THANJAVUR: Medical college students and doctors here organised a human chain on Gandhiji Road on Wednesday appealing to the Central Government to urge Sri Lankan Government to release four Tamil doctors arrested by the Lankan police “just because they gave treatment to wounded Sri Lankan Tamils during the recent war.”
The doctors in custody are Thambimuthu Sathyamurthy, Durairaja Vasantha Raja, Veerakathi Shanmugha Raja and Ilanchezhiya Pallavan.
R. Venkateswaran, students chairman, Vijay Pandiyan, secretary, Prathiba and Preethi led the agitation. S. R. Marududurai, Professor, Thanjavur Medical College, inaugurated the human chain. Thanjai Ramamurthy, senior advocate, D. Mathivanan, General secretary of Transport Corporation Employees Union, offered felicitations.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Sri Lanka foreign reserves rise 23 pct to $1.6 bln
[ Reuters ][ Jul 02 13:20 GMT ]
Sri Lanka's foreign currency reserves have risen by over 23 percent in two months as funds flowed into the country after the end of its long war against the Tamil Tigers, the central bank governor said on Thursday. Sri Lanka in March sought a $1.9 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan to avert a balance of payments crisis, after spending half its reserves defending the rupee and paying foreign investors who sold off treasury securities after the global downturn. [ full story ]
Sri Lanka's foreign currency reserves have risen by over 23 percent in two months as funds flowed into the country after the end of its long war against the Tamil Tigers, the central bank governor said on Thursday. Sri Lanka in March sought a $1.9 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan to avert a balance of payments crisis, after spending half its reserves defending the rupee and paying foreign investors who sold off treasury securities after the global downturn. [ full story ]
MR says IDPs can seek asylum
By Kelum Bandara
President Mahinda Rajapaksa told the Cabinet meeting last evening that he would not mind Canada and the European countries giving asylum to the internally displaced persons.
However, the President said that he could not send IDPs to India anymore because that country was not willing to accommodate them.
“Canada has pledged to accept any number of IDPs. I do not mind these countries putting up visa offices in the welfare camps to facilitate people willing to leave the country,” he said.
The President charged that the foreign diplomatic missions had started making malicious allegations against Sri Lanka now, and some Sri Lankans had even been denied visas.
He pointed out that the US State Department had now put up a news item regarding some Sri Lankan soldiers who were facing charges during their peace keeping mission in Haiti a few months ago.
“I got to know this information from other sources, not from the Foreign Ministry,” he said.
Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Hussein Bhaila who was present at the meeting said that he too had not been informed in this regard properly.
Besides, the President also emphasised the need for all the Ministers to be present in Parliament during important debates. He was referring to the government not being able to pass a supplementary estimate in the House last Friday since there was no quorum.
http://www.dailymirror.lk/DM_BLOG/Sections/frmNewsDetailView.aspx?ARTID=53567
President Mahinda Rajapaksa told the Cabinet meeting last evening that he would not mind Canada and the European countries giving asylum to the internally displaced persons.
However, the President said that he could not send IDPs to India anymore because that country was not willing to accommodate them.
“Canada has pledged to accept any number of IDPs. I do not mind these countries putting up visa offices in the welfare camps to facilitate people willing to leave the country,” he said.
The President charged that the foreign diplomatic missions had started making malicious allegations against Sri Lanka now, and some Sri Lankans had even been denied visas.
He pointed out that the US State Department had now put up a news item regarding some Sri Lankan soldiers who were facing charges during their peace keeping mission in Haiti a few months ago.
“I got to know this information from other sources, not from the Foreign Ministry,” he said.
Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Hussein Bhaila who was present at the meeting said that he too had not been informed in this regard properly.
Besides, the President also emphasised the need for all the Ministers to be present in Parliament during important debates. He was referring to the government not being able to pass a supplementary estimate in the House last Friday since there was no quorum.
http://www.dailymirror.lk/DM_BLOG/Sections/frmNewsDetailView.aspx?ARTID=53567
Sri Lankan FM says China always friend
BEIJING, July 2 (Xinhua)
The visiting Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama said on Thursday that China has always been a friend to Sri Lanka and he is seeking closer bilateral ties during his five-day official visit.
"China has remained a friend of Sri Lanka at times of difficulty. A friend in need is a friend indeed," said Bogollagama in an exclusive interview with Xinhua.
This is Bogollagama's first visit to China as Sri Lankan foreign minister since he took office in January 2007.
Bogollagama, who is visiting China from July 1 to 5 at the invitation of Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, is scheduled to meet with Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang and talk with Yang.
"The relationship (between Sri Lanka and China) has stood test of time...We value the relationship," said Bogollagama, stressing that one-China policy is always maintained by the Sri Lankan government.
"China is a major player in the world, and a major player in the regional context too. We will work very closely with China," Bogollagama said.
DOMESTIC CHALLENGES
After declaring victory over the rebel group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May, the Sri Lankan government is still facing challenges such as national reconciliation, resettling displaced civilians, post-war reconstruction and economic development.
But Bogollagama sees the process of addressing the problems as "an opportunity for us to transform."
"What was threatening Sri Lanka's democracy and development was terrorism, we now have defeated and eliminated the threat of terrorism to the country," said Bogollagama.
Bogollagama said the country would focus on infrastructure development and security during its reconstruction phase.
In early May, China gave 1 million U.S. dollars in humanitarian aid to Sri Lanka to help the displaced civilians. China's provision of 20-million-yuan tents had also reached Sri Lanka.
"China always backs Sri Lanka's domestic reconciliation and peace process and will continue to play its positive and constructive role," said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang on June 25.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-07/02/content_11641550.htm
The visiting Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama said on Thursday that China has always been a friend to Sri Lanka and he is seeking closer bilateral ties during his five-day official visit.
"China has remained a friend of Sri Lanka at times of difficulty. A friend in need is a friend indeed," said Bogollagama in an exclusive interview with Xinhua.
This is Bogollagama's first visit to China as Sri Lankan foreign minister since he took office in January 2007.
Bogollagama, who is visiting China from July 1 to 5 at the invitation of Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, is scheduled to meet with Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang and talk with Yang.
"The relationship (between Sri Lanka and China) has stood test of time...We value the relationship," said Bogollagama, stressing that one-China policy is always maintained by the Sri Lankan government.
"China is a major player in the world, and a major player in the regional context too. We will work very closely with China," Bogollagama said.
DOMESTIC CHALLENGES
After declaring victory over the rebel group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May, the Sri Lankan government is still facing challenges such as national reconciliation, resettling displaced civilians, post-war reconstruction and economic development.
But Bogollagama sees the process of addressing the problems as "an opportunity for us to transform."
"What was threatening Sri Lanka's democracy and development was terrorism, we now have defeated and eliminated the threat of terrorism to the country," said Bogollagama.
Bogollagama said the country would focus on infrastructure development and security during its reconstruction phase.
In early May, China gave 1 million U.S. dollars in humanitarian aid to Sri Lanka to help the displaced civilians. China's provision of 20-million-yuan tents had also reached Sri Lanka.
"China always backs Sri Lanka's domestic reconciliation and peace process and will continue to play its positive and constructive role," said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang on June 25.
Editor: Fang Yang
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-07/02/content_11641550.htm
Structured Genocide history of Tamils
This book traces the poignant history of Tamils in Sri Lanka after independence.It catalogues the Sri Lankan Tamils’ descent from a once thriving vibrant Nation to one that is today fighting for its very survival. This is a story about how a majority population consumed with religious chauvinism can corrupt a democratic process with untold consequences.The book is organised into three sections covering the physical harm suffered by the Tamil community, the destruction of their cultural heritage and the attempts at negotiating a settlement which has come to nothing. The book also strikes a hopeful note at the end on how lasting peace can be achieved from the rubble of destruction. The reader is likely to find some images depicting examples of violence difficult and is left to imagine the suffering endured by not only the victims but also their families and communities over the years. Unlike the usual Sri Lankan state sponsored propaganda material that is normally seen on the international news media, this is refreshingly narrated from a Tamil perspective - one that rarely gets an airing on the worldstage. A reader with limited time and interest, used to the democratic system in theWestern world with its checks and balances tends to give credibility to a government’s statements over any other. In Sri Lanka, the reality is far from the ‘truth’ claimed by its Government. By systematically documenting the key events, this book is bound to add to the reader’s knowledge of what Tamils in Sri Lanka have endured post independence in 1948."
Karunanidhi's sermon on Srilankan Tamils
What a shift in stand it is! Incredible, yet true. Recalling the events that led to the DMK giving up the demand for a separate 'Dravida Nadu', Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M Karunanidhi has said no action or remarks, provoking Sinhalese majority, should be made in Tamil Nadu as it could affect future prospects of Tamils in Sri Lanka.
The simple truth is that the Sri Lankan Government is in no mood to give equal rights to the millions of Tamils in the Island Nation. In fact. Lakhs of Tamils are now in transit camps, where basic facilities are absent and lakhs of others are homeless.
The Tamils in Sri Lanka look forward to help, assistance and moral support from their brethren in the mainland. And Karunanidhi has chosen to advice restraint. He has said that antagonising the Sinhalese will not be in the interest of Tamils. Nobody wants to unnecessarily antagonise the Sinhalese. The truth is that the Sinhalese do not want Tamils in Sri Lanka to enjoy the same rights and privuileges that they do.
Asserting the rights of Tamils does not amount to provoking the Sinhalese. There is a beautiful Tamil saying, which I hope, Karunanidhi would not have forgotten. “Mayile Mayile Iraku Podu”. It means, no peacock will shed its feather just for the asking. The Sri Lankan Government has, for decades ignored the just demands of lakhs of Tamils there. And Karunanidhi is an honourable leader!
He says, "This is not a conflict between the governments of Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, but of two races, viz. Tamils and Sinhalese. Even Buddhist monks are likely to react strongly to any of our remarks or actions. If we end up saying something against the Sinhalese community, it will only affect the Tamils there."
Buddhism among Tamils is quenched from two sides: Peter Schalk
“To say that Tamil tradition has always been all-inclusive of religions is modern Tamil national ideology projected into an invented past. It is not history of the Tamils”, writes Professor Peter Schalk, challenging the perspectives of looking at Tamil identity from the point of the use of Tamil language that simultaneously accommodated various religions in its history, despite of them contradicting one another or coming and going. Responding to an article on Buddhism appeared in TamilNet, Tuesday, Prof. Schalk said that Buddhism among Tamils he objectifies is different from what the Sinhala-Buddhists are envisaging.
Response from Peter Schalk to a TamilNet article ‘Ploy of Buddhism to nullify Tamil nationalism’:
Martial Sinhala Buddhism today having left its ties to the Buddha is both exclusive and excluding. It is Sinhala, not Tamil. Therefore Buddhism among Tamils appears like an anomaly to it. What to do about an anomaly? Its existence in the past and present is denied or its importance is reduced to a triviality by Sinhala mercenary scholars.
What happens today is that the former programme by Cyril Mathews from the early 1980s to identify all Buddhist places, mainly 16, in the North as Sinhala, is completed, this time with the full support of scholar mercenaries, the Government and of the Armed Forces.
These places are in the forefront of Sinhala colonisation in areas of Tamil speakers. In this polarised situation it is a riddle to me how Buddhism among Tamil speakers can be said to neutralise Tamil nationalism. Tamil-speaking Buddhists are strongly Tamil oriented. They claim even that Buddhist Kantarotai was Tamil, not Sinhala.
