My conversation with Lakshan Dias, Programme Manager, Centre for Human Rights and Development, was pegged to the issue of human rights in post-war Sri Lanka. Lakshan was in the news recently when he appeared for Sarah Malanie Perera, an author taken in custody over bizarre circumstances. While we touched on this specific case, the interview also looked at broader legislation that undermined human rights in Sri Lanka post-war. I also got Lakshan’s take on the government’s repeated assertion that continued vigilance is vital to thwart any re-emergence of the LTTE, on account of which anti-terrorism legislation is justified even post-war.

We …

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Interview III – Dr. Harsha de Silva from Young Asia Television on Vimeo.

I recently spoke with Dr. Harsha de Silva, now a National List MP from the United National Party (UNP). I first interviewed Harsha a little over a year ago, on the context leading up to and the fall out of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) bail-out package and the general state of the Sri Lankan economy.

This time around we spoke about his entry into parliament, and one of the younger and more dynamic individuals entering for the first time into a chamber hitherto not known as …

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Shanthi Sachithananthan, the Chairperson of Viluthu, has been featured several times on Groundviews in the past, including an interview two months ago looking at significant developments in Sri Lanka after the demise of the LTTE and her views on the July 1983 pogrom against Tamils.

In this recent interview, Shanthi, who recently campaigned for political office in the parliamentary elections in April 2010 after forming an independent political party, speaks about her experiences interacting with voters from the Batticaloa district – the issues they confront, their aspirations and the extremely poor awareness of governance, representative democracy and electoral processes. Shanthi’s …

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Dr. Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu is the Executive Director of the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I begin this interview with a pointed question, asking Dr. Saravanamuttu to flag anything the government has done well since it assumed power in 2005, in the domains of governance and human rights. I go on to ask Dr. Saravanamuttu why it is that what he sees as enduring challenges to human rights, peace, development and governance are not issues the majority of voters agree with, or are able to discern.

We also talked about the nature of economic activity and development in the North and the East, …

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Ameena Hussein is one of Sri Lanka’s best known English authors. She is also one half of the Perera Hussein Publishing House, that since 2003 has published some of the best new English writing in the country. The Moon in the Water, Ameena’s first novel, was long-listed for the first Man Asian Literary Award in 2009. Zillij, a collection of short stories I reviewed four years ago, won the State Literary Prize in 2003.

Our discussion touched on Ameena’s tryst with cancer and how this influenced her writing and outlook on life. We also talked about English literature in …

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I interviewed recently Rohan Edrisinha, who lectures at the Law Faculty, University of Colombo. Along with a number of other issues related to prospects of meaningful constitutional reform in Sri Lanka during Mahinda Rajapaksa’s second term in office, Rohan addressed the farrago of approaches by the Rajapakse administration towards the implementation of the 17th and 13th Amendments in particular and the fate of the APRC, now largely forgotten in the mêlée of presidential and parliamentary elections.

We also spoke in general about the nature of constitution making in Sri Lanka, as an exercise that does not involve the input of citizens and is often seen as used as an instrument of partisan politics….

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A pre-presidential election conversation I had with well-known lawyer and activist Javed Yusuf touched upon a number of issues vital to Sri Lanka over the course of 2010 and well-beyond. Javed Yusuf was Sri Lanka’s Ambassador to Saudi Arabia in the mid-90′s, and in this video strongly argues for the abolition of the office of the Executive President. He notes that the myth of the office protecting the rights of minorities has no basis in fact, noting that no Executive President has really helped the minorities to fulfil their aspirations.

Javed also touches upon issues of post-war reconciliation.

A divergent view is expressed …

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Now officially a Presidential aspirant, erstwhile Army Commander Sarath Fonseka has, since late October 2009 made a number of verbal and written submissions regarding his candidacy and political life after retirement. In October 2009 he made a speech at a Buddhist Temple in Washington DC. On the 12th November, he handed in his resignation addressed to the President. On 27th November, when it was an open secret that he would contest the Presidential elections, he gave an in-depth interview to the Daily Mirror newspaper.

For the first time, the following visualizations of Fonseka’s key submissions to date, using the web based Wordle, reveal the most frequently used words in …

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The late review is at an advantage, in that it is informed by the published critiques of others and subsequent responses online and in print. In this respect, watching Tracy Holsinger’s The Travelling Circus on the last day of its run was to juxtapose the live performance against reviews that dismissed the production as highfalutin nonsense and others that praised it as compelling theatre.

Tracy’s attempt at devised theatre is without, to my knowledge, precedent in Sri Lankan English drama. With roots in commedia dell’arte, devised theatre is a difficult form, which even seasoned actors balk at since it involves co-creation and improvisation instead of the comparatively more straightforward interpretation, direction and delivery of a script. This dramatic inflorescence requires a …

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I spoke with Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka recently on his take on post-war politics, his interpretation of the Southern Provincial Council elections, the issue of war crimes and the extension of GSP+, the challenges of peacebuilding (with peace seen as more than the absence of war) and the purported entry of the former Army Commander Gen. Sarath Fonseka to mainstream party politics.

