"Sri Lanka, stop" says Le Monde

[TamilNet, Friday, 11 September 2009, 11:44 GMT]
"After winning the war, the Sri Lankan regime is in the process of losing the peace. Following the historic, but bloody and distasteful victory, against the armed struggle of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapaksa could be magnanimous and reach out to the Tamil minority and open the way for national reconciliation. But Rajapakse has chosen another path, the path of domination...Under the tents of the refugee camps tomorrow's Tigers may already be rising to mount a future rebellion," warned France's popular daily, Le Monde in Thursday editorial.
Full story >>

US bemoans Sri Lanka inaction on camps, reconciliation

[TamilNet, Friday, 11 September 2009, 09:02 GMT]
The United States this week criticised the Sri Lankan government’s continued internment of hundreds of thousands of Tamils and Colombo’s not taking steps towards a political reconciliation. “President Rajapaksa did meet on Monday with representatives of the Tamil National Alliance, but in general there have been few other concrete steps to re-unite the country and begin to heal the wounds of a long war in such a way that all Sri Lankans feel they enjoy equal rights and opportunities,” US Assistant Secretary, Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Robert Blake said Wednesday.
Full story >>

2 Tamil youths arrested in Colombo

[TamilNet, Friday, 11 September 2009, 08:43 GMT]
Sri Lanka Army (SLA) soldiers took into custody two Tamil youths in a search conducted Thursday night in Kohuwala, a suburb of Colombo city, according to complaints made by the youths’ relatives to Deputy Minister, R. Rathakrishnan.
Full story >>

Emergency extended for another month, JVP walks out

[TamilNet, Friday, 11 September 2009, 05:19 GMT]
Sri Lanka’s parliament Thursday evening approved the motion to extend the State of Emergency for another year by a majority of eighty-seven votes. One hundred parliamentarians of the ruling United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA) and its constituent parties voted for the motion. Thirteen parliamentarians of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) voted against. The main opposition United National Party (UNP) parliamentarians were not present in the house during the debate, parliamentary sources said.
Full story >>

Remove SLA camps, HSZ, checkpoints from NE - Sampanthan

[TamilNet, Friday, 11 September 2009, 05:19 GMT]
R. Sampanthan, parliamentary group leader of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), told parliament Thursday that the government could not cite any reason for the delay in resettling hundreds of thousands of internally displaced Tamils in their own places in Vanni region. "High Security Zones (HSZs) should be removed from the north and east. Sri Lanka Army (SLA) camps and check points should be dismantled immediately to restore normalcy in the provinces," Mr.Sampanthan said while speaking in parliament Thursday opposing the motion moved by the Government of Sri Lanka to extend the State of Emergency for another month.
Full story >>

Western inaction the building blocks of Chinese vassal state - Former Australian Diplomat

[TamilNet, Friday, 11 September 2009, 00:22 GMT]
Nations operating behind the Sri Lankan Governments’ manipulation of the post 9-11 global climate in equating 'Tamil and terrorist' continue to ignore their humanitarian obligations to the point of complicity accused former Australian diplomat Bruce Haigh, referring to the imprisonment of 300,000 Tamil refugees in government camps. Speaking at a forum held at The University of Sydney last week, Haigh described the actions of the Sri Lankan Government as one of “pure vindictiveness…towards people who are totally dispossessed and totally powerless”, before warning that the island may become “a vassal state of China.. not averse to carrying out acts of terror and in the future that may be directed towards India in ways to be determined by the Chinese".
Full story >>

Colombo opts for bravado than complying with Human Rights

[TamilNet, Friday, 11 September 2009, 00:22 GMT]
Challenging the impending EU move to cancel 1 billion pounds trade concession to Sri Lanka, the islands former foreign secretary and newly appointed permanent representative to UN, Palitha Kohona , Thursday said, that it is a “cynical approach” of the EU. "We can handle [the loss]. Western countries should remember that economic power has shifted from the west to the east. New markets open up in the east. Our friends China, India, Japan, Korea, Iran … a whole range of countries [can help]," he said. UK refused ‘five years multiple entry visa’ to Kohona this week. Palitha Kohonoa was earlier named in media reports as one of the actors of the ‘failed rescue’ of LTTE officials that could be considered a matter for war crimes investigation.
Full story >>

