Rajapakse accused of war-crimes in Melbourne Court filing

[TamilNet, Monday, 24 October 2011, 16:01 GMT]
Sri Lankan-born Australian Arunachalam Jegatheeswaran filed an indictment on war-crime charges against the Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapakse yesterday, declaring he was seeking justice for thousands who perished in a series of aerial bombardments and ground attacks on shelters, schools, hospitals, orphanages and community centres. Rajapakse was leading a delegation to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) to be held in Perth.
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Sri Lanka in war crimes quagmire before CHOGM

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 19 October 2011, 01:48 GMT]
Sri Lanka is sinking deeply inside a torrent of allegations of war crimes against three senior officials, including Sri Lanka's President, ten days before the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) is to take place in Perth, prompting Premier Julia Gillard to confirm that Australian Federal Police (AFP) is conducting investigations on Sri Lanka officials over allegations of serious war-crimes, and forcing shadow foreign affairs minister Julie Bishop to demand Foreign Affairs Minister Kevin Rudd to reveal whether the government knew about the allegations against Admiral Thisara Samarasinghe before it accepted him as Sri Lanka’s high commissioner.
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Sri Lanka's Ex-Navy diplomat accused of war-crimes

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 18 October 2011, 00:02 GMT]
Citing evidence from Australian Tamil witnesses, the International Commission of Jurists, an international NGO dedicated to ensuring respect for international human rights standards through the law, has submitted a brief before the Australian Federal Police (AFP), to investigate Sri Lanka's high commissioner to Australia, former navy Admiral Thisara Samarasinghe, for committing possible war-crimes, The Age and Sydney Morning Herald reported Sunday. Samarasinghe was the commander of the Sri Lankan navy's eastern and then northern areas, as well as naval chief of staff, during the final years of Sri Lanka's civil war.
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Foreign Office ‘relief’ at Fox resignation – The Times

[TamilNet, Sunday, 16 October 2011, 01:59 GMT]
The Times newspaper Saturday described “a palpable sense of relief” in Britain’s Foreign Office at the resignation of Defence Secretary Liam Fox, whose “shadow diplomacy”, the paper said, “has seriously muddied the presentation of British policy abroad.” Although the Foreign Office had agreed to Dr. Fox visiting Sri Lanka to deliver a public lecture in July, after it added a phrase calling for an independent inquiry into crimes against Tamil civilians, suspicions remained. “There was a lot of suspicion about what was being said in private,” an FCO source told The Times. “We couldn’t be sure that there wasn’t unofficial diplomacy going on.”
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Sri Lanka links to the fore in Liam Fox political storm

[TamilNet, Friday, 14 October 2011, 04:48 GMT]
Amid the relentless political and media storm over British Defence Secretary Liam Fox’s relationship with Mr Adam Werritty, a close friend who has been operating as an unofficial ‘advisor’ to him on security and foreign policy matters, the duo’s links to Sri Lanka’s regime have been regularly popping up. By Friday, three separate types of links had been established in a series of reports filed over the past week by The Times, The Guardian, the Financial Times, and The Daily Telegraph newspapers, as well as Channel 4 and BBC television. The main opposition Labour party has in recent days tabled several questions in Parliament over Dr. Fox’s links to Sri Lanka, while the seemingly ceaseless revelations by the media are unsettling both Dr. Fox’s hitherto staunch allies in the right wing of the ruling Conservative Party, as well as senior Ministry of Defence staff and top military officers.
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US Court authorizes use of TamilNet to serve Rajapakse

[TamilNet, Friday, 14 October 2011, 02:22 GMT]
In a precedent setting order issued by the District Court of District of Columbia Thursday on the case against Sri Lanka's President Rajapakse filed by three Tamil plaintiffs, Judge Kotelly authorized service by "posting the full summons and complaint on the main page of the TamilNet website," and by publication in two Sri Lankan newspapers. Legal sources in Washington said that Rajapakse being haled into a US court to answer charges of complicity in the extra-judicial killings of plaintiffs relatives is imminent.
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Maldives defence minister visits Jaffna

[TamilNet, Thursday, 13 October 2011, 05:04 GMT]
Maldivian Defence Minister, Thalhath Ibrahim Kaleyfaanu, visited Sri Lanka’s occupying Army in the country of Eezham Tamils in Jaffna on Wednesday. His visit follows Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed’s unhindered support to genocidal Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa in shielding the latter from international war crimes investigation. The ‘hundred per cent Islamic country’ Maldives in recent times has entered into a number of agreements with Israel, the secret protocols of which are yet to be known to the public. However, the new friendship and the lease of one of the islands to Israel for ‘agricultural development’ are much talked about in Maldives. The support of US Asst Secretary of State Robert Blake to Nasheed’s Maldives in the international organisations is not without reason, political observers say.
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The Times slams Liam Fox’s ties to Sri Lanka