Victors, if the pre-election shenanigans in the South are any barometer, violently differ on how to share the spoils of war. Unsurprisingly, the war and LTTE are still alive in the pre-election campaigns in the South. Victory against the LTTE and those who championed it are projected as superior, and better fit for political office than those who did not. The nostrums of national security gloss over concerns regarding IDPs. Promises of development abound, as usual without any real basis in economics. Promises of systemic political change, anchored to various pronouncements of the Executive, are also paraded, again without any real sincerity – minority grievances in and to the South, after all, remain largely peripheral to concerns over post-war economic …

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“On my instructions, due to the priority given to the policy of zero civilian casualties the security forces are limiting themselves to rescue operations of the entrapped civilians held hostage as a human shield by the LTTE.” – Address by President Mahinda Rajapakse to the diplomatic community, 7 May 2009

“Firing should stop,” Mr. Anandasangaree, a former MP and the leader of the Tamil United Liberation Front party, said in an interview. “The government has no business to kill people like this.” He said he believed the latest casualty figures because he had heard them directly from a doctor at the hospital that received the dead and injured. “These are 100 per cent true,” he said. “We can’t trust …

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The floods that affected significant swathes of the expansive Menik Farm a week ago generated interesting responses from government. One of the most revealing was the deafening silence of the usually loquacious Rajiva Wijesinghe, and the lack of any statement over the flooding by the Disaster Management and Human Rights Minister, Mahinda Samarasinghe.

On 22 July, Mahinda Samarasinghe noted during an adjournment debate on IDPs in Parliament that,

We are quite definite in our view that conditions on the so-called welfare centres and relief villages can and must be improved. As I have said on numerous occasions, these persons are not a mere statistic to be discussed as an abstract problem. These are Sri Lankan citizens with all the expectations, hopes …

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Tracy Holsinger is one of Sri Lanka’s most accomplished theatre personalities. That she comes from a family of musicians and dramatists is frankly incidental – Tracy’s significant theatrical talent is one honed through hard work, a commitment to professionalism and a demanding standard of acting and directing, evident in this interview.

Many of my generation grew up listening to Tracy on TNL Radio, which is why it so hard to countenance the false accents and inane blathering of radio DJs today. Tracy is recognised more for her compelling theatre than her skills as a radio DJ, though I did ask her in …

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Bijayini Satpathy, for one of the world’s greatest living dancers, is disarmingly mischievous in person. And, as I have experienced with a few others closest to perfection in their chosen art, humble and approachable. She will readily admit to being quite mad and with a casual nonchalance say that she trains from dawn to dusk at Nrityagram. It is then you realise that this is no ordinary dancer, and Nrityagram no ordinary dance school.

This interview was conducted at the Chitrasena Kalayathanaya. The ambient noise in the video reflects the noise levels in which students rehearse and learn dance …

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Two weeks after I had interviewed Prof. Tissa Vitharana on, among other things, the full implementation of the 13th Amendment, I spoke with the Leader of the JVP Somawansa Amarasinghe for his take on constitutional reform.

During the course of our interview, Mr. Amarasinghe came out strongly in favour of the rights of all minorities, the need to meaningfully look into the well-being of Tamils interned in IDP camps and the importance of a secular State. Recalling the violent history of the JVP, he suggested that it was government that pushed the JVP to violence, yet saw little parallel between this violence …

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I began my conversation with Prof. Tissa Vitharana, Minister of Science and Technology and Chair of the All Party Representative Committee (APRC) by asking him about the state of play in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in Sri Lanka, and what exactly the declaration of 2009 as the Year of IT and English meant. We talked about work force development, business service outsourcing, the sustainability of nenasala’s (cybercafes) established by ICTA and efforts by his Ministry to promote IT across the island.

Over half of the programme was devoted to Sri Lanka’s constitutional dynamics, and in particular, options for constitutional reform that included the …

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In what may be a first for a Sunday newspaper in Sri Lanka, a reference from Wikipedia is used to buttress a case for the alleged pro-LTTE bias of Canadian Liberal MP Bob Rae, recently deported from Sri Lanka after first being issued a visa to enter.

The Sunday Times has a full page devoted to a rather long-winded story titled Lanka’s dual track foreign relations. My interest here is not to debate Bob Rae’s real or perceived partiality to the LTTE, but to briefly look at the manner in which a lengthy excerpt from Rae’s wikipedia entry is used to frame a flimsy argument.

The Sunday Times notes that,

…it was public knowledge that Rae had periodically …

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Jagath Weerasinghe is one of Sri Lanka best known and most influential artists (see bio here). He was commissioned by the Sri Lankan government to design the monument ‘Shrine for the Innocent’ as a remembrance for the innocent victims of the ruthless violence that the southern part of the country experienced in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was completed in 1999.

Jagath and I talked about art and politics, how for example the experience of witnessing the Tamil pogrom in July 1983 and being abducted in the late 70′s shaped his political consciousness and in turn influenced his creative output. We …

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Mano Ganesan was recently featured on Rupavahini, the State and pro-government TV broadcaster, in a manner that suggested he unequivocally supported the LTTE and terrorism.This was noticed and taken up bloggers such as Voice in Colombo who challenged this site to answer a number of questions regarding our perceived bias towards Mano Ganesan and by extension the LTTE.

These questions included whether Mano Ganeshan violated the constitution of Sri Lanka by actively speaking on behalf of a separate state called a “Tamil Ealam”, whether he believes that Tamil Ealam is a reasonable idea or a “considered solution” in solving the problem in North, whether LTTE is responsible for massive human rights violations and if so, how he could justify speaking …

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