Indian historian intends well but slips in historiography

[TamilNet, Monday, 16 February 2009, 23:21 GMT]
Indian historian Ramachandra Guha intended well in saying if the defeat of the LTTE at the hands of the Sri Lanka army leads to a consolidation of Sinhala chauvinism it will be impossible to defend that. But the categorical statements he makes such as ‘ the Sinhala almost certainly migrated there (to the island of Sri Lanka) from eastern India, Tamil and other cultures influenced the island in later centuries, the LTTE is a terrorist organization, the civil war in Sri Lanka nears its end’ etc are not in accord with historiographical etiquette, says a Tamil academic based in Colombo.
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SLA, SL Police arrest 100 civilians in Colombo

[TamilNet, Monday, 16 February 2009, 22:43 GMT]
More than one hundred civilians, majority of them Tamils, and residents of North-East were taken into custody in combined cordon and search operations conducted by the Sri Lanka Police and Sri Lanka Army (SLA) in suburbs of Colombo from early morning till evening on Sunday. The arrested are being detained in police stations in the district and are being interrogated. The armed forces also took about three hundred motor bikes into their custody, police sources said.
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India mistaken on arms and talks - experts

[TamilNet, Monday, 16 February 2009, 19:43 GMT]
Indian Home Minister P Chidambaram’s call for the LTTE to surrender arms was not in keeping with international practice on conflict resolution, but an endorsement of the Sri Lankan government’s hardline position, scholars of conflict and peace said Monday. They pointed a number of successful peace processes, including those with the ANC, IRA and Nepal’s Maoists had proceeded without making arms surrender a precondition for talks. There had also been several peace processes involving the LTTE without this precondition, a scholar of Sri Lanka’s conflict pointed out. The Indian government was in effect supporting the Rajapakse government’s efforts to avoid negotiations on a lasting settlement by making talks conditional on a demand unacceptable to any party to a conflict, some academics opined.
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UN sheds responsibilities - NGO official

[TamilNet, Monday, 16 February 2009, 18:01 GMT]
The UN said 15 of its local staff and 75 of their dependents were not allowed to leave the conflict area by the Tamil Tigers, who had forcibly recruited one of the UN staffers, reported AFP on Monday. "The UN for the first time openly acknowledges its agenda of withdrawing even the remaining few local staff from the conflict zone, completely shedding its responsibility of caring for the civilians trapped here," said Velupillai Sivanadiyar, the president of the Tamils Rehabilitation Organisation (TRO), the only NGO working in Vanni. The latest UN stand implies that the apex security system of the world has written off the fate of more than 250,000 civilians to the discretion of Colombo’s hostile and encircling army of 50,000, a ratio of 1:5.
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RSF accuses Colombo of "War Crimes"

[TamilNet, Monday, 16 February 2009, 17:36 GMT]
In an unprecedented move, Reporters sans frontières (RSF), a Paris-based media watchdog, in a press release issued today, expressed "revulsion at the death of Tamil journalist" Sathyamurthy in Sri Lanka Army (SLA) bombardment, and accused Colombo of committing war crimes, asserting "Army air strikes and artillery fire on areas where there are tens of thousands of civilians, including Tamil journalists, are war crimes." Sathyamoorthy was killed inside the "Safe Zone" demarcated by Sri Lanka late last week. Several hundreds Tamil refugees herded into the safe zone by the Government of Sri Lanka have been killed by targeted artillery and air-attacks inside the safe zone.
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Verbal shows fail to save lives in Vanni

[TamilNet, Monday, 16 February 2009, 15:09 GMT]
“War is also theirs, peace is also theirs; therefore the solution also should be theirs. Why don’t they come out with that and end the suffering?” asked a sulking school teacher in Vanni, frustrated at the diplomatic games and dilly-dallying of world powers in protecting the life and dignity of civilians, neither by themselves nor allowing the UN to do it. But the solution some of the powers envisage in what they call the ‘post-LTTE era’ goes back to the concentration camps of the Nazi times.
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Colombo uses firebombs setting ablaze civilian targets in Vanni

[TamilNet, Monday, 16 February 2009, 11:30 GMT]
Sri Lanka Army (SLA) and Sri Lanka Air Force (SLAF) have increasingly deployed incendiary bombs in several forms in recent attacks on Vanni civilians. A petroleum-derived liquid mixture is found used in SLAF bombardments. The same kind of bomb is also used in artillery and mortar barrage in addition to artillery-fired flying fireballs that ignite the bombed target. Recently, the makeshift hospital at Udaaiyaarkaddu was attacked with such bombs, as documented by a video, filmed from a building in the hospital.
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India in duplicitous, murderous collaboration with genocidal regime - SA Post

[TamilNet, Sunday, 15 February 2009, 15:00 GMT]
Noting that the "shelling of safe areas, the genocide massacre of the elderly, innocent women, and children," are war crimes "on a par with the worst of Nazism," an article in South Africa's popular daily, The Post, accuses India that it "has revealed a duplicitous and murderous collaboration with the genocidal regime in power in Colombo. Not only deaf to the pleas and cries of its own Tamil population to intervene in this murderous onslaught, it actively assists the regime in the supply of military hardware, the training of strike-aircraft pilots, the supply of military expertise, and the provision of military advisors on the ground."
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'Electoral victories of Mahinda government justify partition'

[TamilNet, Sunday, 15 February 2009, 12:32 GMT]
The frame of mind of Sinhala majority in the island of Sri Lanka reflects unequivocally in the impressive electoral victories secured by Mahinda Rajapasa’s government in the elections for the provincial councils of Central and North-West Provinces. The electoral victories endorse the ongoing brutal war, aiming total subjugation of Tamils. In the process, the Sinhala majority virtually concedes the need for partition in the island, if any polity acceptable to human civilization should prevail there, said an expatriate Sinhala academic commenting on the reports of 'record victory' for Rajapaksa's ruling UPFA in the provincial elections.
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Genocide in Sri Lanka - Boston Globe

