Archive for English
July 3, 2009 at 5:59 pm · Categories: Colombo, Constitutional Reform, Economy, English, Foreign Relations, Human Rights, IDPs and Refugees, Politics, Post-War | by Sanjana
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 …
July 3, 2009 at 5:52 pm · Categories: Colombo, Constitutional Reform, Education, English, Politics, Post-War | by Sanjana
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 …
July 3, 2009 at 10:39 am · Categories: Colombo, English, Human Security, IDPs and Refugees, Poetry, Post-War | by Thiru Sambandar
You claimed to liberate
hostages, to conduct
the largest rescue
operation in history.
In other countries
people robbed
of freedoms,
rescued,
are treated
by doctors, then
sent home
to be greeted
usually by feisty
and jubilant
crowds. They are
welcomed as heroes.
Here, 100 Tamils
share one latrine,
women don´t eat
so they will not
defecate until night
covers them
squatting in bush by
the perimeter fence
conquering fear
of snakes. Here boys
and girls are picked
up by goon squads
who roam camps
demanding bribes
for teenagers they
choose to leave alone
for now.
Part of the Writers Under Siege collection on Groundviews. For more information, click here.
July 3, 2009 at 10:19 am · Categories: Colombo, English, Foreign Relations, Human Rights, Media | by Nalaka Gunawardene
Located strategically in the Indian Ocean, Sri Lanka was a hub in the maritime silk and spice routes for millennia. It drew traders from the east and west for both business and pleasure. Notable among the attractions were spices, whose many aromas and flavours formed an integral part of the tropical paradise experience.
The traditional Lankan curry contained up to 13 spices and herbs. Most plants were not native – cardamom came from South India, cloves from Indonesia and chilli all the way from the Americas. Cinnamon was Sri Lanka’s unique contribution to this delightful mix. The origins didn’t really matter: the islanders knew just how to mix the native and the foreign to achieve legendary results.
As Sri Lanka embarks on …
July 3, 2009 at 6:15 am · Categories: Colombo, Constitutional Reform, English, Human Rights, Jaffna, Peace and Conflict, Politics, Post-War | by Lionel Bopage
[Editors note: This is a detailed response to over 30 comments left on Sri Lanka: Is the war really over? and read over 2,500 times to date.]
Though several comments made on my article were not directly related to the topic, I wish to respond to some of the issues that have been raised.
The lop-sided comments about the JVP do neither take into account the context nor the causes for their insurrections. Political violence in Sri Lanka cannot be properly understood without recognizing its complex relationship with the socio-political establishment. When social groups vied for access to state power or when they demanded their just rights, the state used repressive and violent force against them. The political …
July 2, 2009 at 12:35 am · Categories: English, Human Security, IDPs and Refugees, Peace and Conflict, Post-War, Vavuniya | by groundviews
[Editors note: The dire conditions of internment in camps that are home to well over a quarter of a million fellow citizens are unknown to many. Fears of inflammatory and inaccurate journalism, as defined and seen by the government, debar independent media from access to these camps even after the end of war.
Rohini Hensman’s exclusive article to Groundviews on the plight of the IDPs and Malinda Seneviratne’s pointed counter based on his experience in the camps, as well as the responses to both articles provide the framework of reference for this compelling eyewitness account of conditions in Menik Farm.
This is an unedited account, posted here without verification. Corroboration and competing perspectives are invited from Government, I/NGOs …
July 1, 2009 at 4:57 am · Categories: English, Media | by groundviews
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June 30, 2009 at 8:05 am · Categories: English, Peace and Conflict, Poetry, Politics, Post-War | by Indran Amirthanayagam
The island belongs
to centipede, rat,
butterfly,
lots of species
each with
their own habitats,
and supervising
all arable
and fallow land
the president king.
Minorities
may enjoy
clean living
in freshly cleared
forest patches,
welfare villages
with amenities
such as latrines
and tents,
gated communities.
