School principal shot dead in Vavuniyaa

[TamilNet, Saturday, 04 July 2009, 12:18 GMT]
Unknown armed men shot and killed the principal of Parathipuram Tamil Mixed School and another man while the victims were travelling in a motorbike at Parathipuram in Vavuniyaa Saturday around 3:00 p.m., Police said.
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Moothoor HSZ displaced barred from resettling in own areas

[TamilNet, Saturday, 04 July 2009, 00:44 GMT]
Lands in Kattaiparichchan village are being cleared to set up temporary structures to shelter displaced families from traditional Tamil villages of Kadatkaraichcheanai, Champoor, Koonitheivu and Soodaikuda in Moothoor east division which fall under the High Security Zone (HSZ) declared by the Government of Sri Lanka after the 2006 military operation.
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Animosity of Tamils will not help India’s maritime ambitions

[TamilNet, Friday, 03 July 2009, 16:46 GMT]
Dominating the Indian Ocean, the shores of which are shared by 47 countries, has been the long-cherished dream of India ever since its independence. As China entering into a competition, the Indian Ocean is fast emerging as the new hotspot of Sino-Indian rivalry, says an article appeared Wednesday in Pakistan Observer. India’s security concerns as well as its needs to assert as a world power may be justifiable, but it is making a grave blunder in earning the animosity of Tamils, which is not going to help in its maritime ambitions, says TamilNet political commentator in Colombo.
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Tributes flow for Australian Tamil doctor killed in car crash

[TamilNet, Friday, 03 July 2009, 15:52 GMT]
Hundreds of Australians have paid tribute to Dr Nagaruban “Ruban” Armugam, a Tamil paediatrician tragically killed last week in a tragic road accident in Australia on 22 June. The 32-year-old Paediatrician was commemorated Monday at a moving funeral as tributes from politicians, colleagues, former patients and members of the community marked a week of mourning.
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5000 Vanni IDPs from internment camps moved to Anuradhapura

[TamilNet, Friday, 03 July 2009, 13:23 GMT]
The Sri Lankan military has relocated nearly 5000 Tamil civilians from Vavuniyaa and Cheddiku'lam internment camps and resetteld them in pre dominant Sinhala village Tharmapuram in Anuradhapu on Tuesday and Wednesday, civil sources said. The SL military officials had told the Tamil civilians that they would be re-settled in their native villages in Ki'linochchi or Mullaiththeevu within 14 days, but the Rajapaksa government, at an all party meeting in Colombo on Thursday, said that it needed time to clear the mines before any resettlement.
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Britain maintains warning against travel to Sri Lanka’s North and East

[TamilNet, Friday, 03 July 2009, 12:31 GMT]
Updating its travel advisory Wednesday, Britain warned its nationals “against all travel to the north and east of Sri Lanka, and to Yala National Park and the areas around it.” The new advisory was issued with an update on new surveillance measures at Bandaranayake International Airport related to A (H1N1) Swine Flu.
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Sri Lanka turning Manik Farm camp into permanent ‘city’ - report

[TamilNet, Friday, 03 July 2009, 12:11 GMT]
Despite assuring the international community that most Tamils interned in militarized detention camps would be resettled by the end 2009, the Sri Lankan government is turning Manik Farm, the largest barbed-wire ringed site, into a permanent detention centre, The Times newspaper reported Friday. Tamil refugees are being used as forced labour, UN sources told the paper. Aid workers say the site was fast becoming Sri Lanka’s second biggest city after the capital, Colombo. Whilst Sri Lanka blames mines for preventing resettlement, foreign demining agencies say that they have been given access so far to only about 30 sq km of the former Vanni conflict zone.
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Kohona: ‘Victorious soldiers could have raped every single woman’

[TamilNet, Friday, 03 July 2009, 02:20 GMT]
Sri Lankan government officials are running a prostitution racket using Tamil women interned in at least one of the militarised camps for displaced people, The Australian newspaper reported Thursday. "It's been brought to the attention of senior government officials but no one seems to be doing anything about it," an aid worker, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, told the paper. In response to the accusations, Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Palitha Kohona told the paper: "These (the military) are the guys who were winning the war - they could have raped every single woman on the way if they wanted to. Not one single woman was raped."
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Jaffna residents demand back money, jewelry from Central bank

[TamilNet, Thursday, 02 July 2009, 16:30 GMT]
Representatives of civil organizations, NGOs, Traders’ Circle and other participants requested the President of Bank of Ceylon, Dr. Gamini Wickremasinghe, to expedite the return of all the money and jewelry belonging to Jaffna residents taken to the Central Bank in Colombo in 1996 for safe keeping, Wednesday evening at Uroville Hall in Muththirai Chanthai in Nalloor. Mr Wickremasinghe was presiding a seminar titled "The role of Bank of Ceylon in the Development of Northern Province," when the demand was made, sources in Jaffna said.
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UN hires lawyers to defend detained local UN staff