We have to distinguish between Buddhism among Tamils and Buddhism in Tamil speaking areas implanted by modern martial Sinhala-Buddhists for the benefit of the Sinhala army personal, traders and colonisers who are fed with Sinhala-Buddhist pamphlets in English or Sinhala. They live as a separate entitity but they have administrative power. They deny of course that Kantarotai was Tamil.
A recent trend among them is to deny the concept of the Mahavamsa 25 that only Buddhists are humans. It does not fit into the official evaluation of what a human is imposed by the UN. Now they think that Tamils are humans and therefore qualified for Buddhism, which however is Sinhala Buddhism. It is sometimes put into English and sometimes even into Tamil.
In this case it is evident that an attempt is made to neutralise Tamil nationalism of Tamil speakers, but that has nothing to do with the kind of Buddhism among Tamils that I objectify. It is indeed important that this kind of humanised martial Sinhala Buddhism is highlighted and revealed as a political program of neutralising Tamil nationalism.
What I say about Saivism was that from the time of Campantar exists a strong trend that is even canonized within Tamil Saivism in the Tevaram that Tamil is an expression of Saivism and Saivism of Tamil. That does not imply that all Saivas think in that way or that Saivism per se thinks so. I mention this about Saivism to show that Buddhism among Tamils is classified as an anomaly by some Saivas also. Buddhism among Tamils is quenched from two sides.
To say that Tamil tradition has always been all-inclusive of religions is modern Tamil national ideology projected into an invented past. It is not history of the Tamils.
My writing on Buddhism among Tamils are available in two volumes from 2002 entitled "Buddhism among Tamils" issued by Uppsala University.
Response from Peter Schalk to a TamilNet article ‘Ploy of Buddhism to nullify Tamil nationalism’:
Professor Peter Schalk
Martial Sinhala Buddhism today having left its ties to the Buddha is both exclusive and excluding. It is Sinhala, not Tamil. Therefore Buddhism among Tamils appears like an anomaly to it. What to do about an anomaly? Its existence in the past and present is denied or its importance is reduced to a triviality by Sinhala mercenary scholars.
What happens today is that the former programme by Cyril Mathews from the early 1980s to identify all Buddhist places, mainly 16, in the North as Sinhala, is completed, this time with the full support of scholar mercenaries, the Government and of the Armed Forces.
These places are in the forefront of Sinhala colonisation in areas of Tamil speakers. In this polarised situation it is a riddle to me how Buddhism among Tamil speakers can be said to neutralise Tamil nationalism. Tamil-speaking Buddhists are strongly Tamil oriented. They claim even that Buddhist Kantarotai was Tamil, not Sinhala.
We have to distinguish between Buddhism among Tamils and Buddhism in Tamil speaking areas implanted by modern martial Sinhala-Buddhists for the benefit of the Sinhala army personal, traders and colonisers who are fed with Sinhala-Buddhist pamphlets in English or Sinhala. They live as a separate entitity but they have administrative power. They deny of course that Kantarotai was Tamil.
A recent trend among them is to deny the concept of the Mahavamsa 25 that only Buddhists are humans. It does not fit into the official evaluation of what a human is imposed by the UN. Now they think that Tamils are humans and therefore qualified for Buddhism, which however is Sinhala Buddhism. It is sometimes put into English and sometimes even into Tamil.
In this case it is evident that an attempt is made to neutralise Tamil nationalism of Tamil speakers, but that has nothing to do with the kind of Buddhism among Tamils that I objectify. It is indeed important that this kind of humanised martial Sinhala Buddhism is highlighted and revealed as a political program of neutralising Tamil nationalism.
What I say about Saivism was that from the time of Campantar exists a strong trend that is even canonized within Tamil Saivism in the Tevaram that Tamil is an expression of Saivism and Saivism of Tamil. That does not imply that all Saivas think in that way or that Saivism per se thinks so. I mention this about Saivism to show that Buddhism among Tamils is classified as an anomaly by some Saivas also. Buddhism among Tamils is quenched from two sides.
To say that Tamil tradition has always been all-inclusive of religions is modern Tamil national ideology projected into an invented past. It is not history of the Tamils.
My writing on Buddhism among Tamils are available in two volumes from 2002 entitled "Buddhism among Tamils" issued by Uppsala University.
Arms surrender deadline to Muslim groups in the east extended
Sri Lanka’s Defence Ministry Wednesday extended the deadline given to Muslim armed groups in the east to surrender their weapons to the security forces, by two more days. The deadline issued earlier was to expire on July 2. The deadline has been extended following requests made by parties concerned, police sources said.
Police said a special committee has been formed to accept firearms and other weapons from these Muslim armed groups within the stipulated period. These groups could surrender their weapons to this committee through Mosque Federations in the area before 3 p.m. on July 4, Eastern Regional Deputy Inspector General of Police, Edison Gunatilake, said in Batticaloa Wednesday.
According to a report submitted by the Police, there are eighteen Muslim armed groups in Kaaththankudi alone, in Batticaloa district.
Police said a special committee has been formed to accept firearms and other weapons from these Muslim armed groups within the stipulated period. These groups could surrender their weapons to this committee through Mosque Federations in the area before 3 p.m. on July 4, Eastern Regional Deputy Inspector General of Police, Edison Gunatilake, said in Batticaloa Wednesday.
According to a report submitted by the Police, there are eighteen Muslim armed groups in Kaaththankudi alone, in Batticaloa district.
UN hires lawyers to defend detained local UN staff
Inner City Press (ICP) reported Tuesday that after a week of silence by the U.N. the U.N. spokesperson has revealed that "U.N. has hired a lawyer who has visited the U.N. staff and who are still detained in Colombo. Kandasamy "Saundi" Saundrarajan of UNOPS (Office of Project Services) and N. Charles Raveendran of UNHCR taken by the Sri Lanka Government and are under detention for more than a month.
"The head of the UN Refugee Agency in Sri Lanka Amin Awad issued a strange statement saying in essence that the government is free to detain staff as long as procedures are followed. But despite top UN humanitarian John Holmes' statement that unlike international staff, national staff members of the UN are not immune, the Staff Union disagrees. They criticize Awad's statement, and counter that national staff have immunity within the scope of their work," ICP said in its report.
When "lawyers in Sri Lanka who represent those accused of Tamil Tiger sympathies have themselves been labeled as traitors by the country's military," and the "UN has already shown it cannot protect its own staff in Sri Lanka," the Inner City Press questioned if the U.N. will be able to "protect the lawyers it hires for its staff?"
"The head of the UN Refugee Agency in Sri Lanka Amin Awad issued a strange statement saying in essence that the government is free to detain staff as long as procedures are followed. But despite top UN humanitarian John Holmes' statement that unlike international staff, national staff members of the UN are not immune, the Staff Union disagrees. They criticize Awad's statement, and counter that national staff have immunity within the scope of their work," ICP said in its report.
When "lawyers in Sri Lanka who represent those accused of Tamil Tiger sympathies have themselves been labeled as traitors by the country's military," and the "UN has already shown it cannot protect its own staff in Sri Lanka," the Inner City Press questioned if the U.N. will be able to "protect the lawyers it hires for its staff?"
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Tamil refugees forced into sex rackets
DICNOTIONS for about 300,000 refugees forcibly detained in camps across Sri Lanka remain dire, with reports of a prostitution racket run by officials in a remote camp.
Aid workers told The Australian yesterday officials at the internally displaced people's camp in Pulmoddai, a remote northeast region, are running the prostitution ring using women kept in the camp.
The Australian understands the allegations are the subject of a joint investigation between the Sri Lankan government and an aid organisation.
"It's been brought to the attention of senior government officials but no one seems to be doing anything about it," said an aid worker, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal.
"It's hard to know whether it's coercive or not, but there is an average of three families living to a tent and it can be extremely difficult trying to get privacy. You can imagine the military coming in and asking for something in return for more space or more favours."
Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Palitha Kohona described the claims as "absolute rubbish", but confirmed the government was investigating the reports.
"These (the military) are the guys who were winning the war - they could have raped every single woman on the way if they wanted to. Not one single woman was raped," he told The Australian last night.
"I am sure in a mass of people there may be individuals who want to make a quick buck one way or another, but you have to remember the tents are so close together you can't do anything without the entire neighbourhood knowing. If you had a racket going, thousands of people would know about it."
A UN official said yesterday many families remained separated in the camps and that men and women believed to be Tamil Tiger fighters were being removed with "no due process or proper documentation, like arrest receipts, given to parents or guardians". "These issues are of huge concern for us," the official said. "The lack of freedom of movement is a violation of human rights under Sri Lanka's own constitution."
The restrictions have heightened tensions in the camps, including a mass protest in the Ramanathan camp in the northern town of Vavuniya on Sunday in which IDPs tried to break down barbed-wire fences separating one camp zone - and many relatives - from another.
Tamilnet.com claimed two people were killed and at least two were injured when troops opened fire on the refugees.
But reports from aid workers in the camp suggested troops fired only into the air, causing no casualties, and that camp officials reached a compromise that allowed the IDPs movement between the two camps.
UN Sri Lanka co-ordinator Neil Buhne said camp conditions were slowly improving, thanks to better water and sanitation facilities.
"But the main thing is people are still inside these camps and they can't go anywhere. The government has made public commitments to get 80 per cent of people back to their homes by the end of the year (after separating civilians from the fighters) but that's going to be a difficult target to meet."
The Sri Lankan military crushed the Tamil Tiger rebel forces in May after a 26-year civil war. President Mahinda Rajapakse has committed to reaching a political settlement with the Tamil leaders that goes some way to addressing their grievances.
This week he gave the All Parties Committee, established some years ago to find a compromise solution, until next month to submit its report.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25721366-25837,00.html
Aid workers told The Australian yesterday officials at the internally displaced people's camp in Pulmoddai, a remote northeast region, are running the prostitution ring using women kept in the camp.
The Australian understands the allegations are the subject of a joint investigation between the Sri Lankan government and an aid organisation.
"It's been brought to the attention of senior government officials but no one seems to be doing anything about it," said an aid worker, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal.
"It's hard to know whether it's coercive or not, but there is an average of three families living to a tent and it can be extremely difficult trying to get privacy. You can imagine the military coming in and asking for something in return for more space or more favours."
Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Palitha Kohona described the claims as "absolute rubbish", but confirmed the government was investigating the reports.
"These (the military) are the guys who were winning the war - they could have raped every single woman on the way if they wanted to. Not one single woman was raped," he told The Australian last night.
"I am sure in a mass of people there may be individuals who want to make a quick buck one way or another, but you have to remember the tents are so close together you can't do anything without the entire neighbourhood knowing. If you had a racket going, thousands of people would know about it."
A UN official said yesterday many families remained separated in the camps and that men and women believed to be Tamil Tiger fighters were being removed with "no due process or proper documentation, like arrest receipts, given to parents or guardians". "These issues are of huge concern for us," the official said. "The lack of freedom of movement is a violation of human rights under Sri Lanka's own constitution."
The restrictions have heightened tensions in the camps, including a mass protest in the Ramanathan camp in the northern town of Vavuniya on Sunday in which IDPs tried to break down barbed-wire fences separating one camp zone - and many relatives - from another.
Tamilnet.com claimed two people were killed and at least two were injured when troops opened fire on the refugees.
