Gordon Weiss tries to unrelate fire and smoke: Jaffna politician

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 15 June 2011, 12:59 GMT]
“The problem was not that the army of Sri Lanka had decided to regain its sovereign territory and to take on the Tamil Tigers, whose brutality was a matter of record, the problem was the manner in which they carried out the final phase of the war and the sheer number, the sheer proportion, of civilians who were killed during these final assaults,” said Gorden Weiss, former UN spokesperson stationed in Colombo during the war, commenting on a fresh evidence of war crime brought out by Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) on Tuesday. By projecting the genocidal war waged by the Sri Lankan state in this manner, Gorden Weiss, who was veiling the crimes to the knowledge of the world when they were taking place, now tries to say that fire was not the problem but smoke was the problem, responded an Eezham Tamil politician in Jaffna.
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Colombo continues bilateral ploy to elude international solution

[TamilNet, Monday, 13 June 2011, 01:35 GMT]
The genocidal establishment of Mahinda Rajapaksa continues with its pre-war trick of bilateral dealings to escape comprehensive international action cum solutions to the national question in the island, and some competing powers and their proxies continue to provide space for Rajapaksa juggle, by not collectively calling for the logical solution of liberation of Eezham Tamils but bilaterally harping on unworkable models, accused political circles in Jaffna watching the coming and going of the Indian Troika and new bilateral deals Colombo is hatching with others. While there is immense irritation in Eezham Tamil political circles over New Delhi and Colombo ‘talking’ land and police powers for nearly 25 years, informed sources said anger is mounting in Tamil Nadu over New Delhi ignoring the stand of TN State Assembly and scheduling the visit of Manmohan Singh to Colombo.
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Sinhala policeman found slain in Vanni

[TamilNet, Sunday, 12 June 2011, 15:21 GMT]
A 41-year-old Sinhala policeman from Ki'linochchi police station was found beaten to death at Umaiyaa'lpuram in Paranthan in Vanni Sunday morning. The dead body in civil, with beaten injuries on face and chest, was first believed to be a civilian and was taken to the mortuary at Ki'linochchil hospital. Later, the body was identified as that of Sinhala policeman, Ananada Samarakoon, sources in Ki'linochchi said.
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Sri Lanka committed genocide of Tamils: Arundhati Roy

[TamilNet, Sunday, 12 June 2011, 03:24 GMT]
Taking part in a meeting organized by a London based Tamil media association in Southall in London on Saturday, celebrated writer Arundhati Roy termed the war on Eezham Tamils in the island of Sri Lanka as genocide that was allowed to happen by the world. "The most horrific things I have seen and testimonies I have read are from Sri Lanka," she said. Ms. Roy, known for championing the cause of the Aathivaasis (indigenous tribes), emphasized how similar sorts of patterns of annihilation were taking place in India too. "There is a whole universe of fractured morality between what people say and what people do. As the Indian military, and platoons and platoons of policemen are displacing the Aathivaasis in the back of everyone's mind are the graves of Tamils in Sri Lanka," she said.
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Oil, canal and security cause call for retrieval of Kachcha-theevu

[TamilNet, Saturday, 11 June 2011, 16:34 GMT]
The Tamil Nadu State Assembly on Thursday unanimously passed a resolution to legally associate the Tamil Nadu government with a case already pending in the Supreme Court of India on Kachchatheevu. The petition in the Supreme Court filed in 2008, by AIADMK General Secretary and present Chief Minister Ms. Jayalalitha, seeks the Supreme Court to declare India’s ceding of Kachchatheevu to Sri Lanka as unconstitutional. According to the CM and some Indian policy planning writers, the ceding of the islet under the 1974 and 1976 bilateral agreements affected fishing rights of the Tamil Nadu fishermen and resulted in the killing of hundreds of them by the Sri Lanka Navy. But oil in the Palk Bay, a canal project and security fears of India count more than the interests of the fishermen, writes TamilNet political commentator in Colombo.
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Gotabhaya grooms private army in the north

[TamilNet, Friday, 10 June 2011, 06:13 GMT]
In order to absolve the Sri Lanka Army occupying the Tamil country from international accusations, but at the same time to continue terrorisation and subjugation of Tamils, genocidal Sri Lanka’s Defence Secretary and presidential sibling Gotabhaya Rajapaksa has formed a private army in the north consisting of military intelligence personal and some members of the paramilitaries who had gone astray, news sources in Jaffna said. This new outfit headquartered in Vanni but operates mainly in Jaffna as groups of thugs, is responsible for many recent acts terrorising civil society movements, public protests and university student activities, the news sources further said.
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Eezham liberation is geopolitical priority for Tamil Nadu: Thirumurukan

