"Assuming the LTTE finished is fantasy masquerading as fact"

By Qadri Ismail

Che Guevara once said: “if you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are my comrade.”

The distillation of a lifetime of agitation, intervention, reflection, this statement, the opposite of a soundbite, pithily articulates ethics with politics. We’ve known, at least since Aristotle, that the two are inextricable, yet distinct.

Che links them together in exemplary leftist fashion. If one understands ethics, following Levinas loosely, as deference to the other; and politics, following Derrida equally loosely, as a calculus about the possible; then Che’s formulation insists that, while the leftist might not (be able to) act upon every injustice, she must be moved. Narcissistic indignation is called identity politics.

[Che Guevara appeared on Meet the Press at CBS Television on December 13, 1964-AP]

When the leftist acts, she cannot be deterred by considerations of difficulty, of (im)possibility. They get overdetermined by the ethical imperative, the banal necessity, to resist injustice, oppression of the other. Not the political calculation whether resistance might be fruitful. Necessity, as opposed to choice, characterizes leftist action.

In other words, the leftist is not and has never been a realist. Revolutions, national liberation struggles, campaigns against patriarchy were not inspired by opportunists. Neither is the Tamil struggle for justice in Sri Lanka. The legitimacy of that struggle doesn’t stand or fall by the record – the abysmal, atrocious record – of the LTTE.

And yet, as one writes, many on the left, thinking the LTTE in the past tense, advice the Tamils to adopt a “realist,” that is to say mendicant, position regards the Rajapakse regime: reconcile with the actuality of its overwhelming power. Take what you can get. In effect, surrender.

As one writes, that same regime continues to bomb, from air and ground, the tiny territory still in LTTE hands. It kills between 10 and 20 Tamil civilians every day, maims dozens of others. Many little children are now amputees. They might be safe if the LTTE, unconscionably, does not hold them as human shields; even, horribly, shooting those who try to flee. But that is no alibi for this government’s brutality.

Yet, as one reads, one finds no indignation, no outrage, from sections of the left. There is, of course, the mandatory, parenthetical – pathetic – gesture of concern about civilian casualties. But the brutality of this government, it appears remarkably enough, should not shape our response to it. Only the “fact” of its assumed victory.

Take, as symptomatic instance, a recent position paper by Sumanasiri Liyanage. It expresses with clarity a position held by many about “the post-LTTE era.” But assuming the LTTE finished is fantasy masquerading as fact. Its record suggests resilience, not oblivion. Weakened, broken as the guerillas are – they’ve never been so unpopular, even amongst their own – there’s nothing inevitable about their disappearance from our politico-military terrain. Regardless, the leftist commitment to the justice of the Tamil struggle is not bound to the fate of the LTTE.

Liyanage’s undeniable commitment to peace with justice has been established over decades, with great consistency. I have admired his many thoughtful interventions, especially in the last couple of years. But, now – and this is said with loss, not anger – he effectively whitewashes the regime. Arguing that “revolutionary” constitutional change is “unlikely” – the word litters the article – he advances realistic “reform” as the position we should all adopt. One could ask, in response: if U.S. slaves had considered the likelihood of ending their captivity, if they had realistically calculated their chances against the overwhelming power of the white establishment, would they have rebelled? Unlikely.

Incredibly, Liyanage doesn’t once identify the Rajapakse regime as responsible for any – not a single – part of the horrible Sri Lankan present. The “JVP and Hela Urumaya…[are] the main advocates” of exclusivist nationalism. The SLFP, it would appear, doesn’t share this ideology, is innocent of blame.

As one writes, the Rajapakse regime has announced plans to house Vanni Tamils in specially constructed detention camps for up to three years. These camps will include schools, hospitals and banks. The populace inside will be held captive, policed by the military. The Rajapakses, brazenly, have even approached the U.N. and other international NGOs – the same organizations its spokespeople routinely slander – to fund these centers akin to concentration camps.

Given the career – brief, but consistently exclusivist – of this government, one doesn’t need to be an astrologer or political scientist to foresee the next stage of the plan. Over the past two years, led by the JHU’s Champika Ranawaka and Basil Rajapakse, the regime has systematically alienated Muslim land in the east. Sinhala settlers cannot be far behind.

There is little reason to doubt that the Vanni territory, once denuded of Tamils, will also be colonized with Sinhalese. This is the Rajapakses’ “final solution” to the national question: make the Tamils politically irrelevant. Physically eliminate any resistance, even the non-violent. Concentrate the rest in camps.

In this regard, the only moot question is whether Sinhala nationalism, which has systematically followed such a strategy since D. S. Senanayake in the late 1940s, learned this from Zionism – or whether the Israelis copied the Sri Lankan example. Not coincidentally, the two states have been co-operating openly since the mid-1980s. Mahinda Rajapakse, opposition M.P., may have been a champion of Palestinian rights, a progressive, in those 1980s; his regime is comparable to the Israeli state.

In such a context, advocating reform would be to debate how many Sinhalese should be allowed to colonize the north. Not whether colonization should occur in the first place.

But “reform” and “revolutionary change” are not the only alternatives. Resistance – the unyielding demand for peace with justice – is another. Liyanage, however, frames his position with canny rhetoric. Reform, after all, sounds realistic, possible, even reasonable. Naming its alternative revolutionary – spin worthy of U.S. conservatives, the (white) guys who call universal health care “socialism” – is delegitimizing. For, in the worldview fabricated by George W. Bush, that Liyanage reproduces, perhaps unwittingly, a synonym for revolutionary is terrorist.

Yes, the LTTE could be accused of terrorism – if one finds the term productive. Among national liberation organizations, its brutality is unmatched. Its record is too well known to require iteration here. A powerful case could be made that the LTTE and its leadership must face trial for war crimes. But, surely, an equally powerful case could be made about leading figures of the government.

On the other hand, if one advocates engagement with the regime, shouldn’t one also advocate the same with the LTTE? Ideologically, both embody exclusivist, extremist – if not totalitarian – nationalism. Both equate dissent with treason. Gotabhaya Rajapakse actually said this to BBC television, following the murder of Lasantha Wickrematunge. The LTTE has systematically assassinated resistant Tamils, including K. Padmanabha and Rajini Thiranagama. The only difference is that the LTTE’s brutality extends for decades. Simply put, it has killed, intimidated, devastated more. But considerations of number should not determine leftist ethics.

Liyanage knows this. He refers to the Tamils and Muslims as “numerically small nations,” desiring not to other the Tamils and Muslims by calling them “minorities.” Yet he cannot frame his position outside the logic of number. For, one could ask, after Derrida: at what number does a nation become small or large? Would we also need a cage for the medium-sized? Would the Chinese be extra-large? Is there some secret book of rules, available only to social scientists, with the right answers?

More importantly, does it matter? Does their number have anything to do with the fact that we’re moved, appalled, outraged by the oppression of the Tamils – or the Palestinians, for that matter? Should indignation not serve as the launching pad of our response?

The argument for engagement, for reform, is an argument for accepting the continued domination of the Tamils and Muslims. It negates the very basis of the Tamil struggle, for peace with justice. Even worse, it provides the Rajapakses with an alibi. For, one must ask: given that the president himself turned the consensus within the APRC, for greater devolution, into acceptance of the status quo, what are the chances of this regime, even minimally, reforming the state? Unlikely.

The stagist argument – finish the LTTE first, then attend to Tamil “grievances” – is, at best, counter-factual, presumptuous. Both about the LTTE, that it can’t re-emerge; and the regime, that it will suddenly, miraculously, turn democratic.

But what are the chances of the Rajapakses, who cannot countenance journalistic resistance – witness the murder of Wickrematunge, the continued imprisonment of J. S. Tissainayagam – suddenly becoming democratic? Is it “realistic” to expect this regime, which refuses to honor the 17th amendment, to discover the virtues of constitutional governance? Or, as Jayadeva Uyangoda begs, Mahinda Rajapakse to display “statesmanship”? You know the answer.

The Sinhala left has a long, impressive, honorable record on the question of social justice. Despite being woefully underfunded, we can boast of free universal health care and education through university. The United States cannot. Despite the best efforts of J. R. Jayewardene, in the 1980s, our trade unions thrive. They even strike every now and then. Without the left, this would not be the case.

On the national question, however, the organized left, with the rare exception of a Vickremabahu Karunaratne or Sarath Muttetuwegama, has been a paragon of complicity with Sinhala nationalism. It bears iteration that the same Colvin R de Silva, who said with astute prescience in 1956, that establishing Sinhala as the only official language would lead to separatism, sixteen years later effectively instituted Buddhism as the state religion. The militant Tamil resistance was inaugurated that same year, 1972. Then, as now, members of the CP and LSSP adorn the cabinet.

Just last January, after the murder of Wickrematunge, after the rampages of this regime against Tamil and Muslim civilians, documented over three years, an old leftist – I don’t have the heart to mention his name – told a mutual acquaintance: “Mahinda is basically a progressive.”

Surely, the task of our intellectual left must be to hold these positions to account, not make them role models!

Our task is to insist, and keep insisting, that there cannot be a just peace in Sri Lanka without radical – not reformist, or revolutionary, but radical – constitutional change. (Revolutionary change, a complete, total break from the past, is impossible – even conceptually.) A form of confederalism, if that’s what it takes; which accounts for Muslim, as well as Tamil demands.

The equality of all citizens, including those outside the northeast, must be institutionalized in something like a bill of rights. As importantly, the symbols of the state must signify such equality. This means no special status for Buddhism. And redesigning the flag, which as it now flies reproduces – with its dominant, armed, scary lion and two miserable stripes for the minorities – Sinhala nationalist dominance.

This will take a long struggle, but reform – surrender to Sinhala nationalism – takes us down a dead-end. This will involve rethinking the tired clichés about peace we’ve inherited from social science, conflict management. This entails much labor, patience, anger and frustration, but we must abide by our convictions, not yield to our most conformist instincts.

Edward Said once told me, when I asked of his vocal opposition to the Oslo accords, that they could only lead to the continued subjugation of the Palestinian people – while providing Israel with the alibi of commitment to peace. Despite tremendous pressure, mostly from the PLO, he refused to yield his position. Refused, that is, to settle for mere reform.

The point is not that he turned out to be right. He was no realist. Rather, after a lifetime of agitation, intervention, reflection, he had conviction. He understood that the leftist, when confronted with surrender or resistance, doesn’t have a choice. Like Che, Said knew how to articulate ethics with politics.

Posted by transCurrents at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (24)

By Namini Wijedasa

As fighting rages further north, haggard civilians with tales of horror are continuing to stumble into Vavuniya.

And with numbers growing, authorities are under intense international pressure to balance humanitarian concerns with security requisites — so that men, women and children traumatised by the LTTE are not victimised again by the government.

Barbed wire

“Civilians who manage to escape the Tamil Tigers and the shelling soon find themselves locked up in military camps by the government, surrounded by barbed wire and cut off from the outside world,” says a statement on Friday by Anna Neistat, senior emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch. She reportedly returned from Vavuniya two weeks ago.

[A young Tamil woman attempts to speak to family members inside one of 16 'transit sites' set up by the government-pic: IRIN]

The tales of grief are everywhere. A firsthand account of welfare camps written by Dr Thaya Thiagarajah, a psycho-social consultant, speaks of separated families, civilians with gruesome injuries, tight security and dismal conditions inside welfare camps.

“Nobody was allowed to get into the camp,” she writes. “The schools are being used as the interim camps. But they were putting up sheds which I would call tents about 5-6 meters in length. They had put barbed wires around the camps like those around the army camps. People could see those inside only from the other side of the road. The security was very tight.”

The visual and psychological impact of barbed wire is strong and stark. It evokes memories of concentration camps and some international journalists have already used the comparison in their writing. Sharp and inhospitable, barbed wire is generally used to keep out predators or to keep in prisoners. So why has it been installed in “welfare camps” for the displaced?

Some commentators feel the government doesn’t care about these civilians. “I think, crudely, the government wants to make life as uncomfortable as possible for people when they come out,” said a westerner working for an international think tank. He did not wish to be quoted. Others are more accommodating. “I think they are trying their best but certainly a lot of concerns need to be addressed,” said a source from an international NGO. He, too, did not wish to be identified.

Weeding out the Tigers

One of the trickiest issues faced by the government is the weeding out of Tigers who are inevitably lurking among civilians. “A journalist who visited an IDP camp in Vavuniya told me that a woman said softly that she can’t speak to him,” recounted the westerner earlier quoted. “He asked whether it was because there were soldiers around and she replied: ‘No, they are here, they are here’. The LTTE is good at blurring the lines between cadres and civilians.”

“Yes, there are terrorists among civilians,” said Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara, military spokesman. How did they know? “We have identified certain numbers,” he replied. “Some people have confessed that they had undergone training and request rehabilitation.”

Asked what happens to them once identified, he said the adults (“if they are hardcore”) would be sent to rehabilitation camps at Tellipalai and Welikanda while former child soldiers are taken to a centre in Ambepussa. “So far, nobody has been arrested,” Brig Nanayakkara said. There are around 200 cadres undergoing rehabilitation at Welikanda alone.

Camps

All displaced persons seeking protection in government territory are sent to the camps. This includes those who have relatives in other parts of the country that are willing to house them. Some civilians inside the camps are residents of Vavuniya but can’t move into their homes in that town. Movement outside the camps is barred. According to reports, inmates are even prohibited from visiting family members in hospital or attending the funerals of those who have died. Every incoming civilian is screened by military intelligence and registered. No international agency or organisation is present during this procedure. “I am concerned, not so much about the camps per se, but the prior stages of screening for LTTE presence,” said another aid community source, speaking on condition of anonymity. “It is not transparent. There is no reason in the world why they can’t have the ICRC present, to create confidence that they are not pulling people aside and just killing them. There is no transparency.”

Human Rights Watch, whose voice is influential in international circles, also highlighted this issue. Its statement last week complained that international humanitarian agencies were “no longer allowed to adequately monitor the government’s screening process of new arrivals to government-controlled areas, and that there were reports of the security forces taking away LTTE suspects to arbitrary detention and possible enforced disappearances”.

But the government remains firm on this issue. “How can ICRC, international organisations or anybody else do screening?” asked Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa. “Only security people can do that. The problem is that people start creating doubts even before we start doing anything.”

“This is a sovereign country,” he asserted. “We have systems here. We have a sense of responsibility, the capacity and capability. We know terrorists will come with the people. We are doing the screening and people must have confidence in us. It is not the ICRC’s task to get involved. They have signed a memorandum with the Sri Lanka Government in which their specific duties are identified.”

“People come here and get involved in things that are not their business,” he continued. “When ambassadors come here, they start doing politics. That is not their job. Our ambassador in the US will never be allowed to do politics. Our high commissioner in the UK cannot meet people all over the countryside and do politics.”

Freedom of movement

As routines fall into place and new procedures are adopted, international agencies are hoping that life becomes easier for the civilians. Family members are being reunited. More temporary shelters are being constructed. Children have resumed “school”. Clinics meet the medical needs of the displaced. Toilet and bathing facilities are expected to improve when more money and assistance is received.

The most crucial requirement, however, is freedom of movement which would contribute towards building confidence among the Tamil population. Nobody detained indefinitely in “open prisons” will feel benevolent towards the government. It is learnt that the government will soon issue identity cards to the displaced. It is not known, however, whether these will permit them to move freely around Vavuniya, gain employment or live life as normally as possible. All attempts to contact Basil Rajapaksa, the parliamentarian overseeing this subject, failed last week.

It is also not clear when the displaced will be resettled in their villages. With the conventional battle between the LTTE and military still raging, it might be irrational to raise the question. Nevertheless, it is imperative that the government handles displaced civilians in a humane and dignified manner which builds confidence and creates a platform for lasting peace.

Any ill-treatment of these helpless Tamils will undermine the prospect of a lasting political solution. A lack of transparency will undermine the credibility of the government with Tamils. A failure to give heed to their legitimate grievances and urgent needs will only create a repetition of the vicious cycle.

Pressure from international quarters has been welcome because it has kept the government on its toes. In the final equation, however, it is not about satisfying the requirements of “foreigners who butt their noses into every bit of your business”. It should be about appealing to the Tamil people so that they permanently desert the LTTE — physically and ideologically — out of a sense of genuine sense of trust in the government.

(This article is reproduced from Lakbima News.It appeared under the heading “A state’s dilemma;Catching terrorists or caging civilians behind barbed wires?”)

Posted by transCurrents at 06:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

by Rajan Hoole and Kopalasingham Sritharan

The LTTE’s treatment of civilians who came within its ambit calls for greater imagination and restraint in giving practical effect to the rules of war. Nominal government instructions to civilians to move into supposedly safe zones have been cited as a reasonable pretext for free shelling elsewhere, regardless of the life-threatening obstacles the LTTE imposed on them. The recent Human Rights Watch report ‘War on the Displaced’ is brutally frank in placing the LTTE’s relation to the Tamil civilian population — whom it has frequently shot and killed for trying to escape — as a predator, and not a protector. Based painstakingly on copious tragic testimonies, HRW also conveys an implicit warning to the government on its approach to humanitarian norms.

“Violations of the laws of war by one side to a conflict do not justify violations by the opposing side” (HRW report), is an absolute principle of civilised humanity. Day by day, testimony coming from civilians fleeing the LTTE drives home the task of protecting trapped civilians to be diabolically intricate. In each incident a turning point is reached where we revise our judgments, and are forced to see the problem differently and find answers to new challenges that become more urgent by the hour.

Those who long knew the LTTE, understood clearly where it was taking the Tamil people. In addition, the present government has an atrocious human rights record and its chauvinist leanings have led to widespread alarm. Such a government being in a war where mainly the Tamils are at the receiving end, would have predisposed most observers to see every incident in a light unfavourable to it.

Take, for instance, the incident when just before midnight on 1 February, Puthukkudiyiruppu (PTK) hospital was shelled killing nine persons. Questioned by Sky TV, the defence secretary said, “No hospital should operate outside the safety zone...everything beyond the safety zone is a legitimate target.” One wonders how someone in the Government could have demarcated a safe zone exempting the hospital barely two miles beyond its south-eastern edge.

The shelling of the hospital is a grave contravention of humanitarian norms for which there is no excuse. Minister Keheliya Rambukwella, in an ill-conceived exercise in damage control, produced an aerial video of the hospital in an attempt to discredit ICRC and UN reports of shelling. The minister also attempted to mitigate the killing of civilians by suggesting that injured LTTE cadres being treated in hospital could pass as civilians. He also charged that some persons in international organisations were on LTTE payroll.

That is, however, not the whole story. We now have testimony from a senior member of the refugee community that, prior to the shelling, the LTTE stood behind the hospital and fired into the air. While the government response is unjustified, the question arises how feasible is it to protect civilians when the group allegedly fighting for them holds them hostage and does everything possible to maximise their misery for propaganda. If that, too, does not enable them to re-emerge to a dominant position, they are quite capable of imposing mass suicide on the people. It was implicit in their politics from the beginning.

Testimony gathered by the UTHR(J).Testimonies exemplify the plight of civilians.

When Visvamadu fell at the end of January 2009, the ICRC was doing valuable work in transporting the injured by bus to Vavuniya. The LTTE had to “clear” those being transported.

The man in his late 50s had been fleeing the battle zone amidst fire from hi-tech weapons and had become weary and thirsty. He said from his hospital bed that he had been looking for a well so that he might fall into it and die. That was when he spotted a waiting ICRC bus taking in injured. No sooner had he climbed into it and slumped into a seat than an armed LTTE cadre stepped in and told him roughly to get out as he was not given permission to leave. He had replied that he could shoot. They left him alone and now he is in the local hospital.

Another highly traumatised lady in her late 50s is under treatment at another hospital (Cheddikulam). She with some others was caught between advancing troops and the LTTE defending fiercely. She spotted a bunker and crouched inside it for over six hours under a heavy exchange of fire overhead. Finally, the defenders retreated and the troops passed over her bunker in pursuit. She climbed out after some time, walked over dead bodies, some of them her kith and kin, to the army defence line.

A joint family from Mannar District who had for over two years been fleeing from place to place in search of safety got into a bunker, late January, to take cover from a heavy exchange of shelling overhead. One shell fell right into their bunker killing every one. Their only surviving sibling is an agonised Roman Catholic nun.

The civilians had been so caught up in a pincer movement where they got no relief, but have been continuously either kept on the run or confined to bunkers. Though all of them had some dry rations, money was in short supply, and given the collapse of the agricultural economy, purchase of other essentials was difficult. They survived by boiling rice with either soya meat or dhal and salt.