But reports from aid workers in the camp suggested troops fired only into the air, causing no casualties, and that camp officials reached a compromise that allowed the IDPs movement between the two camps.
UN Sri Lanka co-ordinator Neil Buhne said camp conditions were slowly improving, thanks to better water and sanitation facilities.
"But the main thing is people are still inside these camps and they can't go anywhere. The government has made public commitments to get 80 per cent of people back to their homes by the end of the year (after separating civilians from the fighters) but that's going to be a difficult target to meet."
The Sri Lankan military crushed the Tamil Tiger rebel forces in May after a 26-year civil war. President Mahinda Rajapakse has committed to reaching a political settlement with the Tamil leaders that goes some way to addressing their grievances.
This week he gave the All Parties Committee, established some years ago to find a compromise solution, until next month to submit its report.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25721366-25837,00.html
Sri Lanka revives draconian law to gag media
By Sampath Perera
1 July 2009
The Sri Lankan government has revived legislation that vests the Sri Lanka Press Council, a statutory body, with broad powers to restrict the media and punish offending journalists and publishers with fines and imprisonment.
The law was first enacted in 1973 by the coalition government of Prime Minister Sirima Bandaranaike amid a deep economic crisis and widespread social discontent. The government had just suppressed an armed uprising of rural Sinhala youth and was facing growing industrial action by the working class, including an all-island bank workers strike. The Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), which broke from Trotskyism in 1964, played a key role in the ruling coalition.
The Press Council continued to function as a mechanism to intimidate the media under successive governments until 2002 when it was rendered inoperative through a bipartisan resolution in parliament. The United National Front government of Ranil Wickremesinghe had just signed a ceasefire agreement with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as the basis for internationally-sponsored negotiations for a permanent peace. The law, however, was never scrapped.
After plunging the country back to war in 2006, President Mahinda Rajapakse and his government pressured and intimidated the media, but did not revive the Press Council. His decision to do so now is a sign of political weakness, not strength. Having militarily defeated the LTTE, the government is now facing a worsening economic crisis as the result of huge defence spending, compounded by the global recession.
The President has the sole prerogative to appoint the revived Press Council, including its chairman. Its orders and censures cannot be challenged in any court of law. Moreover, the Council is set above public criticism. Clause 12 states that it is a punishable offence if anyone “without sufficient reason publishes any statement or does anything that brings the council or any member thereof into disrepute during the progress or after the conclusion of any inquiry conducted by such Council”.
The law prohibits the media from revealing any aspect of government discussions. “No person shall publish, or cause to be published, in any newspaper, any matter which purports to be the proceedings or any part thereof, of a meeting of the Cabinet of Ministers,” it states. Even the contents of documents exchanged between ministries are prohibited from publication.
The most important restrictions are in clause 16. Subsection 3 states: “No person shall publish or cause to be published in any newspaper any official secret within the meaning of the Official Secrets Act or any matter relating to military, naval, air-force or police establishments, equipment or installation which is likely to be prejudicial to the defence and security of the Republic of Sri Lanka”.
This sweeping prohibition on matters related to the military is particularly significant. Rajapakse has repeatedly accused opponents—the media, striking workers, protesting students and opposition politicians—of undermining “national security”. In the wake of the LTTE’s defeat, the government has retained draconian emergency powers and is boosting the military. It has been particularly sensitive to any criticism of the army’s killing of civilians in its final offensives and the internment of nearly 300,000 Tamils in detention camps.
Subsection 4 prohibits the publication of “any statement relating to monetary, fiscal, exchange control or import control measures alleged to be under consideration by the Government or by any Ministry or by the Central Bank, the publication of which is likely to lead to the creation of shortages or windfall profits or otherwise adversely affect the economy of Sri Lanka”.
Under the guise of a “nation building” program, the government is preparing a massive assault on the social position of the working class. In his victory speeches, Rajapakse declared that working people would have to sacrifice like the “war heroes” had. This subsection of the law effectively provides the means for suppressing any criticism of the government’s economic policies.
The revival of the Press Council comes amid an atmosphere of communal triumphalism whipped up by the government after the LTTE’s defeat, which was accompanied by intensified harassment and intimidation of anyone critical of the government or the military. In the first instance, Rajapakse is determined to block any investigation, no matter how limited, into his government’s criminal war.
Last month, the opposition United National Party called for a parliamentary select committee to examine police investigations into the abduction and killing of hundreds of people, including journalists and politicians, over the past three years by death squads associated with the military. Media Minister Anura Priyadarshana Yapa summarily dismissed the proposal. “When you say that 11 journalists were killed, we have doubts about this figure. In this list of journalists, there are names of those who worked for the LTTE’s Voice of Tigers. I don’t know whether we can identify them as journalists,” he said.
The abductions are continuing. Last Wednesday, Krishni Kandasamy (Ifham), a Tamil journalist, was seized by a gang, whom she suspected were policemen, on the outskirts of Colombo city. They arrived in a white van, the hallmark of the pro-government death squads. The thugs dropped her in Kandy, 116 kilometres away, without facing any challenge at the numerous security check-points in between.
Reporters, sales agents and other employees of Uthayan, a Tamil newspaper published in the northern town of Jaffna, received an ultimatum to stop working for the newspaper by June 30 or face the consequences. The newspaper has been repeatedly attacked during the past three years. Last week, copies of Uthayan and other Tamil newspapers were seized and burned in Jaffna town after refusing to publish an unsigned pro-government letter sent by unknown persons.
Earlier this month, Poddala Jayantha, the general secretary of the Sri Lanka Working Journalists Association, was abducted and brutally beaten by an unidentified gang on the outskirts of Colombo. Last year he was summoned by Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse and warned not to criticise the military.
None of the attacks on the media has been seriously investigated by police. The reestablishment of the Press Council provides the government with the means to further suppress any critical reporting. Sections of the media, which has for the most part backed the war and raised very limited objections to the government’s policies, have raised some concerns about the new law.
An editorial in last weekend’s Sunday Times declared: “The Government’s act is a stab in the back not only to the media but to the citizenry. The Press Council is meant to have a ‘chilling effect’ on media freedom; it is the proverbial ‘sword of Damocles’ hanging over the head of the media practitioner.” It continued: “These undemocratic moves are totally un-becoming of the president, and the re-introduction of the Press Council betrays a gloomy picture for the future of the post-war Sri Lanka, and the questions are being raised if there is ‘deep state’ syndrome in Sri Lanka.”
President Rajapakse, however, has increasingly acted with contempt for the constitution, the law and parliament, operating through a cabal of selected ministers, senior officials and military officers. The Sunday Times editorial reflect concerns in sections of the ruling elite that Rajapakse’s open attacks on democratic rights will only undermine the legitimacy of the state apparatus and provoke opposition from working people.
The revival of the Press Council poses an obvious question: if the war is over, why is the government imposing tighter controls on the media? The answer is equally clear: it is to gag the press as this shaky government proceeds to make savage attacks on the jobs, living standards and democratic rights of working people.
1 July 2009
The Sri Lankan government has revived legislation that vests the Sri Lanka Press Council, a statutory body, with broad powers to restrict the media and punish offending journalists and publishers with fines and imprisonment.
The law was first enacted in 1973 by the coalition government of Prime Minister Sirima Bandaranaike amid a deep economic crisis and widespread social discontent. The government had just suppressed an armed uprising of rural Sinhala youth and was facing growing industrial action by the working class, including an all-island bank workers strike. The Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), which broke from Trotskyism in 1964, played a key role in the ruling coalition.
The Press Council continued to function as a mechanism to intimidate the media under successive governments until 2002 when it was rendered inoperative through a bipartisan resolution in parliament. The United National Front government of Ranil Wickremesinghe had just signed a ceasefire agreement with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as the basis for internationally-sponsored negotiations for a permanent peace. The law, however, was never scrapped.
After plunging the country back to war in 2006, President Mahinda Rajapakse and his government pressured and intimidated the media, but did not revive the Press Council. His decision to do so now is a sign of political weakness, not strength. Having militarily defeated the LTTE, the government is now facing a worsening economic crisis as the result of huge defence spending, compounded by the global recession.
The President has the sole prerogative to appoint the revived Press Council, including its chairman. Its orders and censures cannot be challenged in any court of law. Moreover, the Council is set above public criticism. Clause 12 states that it is a punishable offence if anyone “without sufficient reason publishes any statement or does anything that brings the council or any member thereof into disrepute during the progress or after the conclusion of any inquiry conducted by such Council”.
The law prohibits the media from revealing any aspect of government discussions. “No person shall publish, or cause to be published, in any newspaper, any matter which purports to be the proceedings or any part thereof, of a meeting of the Cabinet of Ministers,” it states. Even the contents of documents exchanged between ministries are prohibited from publication.
The most important restrictions are in clause 16. Subsection 3 states: “No person shall publish or cause to be published in any newspaper any official secret within the meaning of the Official Secrets Act or any matter relating to military, naval, air-force or police establishments, equipment or installation which is likely to be prejudicial to the defence and security of the Republic of Sri Lanka”.
This sweeping prohibition on matters related to the military is particularly significant. Rajapakse has repeatedly accused opponents—the media, striking workers, protesting students and opposition politicians—of undermining “national security”. In the wake of the LTTE’s defeat, the government has retained draconian emergency powers and is boosting the military. It has been particularly sensitive to any criticism of the army’s killing of civilians in its final offensives and the internment of nearly 300,000 Tamils in detention camps.
Subsection 4 prohibits the publication of “any statement relating to monetary, fiscal, exchange control or import control measures alleged to be under consideration by the Government or by any Ministry or by the Central Bank, the publication of which is likely to lead to the creation of shortages or windfall profits or otherwise adversely affect the economy of Sri Lanka”.
Under the guise of a “nation building” program, the government is preparing a massive assault on the social position of the working class. In his victory speeches, Rajapakse declared that working people would have to sacrifice like the “war heroes” had. This subsection of the law effectively provides the means for suppressing any criticism of the government’s economic policies.
The revival of the Press Council comes amid an atmosphere of communal triumphalism whipped up by the government after the LTTE’s defeat, which was accompanied by intensified harassment and intimidation of anyone critical of the government or the military. In the first instance, Rajapakse is determined to block any investigation, no matter how limited, into his government’s criminal war.
Last month, the opposition United National Party called for a parliamentary select committee to examine police investigations into the abduction and killing of hundreds of people, including journalists and politicians, over the past three years by death squads associated with the military. Media Minister Anura Priyadarshana Yapa summarily dismissed the proposal. “When you say that 11 journalists were killed, we have doubts about this figure. In this list of journalists, there are names of those who worked for the LTTE’s Voice of Tigers. I don’t know whether we can identify them as journalists,” he said.
The abductions are continuing. Last Wednesday, Krishni Kandasamy (Ifham), a Tamil journalist, was seized by a gang, whom she suspected were policemen, on the outskirts of Colombo city. They arrived in a white van, the hallmark of the pro-government death squads. The thugs dropped her in Kandy, 116 kilometres away, without facing any challenge at the numerous security check-points in between.
Reporters, sales agents and other employees of Uthayan, a Tamil newspaper published in the northern town of Jaffna, received an ultimatum to stop working for the newspaper by June 30 or face the consequences. The newspaper has been repeatedly attacked during the past three years. Last week, copies of Uthayan and other Tamil newspapers were seized and burned in Jaffna town after refusing to publish an unsigned pro-government letter sent by unknown persons.
