withdraw from the race for SL presidential candidate. However, such a move has not taken place, said Mr Shivajilingam in a comment to TamilNet on Wednesday. He was responding to Mr Sampanthan’s public appeal to Mr Shivajilingam to step down from the presidential race without any preconditions.
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Jaffna TELO branch contradicts party stance on SL presidential election

[TamilNet, Saturday, 09 November 2019, 20:02 GMT]
The Secretary and Deputy Secretary of the Jaffna branch of Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation (TELO), a constituent party of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), has issued a statement against the decision made by its hierarchy on supporting Sajith Premadasa in the forthcoming SL Presidential election. The party should not back a candidate who fails to genuinely honour the thirteen-point demands put forward by the six major Tamil parties, the Jaffna branch of the TELO said in a media statement issued after discussing the matter at a meeting held in Jaffna on Saturday.
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