The Morning Leader (31st January 2007) carries a report of the first press conference given yesterday by the Hon. G. L. Peiris M. P., the new Minister of Export Promotion and International Trade, since he crossed over to the government. In this he is reported to have, to put it tartly, rubbished the significance and import of the Oslo Declaration of December 2002, which he was instrumental in producing. The Declaration appeared to articulate the framework of a politically negotiated constitutional settlement around an asymmetrically federated, united Sri Lanka. Stressing that constitutional concepts such as federalism are ‘mere words’ which have ‘no clear definition and are indistinct at best’, he states that effectively what he and other actors in …

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Jaffna people are now paying a higher price for essential things than when they were taken through the land route and taxed by the LTTE. Now essential items are taken to Jaffna by ship and sold through the MPCS (Multipurpose Cooperative Society) for ration.
The prices are higher than the marketprice when they were taxed by LTTE.
Before the landroute closed all the things taken to Jaffna by land. Normally LTTE imposed 15% duty for the essential things but everything was nevertheless sold at market prices in line with Colombo prices.
Some pharmacies even sold the baby milk powder and baby infant lower than the market price eg 135.00 marked Cerelac sold for 128.00 rs. Those days some people criticised Jaffna people for …

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Dr Syedna Mohammed Burhanuddin Saheb greeting AHM Aswer

In case you hadn’t noticed, Colombo has been full of men and women in head to toe cloth, white and colored respectively. Nice hats too. These people are obviously Muslim, but I did a bit of reading and they are part of a Shia sect called the Bohra. Their leader Dr. Syedna Mohammed Burhanuddin Saheb, has arrived in Colombo for a ten day ceremony called the Ashara Mubaraka. This influx has almost single-handedly boosted the Colombo tourism industry, filling hotels and guest houses. I’ve also seen Majestic City and Odel full of these guests.

The Prophet Mohammed’s temporal succession involved many schisms in Islam, the most notable being that between Sunni …

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This from the FMM today:

Internet facilities and 8,000 telephones cut off in Jaffna Peninsula

The Free Media Movement (FMM) is deeply disturbed to learn that basic communications facilities to the Jaffna Peninsula have been blocked from 28th January 2007. Internet facilities and around 8,000 landline telephones of Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT) are dysfunctional to date. SLT, jointly owned by the Sri Lankan Government and Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corporation (NTT) of Japan, is the sole Internet provider in Jaffna Peninsula with a population of around 600,000 according to official statistics.

The FMM was told that there is no official decision by the Telecommunication Regulatory Authority to block communications in this manner in the Peninsula.

However, a number of citizens in Jaffna and journalists …

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My recent visits to the coastal village of Nalarua in the district of Kalutara, about 5 kilometres from Kalutara town, got me thinking about life in the south. 450 families live in that village. I spoke to eight men and seven women on a Tuesday morning.

Religion-wise 97% of them were Buddhist, 2% Catholic and 1% Muslim. They work as masons, carpenters, craftsmen working with coconut fibre to make ropes and small boats and others as garment factory workers. Their political affiliations are with parties such as the SLFP, UNP, JVP and JHU.
I asked one of the middle-aged men asked whether there were any caste issues in their village.

“We don’t have any caste issues, we are all Sinhalese living …

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For previous polls, click here.

Really, does Sri Lanka actually need a Minister of bloody Indigenous Medicine? Or a Minister of Special Projects (whatever that is). Has no one heard of parliamentary and ministerial secretaries — in other words, the Civil Service? The latter, while not quite the bastion of Sir Humphrey Appleby’s bureaucracy, should theoretically be able to handle the bulk of work areas currently awarded separate ministries. And probably much better than the politicians themselves. For example, is a former union leader the best choice as Minister of Sports and Public Relations?

I doubt that there was anyone in Sri Lanka today who wasn’t blown away by the number of cabinet apointments, and that’s not even counting the deputy ministers and other assorted cooks …

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If the Bush regime can do it, why can’t the Sri Lankan Government …
From today’s Daily News:

Army Commander Lieutenant General Sarath Fonseka paid a special visit to the area yesterday as the LTTE violence gathered momentum in Vavuniya.

From today’s Daily Mirror:

The Defence Ministry yesterday warned that following a severe setback in the east, the Tigers were planning a major offensive against the …

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Editors note: Text from the Mahinda Chintanaya referred to in this post is in bold. The Mahinda Chintanaya can be downloaded here.