Earlier this month, Poddala Jayantha, the general secretary of the Sri Lanka Working Journalists Association, was abducted and brutally beaten by an unidentified gang on the outskirts of Colombo. Last year he was summoned by Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse and warned not to criticise the military.
None of the attacks on the media has been seriously investigated by police. The reestablishment of the Press Council provides the government with the means to further suppress any critical reporting. Sections of the media, which has for the most part backed the war and raised very limited objections to the government’s policies, have raised some concerns about the new law.
An editorial in last weekend’s Sunday Times declared: “The Government’s act is a stab in the back not only to the media but to the citizenry. The Press Council is meant to have a ‘chilling effect’ on media freedom; it is the proverbial ‘sword of Damocles’ hanging over the head of the media practitioner.” It continued: “These undemocratic moves are totally un-becoming of the president, and the re-introduction of the Press Council betrays a gloomy picture for the future of the post-war Sri Lanka, and the questions are being raised if there is ‘deep state’ syndrome in Sri Lanka.”
President Rajapakse, however, has increasingly acted with contempt for the constitution, the law and parliament, operating through a cabal of selected ministers, senior officials and military officers. The Sunday Times editorial reflect concerns in sections of the ruling elite that Rajapakse’s open attacks on democratic rights will only undermine the legitimacy of the state apparatus and provoke opposition from working people.
The revival of the Press Council poses an obvious question: if the war is over, why is the government imposing tighter controls on the media? The answer is equally clear: it is to gag the press as this shaky government proceeds to make savage attacks on the jobs, living standards and democratic rights of working people.
Sri Lanka Urged to Probe the Murder of Tamil MPs
By Lisa Schlein
Geneva
01 July 2009
The Inter-Parliamentary Union says the Sri Lankan government no longer has any reason for not investigating the murders of the Parliamentarians now that its long-running civil war with the Tamil Tiger rebels is over.
Chair of the IPU's Human Rights Committee, Canadian Senator, Sharon Carstairs, says the government has always maintained it was unable to investigate the murders because they occurred in rebel-held territory. She says that excuse no longer exists.
She tells VOA, Tamil Parliamentarians are subject to arbitrary arrest, harassment and intimidation. She says her Committee is concerned about the situation of 12 Tamil Parliamentarians. She says they essentially have been stripped of their rights of freedom of movement and of their ability to perform their legislative duties.
She says the Tamil Parliamentarians are reluctant to leave the capital, Colombo, because their security is not guaranteed.
"So, there is great fear among the Tamil Parliamentarians," Carstairs said. "So, what we hope from Sri Lanka at this point is to get a new signal from them that Tamil Parliamentarians will have freedom of movement, they will have adequate security, they will be full participants of the government of Sri Lanka because they are duly elected Parliamentarians."
The IPU Committee is also very concerned about the cases of two Parliamentarians in Iraq. Hareth Al-Obaidi, who was the Vice-Chair of Iraq's Human Rights Committee, was murdered on June 12. His colleague, Mohammed Al-Dainy, who also was a member of the Committee, disappeared on February 5th.
Carstairs says Al-Dainy eventually surfaced in another country. But, she says 19 of his family members and staff were arrested and some were tortured.
"Now both these men, and this is what I think is important, had both called for the creation of a Commission of Inquiry in cases of torture, rape and death in Iraqi prisons," Carstairs said. "And, so, they essentially were working on the same file together… The concerns were that these were not American-run prisons that these two men were concerned about. They were Iraqi-run prisons."
The IPU Committee is calling for the reinstatement of a female MP in Afghanistan. She was suspended from her duties two years ago for publicly criticizing some warlords on television. Carstairs says the male-dominated Parliament described her remarks as un-Islamic.
"If you are a Parliamentarian and a you are a woman in Afghanistan, it is better to be seen and not heard," Carstairs said. In a rare bit of good news, the IPU welcomes Israel's decision to release three Palestinian Parliamentarians who were duly elected in Gaza in 2006. It calls on the Israeli government to also release 40 other Palestinian Members of Parliament who the IPU charges were kidnapped and imprisoned in Israel after the election.
Geneva
01 July 2009
Sharon Carstairs
The Inter-Parliamentary Union is calling on the government of Sri Lanka to mount a thorough investigation of the murders of three Members of Parliament, two of them Tamils. The IPU's Human Rights Committee, which has wrapped up its latest session, has examined cases of abuse of some 300 MPs in 29 countries. The Inter-Parliamentary Union says the Sri Lankan government no longer has any reason for not investigating the murders of the Parliamentarians now that its long-running civil war with the Tamil Tiger rebels is over.
Chair of the IPU's Human Rights Committee, Canadian Senator, Sharon Carstairs, says the government has always maintained it was unable to investigate the murders because they occurred in rebel-held territory. She says that excuse no longer exists.
She tells VOA, Tamil Parliamentarians are subject to arbitrary arrest, harassment and intimidation. She says her Committee is concerned about the situation of 12 Tamil Parliamentarians. She says they essentially have been stripped of their rights of freedom of movement and of their ability to perform their legislative duties.
She says the Tamil Parliamentarians are reluctant to leave the capital, Colombo, because their security is not guaranteed.
"So, there is great fear among the Tamil Parliamentarians," Carstairs said. "So, what we hope from Sri Lanka at this point is to get a new signal from them that Tamil Parliamentarians will have freedom of movement, they will have adequate security, they will be full participants of the government of Sri Lanka because they are duly elected Parliamentarians."
The IPU Committee is also very concerned about the cases of two Parliamentarians in Iraq. Hareth Al-Obaidi, who was the Vice-Chair of Iraq's Human Rights Committee, was murdered on June 12. His colleague, Mohammed Al-Dainy, who also was a member of the Committee, disappeared on February 5th.
Carstairs says Al-Dainy eventually surfaced in another country. But, she says 19 of his family members and staff were arrested and some were tortured.
"Now both these men, and this is what I think is important, had both called for the creation of a Commission of Inquiry in cases of torture, rape and death in Iraqi prisons," Carstairs said. "And, so, they essentially were working on the same file together… The concerns were that these were not American-run prisons that these two men were concerned about. They were Iraqi-run prisons."
The IPU Committee is calling for the reinstatement of a female MP in Afghanistan. She was suspended from her duties two years ago for publicly criticizing some warlords on television. Carstairs says the male-dominated Parliament described her remarks as un-Islamic.
"If you are a Parliamentarian and a you are a woman in Afghanistan, it is better to be seen and not heard," Carstairs said. In a rare bit of good news, the IPU welcomes Israel's decision to release three Palestinian Parliamentarians who were duly elected in Gaza in 2006. It calls on the Israeli government to also release 40 other Palestinian Members of Parliament who the IPU charges were kidnapped and imprisoned in Israel after the election.
Sri Lanka’s Judiciary: Politicised Courts, Compromised Rights
Source: Crisis Group
Reuters and AlertNet are not responsible for the content of this article or for any external internet sites. The views expressed are the author's alone.
Colombo/Brussels, 30 June 2009: The Sri Lankan government must reform the country’s judicial system urgently if the military defeat of the Tamil Tigers is to lead to a lasting peace.
Sri Lanka’s Judiciary: Politicised Courts, Compromised Rights,* the latest policy report from the International Crisis Group, warns that the Sri Lankan judiciary is not working in a fair and impartial way that secures justice and human rights for everyone regardless of ethnicity. This risks undermining the government’s recent military victory over the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam). A durable national reconciliation process is only possible if human and constitutional rights are fully restored.
“The judiciary has not acted as a check on presidential and legislative power but has instead contributed to the political alienation of Tamils”, says Robert Templer, Crisis Group’s Asia Program Director. “Under the former chief justice, the Supreme Court’s rulings strengthened political hardliners among Sinhala nationalist parties”.
Rather than assuaging conflict, the courts have corroded the rule of law and worsened ethnic tensions. They are neither constraining militarisation of Sri Lankan society nor protecting minority rights. Instead, a politicised bench has entrenched favoured allies, punished foes and blocked compromises with the Tamil minority. The judiciary’s intermittent interventions on important political questions have limited settlement options for the ethnic conflict.
Today, neither the lower nor the higher courts in Sri Lanka provide any guarantee of personal security or redress against arbitrary state violence. Although torture in police custody is endemic, courts are unwilling to provide adequate remedies for illegal or abusive detention. Police, judges and government officials have acted in ways that further the goals of powerful political actors, undermine the rule of law and deepen the current political and humanitarian crisis. The possibility of transitional justice, which is necessary for society to break the cycle of violence, is still missing.
The recent appointment of a new chief justice is an opportunity for reforms to begin. A first step toward restoring judicial independence would be a return to an orderly appointment and transfer of judges. This needs to be done both in the lower and appellate judiciary. There should also be fundamental reform of Sri Lanka’s extensive and often abused emergency laws, which are used disproportionately against Tamils. Provisions in the emergency laws concerning arrest, detention and derogation from routine criminal procedures need to be removed, as well as those that criminalise free speech and the exercise of associational rights.
“Fixing institutions and reforming laws will only have a limited effect until political actors, and especially the presidency, feel the cost of infringing on judicial independence”, warns Donald Steinberg, Crisis Group Deputy President for Policy. “Without a concerted effort by the bench and bar, the political costs of interfering with the judiciary will remain minimal”.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/ICG/6170ca02fa9d99027397073d759508a0.htm
Reuters and AlertNet are not responsible for the content of this article or for any external internet sites. The views expressed are the author's alone.
Colombo/Brussels, 30 June 2009: The Sri Lankan government must reform the country’s judicial system urgently if the military defeat of the Tamil Tigers is to lead to a lasting peace.
Sri Lanka’s Judiciary: Politicised Courts, Compromised Rights,* the latest policy report from the International Crisis Group, warns that the Sri Lankan judiciary is not working in a fair and impartial way that secures justice and human rights for everyone regardless of ethnicity. This risks undermining the government’s recent military victory over the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam). A durable national reconciliation process is only possible if human and constitutional rights are fully restored.
“The judiciary has not acted as a check on presidential and legislative power but has instead contributed to the political alienation of Tamils”, says Robert Templer, Crisis Group’s Asia Program Director. “Under the former chief justice, the Supreme Court’s rulings strengthened political hardliners among Sinhala nationalist parties”.
Rather than assuaging conflict, the courts have corroded the rule of law and worsened ethnic tensions. They are neither constraining militarisation of Sri Lankan society nor protecting minority rights. Instead, a politicised bench has entrenched favoured allies, punished foes and blocked compromises with the Tamil minority. The judiciary’s intermittent interventions on important political questions have limited settlement options for the ethnic conflict.
Today, neither the lower nor the higher courts in Sri Lanka provide any guarantee of personal security or redress against arbitrary state violence. Although torture in police custody is endemic, courts are unwilling to provide adequate remedies for illegal or abusive detention. Police, judges and government officials have acted in ways that further the goals of powerful political actors, undermine the rule of law and deepen the current political and humanitarian crisis. The possibility of transitional justice, which is necessary for society to break the cycle of violence, is still missing.
The recent appointment of a new chief justice is an opportunity for reforms to begin. A first step toward restoring judicial independence would be a return to an orderly appointment and transfer of judges. This needs to be done both in the lower and appellate judiciary. There should also be fundamental reform of Sri Lanka’s extensive and often abused emergency laws, which are used disproportionately against Tamils. Provisions in the emergency laws concerning arrest, detention and derogation from routine criminal procedures need to be removed, as well as those that criminalise free speech and the exercise of associational rights.