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 12 October 2011, 07:17 GMT]
Amid the continuing – and seemingly expanding – controversy in Britain over Defence Secretary Liam Fox’s working relationship with close friend, Mr. Adam Werritty, the former’s relationship with Sri Lanka’s regime has been thrust into the media spotlight. In its editorial Wednesday, The Times newspaper slammed Dr. Fox’s involvement with the Colombo government with which, press reports reveal, Mr. Werritty is also intimately associated. “The Defence Secretary’s ties to Sri Lanka are wrong and have exceeded his ministerial remit,” The Times said, referring to how his actions have undermined UK policy in dealing with the “grotesque and criminal” actions of the Sri Lankan armed forces against Tamil civilians in 2009.
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"Racial supremacist ideology thriving in Sri Lanka"

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 12 October 2011, 04:51 GMT]
"The status of Sri Lanka in the 21st century is of a political elite triumphantly thriving on racial supremacy ideology....CHOGM is the perfect opportunity to challenge Rajapaksa over his government's wilful murder of Tamils under the guise of defeating terrorism. It is arguable whether he should even be allowed into the country but if he arrives in Perth he should be made to realise that he has the blood of innocents on his hands," said Antony Loewenstein, an Australian independent journalist who sits on the advisory council of the UK-based Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice, in the ABC's online column Wednesday.
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Remedial Sovereignty

[TamilNet, Sunday, 09 October 2011, 05:22 GMT]
Tamils' demand for self-determination in the past four decades, which posed persistent challenges to Sri Lanka's sovereignty, was rooted on the acceptance of Tamils fundamental right to self-determination under customary international law, as a "people" possessing a distinct language, distinct culture and living in an identifiable region considered as the historic homeland. But recent, state sanctioned, massacre of 40,000 Tamils in Mu'l'livaaykkaal, and the continuing structural genocide, while reinforcing the traditional argument based on rights, also supplies an independent, stand alone justification for the creation of a state, based on the need to defend the Eelam Tamil population from further destruction - the doctrine of "remedial sovereignty."
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Snail pace delivery of houses with Indian assistance, mere 0.1% completed

[TamilNet, Saturday, 08 October 2011, 14:38 GMT]
Housing scheme for displaced civilians of North and East, announced by India last year, has failed to deliver, according to Tamil NGO and political circles in Jaffna. India had announced last year that it would construct 50,000 houses for the displaced in the North and East. However, only 53 houses have been constructed so far till October 2011, Tamil NGO sources said. Plans were afoot in Mannaar, Vavuniyaa, Ki'linochchi, Mullaiththeevu and Jaffna in North to construct houses for the war-displaced people. Earlier this year, when asked on the lack of progress of Indian announcement, Indian officials in the island responded that at least one thousand houses will be constructed before the end of 2011. The officials diluted the commitment further indicating that the numbers also included repair of existing houses.
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"Sri Lanka's Killing Fields" to be screened at EU Parliament

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 05 October 2011, 03:35 GMT]
Three international Human Rights watchdogs, Amnesty International, International Crisis Group (ICG), and Human Rights Watch (HRW) are jointly organizing the screening of Channel-4 documentary "Sri Lanka's Killing Fields," at the European Union Parliament Wednesday (12th), invitation sent to decision makers said. The documentary has been shown at the legislative bodies of western capitals including Washington, Ottawa, London, Wellington (NZ), and Oslo, and United Nations in Geneva and New York, and has triggered calls for international investigation on war crimes in Sri Lanka.
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SLA encroaches 100 acres of farmland in Ki'linochchi

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 04 October 2011, 17:20 GMT]
The occupying Sri Lanka Army in Vanni has forcibly taken over about one hundred acres of farmland situated between the villages Shanthapuram and Kanakaampikaik-ku'lam 5 km southeast of Ki'linochchi town. Earlier, the farmland was the livelihood of hundreds of people under a poverty alleviation scheme under the civil administration of the LTTE. A church and a well used by the residents of Shaanthapuram and Ira'naimaduk-ku'lam are also located in the land militarised by the occupying SL military. The SL military says it wants to exhibit military hardware seized from the Tigers in the farmland, which is situated near Ira'naimadu.
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‘Misplaced Loyalties’