No change in dire camp conditions - CAFOD

[TamilNet, Thursday, 10 September 2009, 11:41 GMT]
As monsoon floods loom, CAFOD (Catholic Fund for Overseas Development) has called on Sri Lanka’s government “to end the forced confinement” of hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians. “Nothing has changed over the last three months for the people that are living in the camps. They are overcrowded with poor sanitary conditions and inadequate health care,” CAFOD’s head of international programmes said this week. Another CAFOD official who visited one of the barbed-wire ringed militarised camps told the BBC this week that “a potential crisis could brew there if the rains come through and those camps are still as congested as they are [now].”
Full story >>

Turbulent Sri Lanka opts for offshore tourism

[TamilNet, Thursday, 10 September 2009, 10:54 GMT]
Some European investors and a Sri Lankan entrepreneur, relieved about the ‘end of war,’ are embarked upon building a 175 million dollar luxury tourist resort in the offshore tracts of the Dutch Bay in Katpiddi, media sources in Colombo reported Wednesday. The narrow stretch of land lying between the Dutch Bay and the Indian Ocean will have 60 chalets and 20 villas in the first phase, costing 1000-1500 dollars per night and will have 80 villas in the second phase to be sold to Arabs, Europeans and Sri Lankans as holiday or retirement homes. The Katpiddi region of the North Western Province was part of the Tamil homeland and even now is a territory of Tamil speaking people. Mr Neil de Silva, chairman of the project refused to say how much the investors paid for the land to the local people.
Full story >>

3 Tamil civilians missing, abducted in Colombo

[TamilNet, Thursday, 10 September 2009, 04:59 GMT]
Three Tamil civilians have been reported missing since the last week of August from Wattala, Pettah and Moratuwa in separate incidents, according to complaints lodged by their relatives with the respective police stations and human rights groups in Colombo.
Full story >>

Chiththirameazhi

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 09 September 2009, 22:42 GMT]
(The village of) the guild of agriculturists whose totem symbol was the 'magnificent plough'
Full story >>

500 Tamil police personnel to be appointed in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 09 September 2009, 08:19 GMT]
Jaffna district Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), Roshan Fernando, said that 500 Tamil young men and women are to be selected to be trained as police constables, sub-inspectors and inspectors to serve in Jaffna district to meet the need for Tamil police personnel, in a press meet held Tuesday in Jaffna police station, sources in Jaffna said.
Full story >>

Channel-4 broadcast of internment camp conditions irks Colombo

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 09 September 2009, 00:11 GMT]
Following the broadcast of shocking video footage showing Sri Lanka Government soldiers executing Tamils stripped naked and hands tied behind their backs, British Television Channel-4 Monday revealed a new film that showed Tamil "victims of Sri Lanka's war suffering poor conditions in UN-funded camps." The new footage, allegedly taken by a mobile phone, was sent to Channel-4 from the group War Without Witness, and was reportedly shot two weeks ago in Vavuniyaa, in northern Sri Lanka, where more than 300,000 Tamils are being interned in Sri Lanka military supervised camps. Sri Lanka's spokesperson, while insisting that United Nations is active inside there [the camps], responded that the malnutrition statistics reflect "Western standards," indeed malnutrition is present in other parts of Sri Lanka, and also that the situation was worse under the Liberation Tigers.
Full story >>

Banning political parties identifying with race, religion is violation

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 08 September 2009, 16:59 GMT]
Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court has ruled that certain sections of the Amended Parliamentary Elections Bill are inconsistent with the Constitution, Speaker W.J.M Lokkubandara informed the Parliament Tuesday. A section in the Bill banning political parties signifying a race or a religion is a violation of fundamental rights of the citizens. Hence the Bill is inconsistent with the Constitution and will require two-third majority to be approved by Parliament, he said. The Supreme Court conveyed its ruling to the Speaker after inquiring into several petitions filed against the Amended Bill, parliamentary sources said.
Full story >>