“Fixing institutions and reforming laws will only have a limited effect until political actors, and especially the presidency, feel the cost of infringing on judicial independence”, warns Donald Steinberg, Crisis Group Deputy President for Policy. “Without a concerted effort by the bench and bar, the political costs of interfering with the judiciary will remain minimal”.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/ICG/6170ca02fa9d99027397073d759508a0.htm
Quiet or simply silent diplomacy?
Ban Ki-Moon has been secretary general of the United Nations for exactly two and a half years on Wednesday, July 1.Ban took over as the world's leading diplomat on January 1, 2007 from Kofi Annan.
But whereas Annan was seen as ready to speak his mind, Ban is regarded as a much quieter bureaucrat, working behind the scenes to get things done.
It's thought Ban, a former foreign minister of his native South Korea, would like to serve for a second term at UNHQ in New York.But many wonder if his brand of low key diplomacy is right for today's troubled and divided world.
He is only the eighth man ever to be elected UN secretary general, attending his inauguration at the end of 2006.
Ban Ki-Moon replaced the once popular African born two-term secretary general Kofi Annan, whose reputation towards the end had been tarnished by the Iraq Oil For Food scandal.
It was Asia's turn for the job and Ban was selected with the full backing of Security Council heavyweights America and China.
From the outset he made it clear his approach to the job would be low-key.
'Restore trust in UN'
"My first priority will be to restore trust," he said at his inauguration.
Two and a half years on and the secretary general is trying to build-up confidence in his first 900 plus days in office... aware there are those who think he's not quite up to the job.
On June 11, he said: "It is just impossible. I need more political support. I need more resources by the member states. Then judge my support on the basis of that."
As Ban positions himself for a second run at high office his professor at Harvard University, Joseph Nye, says the secretary general's chief selling point is precisely that below the radar approach.
He told me: "The problem with that job is that you have soft power of attracting people. You don't have much hard power, so you are more secretary than general."
But many on the UN staff are not convinced Ban's the man for the top job in these troubled times.
They point to the length of time it took him to get aid into Myanmar after Cyclone Nargis.
They are critical of his decision to visit Myanmar this week when Aung San Su Kyi is on trial.
They express amazement he praised the Israeli government on the day he published only a summary of the UN's report into the Gaza War.
And they highlight the UN's lack of clarity regarding civilian deaths at the end of the Sri Lanka's war with the Tamil Tigers.
There is also a feeling that Ban sides too often with the major powers.
Nye disagrees: "It's one thing to say you're the hero of the small countries, but if you can't get the big powers to behave, to go along with things, then you're not going to be very effective."
'Silent diplomacy'
But critics argue Ban fundamentally misunderstands the role of the secretary general in the new century and has failed to grow into the job.
Thomas Weiss, who teaches UN studies at the City University of New York, says: "There's a difference between quiet diplomacy and non-existent diplomacy, or silent diplomacy, which is what we have at present."
While Ban's applauded for his work talking-up the risks of climate change even his supporters recognise he scores low in other vital areas of leadership.
Joseph Nye from Harvard University suggests: "He might ask himself whether he's got the balance quite right on speaking up verses mediating.
"I think he might ask himself if he might do a little bit more on managing the institution."
There is a sense that Ban lacks the ability to defend the UN and stand up for its staff in the way this man Kofi Annan used to do.
But unless he gets a better offer from his native South Korea it is expected Ban will get his second chance on the 38th floor here at UNHQ - if only because he doesn't antagonise the powerful permanent five Security Council members.
Power sharing can benefit all Sri Lankans
By Jehan Perera
Column: Pursuit of Peace
Colombo, Sri Lanka — Sri Lanka is a plural society in which there are diverse communities. Its people see themselves as Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, Burghers, Malays, Buddhists, Christians, and Hindus, low country and Kandyan, and of various class and caste groups. Sociologists have documented the pluralism in Sri Lankan society from the earliest times, when writings were inscribed in stone carvings. It was acknowledged during the British colonial period when more than a dozen communities were described as inhabiting Colombo. However, in today's context, the main line of division is ethnic, with political parties being set up to advance ethnic agendas.
The diversity in Sri Lanka varies from province to province and locality to locality. The people who live in areas that have been traditionally multi-ethnic have developed coping mechanisms that are in advance of those to which ethnic diversity is less common. An area of old ethnic diversity and plural settlement is Puttalam in the North West Province, where I spent last weekend as a participant in a seminar on pluralism.
Puttalam has also come to bear some of the impact of the 30-year ethnic war that ended in the final defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. It is now home to tens of thousands of Muslim people who were expelled from the North by the LTTE in 1990. There are tensions between the traditional inhabitants and the newer settlers, who intended to be temporary settlers but have now resided in Puttalam for close to two decades.
One of the observations made at the seminar was that the traditional inhabitants of the Puttalam district have purposefully made accommodations to enable multi-ethnic coexistence. The main mosque in Puttalam town was constructed over seven decades ago, in a much more peaceful and optimistic time. Therefore a deliberate decision was taken to make the construction of the mosque an interreligious and inter-ethnic effort.
The architect who designed the mosque was of Sinhalese ethnicity, while the engineer who did the wiring was Tamil. Although there have been instances of inter-ethnic tensions, these have so far not got out of hand. In 1976 there were Muslim-Sinhalese clashes in Puttalam town, but these were an exception.
Throughout the seminar in Puttalam, the spirit of coexistence was manifested in the interaction and contribution of the participants. These included central government officials now working in the districts, local government officials from the Puttalam area, leaders of community-based organizations, Buddhist monks and other religious clergy.
This micro-level meeting of less than 40 persons, with its nonviolent and rational discourse, belied the ferocity of the national debate on issues of ethnicity and power sharing. The religious clergy represented their communities, and their willingness to interact and demonstrate empathy for pluralism reflected the ethos of their religions and their communities.
Unfortunately, they too are often bracketed as being in the nationalist category due to the debate that is currently monopolized by those espousing nationalist views on the political stage and national media.
At present, the national debate on the future direction of society in Sri Lanka is being dictated by the nationalist groups. They are dominant, but are not necessarily a majority in either the government or in the electorate at large.
The co-opting of Tamil and Muslim political parties into the ruling alliance and the manner in which they have been compelled to contest together in the forthcoming northern elections is an indication of the present governmental desire and design for unity within a single alliance. The vision appears to be one of ethnic minority participation within a centralized system of power, rather than of independent decision-making powers within a devolved system of power.
President Mahinda Rajapaksa has regularly stated that a political solution is necessary to resolve the ethnic conflict. At the same time however, there are other members of the government who are adamant that a political solution has become irrelevant in the aftermath of the defeat of the LTTE.
With the restoration of central rule over the entire country, this section of the polity sees no need for a political solution. It has even argued that to call for a political solution is to denigrate the sacrifices made by the Sri Lankan military to defeat the LTTE at such a high cost. The failure of previous attempts at a political solution have convinced them that the only way to deal with the problem is a military solution and continued military dominance so that another insurrection does not happen.
In the context of the LTTE's total military defeat there is obviously no further need to negotiate a political solution with the group. However, the roots of the ethnic conflict need to be dealt with in a democratic and peaceful manner, through negotiations with them. A stable and negotiated solution is necessarily one that ensures all sides that they have been fairly treated and that they are joint participants in the outcome. The purpose of devolution of power is to ensure that one section of the population does not feel it is being unfairly dominated by another section of the population or their political leaders.
In view of the dominant nationalist sentiment that is being articulated today, the government will face a problem with regard to enhancing the devolution of power to satisfy ethnic minority sentiment that could pave the way to a political solution. Some of the proposals being put forward are to increase the quantum of powers available under the present Provincial Council system, and to establish a Second Chamber of Parliament with representation from the provinces and with veto power over parliamentary legislation.
The current nationalist dominance of the Sri Lankan polity, coupled with the nearness of decisive national elections, not least the general elections, would reduce the likelihood of any substantial movement forward for the ethnic minorities.
On the other hand, if people see the devolution of power as empowering their own provincial council rather than resolving the ethnic conflict, it is unlikely that they will oppose such a strengthening. At the seminar in Puttalam, the participants complained about outsiders running their affairs, rather than people of their own area. They called for additional powers and financial resources to be made available to the people of Puttalam and their elected officials.
In other words, people who might be swayed by nationalist fears of the devolution of power as a solution to the ethnic conflict might be supportive of devolution of power to strengthen their own provincial council. This may be a way forward for the government in an election period.
--
(Dr. Jehan Perera is executive director of the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka, an independent advocacy organization. He studied economics at Harvard College and holds a doctorate in law from Harvard Law School. ©Copyright Jehan Perera.)
http://www.upiasia.com/Politics/2009/07/01/power_sharing_can_benefit_all_sri_lankans/8198/
Column: Pursuit of Peace
Colombo, Sri Lanka — Sri Lanka is a plural society in which there are diverse communities. Its people see themselves as Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, Burghers, Malays, Buddhists, Christians, and Hindus, low country and Kandyan, and of various class and caste groups. Sociologists have documented the pluralism in Sri Lankan society from the earliest times, when writings were inscribed in stone carvings. It was acknowledged during the British colonial period when more than a dozen communities were described as inhabiting Colombo. However, in today's context, the main line of division is ethnic, with political parties being set up to advance ethnic agendas.
The diversity in Sri Lanka varies from province to province and locality to locality. The people who live in areas that have been traditionally multi-ethnic have developed coping mechanisms that are in advance of those to which ethnic diversity is less common. An area of old ethnic diversity and plural settlement is Puttalam in the North West Province, where I spent last weekend as a participant in a seminar on pluralism.
Puttalam has also come to bear some of the impact of the 30-year ethnic war that ended in the final defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. It is now home to tens of thousands of Muslim people who were expelled from the North by the LTTE in 1990. There are tensions between the traditional inhabitants and the newer settlers, who intended to be temporary settlers but have now resided in Puttalam for close to two decades.
One of the observations made at the seminar was that the traditional inhabitants of the Puttalam district have purposefully made accommodations to enable multi-ethnic coexistence. The main mosque in Puttalam town was constructed over seven decades ago, in a much more peaceful and optimistic time. Therefore a deliberate decision was taken to make the construction of the mosque an interreligious and inter-ethnic effort.
The architect who designed the mosque was of Sinhalese ethnicity, while the engineer who did the wiring was Tamil. Although there have been instances of inter-ethnic tensions, these have so far not got out of hand. In 1976 there were Muslim-Sinhalese clashes in Puttalam town, but these were an exception.
Throughout the seminar in Puttalam, the spirit of coexistence was manifested in the interaction and contribution of the participants. These included central government officials now working in the districts, local government officials from the Puttalam area, leaders of community-based organizations, Buddhist monks and other religious clergy.
This micro-level meeting of less than 40 persons, with its nonviolent and rational discourse, belied the ferocity of the national debate on issues of ethnicity and power sharing. The religious clergy represented their communities, and their willingness to interact and demonstrate empathy for pluralism reflected the ethos of their religions and their communities.
Unfortunately, they too are often bracketed as being in the nationalist category due to the debate that is currently monopolized by those espousing nationalist views on the political stage and national media.
