The declared threat, the demonstration, siege, fast unto death outside the office of the UN in Colombo by the Wimal Weerawansa led National Freedom Front, raises interesting and alarming questions about policymaking in our country.

Wimal Weerawansa announced that he would call upon his supporters to surround the UN office until the UN Secretary General disbanded the advisory panel he has set up on alleged war crimes in Sri Lanka.  It was reported that the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) had informed the UN that these were the views of an individual and not that of the GOSL.  Days later, Weerawansa, a cabinet minister and key supporter of the president and regime, leads a demonstration of hundreds to the UN office, …

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Many readers may have seen if not read about Defence Secretary Gothabhaya Rajapaksa’s interview with Stephen Sackur of the BBC HardTalk programme in which he calls Sarath Fonseka a liar and threatens to hang him for his position on a war crimes investigation. Local opinion, not surprisingly, given the current political context, has been divided on the propriety of Mr Rajapaksa’s outburst and the damage it could do to the image of the regime and of the country internationally.  There are the shocked and perturbed, albeit mostly in private, on the one hand and on the other, the hallelujah chorus of the apparatchiks. According to …

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Editor’s note: An edited version of this article appeared in the Daily Mirror today. A section of the last sentence of the article had been omitted. The original article appears below.

The first anniversary of the end of the war approaches and we are into a celebratory heroes’ week.  Whilst the regime will not fail to remind us ad infinitum of the great service it did us in defeating the fascist and ferocious LTTE and continue to accrue political capital on account of it, there is no denying the widespread relief felt over the defeat of the LTTE and the end of the war.  There is no denying either, that this was achieved through military victory by the armed forces …

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The idea of liberalism in Sri Lankan politics is intimately associated with the life and writings of the leader and founder of the Liberal Party, Dr Chanaka Amaratunga.  He passionately believed in the liberal idea, hoped fervently that it would inspire the body politic and be integrated into it and the political culture of Sri Lanka.  His all too brief life prevented him from realizing this and from resisting as formidably as he could the equally passionate anti liberal forces and their opportunistic apparatchiks from enshrining a narrow, populist nationalism as the conventional orthodoxy of the day.

Writing about Chanaka is not easy for me.  We were each other’s oldest friends – a continuous friendship, unbroken by political differences, of …

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The 24th of February marked the first month anniversary of the disappearance of Prageeth Ekneligoda, the Lanka E-News journalist. Two special Police teams are said to be on the case.  They have however, not come up with any information as to Ekneligoda’s whereabouts.

Ekneligoda’s disappearance is yet another statistic of shame in the long list of disappearances, abductions and extra-judicial killings that have targeted the media in particular over the last four years.  His disappearance, it should be noted, took place in the course of a presidential election campaign the first post –war island-wide electoral contest in this country for two decades.  The war – the one that it between the GOSL and the LTTE is over and cannot be cited …

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The results of the national elections are now by no means certain.  There is a contest and as a consequence, there is the possibility that the presidency could change hands, which in turn will have its impact on the general elections.  This is attributable to the Fonseka presidential candidacy and it depriving the incumbent of claiming sole credit for the defeat of the LTTE.

Contests in themselves are good.  Elections being the principal mechanism for choice and change in a functioning democracy, the lack of a contest could breed a lack of interest in elections on the part of the electorate, which in turn is not healthy for participatory and representative democracy.  The Fonseka candidacy ensures that the Rajapaksa dynasty is …

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Whilst it is not clear as to whether we would be voting in both the presidential and general elections on the same day, it is clear that we will be voting in at least one of them in the next three months, followed soon thereafter by the other.  Most likely it will be the presidential elections since it is the president who has to decide and since he is much more popular than his party. Moreover, we have been told that he is willing to sacrifice, if necessary, two years of his first term in order to secure a second and a parliamentary majority nearest to the heart’s desire.

All elections are important and these will be no exception. It is worth …

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The Final Report of the investigation initiated by the European Union under the terms of the GSP Plus concession entitled “The Implementation of certain Human Rights Conventions in Sri Lanka” has been handed over to the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL).  The GOSL has time till the 6th of November to respond to the report. Two months from that date- 6th January 2010- the Council will take the final decision on the extension of GSP Plus to Sri Lanka, which will be effective six months from that date.

According to the statement released by Lutz Gullner, the spokesperson of the European Commission:

The Commission has completed a thorough investigation into the human rights situation in Sri Lanka and in particular whether Sri …

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“Nearly 20,000 escape from IDP centres was the headline of an English language broadsheet yesterday.  The strap line read –“Most believed to be LTTE cadres”.  The article quotes the SSP for Kandy Ranjit Kasturiratna as saying this at a meeting of the Kandy District Coordinating Committee chaired by the Chief Minister of the Central Province Sarath Ekanayake on Monday.  The article goes on to say that according to the SSP special teams have been dispatched from Kandy to the IDP camps to conduct investigations.

This is not the first time this information has been reported in the media.  Since the source of this information is a senior Police officer, we can assume that the information is reliable and accurate.  Given the …

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The war it seems is not over.  The international conspiracies to save Prabhakaran and the LTTE are now said to have morphed into a conspiracy to destabilize the government, initiate regime change and charge its leading lights and war heroes with war crimes.  The opposition and civil society activists are said to be key figures in this decidedly and dangerously unpatriotic exercise.