[TamilNet, Thursday, 02 July 2009, 11:26 GMT]
Inner City Press (ICP) reported Tuesday that after a week of silence by the U.N. the U.N. spokesperson has revealed that "U.N. has hired a lawyer who has visited the U.N. staff and who are still detained in Colombo. Kandasamy "Saundi" Saundrarajan of UNOPS (Office of Project Services) and N. Charles Raveendran of UNHCR taken by the Sri Lanka Government and are under detention for more than a month.
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2 Tamil youths abducted in Batticaloa

[TamilNet, Thursday, 02 July 2009, 09:42 GMT]
Unidentified armed men arriving in a jeep abducted Friday night a Tamil youth travelling in a three-wheeler while on the same day armed men in Sri Lanka Army (SLA) uniforms took away a Tamil youth from his house in Koapaave’li in Batticaloa saying that he was to be interrogated, according to complaints made by the youths’ relatives to Chengaladi Prethesa Chapai President, S. Jeevarangan.
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Buddhism among Tamils is quenched from two sides: Peter Schalk

[TamilNet, Thursday, 02 July 2009, 06:09 GMT]
“To say that Tamil tradition has always been all-inclusive of religions is modern Tamil national ideology projected into an invented past. It is not history of the Tamils”, writes Professor Peter Schalk, challenging the perspectives of looking at Tamil identity from the point of the use of Tamil language that simultaneously accommodated various religions in its history, despite of them contradicting one another or coming and going. Responding to an article on Buddhism appeared in TamilNet, Tuesday, Prof. Schalk said that Buddhism among Tamils he objectifies is different from what the Sinhala-Buddhists are envisaging.
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Rights Coalition urges Obama to initiate War Crime investigations

[TamilNet, Thursday, 02 July 2009, 00:07 GMT]
A Coalition of six US-based Human Rights Organizations in a letter to U.S. President Obama wrote: "[t]o address abuses associated with the recent fighting [in Sri Lanka's north], there is an urgent need for an independent, international commission of inquiry into many credible allegations of laws of war violations, including possible war crimes, by both sides, as well as illegitimate detentions. Mr. President, we urge you to publicly call for an international commission of inquiry and to take necessary steps to achieve it. We also urge you to take steps for the full protection of internally displaced persons, including independent access to camps, former areas of conflict and to conflict-affected civilians by humanitarian and human rights organizations and the media."
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A "rolling" genocide?

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 01 July 2009, 11:56 GMT]
"The continuing concentration of over 250,000 people in the camps both blocks the search for answers to these questions, and itself constitutes a most serious crime. If the doors are not opened quickly, this will raise questions of whether the government seriously intends a restoration of Tamil society in the conquered zone. This would indeed pose a question of genocide, in the sense of the deliberate destruction of a population group in its home territory," writes Dr. Martin Shaw, professor of International Relations at UK's University of Sussex, and a historical sociologist of war and global politics.
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3 Tamil civilians arrested in Colombo

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 01 July 2009, 09:27 GMT]
Sri Lanka Terrorist Intelligence Division (TID) in Colombo took into custody Wednesday three Tamil civilians staying in a lodge located in Kotahena, sources in Colombo said. The arrested civilians are suspected to be escaped detainees from one of the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) internment camps in Vavuniyaa, the sources added.
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Politicized courts, Compromised rights, says ICG on Sri Lanka Judiciary

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 01 July 2009, 05:28 GMT]
"Sri Lankan judiciary is not working in a fair and impartial way that secures justice and human rights for everyone regardless of ethnicity. This risks undermining the government’s recent military victory over the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam). A durable national reconciliation process is only possible if human and constitutional rights are fully restored," warned a report released by the International Crisis Group (ICG) Tuesday.
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NFF wants provincial boundaries redrawn

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 01 July 2009, 05:23 GMT]
The National Freedom Front (NFL), splinter group of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), and a close ally of the ruling United Peoples Freedom Alliance led by Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapakse, has asked the government to immediately appoint a Special Delimitation Commission to redraw the boundaries of provincial councils. NFF has twelve members of the current parliament.
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Elie Wiesel: Sri Lanka's victimization of Tamil people must stop

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 01 July 2009, 02:42 GMT]
Holocaust surviver, Jewish icon, and Nobel laureate, Professor Elie Wiesel, in a message posted on his website said: "Wherever minorities are being persecuted we must raise our voices to protest. According to reliable sources, the Tamil people are being disenfranchised and victimized by the Sri Lanka authorities. This injustice must stop. The Tamil people must be allowed to live in peace and flourish in their homeland."
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51 Moothoor IDP families return to Killiveddy

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 30 June 2009, 12:48 GMT]
Two hundred and one members of fifty one Tamil families who were displaced from Moothoor east three years ago following a military operation launched on their traditional villages by the Sri Lanka Army (SLA), and who stayed in temporary shelters located in Maavadivembu and Palachcholai in Batticaloa district, were brought to Killiveddy via Vaaharai Tuesday morning in seven buses of the government transport service with state security, sources said.
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Galle / Kaali

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 30 June 2009, 03:03 GMT]
The rocks
The rocky place
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