At present, the national debate on the future direction of society in Sri Lanka is being dictated by the nationalist groups. They are dominant, but are not necessarily a majority in either the government or in the electorate at large.
The co-opting of Tamil and Muslim political parties into the ruling alliance and the manner in which they have been compelled to contest together in the forthcoming northern elections is an indication of the present governmental desire and design for unity within a single alliance. The vision appears to be one of ethnic minority participation within a centralized system of power, rather than of independent decision-making powers within a devolved system of power.
President Mahinda Rajapaksa has regularly stated that a political solution is necessary to resolve the ethnic conflict. At the same time however, there are other members of the government who are adamant that a political solution has become irrelevant in the aftermath of the defeat of the LTTE.
With the restoration of central rule over the entire country, this section of the polity sees no need for a political solution. It has even argued that to call for a political solution is to denigrate the sacrifices made by the Sri Lankan military to defeat the LTTE at such a high cost. The failure of previous attempts at a political solution have convinced them that the only way to deal with the problem is a military solution and continued military dominance so that another insurrection does not happen.
In the context of the LTTE's total military defeat there is obviously no further need to negotiate a political solution with the group. However, the roots of the ethnic conflict need to be dealt with in a democratic and peaceful manner, through negotiations with them. A stable and negotiated solution is necessarily one that ensures all sides that they have been fairly treated and that they are joint participants in the outcome. The purpose of devolution of power is to ensure that one section of the population does not feel it is being unfairly dominated by another section of the population or their political leaders.
In view of the dominant nationalist sentiment that is being articulated today, the government will face a problem with regard to enhancing the devolution of power to satisfy ethnic minority sentiment that could pave the way to a political solution. Some of the proposals being put forward are to increase the quantum of powers available under the present Provincial Council system, and to establish a Second Chamber of Parliament with representation from the provinces and with veto power over parliamentary legislation.
The current nationalist dominance of the Sri Lankan polity, coupled with the nearness of decisive national elections, not least the general elections, would reduce the likelihood of any substantial movement forward for the ethnic minorities.
On the other hand, if people see the devolution of power as empowering their own provincial council rather than resolving the ethnic conflict, it is unlikely that they will oppose such a strengthening. At the seminar in Puttalam, the participants complained about outsiders running their affairs, rather than people of their own area. They called for additional powers and financial resources to be made available to the people of Puttalam and their elected officials.
In other words, people who might be swayed by nationalist fears of the devolution of power as a solution to the ethnic conflict might be supportive of devolution of power to strengthen their own provincial council. This may be a way forward for the government in an election period.
--
(Dr. Jehan Perera is executive director of the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka, an independent advocacy organization. He studied economics at Harvard College and holds a doctorate in law from Harvard Law School. ©Copyright Jehan Perera.)
http://www.upiasia.com/Politics/2009/07/01/power_sharing_can_benefit_all_sri_lankans/8198/
Elie Wiesel: Sri Lanka's victimization of Tamil people must stop
Holocaust surviver, Jewish icon, and Nobel laureate, Professor Elie Wiesel, in a message posted on his website said: "Wherever minorities are being persecuted we must raise our voices to protest. According to reliable sources, the Tamil people are being disenfranchised and victimized by the Sri Lanka authorities. This injustice must stop. The Tamil people must be allowed to live in peace and flourish in their homeland."
In 1986, Prof. Wiesel won the Nobel Prize for Peace, and soon after, Marion and Elie Wiesel established The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.
For his literary and human rights activities, Prof. Wiesel has received numerous awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal and the Medal of Liberty Award, and the rank of Grand-Croix in the French Legion of Honor.
Dr Elyn Shander, a Connecticut physician and a member of US-activist group, Tamils Against Genocide, has been working with the Elie Wiesel Foundation, updating the organization on the ground situation in the NorthEast. The Elie Wiesel Foundation has been receiving regular updates of the condition of the 300,000 Tamil civilians in the internment camps., Dr Shander said.
"We are very grateful that he [Prof. Wiesel] has responded to our request to support the Tamil people. Now that it is official on his website, we are certain that other institutions that are involved in holocaust and war-crime research will take up Sri Lanka case," Dr Shander told TamilNet.
Shander is also the vice president of a new organization USTPAC (United States Tamil Political Action Committee), an independent democratic organization dedicated to lawful means to restore Tamil Peoples right to self-determination and democratic self rule in their traditional homeland.
In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed Elie Wiesel as Chairman of the President's Commission on the Holocaust. In 1980, he became the Founding Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. He is also the Founding President of the Paris-based Universal Academy of Cultures and the Chairman of The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, an organization he and his wife created to fight indifference, intolerance and injustice. Elie Wiesel has received more than 100 honorary degrees from institutions of higher learning.
External Links:
US: The Elie Wiesel foundation for humanity
In 1986, Prof. Wiesel won the Nobel Prize for Peace, and soon after, Marion and Elie Wiesel established The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.
For his literary and human rights activities, Prof. Wiesel has received numerous awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal and the Medal of Liberty Award, and the rank of Grand-Croix in the French Legion of Honor.
Dr Elyn Shander, a Connecticut physician and a member of US-activist group, Tamils Against Genocide, has been working with the Elie Wiesel Foundation, updating the organization on the ground situation in the NorthEast. The Elie Wiesel Foundation has been receiving regular updates of the condition of the 300,000 Tamil civilians in the internment camps., Dr Shander said.
"We are very grateful that he [Prof. Wiesel] has responded to our request to support the Tamil people. Now that it is official on his website, we are certain that other institutions that are involved in holocaust and war-crime research will take up Sri Lanka case," Dr Shander told TamilNet.
Shander is also the vice president of a new organization USTPAC (United States Tamil Political Action Committee), an independent democratic organization dedicated to lawful means to restore Tamil Peoples right to self-determination and democratic self rule in their traditional homeland.
In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed Elie Wiesel as Chairman of the President's Commission on the Holocaust. In 1980, he became the Founding Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. He is also the Founding President of the Paris-based Universal Academy of Cultures and the Chairman of The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, an organization he and his wife created to fight indifference, intolerance and injustice. Elie Wiesel has received more than 100 honorary degrees from institutions of higher learning.
External Links:
US: The Elie Wiesel foundation for humanity
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Sri Lanka - camps, media…genocide?
Written by Martin Shaw
What kind of violence has the Sri Lankan state been committing against its Tamil civilian population as the island‘s civil war ended; on what scale and with what intentions? Martin Shaw explores the difficult terrain where war, atrocity and genocide meet. he civil war in Sri Lanka is receding from the international headlines, as crises in Iran and celebrity deaths occupy the media's limited space and attention-span. A very large number of its Tamil victims are still, more than six weeks after the fighting ended, confined in government forces in a complex of forty camps in the north east of the country. An estimated 280,000 civilians - originally displaced from their homes by the fighting between the Sri Lankan military and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (TamilTigers / LTTE), and in some cases fleeing from the brutal regime in the LTTE's former "liberated" zone - are being held, generally against their will. President Mahinda Rajapaksa, in his "victory speech", told Sri Lanka's parliament that "our heroic forces have sacrificed their lives to protect Tamil civilians", and he took "personal responsibility" for protecting Tamils. Yet his government is now scandalously confining this huge population - who have already suffered not only from the LTTE but from Sri Lankan bombardments which caused probably tens of thousands of deaths and injuries - in squalid conditions. The government has officially backtracked, under international pressure, on plans to hold the displaced, while screening them for potential "terrorists", for up to three years; it now says that 80% will be resettled by the end of 2009.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) comments: "The government's history of restricting the rights of displaced persons through rigid pass systems and strict restrictions on leaving the camps heightens concerns that they will be confined in camps much longer, possibly for years."
In the shadows
The eruption in Iran has in a twisted way done the Sri Lankan government a service. In any case, Colombo has been ruthless in restricting international journalists and rights organisations: in May 2009 even the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was barred from Menik Farm, the largest camp, and Channel 4's Nick Paton Walsh was deported. Sinhala nationalism remains oppressively dominant within the majority population, and critics of the government face an atmosphere of intimidation and even terror: Sri Lankan journalists have frequently been murdered, assaulted and detained.
Although human-rights organisations and western governments have continued to protest at the situation, the Sri Lankan government has found friends in the United Nations's new Human Rights Council; it was able to pass a resolution there on 27 May 2009 praising its own commitment to human rights (endorsed by such notable bastions of freedom as China, Cuba, Russia, Pakistan and Egypt). The vigorous campaigns by members of the Tamil diasporas have ensured that the situation has not been entirely forgotten, but the interned Tamilsdon't have the mobile-phone access that (in the early post-election stages at least) so embarrassed the Iranian regime. There are some pictures of the camps on the internet, but no iconic images of Tamil suffering have entered the commercial, established media in the manner of Iran's Neda Sultan - or indeed of Fikret Alic, the emaciated prisoner pictured behind barbed-wire in the Trnopolje camp in Bosnia in summer 1992.
Adire predicament
It is often said that pictures tell their own story. However what is important is the media narrative and the momentum behind the issue: in both the Iranian and Bosnian cases the crises were much more strongly established in the dominant media (and the exposure of the experiences of Neda Sultan and Fikret Alic) fed this. In the case of Sri Lanka, sadly, the level and intensity of coverage - despite the impressive Tamil campaigns - has not matched these.
Moreover, what was important in Bosnia was that Trnopolje was described as a "concentration"camp - so the image facilitated the connection between the atrocious treatment of Bosnian Muslim prisoners and the murderous history of concentration camps in Europe under Nazism. The Bosnian-Serbian government that was responsible for Trnopolje naturally disputed this appellation, describing it merely as a holding centre for "refugees"; today the lowest-common-denominator descriptor seems to be a "detention" camp.
The Sri Lankan government also prefers its camps to be seen as "refugee" camps. However once people are detained, camps are clearly more than that; and where there is a sustained policy of concentrating detainees then the term "concentration camp" applies. In war, these camps - invented at the beginning of the 20th century to describe the enclosures in which the Spanish detained Cubans and the British detained Boerfarmers and their families during the South African wars - are usually designed to corral a civilian population seen as potentially sympathetic to a guerrilla enemy (as Tamils evidently are still seen despite the LTTE's defeat).
Totalitarian regimes, including Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, have also used camps to concentrate other civilian groups -actual and potential political opponents, trade unionists, and ethnic "enemies" such as Jews. The complication in using the "concentration camp" category is that such regimes went on to develop their camps into something more - in the Soviet case, labour camps, in the Nazi case, extermination camps. Clearly, not all concentration camps are "death" camps in the Nazi sense; but all concentration camps tend to produce death, as well as widespread physical and mental harm. Since their premise is enmity towards the interned civilians, the history of concentration-camps has been marked, from the Boerwar onwards, by callous disregard for their welfare, and often worse.
As Human Rights Watch remarked of the Sri Lankan situation on 11 June 2009:
"Virtually all camps are overcrowded, some holding twice the number recommended by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Food distribution is chaotic, there are shortages of water, and sanitation facilities are inadequate. Camp residents do not have access to proper medical services and communicable diseases have broken out in the camps."
What is more, "the military camp administration has imposed numerous restrictions on humanitarian organizations working in the camps, such as limiting the number of vehicles and staff members that can enter the camps, which has delayed the provision of much-needed aid. The military does not allow organizations into the camps to conduct protection activities, and a ban on talking to the camp residents leaves them further isolated.'"