This was prior to the fall of Dharmapuram in late January followed soon by Viswamadu. At present, the trapped people rarely get the opportunity for a cooked meal. Many were maimed or killed when they were utterly exhausted by hunger and thirst after spending prolonged periods in bunkers, and had crawled out to have a cup of tea or to cook a meal. In one incident reported by IDPs a mother who left her family in a bunker and came out to prepare a meal was stuck by a shell and died. In another incident a whole family called up by the mother to have a cup of tea in the evening were struck by a shell and died.

On 25 February, about a hundred injured who had been transported by the ICRC from the coastal safe zone in Mullaitivu to Tricomalee were brought to the local hospital for further treatment. Among them were two siblings who had been separated from their father. Their mother and another sibling had died of shrapnel from the same shell that had injured them. Such traumatic separations are all too common. They were expressing the wish that the shells had fallen directly on their heads so that all of them had died together.

To many of the people of Wanni, it came as an unbelievable shock that the LTTE not only threatened to shoot those attempting to flee towards the army-controlled area, but actually did so, sometimes below the knee, but at other times to kill, and sometimes subjected fleeing civilians to mortar-fire. The military men on the front lines saw this with their own eyes and understood that, contrary to the view frequently held by their superiors and the propaganda of the nationalistic media on both sides, the civilians of Wanni were just as human as anybody else. This is perhaps the greatest contributory factor to the mellowed approach by the military in the handling of refugees.

When in a corner, the LTTE has on several occasions over the years strained towards collective self-immolation of the Tamils by massacring Sinhalese, as it did 21 Sinhalese peasants in Inginiyagala on 21 February in an attempt to provoke mass reprisals.

In response to international pressure arising from mounting civilian casualties, the government on 21 January established a safe zone atThevipuram, starting two miles east of PTK, lying north of the Mullaitivu-Paranthan Rd. From 21 to 29 January, this zone experienced intense shelling by the army resulting in several civilian casualties. It quickly became an international issue, prompting the Indian foreign minister’s hurried visit. There is also a different side to it.

Injured civilians have testified that after they moved to safe zones, the LTTE moved in with them and opened fire sometimes standing among them. A senior man in the education field also stated that the LTTE positioned itself next to schools and hospitals and launched artillery attacks on the military. Residents at Thevipuram said that the government’s counter artillery attacks were so accurate that they generally went over them eastwards towards the area from which the LTTE originally launched shell attacks and then vamoosed. Many civilians who were crowded into the safe zone received shrapnel injuries from shells exploding towards the eastern boundary.

Although one is usually sceptical about defence ministry reports, LTTE artillery positions as shown on its web site (defence.lk, 1/31/2009) are in fair agreement with civilian testimony above. The reality was that neither the LTTE nor the army did much harm to each other, but the civilians sustained enormous harm. The army returning the fire served no purpose, proportionate or otherwise. To quote from HRW, “having declared the area a safe zone for civilians, the SLA encouraged civilians to go to the area, increasing the vulnerability of civilians in the event of an attack...all feasible steps must be taken to distinguish between military targets and civilians, the weapons used must be able to discriminate between the two”.

One cannot, thus, on the evidence charge the army with premeditated killing or maiming of Tamil civilians, but it could have acted with greater imagination and restraint. It also raises a problem the south needs to deal with. We have cases of civilians escaping from the LTTE to the army-zone being shelled by the army while on the road. The soldiers would have been more restrained in responding to provocation had the civilians been Sinhalese, for the fear of hitting their kin. The Tamils are, aliens to them. Through this experience, the Tamils would continue to see the army as an alien, Sinhalese army.

Further, there has been too much politics and posturing with safe zones. Following the Indian FM’s visit, which was occasioned by firing into the Thevipuram safe zone, the president announced, “For all those civilians, I assure a safe passage to a secure environment.” A 48 hour grace period was announced. Questioned by LAKBIMAnEWS, the defence secretary confirmed that there was no ceasefire, just ‘an opportunity for the LTTE to send the civilians out to the safe zones.’ It was back to square one, to the same safe zone, the shelling of which was the original problem.

On 12 February, the government announced a new safe zone, a 7 and half mile stretch of the sea coast east of PTK, remarking that the LTTE had moved its heavy weapons into the Thevipuram zone. It did not rescind the safe zone status of Thevipuram. The people were neither asked to move to the new zone nor given a time frame. The people, including the old and infirm, had gone through a lot of trouble to settle down in Thevipuram. After the abandonment of Killinochchi hospital, several temporary hospitals were established to treat the rising toll of injured, including three around Thevipuram. Puthukudiyiruppu hospital, too, had to be moved to Puthumaththalan after the defence secretary had said that all outside the safe zone would be regarded as LTTE. Surely, these movements require reasonable time?

How another safe zone could solve the problem is also unclear. There is nothing to stop the LTTE moving artillery into any zone. Further, safe zones do not provide relief for an estimated one third of the civilian population sheltering everywhere in bunkers, because the LTTE blocked their entry. In the interest of the civilians, diplomacy and exposure of the LTTE’s conduct should have been tried to the utmost. That, too, became difficult when the UN and ICRC were constantly being abused by the government and its supporters as LTTE agents for reporting the civilian plight. Were the people’s safety the main concern, any inaccuracy in their reporting ought to have been sorted out amicably.

India and the international community would do far more good by pressing the government to take concrete and coherent measures to protect civilians and the hapless rank and file of the LTTE, rather than by futile ritual demands for both the government and LTTE to respect humanitarian norms. The government, too, ritually repeats its supposed policy of zero civilian casualties. Civilian protection is a challenge to be undertaken despite the obduracy of the LTTE leadership.

In what is being hailed as the eve of absolute military victory, we must guard against an alarming trend. The euphoria contrived is being used to crack down on democratic dissent in the south as well as the north-east. The country watches in disbelief as the assassination of Sunday Leader Editor Lasantha Wickrematunge is followed by vindictive police harassment of the elderly Mr. R. Sampanthan MP and N. Vithyatharan, who piloted Jaffna’s Uthayan newspaper through daunting vicissitudes. Hate campaigns on state media are the standard fare accompanying harassment. Witch hunting in place of generosity at this time, portends smallness. It could easily transform hopes of victory into another long nightmare.

(Rajan Hoole and Sritharan are Martin Ennals award winning human rights activists of the fiercely independent University Teachers for Human Rights.(J) which they co – founded.)

Posted by transCurrents at 06:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

by Prof.Rajiva Wijesinha

Human Rights Watch, standard bearers of what Michael Roberts has characterized as HRE – Human Rights Extremism – seems to have decided that it has a special relationship with me. I am the only person quoted by name in the presentation made by their Senior Researcher Dr. Anna Neistat to the US Senate Foreign Relations Sub-Committee that dealt with Sri Lanka.

Sadly, this anxiety to use my name in an attempt to shore up her case against the Sri Lankan government was not accompanied by any attempt to check with me as to my views on the matters on which they were pronouncing. This is of a piece with their previous dodging of any engagement with me.

Eighteen months ago HRW failed to respond when I proved, from their own report, that their sensationalistic release about the Sri Lankan forces indiscriminately targeting civilians was totally false. Even more tellingly, they cancelled a discussion on Sri Lanka that they had arranged in the British House of Commons, when they heard that the Foreign Minister had asked me to attend. The official from our High Commission who had been liasing with them, and found first Sir Nigel Rodley dropping out, and then Human Rights Watch abandoning the event, thought they feared I would be excessively critical.

Running away from discussion based on evidence seems a dubious practice for an organization that claims the moral high ground, but an investigation of the way they present their opinions suggests that morality has nothing to do with it. They have a purpose, and if that purpose coincides with the purposes of terrorists, that means nothing to them, since they do not have to live with the effects of terrorism. So they produce what seem to be well researched papers, but singularly fail to substantiate any of the points they make.

In the case of Dr Neustat’s performance in the Senate, the one piece of verifiable evidence she produced was something she attributed to me, all her other quotations being from sources she would not name. However, despite this use, or rather misuse, of my name, she did not bother to check her story with me, even though she claims to have been in Sri Lanka at the time the London Times cited the line she so triumphantly used.

That the line was misleading must of course have been obvious to anyone who understands English. The London Times had claimed I said, "Of course, it will not be voluntary - we need to check everyone." which is tautologous because that is what the word ‘check’ means. Even in what is termed random checking, it is not those checked but those who check who decide who will be checked. I could only conclude then that Dr Neistadt privileging me by citing a redundancy arose from a desire to score debating points, while fearing to see me face to face.

The fear is perhaps understandable, because her testimony is so full of falsehoods that she would have been extremely nervous to actually ask questions that would have upset her applecart. She starts by claiming that the Sri Lankan government is burying ‘the abuses’ by preventing people from gathering or disseminating information, and then immediately says that ‘we’, whoever that might be, managed to collect credible information. If she can achieve that in a short time, and so many others are purveying information they think credible, what on earth makes her think that the government is trying to stop information being collected, or believes that it is possible to succeed in such an endeavour?

Dr. Neistat claims that the government and the LTTE are engaged in a perverse competition to demonstrate the greatest disregard for the civilian population’. She conveniently thus ignores that the government expended much energy and money in providing high quality health and education to those under LTTE control for several years, and continued to supply them when the LTTE drove them from pillar to post as the forces regained more and more territory in the North.

She ignores forced conscription by the LTTE of one and then two children per family, the forced labour to build bunkers with all the cement the Sri Lankan government sent in for dwellings for civilians. And she will not admit that, if civilians are trying to get into government controlled territory, 35,000 of them succeeding despite being shot at in LTTE attempts to stop them, they obviously do not share her view that both sides are as bad as each other.

Dr. Neistat claims that, following the fall of Kilinochchi, civilian casualties have skyrocketed. This is certainly true, but there is no mention of the fact that many of these were due to the LTTE firing on its own people, as indicated by the UN verdict (on the day on which TamilNet reported the greatest number of alleged deaths) that ‘we believe that firing this morning was most likely from an LTTE position’.

Significantly the Human Rights Watch Extremism estimate of civilian deaths, up to 2,000, which they claim came from independent monitors on the ground, is almost the same as that propagated by TamilNet. However, HRW’s figure of other ‘civilian casualties’, 5,000, far exceeds what would otherwise have been thought the worst case scenario, that of TamilNet, which alleged fewer than half that figure over the last eight months.

Dr. Neistat talks about insufficient food, medical care, and shelter in government-run internment camps, which are obviously a figment of her imagination, since no one from the UN or non-governmental agencies who has visited the welfare centres has made any such claim. However Dr Neistat then pulls rank about her wide experience of ‘many conflict areas across the world’ to say that she has ‘rarely seen a humanitarian disaster of such scale’, which is a statement that cries out for that old examination rubric, ‘Name names’.

Dr. Neustat then claims that Sri Lankan forces ‘have committed numerous indiscriminate and perhaps disproportionate attacks consisting of artillery bombardment and aerial bombing. These include attacks on the government-proclaimed "safe zones" and on clearly marked hospitals. Statements by senior officials indicating that civilians who do not leave LTTE-controlled areas are subject to attack are indicative of an intent to commit war crimes.’ which is rich even for her. If she can name me, why can she not name these ‘senior officials’, and perhaps cite what they said to prove her point? Does she not see that talking of ‘perhaps disproportionate attacks’ reveals her prejudices?

She does try to substantiate her claim regarding ‘clearly marked hospitals’ with a long list, dating only from December, which was after we had pointed out how careful the government had been in the preceding six months, since TamilNet had alleged hardly any collateral damage. And whilst it cannot be asserted that there has been no collateral damage since, there was only one allegation of a civilian death until January 22nd, when it was claimed that 30 people had died in an attack on Vallipuram hospital.

When the doctor cited initially denied this, the claim was brought down to 5, while it is ignored by Dr Neustat that this was not a hospital marked by coordinates but a medical centre set up suddenly. Indeed, even the TamilNet claims about this, and the Udaiyaarkadu hospital refer to them as ‘makeshift’ hospitals. It is therefore disingenuous of Dr Neustat to assert that ‘Deliberately attacking a hospital is a war crime.’, and use these instances to bolster her case,

With regard to violations by the LTTE, HRW quotes eyewitness accounts of particulars and, though there are no names, there is some description at least of the alleged eyewitnesses. Contrariwise, claims about excesses by the Sri Lankan forces are usually generalized and full of whims and wise sayings. What are claimed to be eyewitness accounts are sometimes at odds with the earlier TamilNet claims, as when an incident on January 24th is said to have taken place in a playground, whereas TamilNet mentioned a hospital.

The number of deaths alleged is the same, 7, while HRW has 15 persons injured where TamilNet has 87. Whatever the number these deaths and injuries are too many, but as the Bishop of Jaffna put it, the LTTE had positioned its guns amidst civilians, which HRW grants, though helpfully noting that they were ‘about two to four kilometers north of the playground’ and also that the ‘SLA was also not prohibited from attacking LTTE forces inside a safe zone.’ Though obviously the obligations of a government are greater than those of terrorists, this incident, assuming the HRW account is accurate, does not justify the claim of ‘serious violations of international humanitarian law’ which led to high civilian casualties’.

Dr. Neustat then goes on to talk of what she calls lack of humanitarian access after September 2008, and repeats her charge of shortages of water, food, medical supplies and other necessities’, none of which have been reported by others, with the UN indeed informing the Consultative Committee on Humanitarian Assistance after a monitoring visit in December that it was pleasantly surprised at the satisfactory levels of health (and also of education, with the government conducting the General Certificate of Education Ordinary Level Public Examination).

Though things have got more difficult since then, this has finally prompted people who seemed to be hedging their bets before to categorically call upon the LTTE to let go of the civilians whom it was holding against their will. With the support of the Church, 35,000 did make their way out in February, and if there is no ambiguity about criticism of the LTTE for keeping the rest, it is likely that they too will soon be set free.

Then Dr. Neustat, ignoring the fact that, despite the propaganda of both the LTTE and HRW, 35,000 people chose to make their way to what those two organizations described as internment camps, continues with the usual HRW diatribe about these. She sets up a Manichaen dichotomy in claiming that ‘Instead of providing the internally displaced with the assistance and protection they are entitled to under international law, the Sri Lankan government continues to violate their fundamental rights’, forgetting that not only have physical needs been provided, but that education and vocational training have also commenced.

Dr. Neustat talks of arbitrary detention during screening procedures as though she is the sole arbiter of the reasons the Sri Lankan government might have for particular security precautions. However, given that the government has only placed in judicial custody 32 of the 250 or so youngsters who confessed to being fighting cadres, and has allowed the others to remain with their families, its conduct can scarcely be described as arbitrary.

Dr. Neustat then goes on to complain of conditions in the camps as well as the hospitals, obviously not aware that the UN had actually said it could not assist at the level the government had prescribed because it was beyond UN standards. The ICRC has consistently praised the efforts of the Sri Lanka Ministry of Health. Dr. Neustat may have different ideas of a public health system, given her own experience, but she should read the plaudits the Sri Lankan system has received from international observers, and also register the comparative efficiency with which it has dealt with such a large influx of patients.

And though she complains of security precautions, and that humanitarian assistance from outsiders is forbidden, she must recognize first the need to limit access given the reach and intensity of Tiger terrorism, and secondly the fact that many humanitarian workers, including indefatigable nuns, have been assisting the Ministry in its work. Besides, government has made arrangements for relations to accompany those being treated, even though that makes security precautions all the more difficult.

Dr. Neustat cites some cases of what she claims are disappearances, but is extraordinarily coy about these. She may claim that she is silent because of fear for her informants, but since government has had cases of families who were separated in the trek to safety brought to its notice, and has sought and in many cases already achieved reunification, Dr Neustat should get over this particular neurosis if she is really anxious to help.

She should also avoid sweeping generalizations such as ‘some detainees are children’ since government has been waiting anxiously for such victims of the Tigers, but has so far found none, though some of those who confessed to being cadres were former child recruits, though now over eighteen.

Dr. Neustat claims that ‘Several sources reported to Human Rights Watch the presence of plainclothes military intelligence and paramilitaries in the camps. A UN official in Vavuniya told Human Rights Watch that she and colleagues have seen members of paramilitary groups in different camps.’ It is astonishing that this has not been conveyed to government, since the forces, who are present in uniform too to help as necessary, have made it a point to prevent any such incursion.

Indeed, when I checked a claim that the USAID sponsored agency Internews had reported something of the sort, they denied it – but clearly HRW has its own special sources, none of which will actually make any clear allegation.

HRW also goes on at length about restrictions, without any recognition that, with 35,000 people arriving suddenly and the Tiger practice of deathly infiltration, security precautions are essential, at least until the Tiger command structure is dismantled. HRW also ignores that restrictions on outside access were intended to prevent exploitation of those who had been previously exploited by the Tigers, and that aid agencies, once they had committed to particular acts of assistance, have been granted access.

Journalists too now visit, though the salacious reporting of HRW makes one realize why some precautions are still necessary, since the Tiger propaganda wing is now its most efficient component and will take ruthless advantage of anything critical of the government.

Sadly, so systematic has HRW been in its critiques of the Sri Lankan government, that one begins to wonder whether it thinks such grist to the terrorist mill to be no bad thing. Certainly its reliance on simply one-sided information and its refusal to even attempt to engage with government, indicates a deviousness that does no credit to the ideals it professes.

(Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha is head of SCOPP and Secretary. Ministry of Disaster Management and Human Rights)

Posted by transCurrents at 06:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

by Thrishantha Nanayakkara

On Feb. 9, an LTTE suicide bomber killed herself inside a crowded transit camp maintained by the government for displaced Tamil civilians in northern Sri Lanka. She killed and injured scores of Tamil men, women, and children awaiting transport to safer areas. A day later, the LTTE shot and killed 19 civilians as they attempted to cross over to government held areas. The incident was not widely reported in international media, perhaps due to its low political appeal. However, it is absolutely imperative that we resolve—as a global community—that no rebel group or government be allowed to commit such crimes against humanity again.

As a Sri Lankan who has spent most of his life in a brutal conflict between the government and the LTTE—also known as the Tamil Tigers—I have seen many instances in which crime against helpless civilians could have been avoided had the global community devised better mechanisms and conventions to those affected by conflict.

[A Tamil family in conflict-affected northern Sri Lanka-pic by: WFP/Sri Lanka]

Just as gravity pulls together the local chaotic movements of water droplets to orchestrate the outer geometric identity of a waterfall, conventions pull together human turmoil to orchestrate the notion of humanity. The Tamil Tigers can perpetrate the above crime and face mere condemnation from a few countries, because almost no convention to protect war-affected communities exerts enough pressure on rebel groups who abuse civilians. Nearly all mechanisms are devised to limit the scope of military action that a government can take to face a rebellion, which has been proven insufficient to protect internally displaced persons. Moreover, this pressure imbalance is often abused by parties with vested interests to interfere in the internal politics of war-affected countries like Sri Lanka, further compounding the vicious cycle for those affected.

Modern conflicts with sophisticated international involvements—combined with the bitter experiences faced by countries like Sri Lanka during the colonial past—often lead such governments to take extreme precautions to ensure no covert foreign force creeps into their internal politics again. This was evident in Sri Lanka when the government ordered all non-governmental organizations except the International Committee of Red Cross to leave rebel-held areas in September 2008. This action was taken after Sri Lankan authorities learned that several NGOs had wittingly or unwittingly given material aid to the Tamil Tigers.

For example, the government’s unmanned aerial vehicles identified heavy equipments belonging to an NGO called “Norwegian People’s Aid” being used by the LTTE to build a complex network of massive earth bunds around its major strongholds, such as Killinochchi and Mulattivu. Some bunds were longer than 30 miles and rose above 10 feet. When questioned, the NPA replied that LTTE robbed the machinery from them. The government’s position was further consolidated when the program officer of another NGO, called “ZOA,” stated that he would remain with the LTTE to fight against the government, thus disobeying the demand to move out of the rebel-held area.

The civilians of the country were victimized most out of this political drama. Therefore, there is great need to introduce innovative global conventions to exert adequate pressure on NGOs operating in war-affected countries—especially with a colonial history—to absolutely honor the sovereignty of the country. The pressure from the donors alone has proven to be insufficient in the Sri Lankan case.

Furthermore, in the absence of independent information sources to assess the situation of IDPs trapped between the warring parties, the global community should empower international organizations like the United Nations to use modern technology such as satellite imagery and reconnaissance aircrafts to verify claims made by various parties. For instance, the Sri Lankan government claimed that the Tamil Tigers had moved more than six heavy artillery guns into the governmentally declared safe zone to invite return fire to civilian neighborhoods.