A English language broadsheet during the week quoted the Minister of Transport and leading light of the current regime as saying this and in doing so making a link between the Channel 4 video and the fate of the GSP Plus extension.  Whilst the regime’s argument is that the sole purpose of this purported conspiracy is to destabilize and …

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The results of the elections to the Jaffna Municipality and Vavuniya Urban Council are an instructive measure of the distance to be traveled for peace, reconciliation and national unity. In both cases voter turn out was relatively low, though in the case of the Jaffna Municipality not as low as some commentators have made out. This is because the turn out figure has been calculated on the voter registry of some 104,000 electors, when in actual some 41,000 polling cards could not be distributed on account of the absence of voters from the municipality. They have either come south, joined the diaspora or are languishing in camps unaware of the procedures required for the exercise of their franchise or …

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The end game is not ending.  It is being drawn out with an ever increasing toll to the lives and suffering of the civilian population estimated by the UN and the international agencies to be 200,000 and by the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) at 70,000.  According to Sir John Holmes, UN Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and UN Relief Coordinator who recently visited Sri Lanka, in his statement to the UN Security Council on February 27,

The number of casualties from the fighting, among whom we believe are many civilians, cannot be verified in the absence of independent sources, since humanitarian agencies and the media have no access to the area, but we believe dozens of people per day …

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What does the failed abduction attempt against Namal Perera of the Sri Lanka Press Institute (SLPI), which turned into a brutal assault on him and his friend Mahinda Ratnaweera , Political Officer at the British High Commission, tell us about the Rule of Law, human rights protection, the culture of impunity and law and order in Sri Lanka today ?   It took place in close proximity to a major security checkpoint, an army installation and ironically enough, the media ministry and not in the early hours of the morning or at dead of night, but in the evening on a busy road with considerable traffic.  

The sheer chutzpah and audacity of the attackers is a further reminder of the culture …

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In recent weeks, the public at large has been treated to the unseemly saga of the sacking, reinstatement, cancellation of visa and departure from the island of the Executive Director, International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, Dr. Rama Mani.

What began as a internal problem of succession and transition within that organisation took on quite sensational and sordid proportions in the ways in which it was handled and in the way in which an internal problem within a premier and long standing civil society institution in this country of international repute, culminated in an alleged threat to national security associated with the concept of the Responsibility to Protect or R2P.

The internal problems of the ICES are not of concern here, except …

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The APRC has behaved as feared. It has delivered for the regime and not for the country. Clearly Professor Vitharana could not hold out – encomiums about his persistence notwithstanding. He obliged his president and produced the Interim Report of the APRC eighteen months after it was convened. The Majority Report and the Vitharana Report are all history – His Excellency demanded and determined and hey presto they produced a mouse, heralding in, in our inimitable way, the Chinese Year of the Rat, no doubt !

Why on earth did the APRC have to sit some sixty four times over eighteen months to recommend that less than the Thirteenth Amendment be implemented in the interim, whilst …

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The decisive year with terrible beginnings is also a year of anniversaries — 60 years of independence and 25 since the horrific pogrom of July 1983. It may be the case that the crucial push into the Wanni will begin in deadly earnest to coincide with the anniversary of independence, whilst if the pronouncements of the defence establishment are to be realised, it will be approaching final victory around the time of the anniversary of July 1983. There is some irony in this. Both these events are landmarks in the botched and bloody nation and state building exercise we have been engaging in.

Sixty years later in the one case and 25 in the other, on the key issues of national …

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The LTTE attack on the Saliyapura airforce base has reminded those who wanted to think otherwise, that a quick, cheap and/or certain military victory is by no means assured. The attempt to achieve one will take time and cost quite a lot more in human and other resources. In the meantime, the preoccupation with military victory is also underpinning the steady erosion of democracy. Take the last week for instance.

The Wamanan case and the shutting down of the ABC network constituted further assaults on media freedom. The former is an example of crude and shoddy intimidation in response to the exposure of corruption and the latter, one of over reaction prompted by embedded hostility towards media …

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The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights is finally in the island, due, in no small measure, to the campaign of local civil society and international human rights organisations to get the government to invite her to Sri Lanka. This has happened despite the threat and invective directed against local civil society ranging from the perennial accusation of rubbishing the country abroad for pecuniary gain at home, to the more dangerous incitement to hatred — the vilification of local human rights defenders as traitors. .
Louise Arbour is in Sri Lanka because there is a serious enough human rights problem in this country that warrants her presence. Over the years, her office has received information about the full gamut of violations …

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The announcement by the United National Party (UNP) that it is “repositioning” itself on the issue of a political settlement of the ethnic conflict has been received with praise for pragmatism in certain quarters but mostly consternation, disappointment and confusion in others.

The UNP which in government was party to the Oslo Declaration of 2002 and the Tokyo Declaration a year after, will not now use or insist on the mention of the word federal or federalism but will stress the need for meaningful power sharing as the pivotal idea on which a solution best suited to the needs of the country will be founded. .

The repositioning of the party’s position is being presented as a constructive avoidance of semantic arguments …

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The diplomatic offensive of the government is in full swing even though there continues to be confusion as to who speaks authoritatively for it on the matters of war, peace and human rights – the Foreign Minister, other assorted cabinet ministers, the defence secretary, the foreign secretary, the secretary general of the peace secretariat or the ambassador in Geneva. It would not matter much if they all had their role to play in the communication of government policy as long as they all said the same thing. This though is not the case and it is not merely restricted to the dishing out of invective and verbal abuse to international officials a la Fernandopulle. There is also …

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