If reports of violence and disappearances are added to this, the situation of the interned Tamils appears dire.
A "rolling" genocide?The western fixation with the Nazi holocaust means that there is an obvious political temptation to link all anti-civilian violence with the Nazi model.The pro-Tamil United States-based academic Francis Boyle,in his posts, sees a sixty-year "rolling" genocide in which Sinhalese governments of Ceylon (the country's name at independence in 1948) and Sri Lanka have sought "to annihilate the Tamils and to steal their lands and natural resources. This is what Hitler and the Nazis called lebensraum - "living space" for the Sinhala at the expense of the Tamils." In this perspective, the camp system is all too clearly the latest stage of genocide - although other Tamil advocates date genocide back to the anti-Tamil pogroms in 1983 in response to which the LTTE campaign began.
The idea of "rolling" genocide, first developed (I think) by Madeleine Albright to distinguish the Sudanese campaign in Darfur from the "volcanic" genocide in Rwanda, suggests discontinuity in a history of genocide - albeit, in the Darfur case, within two or three years rather than six decades. However in many cases, there may be genocidal "moments" (as the genocide historian, Dirk Moses, has suggested of colonialism) in stories of oppression - decades or even centuries long - which do not, taken as a whole, constitute processes of genocide (see A Dirk Moses ed., Empire,Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History [Berghahn,2008]).
There may be sporadic genocidal massacres, rapes and expulsions, or even sustained campaigns, at particular points in these histories. Something like this seems to be true in the Sri Lankan case: no one doubts the long history of Sinhalese nationalist oppression against the Tamil community since independence, which includes moments like 1983 which can be plausibly seen as genocidal outbursts. But the history as a whole is not simply one of genocide.
Indeed the dedication of the LTTE to armed struggle against the Sri Lankan state helped turn a history of oppression and resistance into one of brutal insurgency and counterinsurgency (see The trouble with guns: Sri Lanka, South Africa, Ireland", 10 June 2009). We know however that counterinsurgency is one of the most common contexts of genocidal violence. It remains to be seen - since most of the survivors are locked away from the world's media and the Sri Lankan government is blocking all attempts at independent investigation of the recent violence - how far the Sri Lankan army went in the direction of deliberate atrocity as opposed to brutal disregard for civilians. Here, indiscriminate allegations of a long-running Sri Lankan genocide paradoxically blunt the real questions: what kind of violence did the Sri Lankan state commit against its Tamil civilian population, on what scale and with what intentions?
The continuing concentration of over 250,000 people in the camps both blocks the search for answers to these questions, and itself constitutes a most serious crime. If the doors are not opened quickly, this will raise questions of whether the government seriously intends a restoration of Tamil society in the conquered zone. This would indeed pose a question of genocide, in the sense of the deliberate destruction of a population group in its home territory. This article is published by Martin Shaw, and openDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons licence.
http://www.australia.to/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=11817:sri-lanka-camps-mediagenocide-&catid=132:special-reports&Itemid=273
What kind of violence has the Sri Lankan state been committing against its Tamil civilian population as the island‘s civil war ended; on what scale and with what intentions? Martin Shaw explores the difficult terrain where war, atrocity and genocide meet. he civil war in Sri Lanka is receding from the international headlines, as crises in Iran and celebrity deaths occupy the media's limited space and attention-span. A very large number of its Tamil victims are still, more than six weeks after the fighting ended, confined in government forces in a complex of forty camps in the north east of the country. An estimated 280,000 civilians - originally displaced from their homes by the fighting between the Sri Lankan military and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (TamilTigers / LTTE), and in some cases fleeing from the brutal regime in the LTTE's former "liberated" zone - are being held, generally against their will. President Mahinda Rajapaksa, in his "victory speech", told Sri Lanka's parliament that "our heroic forces have sacrificed their lives to protect Tamil civilians", and he took "personal responsibility" for protecting Tamils. Yet his government is now scandalously confining this huge population - who have already suffered not only from the LTTE but from Sri Lankan bombardments which caused probably tens of thousands of deaths and injuries - in squalid conditions. The government has officially backtracked, under international pressure, on plans to hold the displaced, while screening them for potential "terrorists", for up to three years; it now says that 80% will be resettled by the end of 2009.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) comments: "The government's history of restricting the rights of displaced persons through rigid pass systems and strict restrictions on leaving the camps heightens concerns that they will be confined in camps much longer, possibly for years."
In the shadows
The eruption in Iran has in a twisted way done the Sri Lankan government a service. In any case, Colombo has been ruthless in restricting international journalists and rights organisations: in May 2009 even the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was barred from Menik Farm, the largest camp, and Channel 4's Nick Paton Walsh was deported. Sinhala nationalism remains oppressively dominant within the majority population, and critics of the government face an atmosphere of intimidation and even terror: Sri Lankan journalists have frequently been murdered, assaulted and detained.
Although human-rights organisations and western governments have continued to protest at the situation, the Sri Lankan government has found friends in the United Nations's new Human Rights Council; it was able to pass a resolution there on 27 May 2009 praising its own commitment to human rights (endorsed by such notable bastions of freedom as China, Cuba, Russia, Pakistan and Egypt). The vigorous campaigns by members of the Tamil diasporas have ensured that the situation has not been entirely forgotten, but the interned Tamilsdon't have the mobile-phone access that (in the early post-election stages at least) so embarrassed the Iranian regime. There are some pictures of the camps on the internet, but no iconic images of Tamil suffering have entered the commercial, established media in the manner of Iran's Neda Sultan - or indeed of Fikret Alic, the emaciated prisoner pictured behind barbed-wire in the Trnopolje camp in Bosnia in summer 1992.
Adire predicament
It is often said that pictures tell their own story. However what is important is the media narrative and the momentum behind the issue: in both the Iranian and Bosnian cases the crises were much more strongly established in the dominant media (and the exposure of the experiences of Neda Sultan and Fikret Alic) fed this. In the case of Sri Lanka, sadly, the level and intensity of coverage - despite the impressive Tamil campaigns - has not matched these.
Moreover, what was important in Bosnia was that Trnopolje was described as a "concentration"camp - so the image facilitated the connection between the atrocious treatment of Bosnian Muslim prisoners and the murderous history of concentration camps in Europe under Nazism. The Bosnian-Serbian government that was responsible for Trnopolje naturally disputed this appellation, describing it merely as a holding centre for "refugees"; today the lowest-common-denominator descriptor seems to be a "detention" camp.
The Sri Lankan government also prefers its camps to be seen as "refugee" camps. However once people are detained, camps are clearly more than that; and where there is a sustained policy of concentrating detainees then the term "concentration camp" applies. In war, these camps - invented at the beginning of the 20th century to describe the enclosures in which the Spanish detained Cubans and the British detained Boerfarmers and their families during the South African wars - are usually designed to corral a civilian population seen as potentially sympathetic to a guerrilla enemy (as Tamils evidently are still seen despite the LTTE's defeat).
Totalitarian regimes, including Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, have also used camps to concentrate other civilian groups -actual and potential political opponents, trade unionists, and ethnic "enemies" such as Jews. The complication in using the "concentration camp" category is that such regimes went on to develop their camps into something more - in the Soviet case, labour camps, in the Nazi case, extermination camps. Clearly, not all concentration camps are "death" camps in the Nazi sense; but all concentration camps tend to produce death, as well as widespread physical and mental harm. Since their premise is enmity towards the interned civilians, the history of concentration-camps has been marked, from the Boerwar onwards, by callous disregard for their welfare, and often worse.
As Human Rights Watch remarked of the Sri Lankan situation on 11 June 2009:
"Virtually all camps are overcrowded, some holding twice the number recommended by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Food distribution is chaotic, there are shortages of water, and sanitation facilities are inadequate. Camp residents do not have access to proper medical services and communicable diseases have broken out in the camps."
What is more, "the military camp administration has imposed numerous restrictions on humanitarian organizations working in the camps, such as limiting the number of vehicles and staff members that can enter the camps, which has delayed the provision of much-needed aid. The military does not allow organizations into the camps to conduct protection activities, and a ban on talking to the camp residents leaves them further isolated.'"
If reports of violence and disappearances are added to this, the situation of the interned Tamils appears dire.
A "rolling" genocide?The western fixation with the Nazi holocaust means that there is an obvious political temptation to link all anti-civilian violence with the Nazi model.The pro-Tamil United States-based academic Francis Boyle,in his posts, sees a sixty-year "rolling" genocide in which Sinhalese governments of Ceylon (the country's name at independence in 1948) and Sri Lanka have sought "to annihilate the Tamils and to steal their lands and natural resources. This is what Hitler and the Nazis called lebensraum - "living space" for the Sinhala at the expense of the Tamils." In this perspective, the camp system is all too clearly the latest stage of genocide - although other Tamil advocates date genocide back to the anti-Tamil pogroms in 1983 in response to which the LTTE campaign began.
The idea of "rolling" genocide, first developed (I think) by Madeleine Albright to distinguish the Sudanese campaign in Darfur from the "volcanic" genocide in Rwanda, suggests discontinuity in a history of genocide - albeit, in the Darfur case, within two or three years rather than six decades. However in many cases, there may be genocidal "moments" (as the genocide historian, Dirk Moses, has suggested of colonialism) in stories of oppression - decades or even centuries long - which do not, taken as a whole, constitute processes of genocide (see A Dirk Moses ed., Empire,Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History [Berghahn,2008]).
There may be sporadic genocidal massacres, rapes and expulsions, or even sustained campaigns, at particular points in these histories. Something like this seems to be true in the Sri Lankan case: no one doubts the long history of Sinhalese nationalist oppression against the Tamil community since independence, which includes moments like 1983 which can be plausibly seen as genocidal outbursts. But the history as a whole is not simply one of genocide.
Indeed the dedication of the LTTE to armed struggle against the Sri Lankan state helped turn a history of oppression and resistance into one of brutal insurgency and counterinsurgency (see The trouble with guns: Sri Lanka, South Africa, Ireland", 10 June 2009). We know however that counterinsurgency is one of the most common contexts of genocidal violence. It remains to be seen - since most of the survivors are locked away from the world's media and the Sri Lankan government is blocking all attempts at independent investigation of the recent violence - how far the Sri Lankan army went in the direction of deliberate atrocity as opposed to brutal disregard for civilians. Here, indiscriminate allegations of a long-running Sri Lankan genocide paradoxically blunt the real questions: what kind of violence did the Sri Lankan state commit against its Tamil civilian population, on what scale and with what intentions?
The continuing concentration of over 250,000 people in the camps both blocks the search for answers to these questions, and itself constitutes a most serious crime. If the doors are not opened quickly, this will raise questions of whether the government seriously intends a restoration of Tamil society in the conquered zone. This would indeed pose a question of genocide, in the sense of the deliberate destruction of a population group in its home territory. This article is published by Martin Shaw, and openDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons licence.
http://www.australia.to/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=11817:sri-lanka-camps-mediagenocide-&catid=132:special-reports&Itemid=273
Sri Lanka carves out economic zone for China
COLOMBO (AFP) – Sri Lanka on Tuesday granted Chinese companies a separate economic zone on the island which has just ended nearly four decades of ethnic bloodshed.
China's Huichen Investment Holdings Limited will manage and bring new investments into the Mirigama zone, some 55 kilometers (34 miles) north of Colombo, for a period of 33 years, officials said.