The LTTE, on the other hand, claimed that the government forces had shelled a hospital in Puthukkudyiruppu. This hit the headlines of many international media. The only way the government could prove it was false was to take images using a Beechcraft. Had there been powerful global conventions to allow the UN to use modern technology to verify such politically sensitive claims, room for political gains over the lives of innocent civilians could have been blocked. By leaving allowances to political bigotry, we are putting the lives of thousands of civilians at risk.

Due to the fact that communities and their aspirations continue to change, conflicts are an indispensable reality in our societies. My definition of peace is an atmosphere in which harmonious change can occur. Therefore, I am stressing the need to introduce innovative global conventions to exert balanced pressure on all stakeholders in a conflict zone. This would keep disturbances within the frame of humanity, just as gravity orchestrates droplets colliding without repeatable pattern into a waterfall.

(Thrishantha Nanayakkara is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. This article appeared in The Harvard Crimson)

Posted by transCurrents at 03:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

by Michael Binyon

Rioting in the Punjab. A military mutiny in Bangladesh. The seizure and intimidation of a newspaper editor in Sri Lanka. Is South Asia falling apart? Is instability about to engulf a region that is home to a third of the world’s population?

In each case, the violence comes after a long period of mounting tension. In Pakistan, the clashes were sparked by popular anger that the Supreme Court has barred Nawaz Sharif, the main opposition leader and leading politician from Punjab, from holding office.

In Bangladesh, thousands of mutinous troops from the paramilitary Bangladesh Rifles went on the rampage to demand higher pay, better conditions and longer holidays.

[Jan 2009: Deputy High Commissioner of UK in Sri Lanka, Mark Gooding, meeting with M.V. Kaanamylnathan, the Editor of Uthayan (A popular Tamil newspaper) newspaper, Jaffna-more pics]

And in Sri Lanka, the police arrest of a Tamil editor attending a funeral came as government troops are on the brink of victory in the long-running war against Tamil Tiger separatists.

The causes of the violence differ. But there is a common underlying theme: in each case, anger is rising at the failure of government to cope with looming challenges. The consequences could be dire. Each of the three countries is teetering on the edge of breakdown. Rioting and popular demonstrations will only exacerbate the problems and the tensions.

In Pakistan, the violence in Punjab is directly related to the political turmoil unleashed in the final year of rule by President Musharraf and the chaotic conditions in which a civilian government succeeded him. The two largest parties, the Pakistan People’s Party and the Pakistan Muslim League, are regionally based, each drawing their strength largely from the country’s two main provinces — the PPP from Sind and the Muslim League from Punjab.

The rivalry between Asif Zardari, widow of the assassinated former party leader Benazir Bhutto, and Nawaz Sharif, the leader ousted by General Musharraf’s coup in 1999, is intense. They briefly formed a government of national unity as a way of forcing Mr Musharraf from office last August, but swiftly fell out over whether he should be prosecuted and all dismissed judges reinstated. Within weeks Mr Sharif withdrew his ministers and went into opposition.

Both leaders are now in a struggle for supremacy. But both feel vulnerable because of previous court convictions that have been set aside. Each party is therefore trying to use the courts, almost the only civil institution still widely respected, to gain political advantage. And few people in Punjab believe that the latest ruling, disqualifying Mr Sharif and his brother, currently the province’s chief minister, from political office is free of pressure by President Zardari.

The riots are a warning to the Government that it has already lost popular support, failing to tackle religious extremism, failing to quell the rebellions in the tribal provinces and, above all, failing to curb inflation, unemployment and economic decline exacerbated by the global downturn.

A similar perception of both political and economic failure now dogs the government of Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh. The mutiny was sparked by anger among the 42,000-strong border guard force at low pay and shorter food rations than the regular army. But it represents the general anger of many in government employment at stagnant or falling living standards.

This, too, is a warning to a civilian government that returned to office only in December. The previous military government had disbanded the two main parties and promised a clean-up of Bangladesh’s notoriously corrupt politics. Sheikh Hasina is one of the two “battling begums” — widows of murdered politicians who have divided the country in the long feud and who were both initially banned and investigated for corruption by the military government.

There is a real danger now that the mutiny, although brought to an end for now, will be echoed by the traditional rivals of Mrs Hasina’s party. The military coup was meant to end a culture of corruption. But if the result of the election has returned not only civilian rule but some of the discredited politicians to power, frustration in Bangladesh will grow — especially as the recession begins to cut the country’s already low living standards.

In Sri Lanka, the fear among the Tamils and many moderate Sinhalese is that the present Government, flushed with its victory over the Tamil Tigers, is seeking not reconciliation but triumph. There is a growing intolerance of any criticism of the military campaign, of the plans for dealing with Tamil refugees and of anyone still proposing autonomy for the former secessionist regions.

Many Sri Lankans are delighted that the 20-year civil war seems to be ending. But many are also deeply worried that the seeds of future conflict are being sown. The arrest and murder of newspaper critics are an ominous sign that free speech may be one of the casualties of the war, along with any hopes for a measure of autonomy for the Tamils.

The three conflicts are on the periphery of India, which appears far more stable and settled than its neighbours. But with a general election coming in May, tensions will inevitably grow there and political frustrations rise. India is immensely resilient, however, and has a deeply embedded tradition of democracy. Whether this is enough to overcome the looming economic difficulties or help its turbulent neighbours remains to be seen. [courtesy: The Times, UK]

Posted by transCurrents at 02:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

by Rajan Philips

In his book: Abiding by Sri Lanka, Qadri Ismail teases the eminent historian, K.M. de Silva, for the latter’s rendering of history that accounts for the Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims contentiously co-existing but “finds no Sri Lankans in Sri Lanka”. The problem of finding Sri Lankans in Sri Lanka has become more than a matter of textual teasing as old divisions are hardened by the current war.

Among the Sinhalese, there is jubilation over the outcome of the war and the victories of their soldiers. President Rajapakse himself has led the celebrations, setting an atavistic tone that has done little to dispel the dominant perception that Sri Lanka is Sinhalese and the Sinhalese are Sri Lanka. This unfortunate and outdated perception is second nature to many influential Sinhalese politicians but anathematic to all others including large numbers of Sinhalese who positively support a plural Sri Lanka.

On the other hand, many Tamils, not all, are dejected by the defeat of the LTTE. Almost all Tamils, even those who are not supporters of the LTTE, are concerned that the Rajapakse government will use the defeat of the LTTE to deny them their equality. Sri Lankan Tamil politics has never been as rudderless as it currently is. Nor has it been as existential – their land has been scorched, tens of thousands of civilians are caught in the crossfire, and several more are living in a virtual state of nature in the North and East.

[Tamil Demonstration in Toronto - January 30, 2009-more pics by: TricotTreat]

The Sri Lankan Tamils in the Diaspora are not extricated from the goings-on in the old country. They are often considered to be a big part of the problem because of their support of the LTTE, and by the same token they will have to be part of the solution too. No one has the right to tell them to find federalism in Canada or settle down in Tamil Nadu. Their stakes in their natal land will not be removed regardless of where they are and what happens in the war. The age of globalization has ensured that.

Besides the Sinhalese and Tamils, Muslims and Upcountry (or Kandyan) Tamils have their own political silos. The Muslims are no longer the group to be tagged on as “Tamil speaking people” by Tamil political leaders at their pleasure, dispensed with by the LTTE in its arrogance, or used as vote banks by the Sinhalese political parties at their convenience. The Muslims are a democratic force to reckon with and will be a formidable presence at future constitutional tables.

The Kandyan Tamils, finally citizens after fifty years in political purgatory, are coming free of the old paternalistic and now corrupt yoke of the CWC. They sit atop what is still a vital sector of Sri Lanka’s economy, and have issues to be addressed and voices to be heard that cannot be substituted for by some inept backbench presence in an oversized cabinet of ministers.

The results of the recent elections in the Wayamba and the Central Provinces show not only the sheer dominance of Mahinda Rajapakse over Ranil Wickremasinghe among the Sinhalese, but also the voting cleavages along ethnic lines. About 70% of the Sinhalese including a solid proportion of Sinhalese Catholics in Wayamba have voted for the Rajapakse government while about the same proportion of Muslims and Kandyan Tamils mostly in the Central Province voted against the government.

These cleavages were there before the LTTE was born. It was their exacerbation over thirty years following independence that produced the LTTE. By its method and its madness the LTTE made itself the problem and created the illusion that merely by eliminating it Sri Lanka would solve all its pre-LTTE problems. The prospect of eliminating the LTTE has also given rise to facile economic expectations that the mere defeat of the LTTE will propel the Sri Lankan stock market to go through the roof and carry the real economy with it!

The outcome of the war will not by itself lessen the task of resolving the pre-LTTE political problems, and the economic costs of war will stifle Lanka for a long time to come. Comparers of Sri Lanka’s ethnic war and the American Civil War should rather than a cowboy reading of the military history of the US Civil War undertake a more serious study of the constitutional and economic histories of the United States.

North and East as Garrison Provinces

More likely to happen is what is being bandied in government circles as the need to consolidate the military victory in the name of national security and in the name of forestalling future challenges to national sovereignty. This approach is neither new nor wise. It is the extension of the old approach of N.Q. Dias, Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s Permanent Secretary, in the 1960s, about whom Neville Jayaweera has recently been writing in these columns. The application of Dias’s method now would be to go beyond establishing military outposts in the Northern and Eastern Provinces and turn them into garrison provinces where suspect Tamils will be kept under surveillance, even in camps if necessary, by Sinhalese soldiers while Sinhalese civilians are induced to settle to change the ethnic composition of these areas. Ethnic surveillance and settlement is what is reportedly happening in the ‘liberated East’.

If this is what is being planned for the North after its ‘liberation’, it would mean that the government has learnt nothing and forgotten everything from the LTTE experience. The Dias initiative of planting a military outpost in every other town or so in the North and the East to keep the Tamils in their place only ended in provoking the rise of Tamil militancy. It took almost two decades before organized violence broke out because Tamils at that time had more to lose than gain from violence given the ‘middle-class’ nature of their society based on human capital and their fine-grained system of family properties. That is no longer the case.

Thirty years of violence has broken and brutalized the Tamil society. People living in the Northern and Eastern Provinces have been displaced multiple times, have little to lose and are quite used to receiving and returning violence. Constant military poking of them will eventually produce violent reactions. They may not have the organization, the resources and the fire power of the LTTE, but they will have the rage and the resourcefulness that Palestinian teenagers showed in their first intifada using sticks and stones against Israeli military tanks. A revamped Dias approach will turn the North and East into two restively lawless provinces that will not make life there any worse than it is now, but will impose a permanent drag on the rest of the country.

A second likely development is on the political front. What is being talked about is a condescending approach that recognizes the need for a political settlement but insists that the military defeat of the LTTE has set limits on what the Tamils can and cannot ask for as well as the manner in which they could ask for it. The Thirteenth Amendment is the most what the Tamils will get, it has been asserted, but they should not expect all of it, only parts of it. The debate over whether the Thirteenth Amendment is sufficient or not will go on endlessly, and a military outcome is not going to put an end to it. What is more important is whether there is the political will and commitment to bring about a constitutional change at this time or in the near future. Political will and commitment are two attributes that have been sorely missing in the shaping of Sri Lanka’s constitutional development.

I say this because both the Donoughmore Constitution and the Soulbury Constitution would have worked and much of our grief would have been avoided if rightwing Sinhalese political leaders had even half-faithfully adhered to the letter and the spirit of the two constitutions in regard to minority rights and sensibilities. Indeed, Lord Soulbury believed that he and his Commissioners had given minority rights the best protection that “the wit of man could devise”. What he did not account for was the electoral opportunism of rightwing Sinhalese leaders to deliberately violate the constitution that his Commission had prepared based on the proposals of the Board of Ministers comprising the self-same leaders. Sinhalese constitutional violations before and after independence, respectively precipitated the Tamil demands for Fifty-Fifty and Federalism. There is no need to revisit the fiascos of the 1972 and the 1978 Constitutions that were virtually drafted, enacted and adopted as if Tamils, Muslims and the Kandyan Tamils did not live in Sri Lanka.

The Thirteenth Amendment, reluctantly introduced at India’s insistence, is far more comprehensive and specific than the Soulbury Constitution. Along with changes to the Citizenship laws the Amendment provides the framework to address three of the “four basic demands” that was formulated by the Federal Party in 1957 and formed the basis of the B-C Pact: in regard to language, regional autonomy and citizenship. The fourth one calling for the stoppage of “state aided colonization” (not to be confused with voluntary internal migration) in the North and East could also be addressed if the government abandons the surveillance and settlement approach that it now seems ready to implement in the North and East.

But the Thirteenth Amendment has had no willing and committed executor. It has been stymied not only by the intransigence of the LTTE but also by the equally vehement opposition among Sinhalese politicians. The present President went further and for once listening to the Supreme Court delinked the North and East even though the Court gave him the option of legalizing the merger of the two Provinces through a parliamentary resolution. Artfully, Rajapakse also arranged New Delhi’s acquiescence after the fact. Notwithstanding the neighbourly goodwill, New Delhi is still unable to get a forthright and public commitment from the Sri Lankan President that he would faithfully implement even what is left of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Nam-arkum kudiyallom

Nor have Delhi and other powers been able to prevail on the government and the LTTE to stop fighting and prevent the humanitarian tragedy involving the civilians in the combat area. The international community sat on its hands for too long and is now unable to do anything to prevent a tragedy escalating into a disaster. International institutions and their highly paid officials stand helpless and exposed of their ineffectiveness. Reduced to basics and stripped of the grand language of sovereignty and self-determination, the failed role of India and the international community in the situation in Sri Lanka is no different from the inability of a civilian police force to stop two fighting gangs going at one another in the middle of a city, town or village. The difference is that globalization and the post-coldwar ‘imbalance’ of powers have transformed local conflicts into modern war pits using weaponry that by any rational assessment should be beyond the means of most of the conflicting state and non-state parties.

The Government of Sri Lanka has been accused of taking cover under its sovereignty to deny the international community its competence to protect the war affected civilians in Sri Lanka. The accusation is not without merit but it is incomplete in that it lets off the LTTE despite its abominable record of ignoring every international plea to respect democracy and human rights while claiming the right of self-determination. The right of self-determination loses all meaning and the claim for it is rendered sinister if it is not intertwined with the principles and practice of democracy.

Self-determination can be experienced in many ways. Tamils steeped in the tradition of their psalms and poetry, know the immortal words of their seventh century savant, Tirunavukarasar (Appar): “Nam-arkum kudiyallom” - we are not subjects of anyone. That sums up better than anything else in Tamil ethos the essence and the defiance of individual self-determination.

In its far better known and more materially sustained European origins too, the principle of self-determination began as an individual development before being usurped, some times positively but many times perversely and atrociously, not only by the building block of modern society – the nation state, but also by non-state actors wanting to become states. In the long history of national self-determination the notorious location of the LTTE is quite widely acknowledged. What is not equally realized is that in taking on and defeating the LTTE at its own game, the state of Sri Lanka is emulating the LTTE and is establishing its own notoriety.

During the dark days of 1983, Narasimha Rao, then India’s Foreign Minister, flew to Colombo and personally delivered a stern message from Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to President Jayewardene. The latter though taken aback kept his composure and responded: “You may occupy us but you cannot conquer our spirit”! Nothing less should be expected of the Tamils of Sri Lanka.

Posted by transCurrents at 08:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

by Malarthamil

The international community is slowly waking up to the humanitarian crisis in Sri Lanka which is quite overdue for the last few months. However it is regrettable that a discussion in the Security Council of United Nations, either about the humanitarian crisis or about the political settlement for Ealem Tamils, has been kept in abeyance due to the geopolitical considerations of the member countries. The day by day account of the last week indicates a stalemate in this issue.

Mr Ban Ki-moon called on for a “suspension in fighting”.

On 19 February 2009 the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes, on a three day visit to Sri Lanka, stressed the need to ensure the protection of civilians caught in the conflict zone in Sri Lanka

On 20 February 2009 UK Ambassador John Sawers at the UN spoke of a Security Council briefing once Holmes return from Sri Lanka.

On 21 February 2009 while returning after the visit Mr.John Holmes urged combatants on both sides of the battle ravaging the northern Vanni region of Sri Lanka to make greater efforts to stop the rising toll of civilian casualties

On 23 February 2009, the U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on for a “suspension in fighting” between the Sri Lanka government and Tamil Tiger separatists to allow civilians to escape. Ban further told “There is an urgent need to bring this conflict to an end without any further unnecessary loss of civilian life and destruction of Sri Lankan society,”. He also said the United Nations was renewing its call on all sides to work for a “political discussion to achieve an orderly end to the conflict.” But on the same day Sri Lanka Government rejected a call for ceasefire by LTTE.

On 24 February 2009 the U.S. Senate committee focused its attention on the situation in Sri Lanka.. Witnesses at the Senate hearing descried the actions of both sides. Anna Neistat, senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, described a deplorable situation in the so-called safe zone, established by the government to protect refugees. “We received several detailed accounts from people who stayed within the safe zone, and these accounts suggest that the shelling by Sri Lankan forces killed dozens if not hundreds of people inside there,” she said.

[UN Nations humanitarian chief John Holmes addresses journalists during a press conference in Colombo on February 19, 2009-AFP pic by Lakruwan Wanniarachchi, via Yahoo! News]

Other witnesses in the US Senate Committee described what they called the Sri Lankan government’s growing assault on dissent and pointed out that nobody has been prosecuted for any of incidents of attack on journalists or abduction and disappearance of Tamils. Ambassador Lunstead said the world community could play an important role in shaping Sri Lanka’s future. He recommended that international donors impose conditions on economic aid to the government of Sri Lanka. He said those conditions should include an improvement in the country’s human rights record, the resettlement of displaced persons and a devolution of power from the capital, Colombo, to local areas to allow all Sri Lankans to have a greater say in how they are governed. Anna Neistat further urged the United Nations Security Council to hold a special session to address Sri Lanka’s humanitarian catastrophe.

On 24 February 2009 Britain’s Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, agreed with UK parliamentarians who said that the Sri Lankan government is “quite prepared to go ahead with acts of genocide.” Responding to Mr. Elfyn Llwyd, MP, Mr. Miliband said “the resolution of [a] terrorist problem cannot be achieved at the expense of the rights of minority communities in Sri Lanka, and that is what we are trying to work on.”

But to the dismay of the Human rights activists, few days back, at the UN, it is learnt ,a move by Mexico to bring the Sri Lanka situation on to the Security Council was scuttled by Russia. Russia took up the position that Sri Lanka was not on the agenda of the Security Council. A Foreign Ministry source in UK said there was little chance that the Sri Lanka situation would be brought up before the Security Council. He said both Russia and China would oppose such a move because the Russians wanted to avoid its human rights situation in Chechenya being put on the Security Council agenda and the Chinese would protect their flank against any attempts to put Tibet on the agenda.

These happenings only show the diplomatic manipulations of the state of Sri Lanka in keeping the big powers beyond the focusing distance of the crisis at Sri Lanka.

But what the international Community could not ignore is that the State of Sri Lanka enjoys unabated impunity in spite of having engaged in extrajudicial killings, abductions, extortion, conscription, and the use of child soldiers. Despite confirming use of cluster bombs by the Sri Lankan Army, the United Nations could take no further action on such open crime.

Under these circumstances, Tamils are wondering whether any country in this world is concerned about putting the Humanitarian or Political aspirations of Tamils in the agenda of the Security Council.

Sri Lanka turning a deaf ear to the international community is understandable but the International Community showing a blind eye to the sufferings of Tamil population could not be explained by its own standards set in the United Nations.

In all their statements the UN, UK, USA or EU appeal to both GOSL and LTTE, accepting very well that LTTE represents the Tamil nation in the island of Sri Lanka and they equally deplore both parties for the crisis but at the same time have proscribed LTTE and allowed the GOSL to proceed with genocide. This is seen as an off-balanced stance and is not justified. Just blaming both sides or appealing both sides could not be considered as neutral if it is not going to stop the killing. They should either declare Sri Lanka a rogue country and apply economic sanctions or lift the ban on LTTE or openly discuss the issue in the security council putting aside the geopolitical compulsions of the big powers and come to a conclusion to stop the count down of the Tamil population in Sri Lanka first and to declare freedom to Ealem.

(Malarthamil is a civil engineer and writer-poet inspired by Thirukkural.This piece appeared in Kalugu.com)

Posted by transCurrents at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

by Shanie

I have raised the questions, daughter
which you and your kids must ponder.
I feel guilty I did not sooner
in my lifetime urge them stronger.
And now, ere I answers provide
I may in cold blood be buried.
Have I your futures compromised?

