LTTE welcomes appointment of British Special Envoy

[TamilNet, Friday, 13 February 2009, 19:03 GMT]
Liberation Tigers of Tamileelam (LTTE) has welcomed the appointment of Des Browne as Special Envoy to Sri Lanka by the British Prime Minister on Thursday. In a letter addressed to Mr. Des Browne, LTTE's Head of International Diplomatic Relations S. Pathmanathan said the British government had a moral responsibility to intervene to stop the genocide being committed by the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) on Tamil civilians in the island of Sri Lanka.
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STF arrests Tamil woman in Batticaloa

[TamilNet, Friday, 13 February 2009, 18:36 GMT]
Special Task Force (STF) commandos arrested Friday morning a 24-year-old woman at her house in Ka’radiyanaa’ru police division in Batticaloa district, claiming that they had been informed that the woman is a former member of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), sources in Batticaloa said. STF commandos and the paramilitary men operating with them are abducting and arresting young men and women who had been in the LTTE in Paduvaankarai area and now living a normal life, relatives of the abducted persons said.
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Eezham Tamil immolates himself to death in front of UN office in Geneva

[TamilNet, Friday, 13 February 2009, 16:17 GMT]
A 26-year-old diaspora Eezham Tamil from UK has self-immolated himself to death in front of the United Nations Office at Geneva (UNOG) in Switzerland Thursday night around 8:20 p.m., according to police spokesman Eric Grandgean. The man has identified himself as Murukathasan in a letter left behind by him 10 meters away from the scene, the Police officer said when contacted by a Tamil journalist in Switzerland on Friday. The copy of the letter in English and Tamil, received by Tamil journalists, with the identical name, said: "I believe the flames over my body, heart and soul will help the world community to have a deep human look over the great sufferings of the Sri Lankan Tamils.
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STF shoots dead two youths in Ampaa’rai

[TamilNet, Friday, 13 February 2009, 16:04 GMT]
Special Task Force (STF) commandos lying in ambush shot and killed Friday early morning two youths in Kedaoya in Lagugala area, sources in Ampaa’rai said. STF claimed that the two youths were Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) members and that they recovered two T56 rifles and 3 hand grenades from the youths.
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Herding people by terror: Intense shelling, dead bodies on roadside in Vanni

[TamilNet, Friday, 13 February 2009, 13:50 GMT]
More than 150 civilians were feared killed Thursday alone and around 90 in the preceding two days in Sri Lanka Army (SLA) shelling in Mullaiththeevu district. Most of the casualties are reported along the sides of two roads through which the civilians are forced to flee in yet another mass exodus to a new 'safety zone' unilaterally announced by Colombo. Dead bodies were lying along the roadside from Theavipuram to Puthukkudiyiruppu and the fleeing civilians were forced to bury their dead along the roadside amid intense shelling, initial reports from Vanni said. The new 'safety zone' declared by Colombo is nothing but an assembling ground to herd 300,000 civilians in a small stretch of land along the lagoon and the sea coast, north of Mullaiththeevu.
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Tamil youth shot dead in Batticaloa

[TamilNet, Friday, 13 February 2009, 11:51 GMT]
Unidentified gunmen forcibly took away a Tamil youth from his house in Ea’raavoor police division and shot him dead, Thursday around 8:30 p.m, in Batticaloa district, according to Ea’raavoor police.
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India changes language with measured ambiguity

[TamilNet, Friday, 13 February 2009, 01:30 GMT]
Indian President Prathiba Patil in her address to the joint sitting of Indian Parliament on Thursday declared that India continued to support a negotiated political settlement in Sri Lanka within the framework of an undivided Sri Lanka acceptable to all the communities, including the Tamil community. Ms. Prathiba Patil urged Colombo and the Tigers to return to negotiating table.
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7 upcountry Tamil youths arrested in Kandy

[TamilNet, Thursday, 12 February 2009, 19:49 GMT]
Seven Tamil youths were arrested in cordon and search operation conducted in Kandy town Tuesday by the Sri Lanka Police, sources in Kandy said. The operation was conducted by the Kandy police to ensure protection of Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapakse who was scheduled to address a provincial council election meeting in Getambe in Kandy district the same evening.
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Silent prayer, fast observed in Jaffna University, for the suffering Tamils in Vanni

[TamilNet, Thursday, 12 February 2009, 16:03 GMT]
“The people in Vanni are undergoing unprecedented suffering and pain without any food, medicine, clothes and places to seek shelter, in the unrelenting attacks on them and we urge the concerned parties and the International Community to help stop the war on the Tamils immediately,” Jaffna University Students Union (JUSU) said in a media report Thursday.
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Burnt bodies of 2 Tamil youths recovered in Vavuniyaa

[TamilNet, Thursday, 12 February 2009, 15:48 GMT]
Bodies of two Tamil youths burnt beyond recognition were recovered from Chamayaapuram in Kaneasapuram area in Vavuniyaa district Wednesday morning by the Vavuniyaa police. Both had been abducted by unidentified armed persons few days ago from their residences, according to the relatives in statements to Vavuniyaa police.
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British ex-defence secretary appointed special envoy to Sri Lanka