Over the next three-years, Huichen will invest 28 million dollars to develop roads, power and sewerage facilities in the zone, said Investment Promotions Minister Anura Priyadharshana Yapa.
"This is the first time the government has given a foreign country a specific area to develop and attract foreign investments into the country," Yapa told reporters.
Huichen's president, Huang Yuping, said nearly 30 Chinese firms involved in manufacturing and IT-related services had shown interest in setting up operations at the Mirigama zone.
With the end of its long-running war with ethnic Tamil Tiger rebels, Sri Lanka has set its sights on attracting one billion dollars in foreign investment this year, Yapa said.
China is an increasingly key military and political ally.
Beijing helped block a resolution censuring Sri Lanka for its handling of the final stages of the war against Tamil Tigers last month and is a main supplier of small arms to the South Asian nation.
Sri Lanka attracted 800 million dollars in foreign investments last year, mostly into IT and telecoms-related sectors.
"With the war over, we have seen a lot of interest from companies to invest in areas like power, telecom, tourism, agro-processing, fisheries, education and IT services," Yapa said.
He said the government plans to carve out economic zones in the former war-scarred northern town of Kilinochchi as well as eastern areas of Trincomalee, Batticaloa and Ampara.
"In the north and east, we are looking at boat-building, fisheries, housing and tourism projects. There is also scope for infrastructure projects to rebuild areas once destroyed by the war," he said.
China's Huichen Investment Holdings Limited will manage and bring new investments into the Mirigama zone, some 55 kilometers (34 miles) north of Colombo, for a period of 33 years, officials said.
Over the next three-years, Huichen will invest 28 million dollars to develop roads, power and sewerage facilities in the zone, said Investment Promotions Minister Anura Priyadharshana Yapa.
"This is the first time the government has given a foreign country a specific area to develop and attract foreign investments into the country," Yapa told reporters.
Huichen's president, Huang Yuping, said nearly 30 Chinese firms involved in manufacturing and IT-related services had shown interest in setting up operations at the Mirigama zone.
With the end of its long-running war with ethnic Tamil Tiger rebels, Sri Lanka has set its sights on attracting one billion dollars in foreign investment this year, Yapa said.
China is an increasingly key military and political ally.
Beijing helped block a resolution censuring Sri Lanka for its handling of the final stages of the war against Tamil Tigers last month and is a main supplier of small arms to the South Asian nation.
Sri Lanka attracted 800 million dollars in foreign investments last year, mostly into IT and telecoms-related sectors.
"With the war over, we have seen a lot of interest from companies to invest in areas like power, telecom, tourism, agro-processing, fisheries, education and IT services," Yapa said.
He said the government plans to carve out economic zones in the former war-scarred northern town of Kilinochchi as well as eastern areas of Trincomalee, Batticaloa and Ampara.
"In the north and east, we are looking at boat-building, fisheries, housing and tourism projects. There is also scope for infrastructure projects to rebuild areas once destroyed by the war," he said.
* US to help Sri Lanka with its demining program to facilitate rapid resettlement of IDPs
Tue, Jun 30, 2009, 11:21 pm SL Time, ColomboPage News Desk, Sri Lanka.
June 30, Washington, D.C.: The United States is to provide additional funding for the demining organizations in Sri Lanka to help the Sri Lankan government with its demining program, Robert O. Blake, Assistant Secretary of the State Department for the South and Central Asian Affairs said today.
The former US Ambassador to Sri Lanka at a press briefing today said the US is looking forward to seeing a plan from the Sri Lankan government about demining, and how the government is going to work with international NGOs.
Reminding that the Sri Lankan government has pledged to resettle at least 80% of the internally displaced persons(IDPs) by the end of the year Blake said the demining would enable the rapid resettlement of the almost 300,000 IDPs in the camps.
"We hope that these pledges will be met and we look forward to working with the Government to help them meet these commitments, particularly on the demining program," he added.
Responding to a question Assistant Secretary Blake said the Sri Lankan government has taken some steps on the humanitarian side and the government is committed to try to do more.
"International access has improved inside the camps in Sri Lanka. International NGOs and other humanitarian organizations are able to get goods and services into the camps now, largely without restrictions. But there are still some issues with regard to access of the ICRC, which performs important protection works inside the camps," he said.
"Broadly speaking, I think, the government is committed to try to do more. For example, I heard last week that fishing restrictions have been eased all over the island which will help to improve livelihoods for people not just in the North but also in Eastern parts of Sri Lanka," Blake added.
On the subject of South Asia Assistant Secretary Blake said India is a preeminent power in the region and he very closely coordinated with his Indian counterpart in Sri Lanka High Commissioner Alok Prasad on Sri Lanka's situation.
June 30, Washington, D.C.: The United States is to provide additional funding for the demining organizations in Sri Lanka to help the Sri Lankan government with its demining program, Robert O. Blake, Assistant Secretary of the State Department for the South and Central Asian Affairs said today.
The former US Ambassador to Sri Lanka at a press briefing today said the US is looking forward to seeing a plan from the Sri Lankan government about demining, and how the government is going to work with international NGOs.
Reminding that the Sri Lankan government has pledged to resettle at least 80% of the internally displaced persons(IDPs) by the end of the year Blake said the demining would enable the rapid resettlement of the almost 300,000 IDPs in the camps.
"We hope that these pledges will be met and we look forward to working with the Government to help them meet these commitments, particularly on the demining program," he added.
Responding to a question Assistant Secretary Blake said the Sri Lankan government has taken some steps on the humanitarian side and the government is committed to try to do more.
"International access has improved inside the camps in Sri Lanka. International NGOs and other humanitarian organizations are able to get goods and services into the camps now, largely without restrictions. But there are still some issues with regard to access of the ICRC, which performs important protection works inside the camps," he said.
"Broadly speaking, I think, the government is committed to try to do more. For example, I heard last week that fishing restrictions have been eased all over the island which will help to improve livelihoods for people not just in the North but also in Eastern parts of Sri Lanka," Blake added.
On the subject of South Asia Assistant Secretary Blake said India is a preeminent power in the region and he very closely coordinated with his Indian counterpart in Sri Lanka High Commissioner Alok Prasad on Sri Lanka's situation.
Australia: Recent instability in Sri Lanka is a very big factor of asylum influx
Australia intercepted a boat carrying almost 200 illegal migrants and is warning of a surge in displaced people heading to its shores from Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The vessel intercepted is the largest of the 15 boats of unauthorized arrivals detained in Australian waters so far this year.
The Australian navy intercepted the boat carrying 194 people, believed to be Sri Lankan Tamils, about 40 kilometers from Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean.
The suspected asylum seekers have been transferred to an immigration center on Christmas Island, where they will undergo health and security checks. The Christmas Island detention facility can hold 800 inmates and houses asylum-seekers while their claims for refugee status are processed.
In Canberra, officials say there has been a sharp increase in the number of displaced people moving through the region to escape conflicts in South Asia, and that many would attempt to reach Australia by boat.
Coordinator of the Malaysian immigration support group Tenaganita, Aegile Fernandez has warned that up to 10,000 asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Burma and Iraq were planning to come to Australia.
Christmas Island can accommodate 1,200 in total.
But Mr Rudd told reporters the Department of Immigration had indicated they had sufficient capacity on Christmas Island to deal with the challenges into the future.
However, Mr Rudd said the government had to go to the core of the problem and increase its police presence overseas.
"The instability recently in Sri Lanka is a very big factor," Mr Rudd said.
"Dealing with problems in source countries is critical. We need to enhance our police and related security representation in countries around the region."
Mr Rudd said the government also needed to maintain a hardline policy when it came to border protection.
"The navy has performed a first-class job at intercepting these vessels at sea and taking them to Christmas Island for processing," he said.
"You need to make sure you've got a proper processing system in place, so that if folk are arriving who are not bona fide refugees, then subsequent to processing, they get sent home."
Earlier Immigration Minister Chris Evans said the government is "very concerned" about the continued arrival of illegal boat people. "We've got an awful lot of people moving through Southeast Asia at the moment; the worsening situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan and of course the developments in Sri Lanka means that there's a lot of people seeking safe haven throughout Southeast Asia, and many of them hoping to come to Australia," Evans said.
The arrival of more boat people has renewed accusations by opposition politicians that the government is too soft on immigration. Critics say that Australia has become a more attractive destination for people traffickers and call for an independent inquiry into why more boat people were trying to reach the country's northern waters.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has dismantled some of the more controversial elements to Australia's asylum policy since coming to power in late 2007. Among other changes, the government closed offshore processing camps in remote parts of the South Pacific. Mr. Rudd also relaxed a policy of detaining all migrants who enter illegally, and has allowed full residency visas for those granted refugee status.
The Labor government says that border protection remains a priority and that about US$524 million will be spent boosting surveillance and combating people smuggling.
Australia accepts about 13,000 refugees under official international humanitarian programs every year. (Sources: VOA & AAP
The Australian navy intercepted the boat carrying 194 people, believed to be Sri Lankan Tamils, about 40 kilometers from Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean.
The suspected asylum seekers have been transferred to an immigration center on Christmas Island, where they will undergo health and security checks. The Christmas Island detention facility can hold 800 inmates and houses asylum-seekers while their claims for refugee status are processed.
In Canberra, officials say there has been a sharp increase in the number of displaced people moving through the region to escape conflicts in South Asia, and that many would attempt to reach Australia by boat.
Coordinator of the Malaysian immigration support group Tenaganita, Aegile Fernandez has warned that up to 10,000 asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Burma and Iraq were planning to come to Australia.
Christmas Island can accommodate 1,200 in total.
But Mr Rudd told reporters the Department of Immigration had indicated they had sufficient capacity on Christmas Island to deal with the challenges into the future.
However, Mr Rudd said the government had to go to the core of the problem and increase its police presence overseas.
"The instability recently in Sri Lanka is a very big factor," Mr Rudd said.
"Dealing with problems in source countries is critical. We need to enhance our police and related security representation in countries around the region."
Mr Rudd said the government also needed to maintain a hardline policy when it came to border protection.
"The navy has performed a first-class job at intercepting these vessels at sea and taking them to Christmas Island for processing," he said.
"You need to make sure you've got a proper processing system in place, so that if folk are arriving who are not bona fide refugees, then subsequent to processing, they get sent home."
Earlier Immigration Minister Chris Evans said the government is "very concerned" about the continued arrival of illegal boat people. "We've got an awful lot of people moving through Southeast Asia at the moment; the worsening situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan and of course the developments in Sri Lanka means that there's a lot of people seeking safe haven throughout Southeast Asia, and many of them hoping to come to Australia," Evans said.
The arrival of more boat people has renewed accusations by opposition politicians that the government is too soft on immigration. Critics say that Australia has become a more attractive destination for people traffickers and call for an independent inquiry into why more boat people were trying to reach the country's northern waters.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has dismantled some of the more controversial elements to Australia's asylum policy since coming to power in late 2007. Among other changes, the government closed offshore processing camps in remote parts of the South Pacific. Mr. Rudd also relaxed a policy of detaining all migrants who enter illegally, and has allowed full residency visas for those granted refugee status.
The Labor government says that border protection remains a priority and that about US$524 million will be spent boosting surveillance and combating people smuggling.
Australia accepts about 13,000 refugees under official international humanitarian programs every year. (Sources: VOA & AAP
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