Ken Saro-Wiwa was a Nigerian writer and activist, a leader of the minority Ogoni people, who was tried in a sham trial by the then military regime and hanged in 1995. He wrote this poignant poem for Zina, his daughter, shortly before his execution. This poem is included in an excellent series of booklets under the title ‘The Value of Dissent’ put out by the Civil Rights Movement of Sri Lanka between 1991 and 2000. The poem has relevance today to an alarming growth of a culture of intolerance in our country. It is not only the state authorities, but also various armed groups and individuals act with impunity by resorting to violence against those who dissent and who disagree with them. This week’s arrest of the Sudar Oli editor Vidyatharan was the latest in the harassment and intimidation of journalists and dissidents. Vidyatharan may or may not be guilty of the charges being made against him, but the manner of his arrest raises several questions and doubts. It is similar to the arrest of journalist Tissanayagam, his incarceration for several months, and the ‘charges’ made against him in a trial that is still going on.

[Illustration of the struggle of Ken Saro-Wiwa-by AHSart]

The CRM’s publication also reproduces an extract from a 2nd Century BC Pali text ‘Milinda Prasna’ a conversation between King Milinda and the Buddhist monk Nagasena:

The King said, "Bhante Nagasena, will you converse with me?"

"Sire, if you will converse with me under the fashion of the wise, I will. But if you converse with me as Kings converse, I will not."

"And how, Bhante Nagasena, do the wise converse?"

"Sire, when the wise converse, whether they become entangled in their opponent’s arguments or extricate themselves, or whether they or their opponents are shown to be in error, and whether their own superiority or that of their opponents is proved, none of these things can make them angry."

"And how, Bhante, do kings converse?"

"Sire, when Kings converse they put forward a proposition, and if any should oppose it they order his punishment, saying, ‘Punish this fellow!’"

"Bhante, you are right. I will converse as the wise do, not as kings do. Let your reverence converse with me in all confidence. Let your reverence converse as unrestrainedly as if with a Bhikku, a novice, a lay disciple or a keeper of the monastery grounds. Have no fear!"

In an introduction to this series, the CRM stated that the publication originated in the context of the appalling violence that had disfigured Sri Lanka, accompanied by a terrifying rise of intolerance. The CRM identified as a priority the need to promote understanding of not only the right to dissent but also the intrinsic value of dissent. ‘Threats to the free exchange of ideas certainly do not come from government alone. They can and do come from other sources too; from various social and political groups, from communal and individual attitudes, even from majority public opinion. Indeed, the suppression of opposing views by the state is often with the support of society at large; governments in many ways reflect society’s prejudices. However, intolerance from whatever source is dangerous to society, and must be identified and opposed.’

The CRM’s warnings are even truer today with growing threats, intimidation and even killing of dissidents. Despite President Rajapakse’s attempts at damage control, these petty ‘potentates’ continue to act with impudence and impunity. These ‘fascist tendencies’, to borrow Michael Roberts’ phrase, must be exposed and opposed, for the sake of the future of democratic rule in our country. As fellow Island columnist Tisaranee Gunasekera has stated, the rule of law must not be allowed to be replaced by the law of the rulers.

The helplessness of the civilians

The current conventional phase of the war rumbles along nearing its inevitable end. Tens of thousands of non-combatants however continue to lie trapped in the conflict zone. Apologists for the two sides, not caring a damn for the helplessness of these civilians, engage in shameless rhetoric. One set of apologists deny the brutality of the LTTE and deny that these trapped people are being used as human shields. The other set of apologists seek to justify the harsh and uncaring attitude towards these civilians. When they argue that those remaining in the LTTE controlled territory are LTTE sympathisers and deserve what they are being subjected to, they are in effect denying the claim that LTTE is using them as human shields.

The situation is compounded by the de facto censorship imposed on the media in the country. The ordinary people are deprived of independent information about the actual ground situation for the civilians. All this is sadly polarising our people as never before. The Tamil diaspora is fed an exaggerated story of the otherwise genuine suffering of the civilians and also a pro-LTTE slant to the real ground situation in the Vanni. This in turn is relayed via the internet to the middle class Tamils in the country and which then filters down to the ordinary Tamil people. Sinhala supremacist propaganda is readily made available to middle classes and the masses via both the electronic and print media. Naturally the result is a major polarisation between the Sinhala people and the minorities on how they perceive the current political position. This polarisation was more than evident in the way the people voted at the two Provincial Council elections held recently. Radhakrishnan of the Upcountry People’s Front stated that his Party which enjoyed substantial support in Nuwara Eliya-Maskeliya and which contested with the UPFA failed to win a single seat because the plantation workers, subject to harassment under the guise of security measures, voted against the Government. That was the ground situation for the minorities. War rhetoric and controlled war news however worked to the advantage of the Government among the Sinhala voters. The intimidation and de facto censorship may prove effective in the short term but in the longer term, history has repeatedly shown that it is counter-productive.

The Final War?

One vocal Sri Lankan diplomat has claimed that the current is the final war – the war to end all wars against LTTE terrorism in our country. He dismisses the fear expressed by many that once the present conventional phase of the war lends and LTTE loses all territory it controls, LTTE will revert to their former guerrilla war strategy. Another diplomat in Vinayagamoorthy Muraltharan, alias Colonel Karuna, now an Honourable Member of Parliament, disagrees. (We refer to this gentleman as a diplomat because he was officially issued a diplomatic passport by the government and allowed to travel under his incarnation as Kokila Gunawardena.) This gentleman predicts that the war will continue for twelve to eighteen months even after the LTTE loses all its territory.

Who is right will probably depend on whether the LTTE supremo is captured, killed or goes underground. Being a largely monolithic outfit, the LTTE will probably disintegrate if he is no longer there to provide leadership. But as Karuna predicts, the second tier of leadership may carry on an underground guerrilla war for some months. But if Pirapaharan himself goes underground, then we will have to brace ourselves for a prolonged and uncertain guerrilla war.

The success or otherwise of such a guerrilla war will depend largely on how the Government of Sri Lanka handles the aspirations of the minorities. If it comes up with political package that ensures that the Tamils, Muslims and other minorities feel that they are equal partners with the Sinhala people and are being treated with justice and dignity, then there is no potential for the LTTE or any other militant group to exist and enjoy popular support, a sine qua non for the success of a militant underground movement.

Posted by transCurrents at 10:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

by K.A.I. Kalyanaratne

An exposition made on a timely subject becomes more impacting when it is presented in an appropriate and meaningful setting. The topic of this essay, namely, ‘Sinhala language possesses an ingenious methodology to enrich its vocabulary’, cannot be considered as more meaningful, timely and appropriate than on March 2, the day the Sinhala community, and more specifically, our literati pay tribute with unbroken continuity, year in, year out, reminiscing the yeoman services rendered by an extraordinary personality who revived the Sinhala nation through his untiring industry aimed at uplifting the Sinhala language, community and the country (foi, ni, /i). This personality is none other than Munidasa Cumaratunga, and his 65th death anniversary falls on 2nd March 2009. The commemoration is scheduled to be conducted by the Hela Havula, at the J. R. Jayewardene Centre, in Colombo.

The users of the Sinhala language had been extremely conscious of formulating a methodology that could serve the formation of words - both nouns and verbs - and enriching the language, without diluting its intelligibility and marring its inimitable qualities. A language is closely interwoven with the thought-process of its users. More particularly a language that has developed through the ages to commit its people’s subtle nuances to writing, should, for certain, develop a methodology to coin words to help convey specific feelings and emotions, as well as, formal expressions, based on new discoveries and experiences.

Ingenuity in word-coinage

The Buddhist doctrine with its abstruse and knotty philosophical concepts, the advanced state of engineering and irrigation technology, sculpture and architecture, and even the medical science that existed at the time, to mention only a few of the nation’s more advanced industries, demanded a rich vocabulary both to express ideas, keep the momentum of the activities, spread the knowledge to the future generations, as well as to preserve such knowledge for posterity. All these industries were the products of the people of the soil, and therefore, they were created, planned and executed through the vernacular, which was none other than Sinhala.

Reliance on local parlance

Our native physicians are fully aware of the efficacy of the medicinal plant ‘isjs /is m,q’ or ‘yS/iaim,q’. It is often used for making medicines for breakages and fractures. ‘Vitis quadrangularis’, is its botanical term. It is a climbing plant, edible when tender, having four-winged stems. Our ancients named this plant based on the three words used in their parlance ‘isjs’, ‘/is’ and ‘m,q’. They neither sought the assistance of Sanskrit lexicons nor lexicographers, for that matter. Isn’t it a shame, therefore, to coin a different technical term for ‘quadrangle’ as ‘p;=ri%h’ or ‘p;=rN+ch’, when our surroundings provide a word ‘isjs /ish’ which is quite close to our hearts.

Dependence on native lexicons

The Sinhala language in its stages of development and enrichment had the fortune of possessing quite a number of lexicons. ‘‘rejkau,a ks>Kagqj’ or ‘kdur;ak ud,dj’ is one such lexicon. In giving alternatives to the meaning ‘ksYap,,’ (not shaking, motionless, still, steady, settled, calm or tranquil), the word ‘ou;a ‘ had been provided in the above lexicon. Professor Vinnie Vitharana in compiling a glossary of geographical terms (N+f.da, jsoHd YnsofldaIh) made use of ‘ou;a’, and coined ‘ou;alv’ for the geographical term ‘doldrums’. It means ‘the equatorial low-pressure belt’. The term provided for this phenomenon in the Composite Glossary of Geographical Technical Terms (Glossary published by the Department of Official languages, in 1962) had been ‘fvda,av%us ;Srh’. One needs no explanation to choose ‘ou;alv’ which is self-explanatory and akin to the Sinhala-tongue. The word ‘ou;s’ appears in Gurulugomi’s ‘Amavatura’, of the Polonnaruwa period, to connote the meaning ‘tamed/ controlled’. (taming of demon Alawaka). Hence, the word goes beyond the period of the Ruwanmal Nighantuwa.

Rendering of Computer Terminology into Sinhala

The lid of the issue of coinage of "Sinhala" technical terms was opened especially with the compilation of the Glossary of Technical Terms in Computer Science, published by the Education Publications Department in 1991. Several scholars challenged the suitability of the words coined by a panel of experts including several professors proficient in the Sinhala language and computer science.

The main criticisms against this glossary were based on

a) Inconsistency in the coinage of words
b) Inability to maintain economy in the usage of words
c) Inability to provide the different shades of meanings related to computers

The glossary under reference has only added additional words as adjectives to the common term ‘mrs.Klh’ without visualising the flexibility needed in using the term in different contexts. The glossary is silent on such shades of meanings as Computable, Computant, Computational, Computative, Computator, Compute, Computerization, and Computerize.

The Cumaratunga-Concept of Word-Coinage

The late scholar, Cumaratunga Munidasa, expresses , in the Subasa journal, his concept of coining of technical terms, in the following manner:

"The language is the most valuable possession of a nation. It should fully portray the character of the nation. Just because immensely coarse and rough words are found in Sanskrit or Wanga or Hindi, it is unbecoming of the nation to borrow such coarse and rough words in the same manner, without taking into consideration the character of both the Sinhala people and their language. It is necessary to deeply study whether we possess or not words that are quite akin to us."

(Volume 2, Issue No. 22, of 24th March, 1941)

Following this Cumaratunga-Concept of Word-Coinage, Kalasuri D. V. Richard de Silva, in his exposition on Coining of Technical Terms, presented at the Silver Jubilee of the Hela Havula, in 1966 (9th July) spelt out the three ways we should follow in attempt to coin words, viz.,

1. Coining of words taking cognisance of both the morphology and the meaning of the foreign word. Examples:

‘frfojsj’ for radio

‘;,nukh’ for turbine

‘lusgqj’ for committee

‘;,nKqj’ for telephone

2. Coining of words taking cognisance of the meaning of the foreign word. Examples:

‘ osh l=uqoqj’ for submarine

‘mysk m; ’ for post-card

‘mdmqjrej’ for foot-board

3. Sinhalizing the foreign word by making the word look like a Sinhala word. Examples:

‘nexl=j’ for bank

‘f,drsh’ for lorry

Philology

The above exposition would lucidly explain that any attempt made to render foreign words into a language should, as an initial activity, study the philology of that language. It is such a study that reveals the history and development of words in that particular language. Unlike most modern western languages, eastern languages, including Sinhala, have their unique word formations. It is such features that maintain the character and nature (unique personality) of each such language. Hence, any attempt made, sans such a study, would result in coining words that act as foreign bodies in the eye.

Technical terms in their proper sense, are not only confined to words relating to modern science and technology. The country has had a history of an advanced irrigation technology, architectural and sculptural technology, as well an advanced agricultural technology, medicine and astrology. Moreover, the advent of Buddhism entailed a planned coinage of terms and phrases capable of rendering its philosophy in its pure and serene form. Buddhism demanded exactitude in the usage of words and phrases so as to connote the quality of being very accurate.

The Sinhala language could, therefore, be described as a veritable palimpsest (an inscription in which the former records are found in the layers beneath the current surface) revealing the nation’s history, its technological advances, vastness of its civilization, richness of its literature and exhaustiveness of its vocabulary. Hence, to ignore such a repertoire of a nation’s wealth is, in fact, a heinous crime.

Overshadowing of language by Sanskritization

A study of the language, and more specifically the attempts made to render new knowledge into Sinhala, would reveal that for the last several years the process had led to deforming the character / characteristics of the nation’s most valued possession. In short it has been a steady process of ‘sanskritization’ of the language.

The language-sanskritization-process is not only confined to the Sinhala language. Short-sighted consultants, translators, and incompetent people had sought refuge in the Sanskrit language, and more specifically, Sanskrit roots of verbs and nouns to render borrowed knowledge into the Tamil language. The process of rendering knowledge of foreign sources, in fact, had commenced in South India much earlier, that is, as early as 1940s.

This is what a memorandum submitted by the ‘Committee of Educationists to the Government of Madras’, stated, as far back as 1941, on the coining of technical terms:

"Though a common terminology may be possible in Northern India where Hindustani and Sanskrit have mingled together very much and local languages have been greatly modified by them, such a terminology would be unsuited to the Tamil area where Tamils have preserved the purity of their language. Words coined must have Tamil roots and suffixes to make them intelligible to the Tamils."

Language planning, Standardization and coinage of technical terms

The Department of Swabhasha (1956), and subsequently, the Department of Official Languages (1962) were established initially to meet the urgent needs of the implementation of the Official Languages Act. However, it needs to be admitted that such hurried acts have affected the development of the language, as the executors had not been able to identify the salient characteristics of the language, and how an unplanned exercise would affect the future of the language. What is heard over the electronic media, as well as in the printed media, provide ample evidence of this debacle.

The Sinhala language possesses the desired efficacy, strength, prowess, flexibility, methodology and an exhaustive vocabulary to meet any demand made on the language as described above. As such, our language should not be made a vassalage of Sanskrit or any other language

(The writer is Manager, Training and Publications, Postgraduate Institute of Management, Member. Central Committee, Hela Havula)

Posted by transCurrents at 09:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

by Prof. A.N.I. Ekanayake

Independent perceptive Sri Lankans whose rational judgment has not been impaired by jingoistic inebriation with good news from the war front, may be excused for having conflicting emotions while watching the passion and sincerity with which President Barak Obama addressed the joint session of Congress and Senate today (25th February), to the accompaniment of repeated standing ovations.

It reminded one of the resounding optimism and euphoria with which millions of Americans heralded the ceremonial inauguration of their new President only a month ago. The joy of one community is often reason for another to weep for itself. I wonder how many people felt this strange dichotomy as they watched this latest performance, as well as the historic transfer of power in Washington a few weeks ago?

On the one hand one can rejoice with the American people. In this decadent age when political leaders in so many parts of the world are viewed with cynicism and contempt, it is the great good fortune of Americans to have discovered out of the blue a unique individual – intellectually brilliant, highly educated, articulate, charming, upright, humble, idealistic and principled to lead that nation. Not that the rise of Obama is a blessing limited to the American people.

Like it or not we now live in an inextricably interconnected "globalised" world where the fate of nations is inexorably determined by global economic, environmental and political currents, and where old fashioned grandiose notions of national sovereignty have very limited application. In such a globalised society it has been euphemistically asserted that the President of the United States is in a way the most powerful man on earth.

Consequently people of all nations not just Americans may well have good reason to rejoice at the emergence of a man of the stature of Barack Obama to give leadership to both America and a deeply troubled world at this time. However it is possible that for many people throughout the world such sentiments were probably eclipsed by the dejection of contemplating the contrasting reality of their own circumstances.

Indeed millions of people across many nations especially those Third world countries which deceptively label themselves "democratic and socialist" when in reality they are quagmires of tyranny, deceit and inequity, may well be deeply envious of Americans at this time when they behold the stark contrast between Barack Obama and their own leaders.

To such, the good fortune of the American people in electing an extraordinarily gifted President in the liberal tradition, is only a stark reminder of their own misfortune at being governed by politicians many of whom are perceived as being corrupt and unscrupulous, or at the very least just plain stupid and incompetent.

Ironically, the delectation of Americans at the election of Obama coincides with a period when they have every reason to be deeply despondent at the state of their nation. At this time Americans share with many other countries the agonies of a historic economic catastrophe. Arguably in some respects the United States being an infinitely larger and more complex economy may be more badly placed than other nations given millions of job losses, the virtual collapse of the banking system, and a tottering business corporations.

Americans also share with populations in many other countries the burden of terrorist threats, although being the prime target of Al-Qaeda’s deadly malevolence, and tied down by two unfinished wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, America is seemingly in a far worse situation than countries like Sri Lanka which boast that 95% of their battle against terrorism has been accomplished.

Nevertheless, why is it that the mood of the American people on inauguration day a few weeks ago was characterised by mighty hope and high morale compared to the spirit of gloom and despondency with which populations in so many countries with similar problems seem to face the future at this time ?. What is it in a nation that transcends the trials and tribulations of the present however depressing and enables people to face the future with hope and optimism ?.

The sight of Americans virtually dancing in the street in January, even as nearly 600,000 people lost their jobs that same month, shows that what enlivens a nation even in the darkest of times is the confident expectation of good governance in the years ahead under trustworthy and competent leadership. It is that which makes all the difference. With President Obama in power Americans rejoiced in being able to look forward to such leadership for many years to come. No doubt their confidence was founded on many certainties which sadly cannot be shared by many people in other parts of the world.

For example Americans could rest assured that their President had not come to power through the fortuitous circumstance of a minority community of his detractors being precluded from voting for his opponent. Nor were they in any doubt that on election the new President would put together a cabinet of brilliant individuals who would be capable of providing outstanding governance in that country. They had no reason to fear that Obama would (even if the US constitution allowed it) use tax payers money to make every Tom, Dick and Harry of a Democratic Party member in Congress into a minister who would do his every bidding and ensure his continuance in power.

There was not a chance that on becoming President Obama’s siblings (if he had any) would have been drawn into positions of influence in his administration. On the contrary Americans could take satisfaction from the fact that their chosen leader was a true intellectual ( a former President of the Harvard Law review no less ) who valued the contribution that quality individuals with education, ability and integrity could make to public service , as against cloning a whole generation of fawning sycophants and mediocrities who only tell politicians what they like to hear.

In the area of policy, in promising to pursue diplomacy and wage peace rather than war wherever possible the new President was not afraid of alienating hawkish nationalists in the American electorate. He neither flinched from being branded a terrorist by fanatics for his moderate views before election, nor did he include extremists in his team after assuming office in order to placate a particular constituency. And if it came to waging war the new President did not believe that the end justifies the means. His uncompromising commitment to human rights and the rule of law come what may was reflected in his inauguration address where he said "As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake".

Unlike so many heads of state with parochial loyalties Barack Obama has sought to bury political differences and unify a nation. Far be it from him to discredit and imperil political detractors and media critics by labeling them as terrorists, and the American public know that at the end of the day four years from now when it is time for re-election it is inconceivable that Obama would resort to ploys like lavishing cheap White House hospitality on successive groups of potential voters in order to canvass their support.

Finally, for us Sri Lankans, Obama’s resounding election victory brings into focus a still more depressing realisation. It has more to do with the contrasting attitudes in the two societies than any attributes of the new American President. The 13th amendment abolished slavery in America less than 150 years ago. Racism in the United States was such that less than just 50 years ago there were separate drinking fountains for whites and blacks, "Coloured balconies" in movie theaters, seats in the back of the bus for black people, with soldiers called out to protect little children who were trying to go to school.

Yet by 2008 Americans elected a black man as their President with the kind of acclamation that bore comparison with the victory celebrations after world war two. By contrast Tamils have resided in Sri Lanka for well over 2,000 years. The nations’ great tea industry was built on the backs of what was by modern standards Indian slave labour. Prof. K. M. de Silva records that during British colonial rule in the late 19th century "with the disinclination of the Sinhalese to take the lead in formal political agitation it was left to men like Ferguson, and more significantly the Tamils to assume the initiative.