June 28, 2009
Part of the Writers Under Siege collection on Groundviews. For more information, click here.
June 30, 2009 at 3:58 am · Categories: English, Politics, Post-War | by Dayan Jayatilleka
We have a once –in-generations chance to re-found Sri Lanka, to build Sri Lanka anew. To do so, we must be both hard and soft; and vigilant as hawks and as conciliatory as doves. We must be hard enough to obliterate what is left of the LTTE as an organization and surgically pre-empt any attempts at re-emergence, be they local or Diaspora-based and originated. We must be soft and malleable enough to arrive at a consensus with the non-Tiger Tamils as to the shape of the Sri Lanka we wish to build and live in.
Where do we start? With renovation, I suggest. The only available starting point is modest and realistic reform, namely the implementation of the 13th amendment to …
June 29, 2009 at 9:25 pm · Categories: English, Human Security, IDPs and Refugees, Peace and Conflict, Politics, Post-War, Vavuniya | by Malinda Seneviratne
[Editors note: This article was published in The Sunday Island on 28 June 2009. Groundviews does not usually reproduce content first published elsewhere in print or online. In this case however, given that the Island's website has no mechanism to feature reader generated comments and because Rohini Hensman's article was exclusively published on this site, Malinda's response is republished with the expectation of continued dialogue between the two principal authors and comments from a wider readership. Those familiar with Malinda's initial trenchant comment to and critique of Rohini's article are also strongly encouraged to read Visit to ‘concentration camps’ in Cheddikulam published in The Nation, also on Sunday.]
Rohini Hensman is absolutely right when …
June 28, 2009 at 4:34 pm · Categories: English, Media, Peace and Conflict, Politics, Post-War | by Lionel Bopage
The end of the conventional war in the north and the east of Sri Lanka witnessed the almost total annihilation of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) including its leadership. However, the Government forces are still carrying out clearing up operations throughout the island. Tens of thousands have been slaughtered; many thousands wounded; hundreds of thousands expelled from their habitats and many hundreds of thousands interned into camps. The deaths of the militants have been celebrated by the overwhelming majority of the Sinhalese and some of the Tamils and Muslims. The Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) is allegedly engaged in destroying any incriminating evidence of its culpability in war crimes. The fate of three doctors, who were earlier praised …
June 27, 2009 at 2:22 am · Categories: English, Peace and Conflict, Politics, Post-War | by Dayan Jayatilleka
As Paul Berman once wrote, “somewhere in the world it is always 1941”. There comes a time in the life of every society when it is faced with an existential threat or challenge. It is the social forces or elements that rise up to this challenge and successfully overcome this threat that then have the power as well as the legitimacy to place their stamp on what comes after. Those who stood on the wrong side of history, or never rose to the occasion, or who abandoned the struggle partway, or simply failed; the defeated enemy, the collaborators, the appeasers and the fence-sitters — and these are not one and the same — all forfeit the chance to place …
June 26, 2009 at 5:10 pm · Categories: English, Peace and Conflict | by Mahesan Niranjan
A trial takes place in a tent at the foot of the mountain. It is me, your potato farmer on trial. Accused of being an intellectual who failed to play a role in stemming the growth of nationalism; thereby contributing to crimes committed on potato soil. This is no ordinary trial. There is only one participant: prosecutor, accused, judge and jury are all the same — me. Accusing, examining, defending and passing judgment, are all going to be done by myself. Readers are invited to be spectators. No judgment please. This trial is my roadmap to nirvana.
I am thirsty. There is water, hundred yards away, but between the water and I is a queue hundred yards in length. …
June 22, 2009 at 6:32 pm · Categories: Colombo, English, Human Security, IDPs and Refugees, Peace and Conflict, Politics, Post-War, Vavuniya | by Rohini Hensman
Image courtesy IRIN
Throughout the last stages of the civil war, the government of Sri Lanka claimed to be engaged in a hostage rescue mission on behalf of civilians in the Vanni who were being held against their will be the LTTE. How far are its words borne out by its actions?