TNA's meeting with Rajapaksa fails to resolve IDP crisis

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 08 September 2009, 12:24 GMT]
Tamil National Alliance (TNA) parliamentarians who held talks with Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his ministers Monday evening at Temple Trees on the issue of resettling Vanni IDPs in their own places, said that the talks ended in failure as Mr. Rajapaksa evaded the main issue by saying resettlement of Vanni IDPs is not immediately possible as demining in Vanni has to be completed before resettlement. The urgent request to resettle the Vanni IDPs in Vavuniyaa internment camps before the monsoon rains was not given any due consideration by Rajapaksa and his ministers, TNA parliamentarians said.
Full story >>

Roads lead to ruin – Prime Minister Wickramanayake

[TamilNet, Monday, 07 September 2009, 19:14 GMT]
Sri Lanka will not open up closed roads despite defeating the Tamil Tigers because this could cause the economy to collapse, the country’s Prime Minister was quoted as saying last week. "Do you remember what happened to the Soviet Union under Gorbachev? He opened the roads immediately and what happened? The entire country collapsed. We can't afford to do that," Ratnasiri Wickramanayake told a business forum in Colombo last Tuesday, according to the business news portal, Lanka Business Online.
Full story >>

Continuing misery of Sri Lanka's camps

[TamilNet, Monday, 07 September 2009, 17:16 GMT]
Two months after Aljazeera compiled a dossier of information highlighting what the broadcaster described as “shocking and disturbing” conditions in Sri Lanka’s militarised internment camps, nothing has changed. Reporting in late July, Aljazeera noted that what the Colombo government calls “welfare camps”, critics have called “the world’s biggest open air prison”. TamilNet is revisiting Aljazeera’s July report, which set out the substantial material about camp conditions compiled by the broadcaster despite the govenrment’s restrictions, to highlight the ongoing misery of the camps’ inmates.
Full story >>

Obama should call for release of Tissainayagam - Boston Globe

[TamilNet, Monday, 07 September 2009, 16:48 GMT]
Boston Globe in a Monday editorial called an irony that Tissainayagam was thrown into prison for his writings that the Sri Lanka Government called have "creat[ed] communal disharmony" when "280,000 Tamil civilians displaced by the government’s victorious war against the separatist Tamil Tigers are currently suffering and dying in flooded, ill-provided camps" which is a real cause of disharmony," and appealed that "Obama should call for his [Tissainayagam's] release and for Sri Lanka’s uprooted civilians to be returned to their homes."
Full story >>

SLA massacred civilians in bunkers - medical worker

[TamilNet, Monday, 07 September 2009, 08:57 GMT]
The advancing Sri Lanka Army massacred civilians by paving their bunkers with tanks, by throwing explosives inside the bunkers and by shooting the injured, says a medical worker who came out of Mu’l’li-vaaykkaal during the last days of the war, became incarcerated in a camp and now escaped the island. "Around a hundred thousand captured civilians herded to Mullaiththeevu were kept in rows within barbed wires, most of the time without water or food under the hot sun, and were bullied and ill treated with arrogance," he writes in a lengthy note that reached TamilNet this week. The note in Tamil was provided by the Norwegian Tamils Health Organisation (NTHO), urging TamilNet not to reveal the identity of the health worker for reasons of his security.
Full story >>

JVP to decide on its stand in supporting extending emergency

[TamilNet, Sunday, 06 September 2009, 16:48 GMT]
The politburo of the Sinhala Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) is to decide this week whether to support the Extension of Emergency in the country any more in view of the arrest and detention of three journalists working in its official paper “Lanka” under the Emergency Regulations (ER) and Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), JVP parliamentary group leader Mr. Anura Kumara Dissanayake told media in Colombo. Police arrested three journalists of JVP in Deniyaya on 2nd September while they were taking pictures and videoing Bewarali estate bungalow.
Full story >>