The energy and enterprise displayed by the Tamil elite was a sharp contrast to the political inertia of their Sinhalese counterparts". After Independence the Tamils were an exceptionally educated and industrious community rising to the highest echelons of academe, administration and the learned professions in the country and making a distinguished contribution to public life. Nevertheless, in 2009 (whatever the constitutional provisions) it is inconceivable that Sinhala Buddhist hegemony in the island would allow a Tamil ( or for that matter even a practicing Christian) to be President or Prime Minister in this country! Even a personality who was as integrated into Sinhala society as Lakshman Kadiragamar and played an outstanding role in discrediting Tamil terrorism worldwide did not stand a chance.

What a tragedy that there should be so many reasons why ironically the very circumstances that made Americans rejoice wildly a few weeks ago should evoke feelings of gloom and dejection in some other parts of the world.

Posted by transCurrents at 05:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Briefing to the Security Council on the humanitarian situation in Sri Lanka: Statement by John Holmes, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator

Thank you, Mr. President, for this opportunity to brief the Council on my recent visit to Sri Lanka.

As you know, the humanitarian situation in northern Sri Lanka has deteriorated significantly over the last few months, in particular since the beginning of this year. As Sri Lankan Government forces have advanced deep into the Vanni area, which had been under the control of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, almost all the civilian population has been progressively displaced along with the LTTE. They are now in a rapidly shrinking pocket of land, and are increasingly being squeezed into a narrow coastal strip of 14 square kilometers, declared a 'no-fire zone' by the Sri Lanka Government, as shown in the map that I have distributed. Many of these people have been displaced many times in recent months, and indeed over the years, but they now face very great danger from fighting between the Sri Lankan Government forces and the LTTE. And there is strong evidence that the LTTE are preventing them from leaving.

[John Holmes, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, urged that combatants ensure the safety of civilians during a press briefing in Colombo on Feb 21-pic by Amantha Perera-IRIN]

Estimates vary of the number of civilians trapped, from 70,000 according to the Government, through around 200,000 according to UN estimates, up to 300,000 or more according to Tamil groups. The number of casualties from the fighting, among whom we believe are many civilians, cannot be verified in the absence of independent sources, since humanitarian agencies and the media have no access to the area, but we believe dozens of people per day at least are being killed and many more wounded.

The physical condition of these civilians is also of increasing concern. Because of the fighting in late January, land convoys organized by the WFP were suspended, leaving only the Government Agents and the ICRC providing some relief supplies by sea. Food, medical supplies, clean water, sanitation facilities and shelter are now extremely short. The risks from hunger and diseases are growing rapidly, in addition to those from the fighting.

Mr. President, the purpose of my visit was to obtain first-hand information about the dire humanitarian situation of those trapped, to look at arrangements for taking care of those who manage to escape, and to promote compliance by all the parties with international humanitarian law and international principles and standards for treatment of the displaced. I had discussions with the highest levels of the Government, including the President. I also met opposition politicians, including the leader of one of the important Tamil political parties; the Co-Chairs, namely the US, Norway, Japan and EU, as well as a wider selection of donors; and UN Agencies, NGOs, the ICRC, and representatives of civil society.

An important part of the visit was to Vavuniya, just south of the formerly LTTE held area, where some 36,000 IDPs who escaped from the fighting have been accommodated in the last three weeks. I visited transit sites in a school and other local buildings, where temporary shelters and other facilities have been set up by the Government and local authorities, with the help of UN agencies, the ICRC and NGOs. I also visited a local hospital where some of the injured evacuated by sea from the Vanni pocket are being treated, and a large site to which the IDPs are gradually being moved - Menik farm - which has caused much controversy because of accusations that it is intended to house Tamil IDPs on a long term basis against their will. In both the transit site and Menik farm, basic needs such as food, shelter, clean water, sanitation and health care appeared to be being met, despite serious overcrowding in some of the transit sites. UN agencies and NGOs now have more or less free access to these sites, which is very important. But movement into and out of them is otherwise currently highly and unacceptably restricted.

Mr. President, I highlighted a number of key humanitarian issues with all I met. First and foremost, I expressed my extreme concern about the fate of the tens of thousands of civilians trapped in the Vanni pocket. I called on both sides to respect international humanitarian law, to ensure the protection of the civilians there, and to do everything possible to avoid further civilian casualties. This includes guaranteeing the safety and the security of a number of UN national staff and their dependents, and of NGO staff and their dependents, still trapped with the rest of the civilian population. I called in particular on the LTTE to let the civilian population leave freely, amid credible reports of shootings of some trying to flee, and to stop forced recruitment, especially of children. I also urged the Government to do all they could to make it possible for the civilian population to get out safely, including by means of agreement to a temporary halt to hostilities or a humanitarian corridor to allow people to leave, if this could be arranged and agreed, and in general to ensure a peaceful, orderly and humane end to the fighting. The risk of a very bloody end to this long running conflict is otherwise unacceptably high.

The Government assured me at every level that they have virtually stopped using heavy weapons because of their recognition of the need to spare the civilian population, who are of course their own citizens. It remains unclear how far this is the case in reality.

Secondly, I called upon both the Government and the LTTE to allow unhindered humanitarian access, to ensure that sufficient relief supplies are delivered into the Vanni pocket. Latest efforts by the Government in cooperation with the ICRC and WFP to ship food and medical supplies via the sea route are welcome. For example, on 26 February, 40 metric tonnes of food provided by WFP were delivered by a tugboat chartered by the Government. UN staff and dependents in the no-fire zone played a key role in its offloading and distribution. The next similar shipment by WFP is planned for this weekend. This is in addition to previous use of an ICRC-chartered passenger ferry, with a capacity of 10 metric tonnes, whose main task is to evacuate the wounded and other particularly vulnerable individuals. Since these evacuations started two weeks ago, nearly 2,000 people have managed to get out by this route. I repeat that recent supply deliveries are welcome, but to have any chance of meeting the most basic requirements of those trapped, such operations need to be scaled up much further.

Thirdly, I emphasized to the Government at every level that the treatment of IDPs has to be in line with international standards and principles. I urged the Government to step-up capacity and arrangements for receiving IDPs in Vavuniya dramatically, especially by allocating additional land for temporary sites, in view of what I very much hope will be an imminent major influx of those currently trapped. I understand that, since my visit, an extra 250 acres have been cleared for temporary sites to accommodate 25,000 people. We expect another 400 acres to be allocated very soon. In addition, I urged the Government to move swiftly to eliminate progressively the military presence inside IDP sites, and to ensure increasing freedom of movement for the IDPs. I also raised specific concerns with the Government about the transparency of the initial security screening processes and about cases of family separation, and stressed the need for enhanced monitoring by the ICRC and UNHCR. I was assured by the Government that UNHCR can be present during the screening as the displaced leave the Vanni area, and that the Government will soon complete the registration of existing IDPs and distribute temporary ID cards, which will help to allow increasing freedom of movement. I understand that IDPs over 60 years of age have already been allowed to move out of the IDP sites to stay with relatives outside the camps where possible.

Fourthly, I reiterated the importance of the displaced being able to return to their places of origin as soon as possible. The Government, at every level, assured me that this was their firm intention, including the goal of returning 80 percent of the IDPs by the end of 2009, once the necessary de-mining is completed. I underscored the need to put to rest suspicions of wanting to manipulate the ethnic mix in the north or keeping IDPs in long-term camps against their will.

Finally, while not part of my humanitarian mandate, I urged the Government to take the historic opportunity to move swiftly, after the end of the fighting, to tackle underlying political issues, and move to a generally acceptable devolution settlement on a fully democratic basis.

Mr. President, I understand that there are continuing attempts via intermediaries to persuade the LTTE to let the civilians go and agree on a peaceful end to the fighting. I desperately hope these attempts will succeed very soon. I also urge the Government of Sri Lanka to hold back from any final military battle in order to allow time for the civilian population to get out safely, one way or another.

Mr. President, the Common Humanitarian Action Plan, or CHAP, 2009 for Sri Lanka was launched on 18 February, for a total amount of USD155 million. In order to accelerate humanitarian response by UN agencies in partnership with NGOs, I have released USD 10 million from the Central Emergency Response Fund. The funds will be utilized for life-saving activities in the areas of protection, food, nutrition, health, shelter, water and sanitation, and emergency education. I appeal to the donor community to respond generously to the CHAP, in the light of the existing and future needs in this very worrying situation.

Mr. President, my visit to Sri Lanka was intended as a visible demonstration of the international community's high level of concern about the humanitarian consequences of the continuing fighting. I trust that my pleas to all parties to do all they can to protect civilians and respect international humanitarian law will not fall on deaf ears. The continuing close attention of the international community will be a very important part of this, including scrutiny of the implementation of the assurances given by the Government. I urge again all those with any influence on the positions of the LTTE to use that influence now to persuade them to let the civilian population go. There is no time to lose.

Thank you for your attention.

Posted by transCurrents at 03:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (53)

By Cherian Thomas

Sri Lanka may need a bailout from international donors to help pay its debts as the island’s 26- year civil war draws to a close.

Since August, the South Asian nation has spent half its foreign reserves, now $1.7 billion, on supporting its currency, paying debt and buying imports. That doesn’t leave much after the government shells out another $900 million due in 2009. The reserves aren’t getting replenished as the ailing world economy pummels exports and overseas investors flee emerging markets.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government is unwilling to turn to the International Monetary Fund, which requires austerity measures in return for loans. Securing financing from other countries may be challenging for a nation whose credit rating from Standard & Poor’s is the lowest apart from those of Bolivia, Pakistan, Grenada, Argentina and Lebanon. Fitch Ratings downgraded its outlook on Sri Lanka today.

“Sri Lankan authorities have to act fast to beef up the country’s reserves,” said Ashok Parameswaran, senior emerging markets analyst at Invesco Inc. in New York. “Otherwise, they may have to devalue their currency significantly.”

Since December, countries including Russia, Vietnam and Kazakhstan have weakened their currencies rather than use reserves to prop them up. That has made imports costlier, reducing demand for goods from overseas.

Neighboring Currencies

Sri Lanka kept its exchange rate at about 108 rupees per dollar between January and October 2008 to slow inflation, even as the currencies of neighboring India and Pakistan weakened. The Sri Lankan rupee has since dropped to 114.95.

“Sri Lanka has relaxed the rupee in stops and starts, but they need a controlled devaluation,” said Agost Benard, a Singapore-based sovereign analyst at S&P. “The implicit currency peg will have to change and that’s one of the long-term solutions to the nation’s foreign-exchange problems.”

S&P cut Sri Lanka’s rating by one level in December to B, five steps below investment grade. Fitch Ratings lowered the nation’s rating outlook to negative from stable because of “heightened concern” over a “marked” decline in the nation’s reserves. It affirmed Sri Lanka’s rating at B+, which is four levels below investment grade and unchanged since April 2008.

Sri Lanka is banking on currency swaps with central banks, sales of treasury bills and bonds and offering higher interest rates on deposits to citizens living abroad to boost reserves.

Tamil Tigers

Once the northern region of the country is recovered from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, peace will lead to more remittances and aid for construction of houses, schools and hospitals, said P. Nandalal Weerasinghe, chief economist at the Central Bank of Sri Lanka. This will provide “some balance of payments support,” he said.

The Tamil Tigers, who have been fighting for a separate homeland, have retreated from most of the northern part of the island nation. They now control a pocket of only 87 square kilometers (34 square miles) in the Mullaitivu region in the northeast, the Sri Lankan Defense Ministry said Feb. 22.

John Keells Holdings Plc, Sri Lanka’s biggest diversified company, last week doubled its stake in Union Assurance Plc, a local insurer, to 74 percent. The company said it’s anticipating that the liberation of Tamil Tigers-occupied territories will spur demand for finance and insurance.

To be sure, the dispute hasn’t ended yet.

“Although there is the possibility of outright military defeat of the Tamil Tigers, a potentially different style and lower-intensity conflict will continue to pose a risk to growth prospects and public finances,” S&P’s Benard said.

Still Raiding

Tamil Tigers launched an air raid in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, on Feb. 20. Their two aircraft were shot down, one crashing into a building housing the Inland Revenue Department and the second north of the city.

Sri Lankan police yesterday arrested a Tamil newspaper editor in connection with the air raid, prompting a protest by media rights group Reporters Without Borders.

At the end of November, Sri Lanka had 1.4 trillion rupees ($12 billion) of foreign debt outstanding. Its total debt is 3.4 trillion rupees, or 75 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, according to S&P.

Liabilities increased as Sri Lanka, which spends a fifth of its annual budget on defense, borrowed from local and foreign sources to build roads and ports, among other spending. The nation’s budget deficit has averaged 8.7 percent of GDP in the past decade.

Debt ‘Distress’

Sri Lanka must reduce reliance on dollar-denominated short- term commercial borrowings to ease public debt “distress,” the IMF said in October. It called on the government to weaken the rupee as part of a “comprehensive policy package that would underpin confidence in the currency.”

The central bank said Jan. 19 that it will neither let the currency fall nor approach the IMF for a bailout to pay for imports and repay its debt.

On Feb. 19 Governor Nivard Cabraal said the central bank received $200 million from Malaysia, declining to reveal the terms of the deal or whether it was a swap or any other facility with Bank Negara Malaysia. Bank Negara didn’t respond to an e- mail sent by Bloomberg News for comment.

“It’s unlikely that Sri Lanka will go to the IMF for funds,” said Dushni Weerakoon, deputy director of the Institute of Policy Studies in Colombo. “At whatever cost, they will try to raise small sums from other countries.” [courtesy: Bloomberg.com]

Posted by transCurrents at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Expected Council Action

On 27 February, the Council is expecting a briefing by John Holmes, Under Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, on the humanitarian situation in Sri Lanka . This briefing follows his 19 – 21 February visit to Sri Lanka . It will take place in closed consultations under “Other Matters”, following a briefing on the Peacebuilding Support Office. Given the difficulty of obtaining first hand news of the situation on the ground in Sri Lanka , members seem very interested in Holmes’ assessment of the humanitarian situation in the conflict zone.

Recent Developments

In the last month the conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) appeared to be moving into a decisive phase.

The LTTE, led by Velupillai Prabhakaran, began fighting for a separate homeland in 1983. In recent months the Sri Lankan army has succeeded in confining the area controlled by the LTTE to about 34 square miles.

Humanitarian groups estimate that there are about 250,000 people trapped in the area and that the combination of its small area and intensity of the fighting was leading to disproportionate risks for civilians. (The government claims that there are only 70,000 civilians in the area.)

It seems that civilians trying to leave the war zone have been targeted and recruitment of child soldiers is on the increase.

It appears that Sri Lankan forces are currently moving on the last LTTE bastion, Puthukkudiyiurppu near the northeastern coastal town of Mullaitivu.

Restrictions to journalists in the war zone have made it very difficult to ascertain actual state of the fighting and numbers killed.

On 20 February the LTTE flew two aircraft to Colombo in an attempted aerial attack. The plans were shot down, with one crashing into the Internal Revenue Department and the second coming down north of Colombo . Forty-five people were killed including the two pilots.

The Sri Lankan government has rejected calls by the US , UK , Japan and the EU for a negotiated truce and are looking for an unconditional surrender from the LTTE.  The LTTE has indicated a desire for a ceasefire but are unlikely to agree to surrender their arms, a pre-condition of the Sri Lankan government for ceasefire negotiations. The Secretary-General has called on “all sides to pursue serious efforts toward political discussion” to end the conflict.

India has said that it is willing to facilitate the evacuation of civilians and provide humanitarian relief materials, medicine and medical care. (In 1987 India sent a peacekeeping force to Sri Lanka but withdrew three years later.)

On 6 February the Secretary-General spoke to Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa about the worsening humanitarian situation in the conflict zone and conveyed his strong concern about the heavy casualties, including children. He has also reiterated the responsibility of the LTTE to let civilians move to safe areas and that the government was obliged to conduct its military operations with “due regard to the need to safeguard civilian lives”.  On 24 February the Secretary-General called for a suspension of fighting to allow safe passage to civilians trying to flee the conflict.

During his recent visit to Sri Lanka , Holmes visited Vavuniya, a town just south of the conflict zone where many of the escaping civilians have sought shelter. Holmes called on both sides to make greater efforts to stop the rising toll of civilian causalities and to protect the people trapped in the area held by the rebel fighters. Holmes also announced that the UN has targeted $10 million from the UN Central Emergency Response Fund to help civilians caught in the conflict.

Options

The most likely option is for Council members to discuss the issues relating to protection of civilians in the conflict zone with Holmes following his briefing. Specific action at this stage seems unlikely.

A possible option is for the Council to agree on a press statement or authorize the president to convey to the media the convergence of views in the Council including:

• Expressing concern over the humanitarian situation, particularly the need to protect civilians and minimize the number of civilian causalities, including children.
• urging the parties to work towards a political discussion and an orderly end to the conflict;
• encouraging the Secretary-General to continue the organization’s efforts to assist in these goals
• stressing that steps need to be taken to prevent further recruitment of child soldiers and the release and rehabilitation of those caught up in the conflict

Key Issues

Among the key issues are:

• the potential scale of the humanitarian problem particularly with the food shortages imminent in the zone of conflict;
• the difficulty of obtaining accurate information on the conflict given that journalists have almost no access;
• Whether the UN can play a more useful and active role in this conflict. For example could it help with evacuation given its expertise in this area and reaffirm its willingness to be of assistance in possible peace talks? ;
• the increasing risks of a humanitarian catastrophe as the area held by the LTTE decreases and civilians remain trapped;
• the immediate needs for rebuilding of infrastructure, homes and schools in the north; and
• The problem of internally displaced persons, both in meeting their current needs in the camps and in resettling them in the future.

Council and Wider Dynamics

In recent months Council members have been divided over whether this issue is one that should be brought before the Council. Members like Mexico and Japan were pushing for a Council discussion several weeks ago. They faced opposition from Russia which was of the opinion that the issue should not be on the Council’s agenda. Most other members seemed willing to distinguish between having a formal agenda item and an informal discussion in the context of a briefing. It seems that agreement has been resolved on a compromise under which members would hear a briefing but not agree to a formal agenda item which would open the way to substantive action

Posted by transCurrents at 11:39 PM | Permalink

By Shamindra Ferdinando

Friday night’s suicide air raids on Colombo and Katunayake came as no surprise. In fact, even before the two Tiger aircraft took off from Puththukudirippu East, the army on the eastern flank knew the so called Thamileelam Air Force was mounting its last attack. The 12 GR (Gajaba Regiment) troops of the 58 Division commanded by Brigadier Shavindra Silva had heard the sound of aircraft engines. After having briefed an SLAF officer attached to the 58 Division of the impending attack, the army on the eastern flank went on the alert. The troops of the Task Force IV commanded by Colonel Nishantha Wanniarachchi too had heard the sound of the aircraft engines. The initial detection had been made at 8.35 pm.

"No sooner they started the engines we knew what was coming," a senior officer based in the Vanni told The Sunday Island. He asserted that the aircraft would have taken off from a part of the Paranthan-Mullaitivu road under Tiger control.

These were the first suicide attacks attempted by the LTTE since its air wing launched operations over two years ago. With the area under its control down to approximately 100 square kilometres, the LTTE had no option but to use its aircraft on one final mission. With the 58 Division now fighting its way into Puthukudirippu East after having secured Puthkudirippu West and the entire Ampalavanpokkani area under its control by Thursday (20), the LTTE is rapidly losing ground on the eastern flank.

After having alerted Colombo, the army had prepared to engage the aircraft. But they had managed to dodge anti-aircraft fire and return to Puthukudirippu. "We alerted artillery units deployed on the eastern flank to zero-in-on the area if aircraft approached Puththukudirippu," a senior officer said but they weren’t aware that the Tigers were using their last remaining aircraft on a suicide mission.

Despite being alerted first by the army and then tracked down by 2D radar supplied by India and 3D radar from China, F7 interceptor aircraft had failed to successfully interdict the LTTE planes. Although the Chinese interceptors lost the opportunity, SLAF anti-aircraft fire brought one of the Czechoslovakian built Zlin 143 aircraft packed with 215 slabs of plastic explosives weighing 140 kgs as it approached the Katunayake air base. A heat seeking missile fired at the aircraft too had failed to lock. But heavy anti-aircraft fire directed by ground troops had hit both the aircraft and its pilot.