[TamilNet, Friday, 10 June 2011, 00:40 GMT]
If the people of Tamil Nadu are vigilant enough of the nature and aims of the geopolitical forces operate in the region, then they will realise that call for independence of Eezham Tamils should get priority over war crimes investigation and indictment of Mahinda Rajapaksa, said Mr. Thirumurukan Gandhi of the May 17 Movement of Tamil Nadu, while discussing the UN report in Chennai last month. The whole world, except Tamil Nadu, knows that the power to change the paradigm lies in Tamil Nadu, he further said. Thirumurukan’s analysis coming from grassroot thinking in Tamil Nadu was refreshing, while ‘analysis groups’ in Chennai and some international organizations backed by establishments aiming to capitalize the war crimes to their interests truncate the ultimate justice of liberation to the affected, said political observers in the island and in the diaspora.
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Abducted Tamil child found deployed in slave labour in Sinhala district

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 08 June 2011, 21:22 GMT]
The grandfather of an abducted 11-year-old Tamil boy from Batticaloa has been threatened by paramilitary for having braved to rescue his grandson from the grips of ‘treasure hunters’ who had deployed the abducted boy for slave labour in Dambulla. Mr. Velmurugu Sivalingam, the grandfather, upon receiving information on the whereabouts of his grandson, had rushed to Dambulla to rescue his grandson, Athisayarajah Soundararajah.
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TN govt was voted for getting justice to Eezham Tamils: CPI member

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 07 June 2011, 23:07 GMT]
Participating the debate on Governor’s Speech in Tamil Nadu State Assembly on Tuesday, the Communist Party of India (CPI) Deputy Leader in the Assembly and Sivagangai MLA, Mr. K. Gunasekaran, pointed out that the new government was voted by the people of Tamil Nadu to bring those who committed genocide on Eezham Tamils across the Palk Strait to justice. Declaring that the CPI considers what happened in the island is genocide and not merely war crime, Gunasekaran said that the TN Assembly should unanimously pass a resolution to penalise Mahinda Rajapaksa for the genocide. He also requested the TN Chief Minister Ms. Jayalalitha to lead the struggle for the right of Eezham Tamils over their country and said that the 100 million Tamils all over the world expect this from her.
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Paradigm hub is Sri Lanka: Jaffna academic responds to Chomsky

[TamilNet, Monday, 06 June 2011, 00:23 GMT]
“The U.S. and its allies are not going to want governments which are responsive to the will of the people. If that happens, not only will the U.S. not control the region, but it will be thrown out,” said renowned intellectual Noam Chomsky, addressing 25th anniversary of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), last month and commenting on the US response to popular uprisings in West Asia and North Africa. Responding, a Political Science academic in Jaffna said that even the progressive Western intellectuals, in their preoccupation with the Islamic World, pay little attention to more dangerous happenings in the island of Sri Lanka, where not only the US and its allies but all the powers in their greed to grab the island as a whole, set a new world record in collectively upholding genocide and extermination of a nation as means of ‘stability’ of their interests.
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US attaché clarification, a linguistic legerdemain, accuses Boyle

[TamilNet, Monday, 06 June 2011, 00:03 GMT]
Response from the US State Department on the comments made this week by US defence attaché Lt. Col. Lawrence Smith in Colombo at the controversial 3-day seminar organised by the Sri Lankan military to expound on its defeat of the LTTE earlier this week that the remarks "reflected his personal opinions," and that "[t]hey [the comments] do not reflect the policy of the United States Government,” was "all linguistic legerdemain by the United States Government," accused Professor Francis Boyle, an expert in International Law and a professor at the University of Illinois School of Law.
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Tamils protest at Lords over allegations of Sri Lanka war-crimes

[TamilNet, Sunday, 05 June 2011, 04:47 GMT]
Tamil youth activists in Britain took their ‘Boycott Sri Lanka Cricket’ campaign to the Lords cricket grounds on Saturday, the third day of the second Sri Lanka v England test match this summer. Several dozen Tamil activists and supporters handed out leaflets to arriving spectators and cricket officials and staged a noisy demonstration opposite the famous grounds in the latest in a series of events organised by the Tamil Youth Organisation (TYO) to raise awareness of the mass killings of Tamil civilians during the final months of Sri Lanka’s war in 2009, and call for a boycott of Sri Lankan cricket until Colombo agrees to an independent international investigation.
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330,000 voters ‘missing’ in Jaffna, Ki'linochchi electoral list after 2009 war of genocide

[TamilNet, Friday, 03 June 2011, 12:21 GMT]
In 2009, the number of registered voters in Jaffna electoral district that comprises of the administrative districts of Jaffna and Ki'linochchi was 816,005. This figure has dropped to 481,791 entries in the register of the electoral district of Jaffna. On Thursday, Assistant Commissioner of Elections (ACE) of Jaffna Electoral District S. Karunanithi confirmed that the SL Election Department has removed 331,214 names from the list. “Most of them have fled the country,” was the official explanation by the ACE. The untold story is that the figure also includes the victims of genocide in Vanni from the Ki'linochchi district. Meanwhile, the date for local elections for 16 Piratheasa Chapais (PS) and three Urban Councils is fixed by the department to take place on July 23, the day when Tamils remember the victims of state-sponsored anti-Tamil pogrom in 1983.
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European United Left upholds Tamil right to self-determination including secession

