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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