In Colombo, the second explosives packed aircraft approaching the SLAF headquarters had also been hit by anti-aircraft fire as it flew over the harbour. According to a report posted on TamilNet on Friday night, Black Air Tigers had targeted the multi-storied SLAF headquarters and Katunayake airbase where the Kfir, MiG and F7 squadrons are based.

The Tigers also released photograph of the two Black Air Tigers, ‘Colonel’ Roopan and "Lieutenant Colonel’ Siriththiran with Prabhakaran before embarking on their suicide mission.

TamilNet reported that both pilots had been previously decorated with what the LTTE called the Blue Tiger award for having carried out successful air raids on enemy targets.

Although the SLAF brought down one aircraft over Katunayake and contributed heavily to the Colombo operation, the failure of the jets and the shoulder fired missile should be investigated. The SLAF which has played a critical role in the overall military campaign to destroy the LTTE must conduct an in-depth inquiry into the shortcomings.

Although the Black Tiger approaching Katunayake had to abort his mission after being hit by small arms fire and crash land his fixed wing aircraft into a marsh, the second suicide aircraft, forced to abandon its intended target (SLAF HQ), hit the Inland Revenue headquarters building triggering a massive explosion. The aircraft is believed to have been hit by a 14.5 mm weapon mounted on the roof top of Rangala naval base.

Defence spokesman Minister Keheliya Rambukwella who had been with a group of security forces officers on board the Jetliner troop ferry at the Colombo harbour had sighted the aircraft first as it flew over the Colombo harbour.

Shooting down of the LTTE aircraft couldn’t have come at a better time as the government prepares for elections for the Western Provincial Council (WPC). It would give a tremendous boost to the ruling coalition, particularly in the Western Province and re-assure people that Air Tigers no longer posed a threat.

Friday’s attempt to mount an air attack on targets within the fortified capital city was the first serious challenge posed by the LTTE following a series of battlefield defeats it suffered on the eastern flank where the Tigers have been constantly on the retreat.

Living in luxury

Government propagandists accused Prabhakaran and his senior cadres of leading a luxurious life in the Vanni after the army recovered a menu card from an underground facility believed to be used by the beleaguered Prabhakaran in the Vishvamadu area. The finding by the 58 Division conducting operations north of the Paranthan-Mullaitivu (A35) road on February 6 prompted accusation that the top LTTE leadership had been living a life of luxury as forcibly recruited Tamil youth were thrown into battle.

The LTTE leadership was accused of feasting on sumptuous biriyani with chicken curry. According to the menu, the LTTE leadership had been served noodles with meat, fried rice with prawns, cuttle fish or meat and a range of other items including string hoppers, roti, thosai, pittu, chapatti, boiled peas, milk rice, herbal drinks, bread, chutney, dry fish, fried fish, sambol and cooked vegetables.

Had anyone bothered to compare the subsidized meals offered to MPs and pariamentary officials at the expense of the taxpayer with Prabhakaran’s menu, neither group would have been considered to be doing badly. Despite rising defence costs, successive administrations had provided heavily subsidized meals, free housing, vehicles and a range of other perks and privileges to some at the taxpayers’ expense.

Politicians receive full pension rights after completing just one term in Parliament and appoint their family members, relatives and associates to their personal staff. Overseas appointments and creation of posts both here and abroad to accommodate friends, associates and relatives and luxurious lifestyles of the ruling elite had been a heavy burden on the country’s struggling economy.

The abuse list is long. The Rajapaksa administration has enhanced and introduced perks and allowances granted to politicians. A case in point is Rs. 100,000 monthly rent allowance drawn by about 40 incumbent ministers.

The Auditor General has quite rightly slammed the House administration for massive waste of meals before the return of Dhammika Kitulegoda as Secretary General of Parliament. But still a lot has to be done to clean up the mess.

The armed forces’ triumph over the LTTE had facilitated the ruling coalition’s victory at the last week’s elections to the Central Provincial Council. Although Elections Commissioner Dayananda Dissanayake held the release of the final results of the Puttalam electoral district due to malpractices taken place at the Nayakkarcheni Tamil Vidyalayam and ordered a re-poll at that particular polling station on Saturday (February 21), the government’s victory was a foregone conclusion.

Even if the UNP polled the entire Nayakkarcheni vote, the government would still take the Wayamba province as it had comfortably secured four out of five polling divisions in the Puttalam electoral district. The bottom line is that the result of yesterdayre-poll wouldn’t make any difference.

The cancellation followed reports that Puttalam district SLMC member A.K. Baiz, now with the ruling coalition, had manhandled a police officer after police thwarted his supporters from rigging the poll. Although the much delayed action taken by the Elections Commissioner wouldn’t deter the ruling coalition from engaging in malpractices, the elections chief has signaled that the absence of an independent election commission wouldn’t be a problem if he wanted to exercise his full powers.

Despite malpractices at Nayakkarcheni, last week’s polling in the Central and Wayamba Provinces was the most peaceful for well over a decade. It is too much to believe that the ruling party had a change of heart and now shunned violence. As resounding battlefield victories and president’s war on terror had given government candidates the upper hand, the tendency to engage in violence directed at UNP and JVP candidates would have been very much less. Had the armed forces’ failed in their task, the country could have seen election violence on an unprecedented scale.

Relative merit

UNP National Organiser S. B. Dissanayake has publicly acknowledged the armed forces’ role in the government victory. Addressing a hastily called press conference immediately after the Elections Secretariat announced the UPFA victory, Dissanayake said that the party had failed to realize the challenge posed by the peoples’ readiness to discard political differences in support of the war effort. The UNP’s loss had been the government’s gain. The Rajapaksa administration has exploited the battlefield success and among the immediate beneficiaries were those who contested last week’s elections.

UPFA chief ministerial candidate Sarath Ekanayake (Mahanuwara district) and his step brother, Nandimithra (Matale), who had switched sides on more than one occasion, had been elected to the Central PC on the UPFA ticket. Three other brothers, S. B. Dissanayake (Mahanuwara), Saliya Bandara Dissanayake (Nuwara Eliya-UPFA) and Jayalath Bandara Dissanayake (Nuwara Eliya-UNP), too found space in the CPC. Livestock Development Minister R. M. C. B. Ratnayake’s brother, S. B. Ratnayake, who contested the Nuwara Eliya district on the UPFA ticket is also in the new council. Provincial Councils Minister Janaka Bandara Tennakoon’s son, Pramitha (Matale), and his cousin, Thilina Bandara Tennekoon (Mahanuwara) are among the UPFA winners. Urban Development Minister Rohana Kumara Dissanayake’s son, Parakkrama, and Dilum Amunugama, son of Enterprise Development Minister Dr. Sarath Amunugama’s brother, and former PA Minister Anuruddha Ratwatte’s eldest son, Lohan , secured slots in the CPC under the ruling party ticket. Former UNP Minister Alick Aluvihare’s son, Wasantha, who contested the Matale district is among the winners on the UNP side. In fact all three successful candidates representing the UNP elected from the Matale district were relatives of politicians. Sanjiva Kaviratne, son of a former UNP Cultural Affairs Minister and Rohana Bandara, son-in-law of former UNP Minister Wijeratne Banda comprise the opposition team.

Power Minister Mahindananda Aluthgamage’s a relative too has found a place among the UPFA team. Sarath Kongahage, a former UNP National List MP now with the UPFA had his wife, Shanthini elected to the CPC on the UNP ticket. Former Kotmale electorate MP Ananda Dassanayake’s son Kumara, too, is in the CPC as a UPFA member.

Although the situation at the Wayamba PC is not as bad as the Central PC, Media Minister Anura Priyadarshana Yapa’s brother, Chandana, former minister D. P. Wickremesinghe’s son, Neranjan, Coconut Development Minister Salinda Dissanayake’s wife, Manjula, Disease Prevention Minister Jayaratne Herath’s son, Piyumal, and Asanka, son of Ranjith Navaratne, President of the Sri Lanka Mahajana Pakshaya had secured slots in the Kurunegala district all on the UPFA ticket. Soma Kumari Tennakoon who received the support of Minister S. B. Navinna had come second in the Kurunegala UPFA list with 67,998 preferential votes. UPFA chief ministerial candidate Athula Wijesinghe topped the list with 90,295 preferential votes.

J. C. Alawathuwala, son of a former UNP MP has also secured a place in the Kurunegala UNP list.

But UPFA’s constituent parties had suffered heavy defeat with the majority of candidates fielded by Wimal Weerawansa’s National Freedom Front, JHU and Communist Party failing to gain entry. The NFF which fielded ten candidates for Kurunegala, Puttalam, Mahanuwara, Matale and Nuwara Eliya districts had managed to secure just one slot. Nimal Piyatissa who contested Nuwara Eliya district was the only winner from Weerawansa’s list.

The loss suffered by the UPFA’s minor constituents is as bad as the poor showing by the UNP and the JVP. The JVP ended up with just one seat in the Wayamba PC. The fact that its most successful candidate at the Wayamba PC, A. Keerthiratne, polled 2,191 revealed the true extent of their defeat.

Former JVP frontliner S. D. Senaratne who contested the Kurunegala district on the NFF (Weerawansa’s) ticket and lawyer Aravinda Wanniarachchi, a central committee member of the party, too, lost. The loss suffered by Senaratne who had played a critical role in Weerawansa’s revolt against the JVP surprised many. Weerawansa and Nandana Gunatilleke based their campaign on the government’s battlefield success.

The crushing defeat suffered by the NFF is likely to have far reaching impact on their efforts to strengthen the party ahead of the parliamentary elections. The debacle couldn’t have come at a worse time as the party prepares to contest the critically important forthcoming elections to the WPC.

Another UPFA constituent the Upcountry People’s Front had failed to secure a place in the Central PC despite fielding three candidates while only two of the eight candidates fielded by the CWC in the same province had been successful.

With Piyasena Dissanayake, President of Minister Dinesh Gunawardene’s Mahajana Eksath Peramuna, seeking nomination from the SLFP after Gunawardene’s refusal to field him in the Western Province, the fight to secure a place on the UPFA ticket has taken a new turn. Candidates hoping to exploit the government’s rising popularity due to battlefield success are fighting hard for a place in the UPFA list. [courtesy: The Island]

Posted by transCurrents at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Michael Freund wrote of the "unfair treatment" Israel gets in the international arena in the Jerusalem Post recently. His argument was that, "Sri Lanka's conflict, which has claimed twice as many lives as our (Israel's) foray into Gaza, has barely seemed to register on the international radar screen."

Dr. Ellyn Shander MD, of Stamford, CT, USA, a humanitarian activist has written to Michael Freund explaining that Sri Lanka's current war is not exactly a "war on terror".

Both views, the article from Jerusalem Post, "Are all counter terror operations created equal?", and Dr. Ellyn Shander's response to Mr. Freund are as follows:

by Michael Freund

What's the difference between Sri Lanka and Israel? The question might seem odd, almost a throwback to elementary school when a teacher having a bad day might attempt to trip up his or her students by tossing a curveball question at them. But it is in fact highly relevant, and far more revealing than you might think.

For aside from all the obvious answers, such as the respective countries' sizes, locations, social structure, topography and weather, there is one dissimilarity in particular which has been noticeably evident in recent months.

Consider the following. In late December, government troops launched a coordinated military assault, with thousands of heavily-armed soldiers storming terrorist strongholds in an effort to deliver a decisive and painful blow against the reviled radicals.

After years of enduring suicide bombings and failed cease-fires, the authorities decided they had no alternative but to resort to overwhelming force to alter the strategic equation on the ground. Something dramatic, they were convinced, had to be done to finally bring the terrorists to their knees.

While the above description may sound familiar, don't be fooled into thinking that it applies only to our own little Middle Eastern corner of the world. For even as the IDF was entering Gaza to strike against Hamas, a similar series of events was unfolding some 5,400 kilometers to the east, in Sri Lanka, where the army was sent in hot pursuit after the Tamil Tiger rebels.

SIMILAR, THAT is, but with one crucial difference: While we were lambasted globally for having the nerve to defend ourselves, hardly a peep could be heard about Sri Lanka's own version of the war on terror.

For years, the Tamil Tigers, which the FBI has called "the most ruthless and efficient terror organization in the world," have been fighting to carve out their own autonomous region in the northern portion of the island country. Chafing under the rule of the majority Sinhalese population, the Tigers have terrified the rest of Sri Lanka for nearly three decades, mounting brazen terrorist attacks against civilian and military targets in the hopes of seceding and forming an ethnic Tamil state.

They managed to create a Gaza-like enclave, where they enforced their rule with a heavy-handed mixture of brutality and cruelty. Just like Hamas, the Tigers, who are also known as the LTTE, used civilians as human shields against the Sri Lankan army, and cowed their opponents into submission through intimidation and murder.

In 2005, Sri Lankans elected Mahinda Rajapaksa to the presidency. He ruled out Tamil autonomy and vowed to reassess the peace process in light of the Tigers' obstructionism. After the terrorists violated a Norwegian-brokered cease-fire (shades of our own Oslo debacle?), the government last year decided to give victory a chance instead of continuing to pursue a capricious peace.

"We gave clear instructions: no cease-fires, no negotiations until we defeat the LTTE completely," Sri Lankan Defense Minister Gotabhaya Rajapaksa told The Washington Post this past Sunday. "The LTTE would use cease-fires and peace talks to reorganize and resupply weapons. There have been... dozens of negotiations and more than 10 cease-fires. Everything failed. After every period of negotiation, they came back stronger. We decided enough was enough."

After ratcheting up its military response, and rallying the bulk of the island's population behind it, the government went on the offensive, seizing the Jaffna peninsula in the north before proceeding to capture several of the Tigers' last remaining outposts. It is now said to be close to defeating the rebels once and for all.

And yet, Sri Lanka's conflict, which has claimed twice as many lives as our foray into Gaza, has barely seemed to register on the international radar screen.

Apparently, not all counterterror operations are created equal.

SURE, HUMAN rights groups have harshly criticized both the Sri Lankan government and the Tigers for their treatment of civilians, but the crisis cannot be said to be at, or even near, the top of the world's list of priorities. Indeed, there have been no calls on American college campuses to boycott Sri Lankan products, few if any editorials have appeared in major newspapers denouncing the counterterror operation, nor have any European Union leaders rushed to the area to press the government to rein in its troops.

This is sheer and unbridled hypocrisy. For while Sri Lanka is fighting to stave off a secessionist insurgency, this country is confronted with a terrorist movement bent on its destruction. Yet while the former is allowed to proceed unmolested, the latter is subjected to incessant and withering international disapproval.

The conflict in Sri Lanka, of course, is just one of many which attracts far less attention than Israel. When was the last time you saw diplomats or demonstrators grow apoplectic on your television screen over hot spots such as Somalia, Burma or the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Because the media ignores them, most people probably could not find these places on a map. But who hasn't heard of the Middle East on an almost daily basis?

Therein lies the tragedy of the international community's approach. By constantly harping on Israel, it is not only being unfair to the Jewish state, but also ignoring countless other crises around the globe, allowing them to fester seemingly without end.

So what, then, is truly the difference between Israel and Sri Lanka? As far as the international community is concerned, it amounts to this: Jews may be news, but Tamils and Sinhalese certainly are not.

_______________________________

Response:

Dear Michael

You missed the boat entirely and have really dealt an unfair blow to the Tamil people

Of course everything you said about Israel getting treated unfairly in the international news is correct. NO QUESTION.

But I am an American doctor who has lived in Israel and also volunteered in Sri Lanka after the tsunami.

I have been devastated at the cruelty of the Sri Lankan government since 1948 when the British left the Tamil minority at the mercy of the government of Sri Lanka

Since then there were pogroms, race riots, systematic murder , rapes extra judicial killings and torture of the Tamil people. Their ancient and beautiful library at the north of the island was burned by thugs.. . This has been systematic killing and hatred of a minority population in their own country !!!

The LTTE was born as freedom fighters from the constant killings and terror wrought upon them over many years. This included marginalizes them as 3rd class citizens in their own country.

The govt of SL has parlayed their fight " against terror" as an incredible propaganda tool. They are not fighting terror., it is a systematic killing of the Tamil people - GENOCIDE.

Rajapakse even won the election on the platform of the 'final solution" of the Tamil people, and his techniques are chilling similar to the Nazi's extermination of the Jews.

So here we have a sovereign government doing mass murder of their citizens the Tamils. and the army that arises to fight back is considered the terrorist.. Frankly the govt has been doing state sponsored terrorism for years. All documented by Human Rights watch and others.

Now the conflict in Israel is entirely different. Israel is a sovereign nation that is being attacked by outside terror organizations to destroy it and take its land. Israel does not kill its own citizens, it is a moral nation and has attacked Hamas for it's murderous attacks on Israelis and Jews around the world.

So in summary the conflicts are not anything alike and when you put them together like you did, you play right into that Nazi Rajapakse's hands who says he can kill all of the Tamil citizens in the name of fighting terror. that is genocide.

So Simple to understand./ The Sinhalese government are the nazis, and the Tamils are the Jews in ww2. Had we had a freedom force in the Warsaw ghetto, would they be branded as terrorist? What do we call the original Haganna who bombed the British out of Palestine to create Israel ?/ terrorist or freedom fighters.

it is so sad an unfortunate that Israel bought Rajapakse's story of fighting terrorism. because I am so ashamed that Israel kefir jets have killed so many unprotected Tamil civilians in safe zones , and refugee camps. Please correct your story.

It is so damaging, we have been fighting this propaganda of the government of Sri Lanka for years, and now it is urgent as they move in to finish the genocide.

Thank you

Ellyn Shander MD
USA

Posted by transCurrents at 05:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

by Yohan Perera and Senaka de Silva

Controversy surrounded the arrest of Sudar Oli Editor N. Vidyadaran in Mount Lavinia last morning after police initially said, he was abducted by an unknown gang which had come in a white van. But later they said he had been arrested by the police and was being questioned over the recent LTTE air attack in Colombo.

There was confusion on the fate of the senior editor with even the police initially saying they did not know anything about his whereabouts and were treating the complaint as an abduction and were investigating the incident.As confusion reigned on the journalist’s fate the Media Centre for National Security (MCNS) and a government minister cleared the air saying the Editor was arrested in connection with the LTTE air attack on Colombo last week.

[E. Saravanapavan, managing director of Tamil language newspaper Sudaroli, gestures as he describes the arrest of his editor Vidyadaran at a funereal parlor in Colombo-AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena-via Yahoo! News]

Police Spokesman Ranjith Gunasekera, who had also earlier told the media that Vidyadaran was abducted by an unidentified group in a white van, also confirmed that he was actually arrested by the Colombo Crimes Division.
Mr. Vidyadaran was taken away while he was attending a family funeral at the Mahinda Florists in Mount Lavinia last morning.

Minister Anura Priyadarashna Yapa who commented on the matter said the editor was arrested over some phone calls he had received during last week’s air attacks. The Minister said he would be released if found innocent but would be legally charged if there was evidence pointing to his involvement.

Sudar Oli Publishers Mass Media Syndicate Ltd Managing Director E.Saravanapavan who was with Mr. Vidyadaran at the time of the arrest said he was at the funeral parlour when the six men approached the editor and dragged him into the van. They had come in a white van bearing number HX 0640, according to an eye witness.

He said three out of the six men were in civvies and others in police uniform. They had said they were taking him to the Dehiwala police station when Mr. Saravanapavan inquired as to where he was being taken.

Mr. Saravanapavan had then inquired from the Dehiwala, Wellawatte and Mount Lavinia police but none of these police stations knew about the arrest according to him.

“I also tried to pull him away when they were dragging him on the ground and I am sure he must have suffered some injuries,” he said.

While speaking to journalists Mr. Saravanapavan received a call on his mobile from Mr. Vidyadaran saying he was alright. However he had not said where he was.

The call followed President Mahinda Rajapaksa being informed of the incident by some Ministers with whom the Mass Media Syndicate Ltd Managing Director talked to after the incident.

Deputy Tourism Minister Faizer Mustpha who is also a member of the Ministerial Sub Committee on Media who rushed to the scene inquired from the IGP and the police Spokesman on the matter. According to the Minister they were not aware of the arrest at that time.

Mr. Saravanapavan said a group of men who identified them selves as officers from the intelligence unit had searched the Sudar Oli office at Grandpass on Wednesday and had asked for all the names and contact numbers of the journalists attached to the paper. However he had refused to provide them with these details.

The Sudar Oli Editor has been working for Udayan newspaper in Jaffna for more than 20 years and has been a native of Trincomalee. He has come to Colombo five year ago.

SLPI deplores manner of editor’s arrest

The Sri Lanka Press Institute lodged a strong protest yesterday at the manner in which Sudar Oli Editor N. Vidyatharan was arrested on Thursday morning at a funeral parlour in Mount Lavinia -- being dragged out by some men in police uniform and others in civvies and bundled into a white van and driven away.

