Former SC judge sceptical of solution without internal or external pressure

[TamilNet, Friday, 16 December 2011, 23:32 GMT]
“I do not see any possible solution to the ethnic conflict immediately, unless extraneous pressure, inland or foreign, compels the powers that be to relent,” said former Supreme Court Judge CV Wigneswaran in giving an interview to Colombo-based Daily Mirror, Thursday. Justice Wigneswaran’s interview gains significance in the light of Sri Lanka’s ‘leaked’ LLRC report, coming out with a blue print for completing structural genocide by 2020, accuses Tamils seeking international remedy as counterproductive. Justice Wigneswaran’s interview, dealing in detail with the past deceits of Sinhala polity, also corresponds with Prof. Sitrampalam’s concerns over Colombo-centric elements in Tamil polity once again leading Tamils into a trap and with the recent Tamil civil society admonition to the leadership of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA).
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TAG files legal challenge to UK deportation policy

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 14 December 2011, 03:27 GMT]
Tamils Against Genocide (TAG-UK), an activist group that assists in obtaining legal redress to war-affected Tamil civilians, filed a legal action in the British Queens Bench Administrative Court Tuesday claiming that UK government’s policy to proceed with the deportation of failed asylum seekers to Sri Lanka was a breach of legitimate expectation of policy review following serious concerns of returnee safety revealed in the UN Committee Against Torture (UNCAT) report and the submissions by independent NGOs including Freedom From Torture (FfT) and Amnesty International to UNCAT, legal sources in London said. The British Government has reportedly organized a chartered flight to return nearly fifty failed asylum seekers to Sri Lanka on 15th December.
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TNA leadership faces admonition from civil society of Eezham Tamils

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 13 December 2011, 23:50 GMT]
Prominent members of the Tamil civil society of all walks of life presented a memorandum to the Tamil National Alliance leadership on Tuesday, strongly condemning deception and deviatory polity of the leadership while times demand well-defined solutions to a long struggle. The civil society members urged firmness of leadership in political stand in convincing India and the US of the indispensability of addressing fundamentals of the aspirations of Eezham Tamils, i.e., nation and the right to self-determination. Tamils are not a ‘minority’ requesting concessions, but a nation demanding self-rule, the memorandum said. The impressive list of signatories included prominent religious leaders, academics, educationalists, professionals, trade unionists and community leaders. For the first time the TNA leadership faces such an open challenge of the first magnitude from the civil society.
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Sri Lanka exclusion zone likely contains mass graves: British MEP

[TamilNet, Saturday, 10 December 2011, 15:41 GMT]
Richard Howitt, a British Member of European Parliament (MEP), after leading a delegation socialist MEPs to Sri Lanka where they were allowed to visit to the edge of the demarcated Exclusion zone, said "he believes there are many bodies of dead civilians buried in exclusion zones where the final fighting of the civil war took place in 2009," BBC reported. Howitt said that there should be full access to the exclusion zone.
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Tension prevails as SLA terrorizes Tamils confronting Sinhala thugs in Vanni

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 07 December 2011, 02:44 GMT]
Scores of Tamils, including women and children, were injured and terrorized by the occupying Sinhala army at Ira'naimadu junction in Ki'linochchi on Tuesday night between 8:00 and 10:30 p.m., following 4 Sinhala thugs were confronted by the local people. Four Sinhala men from South who came to a Tamil shop at Ira'naimadu junction on Tuesday night threatened the shopkeeper and attacked him. When the people of the locality retaliated, the Sinhala men escaped into an SL military camp. Around 30 Sinhala soldiers who came in support of the thugs indiscriminately attacked the people of the locality and all people passing by the junction. The attack continued for nearly two hours.
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West endorses ethno-military rule, military solution: Tamil civil groups

[TamilNet, Thursday, 01 December 2011, 11:39 GMT]
Civil society organisations in the country of Eezham Tamils are enraged at foreign diplomats visiting their country confining the purposes of the visits primarily to meeting the commanders of the occupying Sinhala military but not the civil society. While genocidal Sri Lanka conjures ’normalcy’ has come to Tamils, the gesture of these diplomats is a tacit endorsement to the ethnic-shaded military rule and military solution. Those who delay international justice, sit on international responsibilities, and talk about ‘domestic’ solutions are not honest. They only mean ‘remote controlled’ military solution, and that is what in the minds of the core sections of the Establishments that deploy cosmetic talk of human rights as a cover, the civil groups accused. They are particularly enraged at the conduct of the US, UK and EU diplomats.
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Malaysian Tamils remember Eezham Tamil heroes