Mahinda Chintana (Mahinda Vision) is a document written for the 2005 presidential elections. It gives a vision for the changes that the President would like to bring about during his tenure. After one year it is time to revisit some of the statements made and to assess what has been achieved and start a discussion with the Sri Lankan people on what seems to have been election rhetoric and what has been achieved so far in reality. A first attempt hopefully followed by reactions by many of us who follow the present development in the country. Each section …

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Some Thoughts on the Second Chamber
 

By Sumanasiri Liyanage

One of the main lacuna in the 2000 constitutional draft was that although it proposed quasi-federal arrangements closely following the Indian model, it did not have a provision for a second chamber so that it as a whole lacked adequate power-sharing at the center. The report by the the Sub-Committee A (RSCA) includes comprehensive suggestions on the nature, compositions and the powers of the second chamber. Although the Sub-Committee B (RSCB) is not much enthusiastic about the second chamber, it does not oppose to it if it improves center power-sharing arrangements. This is what RSCB says on the subject: “We are not averse to a Second chamber if it is created to give …

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Most of the Trincomalee district IDPS are living in welfare center in Batticaola .they requested to cha that they want to go to Trincomalee.Batticaloa cha suggest to resettle the Idps to Trincomalee they will take some activities according to resettlement IN NEXT MONTH

First Batticloa cha help to select 120 representatives each and every IDPS welfare center . they will go to Trincomalee and analysis the situation of in their earliest place after that they will fill the questionnaire of the situation and they will explain the situation

Then they will like to go their earliest place Batticloa cha will facilitate them.

Cha means that Consortium of Humanitarian Agencies

As we move towards the Donor Conference towards the end of January, it would be useful to see what the Groundviews community think of the partiality, or lack thereof, of the International Community towards the LTTE.

42 people have surrended at the Human Rights Commission Jaffna office so far. They were facing death threats. HRC officials produced them before Jaffna Magistrate and the Magistrate ordered that they be sent to prison for their saftey. Some of them said that escaped while gunmen tried to kidnap them, while others gave statements that they escaped while gunmen tried to shoot them.

From what I am told by people here, Military Intelligence, LTTE, Para Military are involved but most of them are threatened by MI or Para Military (white van people)

A post here points to a powerful new report on the dangers on humanitarian aid work in Sri Lanka and elsewhere.

Reports in Groundviews, both from Citizen Journalists as well as news snippets from JNW featured on the site, clearly indicate growing concerns about the security and safety of aid workers, increasingly assaulting, vilified and killed for being perceived to be partial to non-state actors, biased towards operations of terrorists and / or acting to undermine the “national security” of the State.

This is the first report I’ve read that comprehensively debunks the myth that local INGO / NGO / staff and humanitarian aid workers are any less vulnerable to attacks. As it notes:
Humanitarian organisations …

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I don’t know much about Burma, or Myanmar as it’s now known… but according to today’s Daily Mirror:

The Myanmar (Burmese) government yesterday assured its support to Sri Lanka in the fight against terrorism and reaffirmed it would never allow any group or individual to use its territory to engage in any hostile activities against neighboring countries, including …

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Following this article in the Daily Mirror today, we’ve experienced a surge of traffic to & interest in Groundviews that I hope will be sustained in the months to come. We’ve now made it easier to search for content with the addition of a more powerful search engine that indexes comments as well as posts.

We’ve also made it easier to keep track of your favourite authors on the site. Each post now includes a list of the 5 most recent posts by the same author at the end of the article.

We also introduced a new page wherein you can see a list of all authors and their contributions by clicking on any name. This page can also …

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Look into the taillight abyss long enough and the chaos looks into you. Find myself driving like a shitheel, cutting off Trishaws and poking lodgedly into impassable lanes. The traffic is bad, its always been bad. In the daytime getting around Colombo is impossible, dangerous, stressful. Lately, however, the city has made lanes one-way and no one has adapted. Will adapt, I wonder. Galle Road flows to the North and Duplication flows to the South, and it flows like butter. Frozen butter. The difficulty now is that simple point-to-point trips now involve kilometers of detour, clogging of traffic, and bottlenecks down narrow lanes. I can’t say if its worse, but it certainly sucks.

Uniflow is a convincing sounding word for traffic …

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Writing through shackles – Notes of a Citizen Journalist

I my column for Ravaya & Groundviews this week I explore the killing of a citizen, a priest, in Jaffna. The manner in which it which it was reported in the Sinhala media, and the occurrence of similar killings elsewhere in the country, I argue is indicative of the dire peril we are facing with regard to human rights and human dignity in Sri Lanka.

Read the full article here -  The Death of a Priest

Rajavarothayam Sampanthan M.P. (TNA/ITAK, Trincomalee District) gave Sri Lankans a wistful and even poignant glimpse of the ghost of parliamentary democracy a fortnight ago, when he delivered an incisive exposition of the arguments for the merger of the Northern and Eastern Provinces in the debate on the de-merger in Parliament. The speech was a three-fold argument that contains a masterful restatement of the historical dimensions of the merger. It also critiqued the reasoning of the Supreme Court’s decision, the gravamen of which was a mooted procedural flaw in the original merger, as well as the domestic and international political considerations applicable to the issue. The latter included the undertakings of the State under an international agreement, the Indo-Lanka Accord of …

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Madrid11 features an article I wrote on Groundviews, where I explore the potential of citizen journalism to support & strengthen peacebuilding in Sri Lanka.

The “war on terror” – that diplomatic, political and military offensive after the 9/11 attacks – is a war that has been silently waged in Sri Lanka for over 27 years. Generations are woven into the spiral of violence. Citizens across the island, particularly in its north and east, have suffered the twin effects of terrorism and the equally reprehensible counterterrorist strategies of successive governments that have trampled on fundamental rights and humanitarian norms.

Human dignity and respect for human life have eroded so dramatically in two decades of bloody conflict that the …

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