“If the editor was needed by police for purposes of an investigation, he or indeed any other citizen, should have been told why he was required, shown the Magistrate’s warrant permitting the arrest and taken away without the rough housing that was evident The methods used were, to say the least deplorable,” a SLPI statement said.

We do not know whether Mr. Vidyatharan was taken away for good reason or bad and without that knowledge will not comment on that matter. But the fact that the police spokesman first told the media that he had been abducted by a group of gunmen and driven off in a white van and the story later changed to say that he was arrested by the Colombo Crimes Bureau, implies either an attempted cover-up in the first instance or that the left hand of the police does not know what the right hand is doing.

Eye witnesses at the funeral parlour, where the editor was standing by the publisher who was to later perform the obsequies at a relative’s funeral, said that three men in police uniform tried to take the editor away and when this was resisted by Vidyatharan and others present, three others in civilian dress came out and dragged Mr. Vidyatharan along the floor, bundled him into a white van and then drove him away.

SLPI strongly asserts that the manner of the arrest and the use of a white van for this purpose are most deplorable.

Arrest a violation of the rule of law- RSF

Reporters Without Borders yesterday expressed shock at the arrest of N. Vithyatharan, the editor of Sudar Oli, a Colombo-based Tamil daily that is part of the Uthayan press group. He was forcibly arrested while attending the funeral of a relative of the group’s chairman in Colombo . The media minister told the organisation that the editer was being “treated well” by the police.

“Carried out without a warrant, this arrest was a violation of the rule of law,” Reporters Without Borders said. “The police must release Vithyatharan without delay. What is this respected Tamil editor accused of?

Outspoken coverage of the situation in Sri Lanka, including the fate of its Tamil population.”

Three uniformed police officers and three men in plain clothes arrested Vithyatharan at the funeral of a relative of Uthayan press group chairman M. Saravanapavan. The police hit people who tried to intervene to prevent the arrest.

“Until we have seen Vithyatharan safe and sound, we will continue to regard this as an abduction,” Saravanapavan told Reporters Without Borders.

Media minister Laxman Yapa told Reporters Without Borders by telephone that Vithyatharan was being held by the Colombo Crimes Division (CCD) for the purposes of questioning. “He is currently being interrogated and his relatives will be able to see him this evening,” Yapa said. “I can assure you that he is all right. And the press will be informed tomorrow.”

Reporters Without Borders asked the minister to guarantee Vithyatharan’s safety.

The CCD is conducting an investigation under the emergency regulations into two reports published in Sudar Oli on 6 and 11 February. Vithyatharan was already summoned for questioning by CCD police officer Aura Senanayake on 13 February.

Senior members of the Uthayan press group have meanwhile received phone calls threatening them with the same fate if they do not leave the country.

Uthayan and Sudar Oli have repeatedly been the targets of violence. Six of the group’s employees have been killed since 2005 and its offices in both Jaffna and Colombo have been attacked several times. [courtesy: the daily mirror]

Posted by transCurrents at 05:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Trincomalee district Parliamentarian and head of Tamil National Alliance Parliamentary group, Rajavarothayam Sambandan has complained to President Mahinda Rajapakse about his being interrogated by the Police over views expressed by him at a press conference. Full text of the letter sent by Mr. R. Sampanthan to President Mahinda Rajapaksa follows:

His Excellency President Mahinda Rajapakse,
President, Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka,
Temple Trees.
Colombo 3.

Your Excellency,

Media conference held by the Illankai Tamil Arasu Kadchi (ITAK) on 17th February 2009 at the Parliamentary Complex.

The Illankai Tamil Arasu Kadchi (ITAK) held a Media conference at the Parliamentary Complex on 17th February 2009 , pertaining to the position of Tamil Civilians in the war zone in the Mullaitheevu District, and the Tamil Civilians who had crossed into Government controlled territory.

I addressed the Media conference, and also answered questions.

An officer of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) visited my residence at Colombo on the evening of 23rd February and orally informed me that the CID would like to record a statement from me pertaining to the Media conference and requested me to attend the CID office at 9.30 am on 24th February for the said purpose. I was present at the CID office, as requested.

I wish to state that the officers who interviewed me did so with the utmost courtesy.

At the Media conference, I referred primarily to the casualties- deaths and injuries of Tamil Civilians in the war zone, how these injuries were largely caused, the inadequacy of food, medicine and shelter, and the complete lack of transparency in regard to what was happening as a result of Government personnel including the Government Agent, Doctors, and other Government Civilian staff, United Nations and other Humanitarian Agencies and their staff and the Independent Media both domestic and foreign being kept out of the war zone. I also referred to the extreme difficulties being faced by those who had crossed into government controlled territory.

I am glad to state that just 2 days later on 19th February, the Human Rights Watch, an internationally reputed Human Rights Organisation, has in a comprehensive report issued by it, confirmed the substance of the statements made by me at the Media conference.

I was informed by the senior officer of the CID that the they were acting on the instructions of the Inspector General of Police.

Some in your Government, may have been irked by what transpired at the conference, and this so-called investigation, despite the courtesy extended to me by the CID officials, constitutes an unwarranted interference in my freedom of thought and action as a democratically elected representative of the people, and the leader of a political party which very substantially democratically represents the affected people. You cannot be unaware that the democratically elected representatives of the Tamil People are prevented from having any direct contact with the displaced Tamil People either in the conflict zone or even after their arrival in government controlled territory. May I please ask what the Government is seeking to conceal by such actions.

I must also mention that certain programmes on Government Television Channels have made slanderous references to me both while commenting on the Media conference and the interview the CID had with me. There is clearly a malicious effort to create an environment hostile to me, the objective of which is to suppress the truth.

I do not know what further developments there could be, and, I consider it my duty to keep you informed of the above, so that such improper conduct by some in your Government would be brought to an end.

R.Sampanthan,
Member of Parliament,
Trincomalee District
Parliamentary Group Leader
Illankai Tamil Arasu Kadchi

Posted by transCurrents at 05:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Sunanda Deshapriya, a journalist, peace activist and the person behind the free media movement in Sri Lanka, has been in India from January 18. The killing of senior journalist Lasantha Wickrematunge has forced many journalists and activists from Sri Lanka to take refuge in Europe and India.

Influenced by the French and the Cuban revolutions, the Vietnam war, the Naxalite movement, Deshapriya started his life as a militant and was jailed for seven years from 1971. In fact, he says he and his group started the armed struggle in Sri Lanka. "I would say we gave birth to Tamil militancy."

Disillusionment with armed struggle made him change and he became a peace activist. He understood that revolution was not possible in the 20th century with powerful and sophisticated States everywhere. He calls himself a social democrat now.

In this exclusive interview, he talks to rediff.com's Shobha Warrier about the current situation in Sri Lanka.

It was reported that you have taken refuge in India. Is it true?

Well, I would like to put it this way. I have taken time out because of the situation in my country. It has become very volatile after the killing of Wickrematunge and the attack on the MTV MBC network.

How difficult was it to take the decision to move from one's own country to another?

It was not easy at all because this is the first time I have done this in my 30 years of life as a peace activist and editor.

Has the accusation of money swindling against you anything to do with the decision?

No. Not only me but 11 other journalists also have left the country after Wickrematunge's killing. It was a collective decision to use the money for some other purpose, and no money was used for any personal interest.

Given the situation, it became a political accusation for the whole movement which is very unfortunate. They tried to mingle the personal and movement together. We all felt later that we should have done it in a proper way. But the fact is not a penny was used for personal purpose by anyone. None of the accusations has been proved. There was no investigation actually; all this was done by the State media.

Is it to suppress the freedom of the movement that such accusations were hurled?

Well, the end result was that. Media freedom has suffered in the last three years. All of us in the media, Tamils, Muslims, Sinhalese, trade union leaders -- all stood united and we became a kind of opposition. The campaign for press freedom became a focal point for everyone to rally around in the country. Other unfounded accusations also came in when we provided safe houses and safe travel for journalists.

The end result of all this was the weakening of the campaign for media freedom. Today, there is virtually no campaign within the country for press freedom.

Did you start the free media movement because there was suppression?

In 1991, the United National Party government tried to take control over the media. Then, we -- a lot of editors and senior activists -- came together and started the free media movement. Now, some of them have joined various political parties; some have joined the government. You know this happens to every movement. Only a few of us remain in civil society, not joining any political party -- that was our main strength.

Image: Sunanda Deshapriya. Photograph: Sreeram Selvaraj [courtesy: Rediff]

Posted by transCurrents at 11:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

by Kath Noble

As I stood at my bedroom window looking out at the red tracers and searchlights crisscrossing the sky on Friday night, I wondered how things had come to such a point. The LTTE hasn’t been very popular amongst its own community for a long time. After the suffering it has imposed on Tamils during all these years of fighting and the appaling number of Tamils it has felt compelled to kill for refusing to accept its leadership, the LTTE has been reduced to stealing children to despatch to the frontlines and even indoctrinate as suicide bombers. I wondered how an organisation with so little ready backing from ordinary people could have built those aeroplanes, and how it could have trained pilots to fly under the most trying of circumstances more than half the length of the country.

The main answer is of course the obsession and ruthlessness of its leader. Prabhakaran is willing to do anything that might bring him closer to his dream, as his recent antics in holding people against their will to effectively stand between him and the advancing Sri Lankan forces demonstrate. Shooting civilians in the back to prevent them escaping to a peaceful life somehow helps liberate Tamils in the warped recesses of Prabhakaran’s mind.

But another part of the explanation must lie in the diaspora. As has been noted many times before, the Tamil community outside Sri Lanka is huge, the majority in India, but with significant groups in the West and elsewhere too. It is from these sources that the LTTE has drawn its power since it lost the confidence of Sri Lankan Tamils. Eelam appeals to a fair number of them, and people living elsewhere have the luxury of working towards the success of an idea while rarely having to endure the pain of failure. Combined with a good bit of LTTE fascism, this has delivered the money and equipment to get things done and the political cover to get away with it.

The diaspora has been particularly active in the last few weeks, with protests almost worldwide. But a couple of individuals and their respective statements have caught my attention.

First there was the interview by the London-born singer Maya Arulpragasam on a talk show in Los Angeles. I must admit that when I first heard about it, I assumed her motive to be self-serving. Celebrities have become ever more engaged in speaking out on various causes in recent years, and while they probably do it with genuine concern for the issue they are pontificating about, they also clearly have at least half an eye on their record sales, sponsorship deals or whatever the currency of their fame happens to be.

When I finally watched it, I decided that she probably meant every word. The host had only just managed to get through the briefest of chatty introductions about her rather obvious pregnancy when Maya Arulpragasam launched into her diatribe on Sri Lanka, in response to his inquiring as to what she made of her success in being nominated for a Grammy and an Oscar in the same year. It was a little prepared, but why not. If I believed that a systematic genocide had been going on in the country that I’d grown up in for the last decade, and I were invited to an American talk show, I too would prepare. Not that preparing seems in her case to have involved looking into the facts of the matter, like whether there are 350,000 people simply trapped in the battle zone, whether aid, humanitarian work and reporting of the story are actually banned, and whether the Government really is 100% to blame. Perhaps she believes that she has, being a musician. If the reaction of the host is anything to go by, she probably isn’t used to having to defend her opinions with facts or even very coherent arguments.

Then came the suicide of Murugathasan Varnakulasingham outside the United Nations in Geneva. From Jaffna, he left Sri Lanka half a dozen years ago for London, where he completed a degree in Information Technology. Yet he somehow ended up setting fire to himself in protest at the situation here, blaming the United Nations for failing to intervene.

His motivation can hardly be questioned, although that of the politicians who were quoted in the British newspapers commenting on his death certainly must be. His local representative, who just happens to be the chairman of the British Tamil Councillors Association, explained that the young man was pushed to suicide because the media was refusing to publish what was going on in Sri Lanka. Whether such politicians truly believe that this is the case, the British newspapers happily printed this opinion that implied there was an unreported genocide underway without any cautionary references.

The LTTE propaganda machine has through the actions of these few individuals shown itself to be quite extraordinary in scope. It can get through to the ordinary man on the street, but is also capable of reaching global celebrities. Some politicians are either convinced by the LTTE or willing to go along with its lines for their own benefit, and most journalists don’t seem to know any better either. The result of all this is a lot of agitation in Western countries, as well as the age old problems with India.

It is very sad that these events were promptly followed by the news last weekend that what I hope it wouldn’t be too presumptuous of me to call Sri Lanka’s most effective diplomat is soon to return home. The Nation on Sunday reported that Dayan Jayatilleka, who has spent the last two years as Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva, will not have his appointment renewed when his current term is up in June. This is despite Sri Lanka’s treatment at that body having been decidedly more reasonable since he arrived.

Dayan Jayatilleka’s most enthusiastic opponents, it would seem from the emails that have also been flying around Colombo of late, are from the Sinhala diaspora. They obviously have more in common with their Tamil brethren than they might like to think, for this demonstrates about as much wisdom as was displayed by Maya Arulpragasam and Murugathasan Varnakulasingham.

Some of the characters involved have got it into their heads that Dayan Jayatilleka is a communist, and thus anathema to the Western countries they believe it very important to pretend to suck up to while pulling faces to each other. Of course this is misguided in every way, and demonstrates not only a total lack of understanding of the world and what diplomacy is supposed to be about, but also a complete failure to grasp why their own attempts to persuade the West that the LTTE is bad haven’t worked.

Shouting terrorist might have been enough to convince George Bush, but the rest of us Westerners aren’t quite so unsophisticated. The only people who are tempted to accept that the fact that the LTTE kill civilians is enough to make it stupid to agree to down weapons and talk about an Interim Self Governing Authority for the North and East are rightwing and, in case these agitators have failed to notice, rightwingers don’t make up the majority in the West any longer. Even when they did, it wasn’t a failsafe argument. John Major, while pretending that it would turn his stomach to do so, was busy talking to the IRA, and might well recommend a similar course of action to the Government here if he didn’t know anything more about the situation.

It is noticeable that the majority of Sri Lankan diplomats think more along the lines of these misguided emailers from the Sinhala diaspora, which is perhaps why Dayan Jayatilleka has become a target. There may not be anything wrong with this per se, although it would seem wise to have as much diversity in overseas representation as there is amongst intelligent people supportive of the Government at home, but it isn’t a lot of help in getting others to understand the truth of this conflict.

Friday night’s attack on Colombo marked what is almost the end of this phase of the fighting with the LTTE. Its territory is nearly gone, and with it the capacity to hide aeroplanes. But that doesn’t mean that all problems are now solved. Whatever happens to Prabhakaran, there are people abroad who believe that the Government is committing genocide against Tamils. This feeling may not be channelled into action so effectively if the LTTE isn’t around, but it can hardly be a good idea to just let it be.

(This article by Kath Noble appeared in "The Island" of February 25th 2009 under the heading "Other battles still to be won".)

Posted by transCurrents at 09:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

By Simon Montlake

The camp's dry goods store opened only a day ago, but its windows are already greasy and smudged from the many faces pressed up against it. As workers stack bags of rice, lentils, and flour on crude wooden shelves, war-weary Tamil refugees stare longingly inside. None have money to spend here, only time to kill.

[Tamil women and girls, who escaped Tamil Tigers rebels-held area following fighting between Sri Lanka army and Tamil Tigers, hold plastic cups in a temporary refugee camp in Vavuniya, northern Sri Lanka February 23, 2009 -pic: via Ybahoo! News-REUTERS/Nir Elias]

Behind them, a resettlement camp for 2,800 people is taking on an air of permanence. Classrooms are being built to house the children who study outside in crisp white uniforms. A post office, bank, clinic, and vocational training center have already opened.

Inside razor-wired fences, soldiers patrol the dusty lanes. And there is relief and joy among those who escaped the battlefield carnage. But there is also frustration and anguish over the strict rules and the prospect of open-ended detention.

On a 1,000-acre site nearby, a vast refugee town for as many as 200,000 people is planned, as authorities brace for an even larger exodus from what appears to be the final stand of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). So far, some 32,000 of those fleeing the fighting have been evacuated to Vavuniya. Most are crammed into schools and other public buildings until more camps are carved out of the red-dirt soil.

For those in the most makeshift facilities, conditions are grim. "It's so bad here, I want to go back to the Vanni. We're like prisoners here," says Mr. Balachandran, who sleeps with 47 others on the floor of a squalid classroom.

Once the fighting is over, the Tamils of the Vanni, the final stronghold of the LTTE, are supposed to return home. Sri Lanka's government says it must first de-mine the conflict zone, a process that will take many months, if not years. To guard against LTTE subversion, refugees aren't permitted to leave the camps. Nor are visitors allowed in.

"We're not detaining anyone. We're not separating anyone. We're keeping them in a safe place," P.S.M. Charles, a district administrator, told reporters on a visit organized by the military.

A need to improve conditions

Authorities say conditions will improve once more camps are built and international aid flows more freely. Sri Lanka has asked foreign donors to shoulder much of the cost. A cash economy should emerge once work initiatives start within the camp, bringing customers to the newly opened cooperative store, whose manager reckons that its sunflower-yellow concrete walls will still be standing in three years' time.

Officials say a faster timetable is possible, once the fighting ends. "The government is trying to think in terms of getting 80 percent of people back [to their homes] by the end of the year," says Rajiva Wijesinha, secretary general of the government's peace secretariat.

A darker fate may await suspected rebels who cross as civilians into government-held areas, where the military tries to weed out LTTE infiltrators. The government says it has detained 32 self-confessed militants and is monitoring another 218 people in camps. But aid workers and church groups have received reports of men being separated from families at Kilinochchi, the rebel capital seized last month.

Western diplomats say they are pressing Sri Lanka to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to monitor the screening and to register those who arrive. Government officials have publicly rebuffed the idea, however. They insist that as a sovereign power fighting domestic insurgents there is no legal requirement for international observers.

Aid workers point out that war refugees can easily be separated in the chaos and that those reported as missing may simply have been sent to other camps. Although the ICRC had begun helping to trace relatives, its program is currently on hold pending further talks with the government.

But there is some trepidation over a repeat of the tactics of the 1990s, when Tamil men taken out of military-run camps joined the ranks of Sri Lanka's disappeared. Some were later traced to detention centers, but many never came back. Fed by LTTE propaganda, such fears die hard among Sri Lanka's Tamil minority.

Still, the most pressing crisis is in the jungles of the Vanni where at least 70,000 civilians are caught between the advancing Army and the cornered LTTE, which has menaced those who seek to flee. While Sri Lanka has insisted that its troops are doing their best to limit civilian casualties, aid groups say the toll of dead and injured is rising.

"My biggest concern is that people are dying … the real crisis is up there," says Annemarie Loof, the country head of Médicins Sans Frontières, a relief agency working in the camps.

Refugees in Vavuniya tell of desperate treks through no man's land, dodging bullets and artillery shells that fell "like monsoon rain," before being evacuated. All cited the constant bombardment and lack of food and water in the war zone as the reason for their escape. Many said they had moved several times due to the fighting.

A dash across a battlefield

Devi Segaram, an English teacher, joined around 1,000 others who waited till dawn on Feb. 7 before cutting across a field that lay between the two forces. On their way out, they ran into a group of five LTTE soldiers, who fired warning shots to stop them. When the refugees kept running, the shots came closer, and two young boys fell down, she says. But Ms. Segaram and her daughter, a high-school graduate, didn't hesitate.

"We came running. I held her hand, and we just kept running," she says. Within half an hour, they caught sight of soldiers who called them over with a megaphone. Within days, she was in the camp.

Now she says her hope is eventually to be reunited with a son who lives in the capital, Colombo, far from her war-torn homeland. [courtesy: The Christian Science Monitor]

Posted by transCurrents at 10:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

“Recent Developments in Sri Lanka”: Hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
February 24, 2009 - Testimony of Dr. Anna Neistat, Senior Researcher, Emergencies Division, Human Rights Watch:

[Dr. Anna Neistat, Senior Researcher, Emergencies Division, Human Rights Watch]

Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee, thank you for inviting Human Rights Watch to testify at this hearing. I will address the most recent developments on the ground in Sri Lanka and, in particular, the desperate plight of civilians caught between the two warring parties—the government of Sri Lanka and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Just over a week ago I returned from Sri Lanka. I have to mention, first of all, that collecting information about the conflict and the situation of the internally displaced persons is extremely difficult. The Sri Lankan government is conducting a cynical campaign to prevent all independent public coverage of its military operations and the plight of civilians caught up in the war. While decrying LTTE abuses, it has kept out the media and human rights organizations that could report on them – and on government abuses. It has kept displaced persons locked up in camps and hospitals. It has traded the well-being of tens of thousands of Sri Lankan citizens for evading international scrutiny. It has been trying its best to bury the abuses.