It is certainly true that the LTTE was keeping hundreds of thousands of civilians hostage and using them as forced labour, a source of child and adult conscripts, and a human shield from behind which they could engage in offensive operations against Sri Lanka’s armed forces. It has also been confirmed that in general the soldiers showed compassion to the escaping civilians, and some even …
June 20, 2009 at 7:46 pm · Categories: Colombo, English, Peace and Conflict, Politics, Post-War | by Vasantha Raja
Sri Lanka’s present administration is a “dictatorship masquerading as democracy” observed Prof. John Neelsen from the Institute of Sociology in Tuebingen, Germany. His judgement is not far from the truth. In this paper I shall argue that a virtual ‘Sinhala-Buddhist dictatorship’ has emerged in Sri Lanka as the outcome of the brutish military campaign that resulted in a humanitarian tragedy of scandalous proportions. Also, I shall show the colonial connection, particularly the British rule that sowed the seeds for the present political impasse in Sri Lanka.
Let me start with a brief description of the war that culminated in the destruction of the Tamil Tiger leadership along with its Tamil mini-state in Sri Lanka’s Tamil habitat.
Successive administrations in Sri Lanka succeeded …
June 19, 2009 at 4:47 pm · Categories: Colombo, English, Jaffna, Peace and Conflict, Politics, Post-War, Trincomalee | by Tanuja Thurairajah
It is a much analysed fact that the Tamils of Sri Lanka under the guidance of its leadership have missed many historically defined opportunities, in laying the foundation towards creating a decent future for their political aspirations and self determination. The 50 – 50 representation in Parliament instead of a federal constitution, a claim that seemed rightfully unreasonable to the Sinhalese; the vote in favour of the Citizenship Act of 1948 that deprived the citizenship of the plantation Tamils which was instrumental in conceiving the impression of the Tamils as lacking moral conviction and as being egocentric; the Sinhalese Only law of 1956; the Referendum of December 1982 leading to the subsequent 1983 racial riots and the Indo-Lanka Accord …
June 15, 2009 at 6:35 am · Categories: Colombo, English, Media, Peace and Conflict, Post-War | by Muttukrishna Sarvananthan
Both in life and death, Veluppillai Prabhakaran divides rather than unites the Tamils in particular, Sri Lankans as a whole. Therein lie the enigma of Prabhakaran (Thambi Anna to me), whom I first met almost thirty years ago in August 1979, and the Tamil Tigers.
“Assuming the LTTE finished is fantasy masquerading as fact”, exclaimed a self-styled ‘leftist’ academic (Sri Lankan born American), namely Qadri Ismail, on March 1, 2009. Qadri Ismail is not alone in fantasizing about Prabhakaran and the Tamil Tigers. Anita Pratap, a veteran Indian journalist, too fantasized about the invincibility and immortality of Prabhakaran and the Tamil Tigers in an article published on May 03, 2009 claiming that the Tiger is just “crouching”, not dying. …
June 14, 2009 at 4:02 pm · Categories: English, Foreign Relations, Media, Post-War | by Sanjana
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 …
June 13, 2009 at 12:44 pm · Categories: Colombo, English, Media, Peace and Conflict, Post-War | by Sanjana
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 …
June 13, 2009 at 6:24 am · Categories: Colombo, Constitutional Reform, English, Peace and Conflict, Politics, Post-War | by Dayan Jayatilleka
The warning about the risk of triumphalism came days before the 65th anniversary celebration of D Day, by the leaders of the US, UK and France. In the USA there are annual re-enactments of the battles of the American Revolution – the War of Independence against Britain —and of the Civil War against the Secessionist Confederacy. While the risk of triumphalism does indeed exist and must be cautioned against, I think there is yet another risk, an opposite one, which we must avoid. The USSR which triumphed over the bulk of the Nazi fascist army, collapsed without a shot being fired, and that collapse was preceded by an ideological surrender in which everything positive in its history was turned …
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