[TamilNet, Thursday, 12 February 2009, 15:44 GMT]
Britain named a special envoy to Sri Lanka on Thursday to help bring about a political solution to the island’s long-running conflict and to ease hardships to Tamil civilians trapped in the Vanni warzone, UK press reports said. "I've asked Des Browne, our former defence secretary, to be an envoy for Sri Lanka," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told a parliamentary committee. Brown said the priorities were to achieve a ceasefire and to get a political settlement, Reuters reported. Meanwhile, US Ambassador to Sri Lanka, Robert Blake was quoted by the Washington Post as saying the Sri Lankan military’s capture of the Vanni region – which he expects within weeks – will not end the LTTE’s armed struggle and that Colombo must reach a political settlement with the Tamils.
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Singapore Tamils protest newspaper misreporting

[TamilNet, Thursday, 12 February 2009, 13:57 GMT]
Singapore Tamils have protested misreporting of a news in the headlines of the country's Tamil daily Tamil Murasu last Thursday, which read that the LTTE had claimed they would even attack Tamil Nadu, media circles in Singapore said.
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Civilian refugees imprisoned in internment camps in Vavuniyaa

[TamilNet, Thursday, 12 February 2009, 11:55 GMT]
The civilian refugees who either fled the war zone or caught by the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) are denied not only the freedom of movement to go out of the buildings in which they are detained under 'near-prison' conditions, but are also denied freedom of movement inside the camp itself after 6:00 p.m. by the SLA, even for the call of nature, on grounds of condemnation that they were linked to the LTTE, said NGO activists on condition of anonymity.
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'Tamil Nadu needs to go beyond demonstrations'

[TamilNet, Thursday, 12 February 2009, 08:49 GMT]
If at all there is any positive impact of the unprecedented uprising and demonstrations, staged spontaneously by the masses of Tamil Nadu and the diaspora, it is the inward awakening of global Tamils to the forces of oppression and to the defiance of the oppressors, whether domestic or international. A historic responsibility lies on the leaders of Tamil Nadu and on those who uphold the struggle of the oppressed, to channel the positive energy generated from the uprising to achieve its goals rather than allowing it to be carried away by the machinations of the oppressors, writes opinion columnist Chivanadi.
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Tamil youth arrested in Anuradhapura

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 11 February 2009, 20:25 GMT]
A Tamil youth was arrested Tuesday in Neriyaku'lam in Anuradhapura district by a special team of the Terrorist Intelligence Division (TID) and is being detained in the police for further inquiry, said Senior Superintendent of Police Ranjit Gunasekara, Police spokesman in Colombo district. The youth is a resident of Maangku'lam.
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9 Tamils arrested in Gampaha

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 11 February 2009, 20:24 GMT]
Nine Tamil civilians were arrested in several cordon and search operations conducted in ten police divisions in the Gampaha district Tuesday. Nearly ten thousand residents were subjected to severe interrogation and about 1200 vehicles were searched during the operation, police sources said.
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Written and spoken: learning conversion of Eezham Tamil

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 11 February 2009, 13:21 GMT]
One of the problems faced by the diaspora children in learning Tamil is relating the spoken and written forms. There is already a useful teaching material addressing this need, produced by Sankaran Radhakrishnan and brought out by the South Asia Institute of the University of Texas at Austin. But this is for the spoken Tamil of Tamil Nadu. A need of the time is linguists among Eezham Tamils to come out with a similar material identifying the rules of conversion for Eezham Tamil.
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Sri Lanka engaged in deliberate, systematic act of genocide - LTTE

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 11 February 2009, 11:15 GMT]
The Tamil homeland is witnessing one of the worst human tragedies of the 21st century said the Political Division of the Liberation Tigers of Tamileelam (LTTE) in a statement issued in Tamil on Wednesday. More than one-thousand civilians have been killed and four-thousand are struggling to recover from the injuries amid continuous artillery barrage, air attacks and cluster bombing by the Sinhala state, the LTTE statement said. The LTTE statement categorically denied the Sri Lankan claim that a Tiger human bomb had recently attacked civilians.
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Colombo orders all health workers to immediately leave Vanni

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 11 February 2009, 06:57 GMT]
Health ministry officials in Colombo issued Tuesday a 'final warning' to the 8 doctors and around one thousand medical and health workers of Mullaiththeevu and Ki'linochchi districts, now serving more than 250,000 civilians in the besieged Mullaiththeevu district, to immediately leave the LTTE controlled territory, according to the sources at the District Secretariat in Vavuniyaa. The move comes after military officials warned the medical staff of dire consequences.
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'Good old game of Sinhala chauvinism'

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 11 February 2009, 03:37 GMT]
The tactics that are played at every juncture during the last several decades by Sinhala chauvinism against Tamil emancipation in the island of Sri Lanka were re-enacted in Colombo Tuesday when Patriotic National Movement (PNM), an outfit of Rajapaksa circle, staged a demonstration against ICRC, USA and Britain, even for their minimal engagement and token gestures to the sufferings of Tamils, journalistic circles in Colombo commented. "It is but only a taste of what to follow for those who envisage a political solution of lasting peace within the state system of Sri Lanka," said a senior journalist.
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