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 30 November 2011, 06:23 GMT]
In an emotionally charged gathering organized by Chem-paruththi (Hibiscus flower) Movement and World Tamil Relief Fund in Kuala Lumpur on Sunday evening, Malaysian Tamils observed the Heroes Day, paying tribute to the Eezham Tamil heroes laid down their lives in the struggle for independence as well as remembering more than a hundreds thousand Tamil civilians deliberately killed in the war.
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Record turnout as Canada Heroes Day event asserts sovereignty

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 29 November 2011, 12:07 GMT]
More than 70,000 Canadian Tamils paid homage to heroes at the Toronto Heroes Day event organized by the Canadian Tamil Remembrance Organization (CTRO) Sunday. Conducted in four sessions in a make-shift venue, emotions were high and messages were clear. Despite threats of manufactured divisions towards the event, organizers came under the banner of CTRO for the importance of a strong display of unity. The event was marked with heart-touching cultural programmes reflecting on national unity amongst Eezham Tamils, highlighting successes and rejecting strategies of division in moving forward.
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Questions for Sri Lankan Ambassador of Australia: Dr. Senewiratne

[TamilNet, Monday, 28 November 2011, 11:21 GMT]
If the war is over and the Tamil people have been ‘liberated’ from the ‘terrorists’ and ‘rehabilitated’, then why does the Sri Lankan government still not allow access to international groups in Tamil areas, asks Brian Senewiratne in a hard-hitting series of questions to Sri Lankan High Comissioner to Australia. Dr. Senewiratne, a renowned physician and an Australia based Sinhala expatriate, produced posers to ex-Admiral Thissara Samarasinghe using evidence from the UN report, Channel 4 video and other sources. The ex-Admiral, incidentally, is also alleged of war crimes and there have been calls in Australia to investigate his role in the genocide of the Eelam Tamils.
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Students, academics bid farewell to A C Nadarajah

[TamilNet, Friday, 25 November 2011, 08:39 GMT]
Around one thousands people, most of them students and teachers, gathered Thursday to pay their last respects to social activist, educationalist and journalist A C Nadarajah (A S Nadarajah), who passed away at the age of 70 at Urumpiraay in Jaffna. Mr. Nadarajah was the president of Displaced Peoples Association of Valikaamam North and former manager of Jaffna Thinakkural. Through his writings he pioneered an independent initiative which instituted social institutions to help the uprooted people of Vanni.
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‘Sandwich theory’ an excuse for not taking a stand: Indian academic Radha D’Souza

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 23 November 2011, 17:59 GMT]
“Those wanting to remain equidistant from state and the struggles of people. [..] actually end up legitimating the moral authority of the state by giving the state the moral authority to continue with the war on people.”, observes Radha D’Souza in an interview to TamilNet on Sunday. Dr. D’Souza, who is a reader of law at the University of Westminster and a social justice activist from India, argues that such an approach by international agencies that act as ‘peace-brokers’, ‘NGOs’, and local actors, only benefits militarist states in the final analysis. They are the other face of oppression because the other face is necessary to sustain the armed intervention, she says.
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Solheim hijacks thrust of Norway report

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 22 November 2011, 03:39 GMT]
Norwegian minister Erik Solheim, while speaking in Oslo 11 November at the release of the report evaluating Norway’s failed peace process in Sri Lanka, tried to hijack the philosophical thrust of the findings of the report and this brought him into confrontation with the evaluation team leader, Gunnar M. Sørbø. Mr. Erik Solheim tried to defend the main criticism in the report and the stand of Sørbø that Norway should have quit the peace process to signal the world of the impending dangers. Arguing that nobody expected a military solution succeeding, Solheim painted the picture of a star-crossed and epic-style tragedy that everyone has to be now contended with in a philosophical way, and said that the stand of Sørbø was ‘arrogant’. Solheim’s speech made Sørbø to remind that the issue was of life and death and Norway should have had contingencies ready.
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China proxies get India's closest coast in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Saturday, 19 November 2011, 04:41 GMT]
The closest coastline to Tamil Nadu in Jaffna, a 15 km stretch from Thiruvadi Nilai to KKS has been given to a Malaysian corporate of Chinese connections to install windmills and solar panels to produce electricity and 'sell' it to the people of Jaffna, replacing the coastal people and the proud palmyra palms now stand there. In October 2011, the Malaysian corporate, KLS Energy entered into an agreement with China Machinery and Engineering Corporation to 'develop' wind/solar hybrid power project in Jaffna. The agreement was part of Malaysian Prime Minister's US$ 10 billion economic cooperation initiative with China. In an ingenious plan to steal the entire northern coast of Jaffna for the SL military, corporates and ventures of imperialism, genocidal Colombo not only seals off Eezham Tamils from Tamil Nadu, but also effectively checks Indian ambitions there with proxy Chinese projects.
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India emerges as main designer of ‘Asian Model’ in Norway report