[TamilNet, Sunday, 15 February 2009, 12:28 GMT]
Comparing the recent bombing of hospital and training artillery barrage on a demarcated safety zone, where most of the 350,000 Tamil refugees were huddled, slaughtering hundreds of them to the "Bosnian Srebrenica genocide of more than 7,000 Muslims," an op-ed article written by former Associate Deputy Attorney General under President Reagan, Bruce Fein, Sunday said only a "genocide indictment" would "deter Rajapaksa and Fonseka from their ongoing atrocities against Tamil civilians." Pointing to US's actions against Serbia for noncooperation in apprehending genocide defendants Slobodan Milosevic et.al., Fein says, "[t]he United States should be no less scrupulous in prosecuting suspected genocide by its own citizens or permanent residents."
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Bomb blast kills 12 STF commandos including an officer in Ampaa’rai

[TamilNet, Sunday, 15 February 2009, 10:25 GMT]
A bomb explosion in Kanchikudichchaanaa’ru area in Ampaa'rai killed more than 12 Special Task Force (STF) commandos including their officer Saturday around 2:40 p.m at a site where preparations were being made to lay the foundation stone for a Buddhist Vihara, according to Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) sources in Ampaa'rai. The sources confirmed the killing of more than STF commandos and injury to many other commandos.
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US Congresswoman calls for ceasefire negotiations

[TamilNet, Saturday, 14 February 2009, 19:28 GMT]
Democratic Congresswoman Nital M Lowey, of 18th District of New York, and Chairwoman of the powerful State and Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee expressed concern on the continued violence and the resulting "humanitarian disaster, including massive civilian casualties and the displacement of approximately 250,000 innocent civilians," called on Sri Lanka and the LTTE to negotiate a ceasefire immediately, in statement issued this week.
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Journalist Sathiyamoorthy killed inside Safe Zone

[TamilNet, Saturday, 14 February 2009, 19:08 GMT]
Puniyamoorthy Sathiyamoorthy, journalist and political analyst, well-known and highly respected by the Tamils in Eelam and among diaspora Tamils, sustained serious injuries in the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) artillery barrage Thursday on Theavipuram in the 'safety zone' declared by Sri Lanka government in Mullaitheevu district in Vanni, and succumbed to his wounds. Lack of proper medical attention contributed to his death, according to relatives who cared for him after the incident.
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Self-immolation reported in front of British PM's residence

[TamilNet, Saturday, 14 February 2009, 16:50 GMT]
An Eezham Tamil has self-immolated himself in front of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's official residence at 10 Downing Street in London, according to UK based Tamil satellite Television Deepam TV.
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Grand scale murder, rape of screened civilians feared, TNA MP alerts

[TamilNet, Saturday, 14 February 2009, 14:34 GMT]
Around 190 males were murdered and 130 females were taken for sexual abuse among the thousands of civilians so far fled and screened by the Sri Lanka Army (SLA), accused Tamil National Alliance MP S. Gajendran Saturday, citing information he received from the inmates of internment camps and from his contacts in Vavuniyaa. The sources informed him that murdered were secretly buried in Anuradhapura. "Unless there is no immediate international supervision and international monitors, situation turning into another Yugoslavia cannot be prevented," the MP said.
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Poignant acts of self-immolation

[TamilNet, Saturday, 14 February 2009, 10:45 GMT]
It may sound good to say that there is no place for feudal expressions in a 'postmodern' world. It may be true that there can be no second word about resolving issues on a democratic plane. But the first warnings have come pointing to the flaws in the handling of the situation by democratic powers and calling for effective rectifications. They have come from non-combatants and have come spontaneously. The extreme expression of self-denial, openly denouncing injustices perpetrated on a people by ganged-up authority, has come from educated people of ordinary walks of life committing self-immolation.
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STF commando killed, another injured in Ampaa’rai

[TamilNet, Saturday, 14 February 2009, 06:15 GMT]
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) combatants killed a Special Task Force (STF) commando and seriously injured another in a direct confrontation Friday around 7:30 a.m in Lagugala area in Ampaa’rai district, Ampaa’rai district LTTE said.
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Teen fasts to publicize Tamils plight - Boston Globe

[TamilNet, Saturday, 14 February 2009, 05:17 GMT]
A 17-year-old Bostonian is the "youngest of eight ethnic Tamils in the country who are fasting to call attention to the plight of their countrymen in Sri Lanka, an island nation off the coast of India where some 300,000 members of the Tamil minority are trapped in the fighting between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil rebel army," reported Boston Globe. The "group plans to fast until they have forfeited 10,000 meals cumulatively - each meal representing 30 of the estimated 300,000 Tamils trapped in the war zone," the paper said.
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SL Police arrests Tamil youth in Kandy

[TamilNet, Saturday, 14 February 2009, 02:48 GMT]
The Kandy Police Tuesday arrested a Tamil youth and have detained him in the police station for further inquiry by the Terrorist Intelligence Division (TID). The Kandy Police said he was taken into custody on a report by the Colombo Terrorist Intelligence Unit that he had been a member of the LTTE intelligence wing.
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5 Tamil youths arrested in Trincomalee

[TamilNet, Saturday, 14 February 2009, 01:42 GMT]
The Kuchchave'li Police in Trincomalee district Tuesday arrested five Tamil youths, who are residents of Kuchchave'li village located along Trincomalee – Pulmoaddai highway, police sources said. The arrested are now being detained in the police station and are being subjected to interrogation by the Terrorist Intelligence Division (TID) of the Sri Lanka Police.
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