[TamilNet, Thursday, 02 June 2011, 12:52 GMT]
A conference organised by the European United Left/Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) at the EU Parliament in Brussels on Wednesday, resolved that it supported “the right to self determination of the Tamil-speaking people, up to and including separation, if that is what they wish, while safeguarding the rights of all minorities” and demanded the SL state to shut down the military bases of the “army of occupation” in North and East and sought a political solution addressing the “national and democratic aspirations” of the Tamil people. Heidi Hautala, Green MEP and Chair of EU Parliament's Human Rights Sub Committee, a key speaker at the event, called for a GUE/NGL fact finding mission to the island of Sri Lanka. Vaiko, the leader of the MDMK in Tamil Nadu and Sinhala and Tamil political activists from the island and the diaspora took part in the event.
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Spain exercises universal jurisdiction in El Salvador killings

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 01 June 2011, 03:13 GMT]
Judge, Eloy Velasco Nuñez of Spain’s National Court, used the doctrine of universal jurisdiction to prosecute crimes committed outside of the country, to issue arrest warrants on Monday for some of the top military leaders of El Salvador’s civil war, accusing them of meticulously planning and carrying out the killings of six Jesuit priests in 1989, New York Times said in its Tuesday edition. The 77-page charging document said that the 20 men named in the warrants never had doubts about “carrying out the most execrable crimes against people merely to impose their strategies and ideas.”
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SLA suppresses evidence of skeletal remains unearthed during demining

[TamilNet, Monday, 30 May 2011, 17:29 GMT]
Officials of demining NGOs in Vanni allege that the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) soldiers are taking measures to ensure that evidence regarding the skeletal remains of Tamil civilians discovered during the demining operations do not become exposed or become public information, sources in Kilinochchi said. Sri Lanka officials have issued unofficial directives to the demining organizations to bury the skeletons in a demarcated area, according to the NGOs.
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Genocide recognition of Mu’l’livaaykkaal 2009 gains ground

[TamilNet, Monday, 30 May 2011, 00:03 GMT]
Genocide recognition is a long and politicised process. While the international media has a pivotal role, historically it has failed to publicise genocides as they occur and has delayed in recognition afterwards. Governments on the other hand have been reluctant to recognise genocide as this would impose obligations on them under international law to act to 'prevent and to punish' and these obligations would consume resources and damage diplomatic relations with countries that may be their allies in military and security endeavours.
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Amidst renewed SL militarisation, Batticaloa village observes 24th year of massacre

[TamilNet, Saturday, 28 May 2011, 12:54 GMT]
The residents of Thoa'ni-thaa'nda-madu, a village situated in Koa'ra'laip-pattu North in Batticaloa district, along the border of Polonnaruwa district, on Friday observed 14th anniversary of massacre of Tamil villagers whom the Sri Lanka Army shot and hacked to death at least 3 women and 8 men with 6 children in the early hours of 27 May 1987 while the victims were asleep. The entire village was burnt together with the bodies of the victims. Last year, following the efforts taken by certain NGOs, around 56 families comprising 102 members had been resettled in the village, according to the Divisional Secretary of the area. However, the SLA has not been willing to hand over the houses it has occupied. Recently, the deployment of the SLA has been further strengthened, threatening the villagers of possible colonisation.
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Political truth of Mu’l’livaaykkaal

[TamilNet, Friday, 27 May 2011, 05:24 GMT]
The Sinhala nation is aware of the massacres, but they justify it the way the USA argues for its invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel argues for invasion of Palestine. For the UN and IC, it was not a mistake but a deliberate action taken by them to protect the Sri Lankan state. The same IC now says there are war crimes and Tamils are victims. Why? They want a group of helpless victims who begin to depend on them to find answers. Tamils had to face the first genocidal massacre of the 21st century, but this should not lead to a sense of helpless victimhood where the very forces who are responsible are seen to be saviours by the Tamils. It is the Tamil people who should decide what their future course of action should be, said Dr. Jude Lal Fernando, post doctoral scholar on International Peace Studies in Trinity College, Dublin, while delivering a speech on 18 May.
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Sri Lanka GA concedes more than 50,000 continue as refugees in Jaffna alone

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 25 May 2011, 06:55 GMT]
Around 55,700 people still live the life of refugees in Jaffna, conceded Sri Lanka Government Agent in Jaffna, Mrs. Imelda Sugumar on Tuesday. The number includes people who lost their homes by the confiscation of lands by the occupying Army in Jaffna for ‘High Security Zones’ (HSZ) and those who have Jaffna connections and have come from Vanni after the war. On de-mining HSZs, 32 percent has been completed, 56 percent doesn’t need de-mining, work progresses in 5 percent and work is yet to start only in 7percent of lands, Imelda said. She didn’t answer the question whether 26 villages that are yet to be resettled in the Valikaamam HSZ come under the 56 percent that doesn’t need de-mining. She also didn’t answer the question whether the lands that are not de-mined yet are localities that have been refused of vacation by the occupying Army.
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