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 16 November 2011, 10:25 GMT]
The Norway report on the failed peace in Sri Lanka, concluding that Asian powers in pursuance of military solution were a reason for the failure, cautions that this model of ‘conflict resolution’ will challenge future Norwegian-style mediations. India’s role in the genocidal model of conflict resolution is not adequately discussed in the report, yet bits and pieces in the report along with what transpired in the panel discussion in Oslo on Friday, place India as decisively responsible for the ‘Asian model’ that ended the war in genocide. Meanwhile, citing the upsurge of Sinhala nationalism as a result of the international peace process, the report advises appeasement by leaving the fate of Eezham Tamils to ‘domestic solutions’. But an upsurge of Tamil nationalism resulting from the genocide, snowballing in either side of the Palk Bay, is yet to make impact with the IC.
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Colombo fails bid to host 2018 Commonwealth games

[TamilNet, Saturday, 12 November 2011, 00:59 GMT]
Gold Coast, located in the eastern shores of Southern Queensland, Australia, a popular tourist destination, leveraging its experience in hosting large-scale sporting events and the well-developed infrastructure facilities, beat Sri Lanka to host the 2018 Commonwealth games Friday. Colombo furiously pursuing its goal of erasing memory of the massacre of 40,000 Tamil civilians in 2009, went after the bid to transform Sri Lankan President's home electorate, Hambantota, as a "sports city," but was voted down 27 to 43 by the voting members of the Commonwealth, according to reports.
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Sri Lanka massacre, 5 times Srebrenica, 80 times My Lai, says German paper

[TamilNet, Friday, 11 November 2011, 11:55 GMT]
Referring to the Channel-4 documentary Sri Lanka's Killing Fields, journalists, Dirk Maxeiner and Michael Miersch, in an opinion column that appeared in German newspaper Die Welt said that the massacre of Tamil civilians in Sri Lanka by the State military is five times the killings from Srebrenica genocide, and 80 times the numbers killed in the Mai Lai massacre. "Colombo successfully covered up the killings by sending away the UN observers on the grounds that the State will not be able to ensure their safety, and then began the mass murder," Die Welt said on 03 November.
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Shavendra not entitled to immunity, argue attorneys for Tamil plaintiffs

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 09 November 2011, 11:56 GMT]
Attorneys for two Tamil plaintiffs Tuesday filed a formal response to Sri Lankan ex-Major General Shavendra Silva’s motion to dismiss the war crimes lawsuit against him in the Southern District of New York, and international human rights groups united to urge the United Nations to suspend the credentials of Silva, who is Sri Lanka’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations. Silva is facing allegations in federal court for war crimes including torture, extrajudicial killing and the intentional shelling of civilians during Sri Lanka’s armed conflict.
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Politics of the Way Ahead

[TamilNet, Thursday, 03 November 2011, 20:22 GMT]
The contradictions between the Establishments and Peoples are likely to be the most antagonistic in the Indian subcontinent and hence that is the region for the next major change in the World. Our alliance with Tamil Nadu is of utmost priority in this regard. It appears that India used the Vanni War without witness as a ‘Field Trial’ for its developing wars against its own Nations without State. In due course, the Indian Establishment will become the main enemy of the region and at that time coalition of Establishments supporting the Indian Establishment will be quite different to the coalition that supported genocidal Sri Lanka. With this in perspective, we should keep our eyes open to new opportunities including progressive Sinhala forces that recognize the Right of Self Determination of the Nation of Eezham Tamils, writes TamilNet Economic and Geopolitical Analyst in the Asia Pacific.
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Britain echoes Canada’s warning to Sri Lanka on CHOGM 2013

[TamilNet, Sunday, 30 October 2011, 16:40 GMT]
British Prime Minister David Cameron urged Sri Lanka on Sunday to make progress on human rights before it hosts the next Commonwealth leaders meeting in 2013 to prevent the likelihood of boycotts, AFP reports. Mr. Cameron also said he pressed President Mahinda Rajapaske during this year's summit in Australia to show that Colombo did not "have things to hide" following the end of the island’s civil war. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared last month he would not attend the CHOGM meeting in Sri Lanka “if we do not see progress in Sri Lanka in terms of human rights and … political reconciliation, democratic values and accountability.”
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Ban reminds Sri Lanka -again- about accountability

[TamilNet, Thursday, 27 October 2011, 01:29 GMT]
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stressed to the Sri Lankan government importance of dealing with accountability issues in themeeting on Wednesday at United Nations Headquarters in New York with Mahinda Samarasinghe, the Special Envoy of the President of Sri Lanka on Human Rights, the UN news agency said.
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