The IDPs from Trincomalee District are scattered, in the Ampara District. There are few from the Mannar District too. Some are willing to return to their original places, some do not. These families prefer to live here. Some have bought small pieces of lands. These families need to be assisted to construct permanent houses here.

Few organizations are assisting for the construction, still a section of families are left off. Those who are living with friends or relations face this problem. If assistance is provided their participation in completing the house is very appreciate able.  There livelihood is another problem they have to contest with the local labour. Most of  them have been cultivators, they do not have any land to …

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Journalists in Sri Lanka are trying to recollect whether they had a worse time under the regime of President Ranasinghe Premadasa when during the height of a crackdown on a JVP insurrection many media personnel were killed or simply disappeared, or if the regime of President Mahinda Rajapaksa is moved ahead of that dark era and is fast creating a special niche for himself as the biggest suppressor of whatever media freedom is there in this country.

Journalists in Sri Lanka have to admit, especially those in the private media that how much ever we may like to fool ourselves into believing we are truly “independent” journalists, this is far from the truth. All journalists have to work within limits and it is …

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After one cease-fire, two formal peace talks, three wars, we wade deeper into Eelam war IV, and we’re back at square one. Or is it we never left?

Over 2000 deaths post-2006. Post-tsunami, over 700,000 refugees upon a decimated Northeast bloated with bone and shades of displacement. Unidentified gunmen, parcel bombs, white vans, lurk in every shadow. From Devakumaran to Senpathi, infants in Kayts to civilians in Dehiwala, the value of human life varies inversely with rising prices of petrol and rice, rates of inflation and centralization. And a panoply of issues like the 17th amendment or justice for 17 aid workers dangling a top Temple Trees’ to-do list, in the contemporary context, no more a blunt sword of Damocles, unable …

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The Media at a time of war
During the Second World War the German people tuned into the BBC for war news rather than their own radio managed by Goebbels who broadcast war propaganda as news. People under Communist rule listened to Radio Free Europe.

Last week the Secretary of Defense summoned the President and Secretary of the Sri Lanka Journalists Association and gave them a piece of his mind which the journalists have said were indirect threats to their lives. Whether it was a warning, an admonition or threat, the fact is that he expressed the view that during a time of war the media should not criticize the Armed Forces and that if they were to do so the …

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By Satheesan Kumaaran
 

While the freedom of the press is a precious ingredient of a vibrant democracy, in most autocracies claiming to be democracies, journalists are casualties of the various conflicts they report on.  Sri Lanka is among the worst in this regard showing utter hostility, to say the least, to members of the media who are prepared to speak out and stand up against unfairness. Free speech in Sri Lanka is the last bastion of democracy well on its way to extinction.

The latest victim is the deputy editor of the Colombo-based Sunday newspaper, The Nation, Keith Noyahr who was kidnapped by the archetypal ‘white-van’ gang on the night of May 22 as he drove home at about 11:00 p.m.  In the …

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A bomb on a train in Dehiwela killed 9 civilians, including a pregnant woman. The Sri Lankan government blames the LTTE; they deny it. Three days earlier, a claymore attack on van deep in LTTE territory killed 16 civilians, including 5 children. The LTTE blames the Deep Penetration Unit of the Sri Lankan army; they deny it. In February, a bomb on a bus in Dambulla killed 20, while a bomb at the Colombo Fort railway station killed 12, including 8 children from the baseball team at D.S. Senanayake College and a 12-year-old girl. The LTTE was blamed for both attacks; they denied it. A few days earlier, a claymore mine attack on a bus in the LTTE-controlled area of …

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Most of what I reveal below has been lying concealed in my notes and diaries deposited in the Government Achieves. I have decided to focus on them out of my belief that they may throw some light as we grope through the darkness covering our arduous trek towards national reconciliation. Read between the lines with insight, they may perhaps point the way to peace and prosperity.

I started my career in the then Ceylon Civil Service in 1957 as a Cadet in the Jaffna Kachcheri. My thoughts of Jaffna are nostalgic, prompted by the happy life I led among a hospitable, and peace-loving people, nurtured in the best traditions of a noble culture. I always looked forward to returning the ample …

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As the much hard-sold elections to the Eastern Provincial Council came to an unseemly and acrimonious conclusion last week, it was already becoming abundantly clear that its political and constitutional ramifications may well turn out to be anything other than what the government’s triumphalist claims would have us believe.

Perhaps the most disturbing political upshot of these elections was the sharp and violent polarisation of ethnic and religious communities in this most pluralistic of provinces. Electoral politics was conducted unashamedly as a form of antagonistic communal competition and outbidding, paralleling without much overstatement that nonpareil of political disintegration, the general elections of 1956. In the years before the watershed of 1956, the gross ineptitude of Sir John Kotelawala’s UNP with regard …

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