[TamilNet, Monday, 03 October 2011, 05:17 GMT]
Genuine anti-imperialism does not lie in mere abstract anti-American/anti-west sloganeering, writes RM Karthick, a freelance writer based in Chennai. “In the wake of a ‘post-national world’ discourse framed by apologists of multi-national capitalism and equally regressive capitalist-bureaucratic models as upheld by states like Turkey, China and Russia - both aiding the logic of genocidal states like Sri Lanka, anti-imperialism in concrete requires solidarity with national liberation struggles and their progressive representatives,” he further writes in an article that appeared in West Bengal based Sanhati online journal on Saturday. The regimes in Cuba and Venezuela end up as political opportunists by supporting mass murderers and despots like Rajapaksa who virulently implement neo-liberal policies in deed, but put up a sham ‘anti-Americanism’ in words, the writer from Tamil Nadu says.
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‘Reconciliation comes by accepting nations are different’

[TamilNet, Sunday, 02 October 2011, 10:15 GMT]
The South and its Sinhala polity talked of themselves as Sri Lanka and Sri Lankans. Those who opposed the war, but still wanted to be part of the warring Sinhala ideology, thus said the common meeting point of all Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim people is the ‘Sri Lankan’ identity. But this ‘Sri Lankan’ identity is essentially a Southern Sinhala identity, points out veteran Sinhala journalist Kusal Perera. Sinhala political parties in the opposition cannot and does not want to leave their Sinhala identity in challenging this regime [of Rajapaksa]. Challenging this regime with a Sinhala identity is impossible, with a State that is now wholly Sinhalised and is firmly controlled with the defence establishment entrenched in politics and economics, he further said, writing in The Sunday Leader, last Sunday.
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Rajapakse, an enemy of all mankind, filed U.S. Court papers say

[TamilNet, Saturday, 01 October 2011, 17:07 GMT]
In a potential precedent setting motion filed in the U.S. District Court of District of Columbia, Bruce Fein, attorney for three Tamil plaintiffs, requested Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, to authorize issuing summons through latest electronic social networks and local papers to the defendant, Sri Lanka's sitting President, Mahinda Rajapakse, forcing the defendant to answer war-crimes charges, paving the way for Court determination of civil claims of $30m, legal sources in Washington said. Arguing that Rajapakse is "hostis humani generis," an enemy of all mankind, the motion provides legal precedence to establish that Rajapakse's crimes fall under Universal Jurisdiction applicable under TVPA.
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Congressman Honda calls for war-crimes accountability

[TamilNet, Saturday, 01 October 2011, 16:01 GMT]
Citing Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International's criticism of Sri Lanka's failed accountability through the locally constituted "Commission," and highlighting the atrocities described in the UN Panel's report, California Congressman Honda said in a US Congressional debate Thursday that a independent international mechanism is necessary to investigate Sri Lanka's war-crime allegations. However, the Congressman, appeared to be adhering to the soft foreign policy on Sri Lanka laid out by Asst. Secretary of State for South Asia, Robert Blake, by continuing to express faith in Government of Sri Lanka to "to provide for the peaceful well-being of all its people."
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HRW to screen Channel 4 documentary at Parliament Hill, Canada

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 27 September 2011, 00:43 GMT]
Human Rights Watch in Toronto, Canada, is screening “Sri Lanka's Killing Fields”, the Channel 4 documentary in Ottawa on Wednesday, September 28, 2011, the HRW said in an invitation to the press. The event will be hosted by Patrick Brown, Member of Parliament for Barrie and will include a discussion with Elaine Pearson, Deputy Asia Director at Human Rights Watch. The film was recently screened to wide acclaim at the United Nations in New York and Geneva, and has fuelled renewed calls for an international response to these crimes, according to the HRW.
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Torture case filed against Sri Lanka's ex-General Shavendra Silva

[TamilNet, Saturday, 24 September 2011, 00:50 GMT]
American University Washington College of Law's Human Rights Clinic in a press release issued today said that it has filed civil action at the District Court of New York Southern District (SDNY), on behalf of two Tamil plaintiffs against Sri Lanka's ex-Army General and currently Sri Lanka's Acting Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Shavendra Silva, on charges of torture and wrongful death. The civil action under the Torture Victims Protection Act (TVPA) called for declaratory relief and compensatory and punitive damages for torts in violation of international and domestic law.
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Sri Lanka relocates uprooted civilians by force in jungles to cover-up war crimes

[TamilNet, Thursday, 22 September 2011, 15:40 GMT]
Closing down the infamous Manik Farm barbed-wire camp where several thousands of war-displaced Tamil civilians were detained under extremely difficult conditions since early 2009, the genocidal Rajapaksa regime has now decided to relocate them in some strange jungle areas by force, under the name of ‘resettlement’ of internally displaced people (IDPs), mainly to cover up war crimes. Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Defence this week announced that preparations were under way to construct 600 acre new village in Koampaavil in Puthukkudiyiruppu area to resettle the remaining 7,394 IDPs from 2,097 families at the Manik Farm Camp.
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