While in the country, however, we managed to collect credible information about egregious violations by the parties to the conflict, both of which appear to be engaged in a perverse competition to demonstrate the greatest disregard for the civilian population. Our findings are summarized in a 45-page report, “War on the Displaced: Sri Lankan Army and LTTE Abuses against Civilians in the Vanni,” that we have just released and submitted for your review along with this testimony.

As you know, after 25 years, the armed conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE may be nearing its conclusion. This conflict has over the years claimed some 70 thousand civilian lives, and has left hundreds of thousands displaced for years and even decades.

Since the fall of the LTTE’s administrative center, Kilinochchi, in early January 2009, civilian casualties in the northern Vanni region have skyrocketed. The latest figures received by Human Rights Watch from independent monitors on the ground suggest that the total number of civilian casualties has now reached 7,000, including up to 2,000 deaths. Added to this are the dire hardships faced by the displaced – insufficient food, medical care, and shelter, whether in the combat zone or government-run interment camps.

Having worked in many conflict areas across the world, I have rarely seen a humanitarian disaster of such scale, where both sides demonstrate such shameless disregard to the safety and well-being of civilians, and which, at the same time, receives so little international attention. Civilians caught in Sri Lanka's conflict continue to die as we speak, and immediate action is necessary to stop this egregious loss of civilian life.

Violations of the Laws of War by both sides of the conflict

During the ongoing fighting in the Vanni, both the Sri Lankan armed forces and the LTTE have committed serious violations of international humanitarian law with respect to the conduct of hostilities. The high civilian casualties of the past months can be directly attributable to these violations.

The LTTE has been responsible for deploying their forces within densely populated areas and deliberately firing on civilians to prevent them from fleeing to safety. There is also evidence that the LTTE has used civilians as “human shields.”

The Sri Lankan forces have committed numerous indiscriminate and perhaps disproportionate attacks consisting of artillery bombardment and aerial bombing. These include attacks on the government-proclaimed “safe zones” and on clearly marked hospitals. Statements by senior officials indicating that civilians who do not leave LTTE-controlled areas are subject to attack are indicative of an intent to commit war crimes.

Violations by the LTTE

The LTTE has deliberately prevented civilians under its effective control from fleeing to areas away from the fighting, unnecessarily and unlawfully placing their lives at grave risk. As the LTTE has retreated in the face of SLA offensive operations, it has forced civilians to retreat with it, not only prolonging the danger they face, but moving them further and further away from desperately needed humanitarian assistance. And as the area that the LTTE controls shrinks, the trapped civilian population has become concentrated, increasing the risk of high casualties in the event of attack and placing greater strains on their living conditions. Human Rights Watch documented a number of incidents when the LTTE forces fired at civilians who tried to cross to the government-controlled areas, killing and injuring dozens. In an illustrative case, a 35-year-old father of three described how LTTE cadres had shot at civilians attempting to flee:

When we came to Suthanthirapuram, it was full of dead bodies. Bodies were lying along the road. Nobody cared about them. They smelled. We didn't have food for two days. We slept in the field.

Some 150 people started out together, but when we tried to leave, at Suthanthirapuruam, the LTTE tried to stop us. There was only a narrow path to leave by. The LTTE caught us. There was fighting, arguments. They were shooting at us. Many people were injured and killed. It was shocking to see. Only 65 were in my group when we came out. We were separated from the rest along the way.

One father was carrying his child on his back. As they were running from the LTTE, he was holding him by the arms so hard—in order not to lose him—that he broke both of the child's arms.

The LTTE practice of forcing civilians to retreat with its forces, rather than allowing them to flee to safer areas, has meant that LTTE forces have been increasingly deployed near civilians in violation of the laws of war. Several cases were reported to Human Rights Watch in which LTTE forces appeared to be making deliberate use of civilians to protect their positions from attack — which is considered to be “human shielding,” and constitutes a war
crime.

The LTTE has continued to place civilians at serious risk by forcibly recruiting civilians for untrained military duty and for labor in combat zones. The LTTE also has a long history of using children under 18 in their forces, including in armed combat, and the UN has reported that it continues to do so. Since September 2008, the LTTE has increasingly forced people with no prior military experience to fight or perform supportive function on the front lines,
which has led to many casualties. One Vanni resident described this practice to Human Rights Watch:

The workers were taken to the frontline to dig bunkers, collect weapons from killed cadres and SLA soldiers, and so on. It was very dangerous for civilians – about 25 of my neighbors were killed while doing this work. They did not receive any training — the LTTE cadres fetched them from their homes and the next day brought their dead bodies back. Every day, many people were crying in my neighborhood because they lost young children; some even beat up LTTE cadres when they brought the bodies back.

Violations by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces

The LTTE’s grim practices are being exploited by the government to justify its own atrocities. High-level officials assert that the ethnic Tamil population trapped in the war zone can be presumed to be siding with the LTTE and treated as combatants, effectively sanctioning violations. Sri Lankan forces have repeatedly and indiscriminately shelled areas packed with displaced persons, causing numerous civilian casualties. This includes numerous reported bombardments of a government declared “safe zone” and of the remaining hospitals in the region.

Concerns of indiscriminate attacks by SLA forces are heightened by reports that they are using multi-barrel rocket launchers. Rockets fired from multi-barrel launchers cannot be targeted with sufficient precision to be accurate against military targets, and their broad area effect makes their use incompatible with the laws of war in areas where civilians or civilian objects (such as schools or hospitals) are located. The use of such weapons in populated areas is indiscriminate in violation of international humanitarian law.

Many of the civilian deaths reported in the past month have occurred in an area that the Sri Lankan government has declared to be a “safe zone.” On January 21, the Sri Lankan armed forces unilaterally declared a 35 square kilometer “safe zone” for civilians north of the A35 road between the Udayarkattu junction and the Manjal Palam (Yellow Bridge) in Mullativu district. The Sri Lankan Air Force dropped leaflets appealing to civilians to move into the safe zone as soon as possible.

During the next days, several thousand people gathered in a large playground located just north of the A35 in the safe zone. The playground also functioned as a food distribution center for the local government agent (GA) and international organizations. Several people located in or around the GA food distribution center told Human Rights Watch that, despite the army declaration of a safe zone in the area, the area was subjected to heavy shelling from SLA positions in the period January 22-29, which killed and injured hundreds of people.

One shell that struck inside the playground early in the morning on January 24 killed seven civilians and injured 15. An eyewitness told Human Rights Watch:

One mortar shell came in, close. I heard the whirling sound. It was dark so we didn't know where it landed. When I stuck my head out of the bunker, I saw the mangled body of a young woman by the entrance. I had never seen that before. I couldn't believe that it was a person.

There was a huge amount of screaming immediately after the impact. More mortar shells started coming in.

Nothing had been touched when we got out of the bunker in the morning. There were lots of people in bits and pieces lying around. My gut reaction was that I don't want to see this, but I felt that I had to.

One woman was lying on her back with two infants, one of whom survived, as I later heard. One baby was hanging from a nearby tree. Another baby, decapitated, was hanging on the barbed wire surrounding the playground. Next to the woman lay her husband, face down.

Next to the family lay other people. One was severed in half. I think the other one was as well, but I couldn't look anymore. One woman sustained shrapnel injuries to her head. Her brain was lying on the ground. The LTTE and police that came to take away the body did not remove the brain from the ground. It was still lying there when they left.

Several sources told Human Rights Watch that LTTE forces maintained positions in the safe zone (although about two to four kilometers north of the playground), from which they fired on SLA positions. And as LTTE forces retreated, they moved heavy artillery eastward through the northern part of the safe zone. This by itself cannot be considered a violation of international humanitarian law, as the safe zones were declared unilaterally by the Sri Lankan government and not in agreement with the LTTE. The SLA was also not prohibited from attacking LTTE forces inside a safe zone.

At the same time, having declared the area a safe zone for civilians, the SLA encouraged civilians to go to the area, increasing the vulnerability of civilians in the event of an attack. By creating the zone, government forces took on a greater obligation to ensure that they spared civilians from the effects of attacks. Given this civilian presence, attacks on valid military targets in the safe zone should only have been carried out after issuing an effective advance warning that the area was no longer a zone protected from attack.

Human Rights Watch also documented several SLA attacks outside of the safe zone which seemed to have been indiscriminate and led to civilian casualties. For example, one of the

witnesses from Vallipunam, a town just outside the government-declared safe zone, recounted to Human Rights Watch the SLA shelling of the town on January 19:

There were about 40-50 people traveling along the road when the shelling started. The shelling lasted for about 15 minutes. About 10 shells landed in the immediate area, but we could hear shells landing further away as well. I was staying in the bunker during this time and for another 30 minutes. When I came out of the bunker, people were crying and shouting. A vehicle had already taken the injured to Vallipunam school [an IDP center]. One shell had landed in the middle of the road, however, killing three people who were still lying there when I came out. The shells were coming from SLA positions, from the southwest. We could hear them when they came in.

According to the witness, there were no known LTTE positions in the vicinity at the time of the attack.

The witness also told Human Rights Watch that seven of his wife’s relatives, including two children—8 and 6 years old—were killed on February 5 by shelling in Mathalan, an area controlled by the LTTE that he believes had come under SLA attack. He was concerned that three other bodies had been found, mangled beyond recognition, and could be those of relatives he had not heard from.

During the fighting in 2009, the few hospitals that exist in LTTE-controlled areas have repeatedly come under artillery attack. This has added immeasurably to the suffering of individuals who have sought help in medical facilities, already horribly overcrowded and dangerously short of medical personnel, equipment, and supplies before the attacks. We gathered information from aid agencies and eyewitnesses on more than two dozen incidents of artillery shelling or aerial bombardments on or near hospitals. Hospitals are specially protected under international humanitarian law. Like other civilian objects, they may not be targeted. But under the Geneva Conventions, hospitals remain protected unless they are “used to commit hostile acts” that is outside their humanitarian function. Even then, they are only subject to attack after a warning has been given setting a reasonable time limit, and after such warning has gone unheeded. Deliberately attacking a hospital is a
war crime.

Attacks on hospitals in the Vanni (December 15, 2008 – February 10, 2009) Information compiled by Human Rights Watch from interviews with aid agencies and eyewitnesses

1. 15/12/08 Mullaitivu GeneralHospital Shelling: 2 patients injured, damage to ward and medical equipment.

2. 17/12/08 Vaddakachchi Hospital 10 a.m. Aerial bombing hit refugee settlement 250-300m from the hospital.

3. 19/12/08 Mullaitivu General Hospital 11:30 a.m. Five shells hit hospital causing damage to wards, operating theater, and the Medical Superintendent’s HQ: 2 staff wounded.

4. 20/12/08 Mullaitivu General Hospital Shells hit inside hospital grounds.

5. 22/12/08 Kilinochchi General Hospital 6:20 a.m. Aerial bombing hit near hospital, causing shrapnel damage. No injuries reported.

6. 25/12/08 Kilinochchi General Hospital Shells hit hospital grounds, narrowly missing staff. Damage to newborn nursing section, outpatient department, and reception.

7. 30/12/08 Kilinochchi General Hospital 4 p.m. Shells hit hospital causing damage to the building. No injuries reported.

8. 08/01/09 Tharmapuram Hospital 1:20 p.m. Shells hit Tharmapuran Junction 75 m from the hospital, killing 7.

9. 10/01/09 PTK Hospital 11 p.m. Shells hit IDP settlement located behind PTK hospital.

10. 13/01/09 PTK Hospital 10 a.m. Hospital hit by shells: 1 killed, 6 wounded. Patients fled to the wards to seek shelter from the shelling.

11. 19/01/09 Vallipunam Hospital Shell landed in hospital yard: 6 people in outpatient ward injured

12. 21/01/09 Vallipunam Hospital 7 p.m. One shell hit hospital

13. 22/01/09 Vallipunam Hospital Morning. Shells hit hospital compound: killing 5 and injuring 22.

14. 26/01/09 UDK Hospital Shells hit hospital: 12 killed, 40 injured.

15. 31/01/09 PTK Hospital Shrapnel from shells hit hospital.

16. 01/02/09 PTK Hospital Three attacks. First attack: 1 person injured by shrapnel inside the hospital. Second attack: one shell hit the hospital: 1 killed, 4 injured. Third attack: 1 shell hit the women and children ward (no
information on casualties).

17. 02/02/09 PTK Hospital One shell hit hospital: 1 nurse killed, 10 patients injured.

18. 03/02/09 PTK Hospital Rocket hit surgical theatre: no information casualties.

19. 05/02/09 Ponnampalam MemorialHospital Shelling : 60 casualties inside and outside the hospital.

20. 10/02/09 Putumattalan (make-shift hospital for PTK) Shelling: 16 people killed.

The government has sought to justify attacks that have resulted in high civilian casualties on the grounds that the civilians failed to heed warnings to flee the areas, and that the LTTE’s use of civilians as shields rendered the LTTE fully responsible for any civilian loss.

Humanitarian access

The plight of civilians in Vanni has been exacerbated by the government’s decision in September 2008 to order most humanitarian agencies out of the region. The government’s own efforts to bring in assistance with a minimal UN role have been insufficient. Fighting, lack of oversight, and the manipulation of the delivery of aid by government forces and the LTTE have all contributed to the continuing humanitarian crisis.

Scarce information that comes out of Vanni through phone calls or text messages suggests that the situation gets worse by day, with civilians lacking water, food, medical supplies and other necessities.

On February 10, an international agency received information from its staff, which had relocated to a place along the coast, that the only supplies that they had left were rice, flour, and oil. They had run out of water and the nearest water was 1.5 kilometers away. Walking there was extremely risky as the area was frequently shelled—an artillery shell had recently landed just 100 meters from the agency’s bunker.

The delivery of humanitarian assistance had been further complicated because both side used humanitarian convoys to advance their military positions, in clear violation of international law.

One individual who joined convoys delivering food supplies on December 23 and 29 said that Sri Lankan government troops used the convoys moving northwards to advance closer to LTTE positions. He told Human Rights Watch that on December 29:

We got to the last SLA checkpoint near Oddusuddan from where the ICRC was supposed to accompany us through no-man's land to the LTTE checkpoint 13 kilometers south of PTK. As soon as we passed the SLA checkpoint, military vehicles joined the convoy and followed the convoy on both sides. LTTE saw it and started firing. The army returned fire and the convoy had to stop for one hour. At this time nobody was injured, but when the same thing happened to the GA [government] convoy the next day, their driver was injured in crossfire.

Plight of the Internally Displaced

The situation of civilians who manage to escape from areas of active hostilities into government-controlled territory is dire. Instead of providing the internally displaced with the assistance and protection they are entitled to under international law, the Sri Lankan government continues to violate their fundamental rights.

The government has arbitrarily detained people during screening procedures; subjected all internally displaced persons, including entire families, to indefinite confinement in militarycontrolled camps; and failed to provide adequate medical and other assistance to displaced persons. The government has directly restricted the efforts of relief agencies seeking to meet emergency needs, and has deterred agencies from offering greater support through policies that the agencies rightly perceive as unlawful.

The number of newly arrived displaced persons changes daily and is hard to verify, especially since the government does not share lDP registration lists with any international agencies. As of February 16, according to estimates by international agencies working in the area, there were about 30,700 internally displaced in 12 sites in Vavuniya.

Screening procedures and unknown fate of the detainees

Sri Lankan security forces subject people fleeing from LTTE-controlled areas to several stages of screening, ostensibly to separate those affiliated with the LTTE from displaced civilians. While the government has legitimate security reasons for screening displaced persons to identify and apprehend LTTE cadres, the screening procedures need to be transparent and comply with the requirements of international humanitarian and human rights law. So far, none of these requirements have been met and dozens of individuals, perhaps many more, have been detained during the screening process. The fate of such detainees remains unknown, raising fears of possible enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings.

According to several sources, at the Omanthai checkpoint - the main screening point for displaced persons on the main A9 roadway before their arrival in camps in Vavuniya - the SLA and the police Criminal Investigation Department (CID) has separated dozens of men and women aged 18 to 35, as well as some teenage children, from their families, allegedly for further questioning. Some have been released within days and transferred to the IDP camps in Vanunya, but the fate of numerous others remains unknown. An international relief worker told Human Rights Watch that on February 8, 2009, she was approached by about 50 families whose relatives had been detained at Omanthai checkpoint in previous days. Neither the families nor the international worker had any information as to the fate and whereabouts of the detainees. Another relief worker said:

One woman in the camp told me that she was crossing the Omantai checkpoint with her husband and child on February 3. The husband was detained there, and for a week now she has no information about him. People like her call us all night long, trying to get information about their missing relatives.

At this point, no independent observers are allowed to monitor the screening process at the Omanthai checkpoint. Efforts of international agencies, including ICRC and UNICEF (some detainees are children), to obtain the lists of the detainees and any information about their fate and location from the Sri Lankan authorities so far have proved futile

Confinement in internment camps

Upon arrival in Vavuniya, all displaced persons, without exception, are subjected to indefinite confinement in de facto internment camps, which the government calls transit sites, “welfare centers,” or “welfare villages.” Those requiring immediate medical attention are first taken to the hospital, and then to one of the camps (see below).

Sri Lankan authorities have ignored calls from the international community to ensure the civilian nature of the camps. The perimeters of the sites are secured with coils of barbed wire, sandbags, and machine-gun nests. There is a large military presence inside and around the camps.

Several sources reported to Human Rights Watch the presence of plainclothes military intelligence and paramilitaries in the camps. A UN official in Vavuniya told Human Rights Watch that she and colleagues have seen members of paramilitary groups in different camps. In particular, local staff members recognized several members of the People’s Liberation Organization of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE), a pro-government Tamil paramilitary organization long implicated in abuses, present at one of the camps. Military and CID officers regularly conduct nighttime interrogations inside the camps, summoning young men and women into their premises.

Displaced persons confined in the camps enjoy no freedom of movement and are not allowed any contact with the outside world. While many of the displaced persons have families in Vavuniya, their relatives have not been allowed to visit them in the camps.

Relatives come to the camp sites, trying to find their family members and communicate with them through the fence and barbed wire surrounding the sites, yet they are often chased away by soldiers. The displaced persons in Vavuniya camps are never allowed to leave the sites on their own.

A local relief worker told Human Rights Watch that a woman she spoke with in one of the camps was not even allowed to attend the funeral of her mother who had succumbed to her wounds at Vavuniya hospital. The relief worker said:

I spoke to one woman in the camp—she was crying and screaming. It turned out that her elderly mother, who had been injured and admitted to the hospital, died there on February 7. The elderly woman’s body was given to the son, who lived in Vavuniya, but her daughter was not allowed to leave the camp even to attend her mother’s funeral. She was in agony because she couldn’t pay respects to her mother.

Several relief workers working with displaced persons told Human Rights Watch that many are devastated because they have been separated from their family members and have no information about their relatives—those who stayed in the Vanni, those detained at Omanthai, or even those who may be in Vavuniya but confined in a different camp.

In apparent efforts to demonstrate that they can handle the influx of displaced persons without assistance from international agencies, and to prevent any communication between displaced persons and the outside the world, Sri Lankan authorities have significantly restricted the access of international relief agencies and local nongovernmental organizations to the camps. Nor have journalists or human rights groups been allowed access.

While in early February, realizing that they would not be able to handle the situation on their own, Sri Lankan authorities allowed various UN agencies and international humanitarian agencies to set up necessary facilities and provide emergency assistance in the camps, the agencies do not enjoy unimpeded access to the displaced. The decision seems to be made on an ad hoc basis by military commanders in charge of the camps, and as a result, muchneeded aid often does not reach the internally displaced. For example, on February 11, 2009, an international agency providing assistance and necessary equipment to the handicapped was not allowed to enter one of the camps. Given the large number of displaced persons disabled as a result of their injuries, the access of this agency to the camps is crucial. Those working in the camps who spoke with Human Rights Watch said that it was virtually impossible for them to talk to displaced persons and interview them about their experiences.

The military, CID, and plainclothes paramilitaries were keeping a close watch on any outsiders in the camp, preventing them from talking to the displaced persons. The military made it clear to the international organizations that violating their rules would result in their losing access to the camps, while local relief workers simply feared for their lives should they get noticed, especially by the paramilitaries.

International bodies, including the UN Secretary-General's representative on internally displaced persons and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees have repeatedly called upon the Sri Lankan government to honor its international legal obligations towards displaced persons. These pleas, however, seem to have fallen on deaf ears.

Meanwhile, the Sri Lankan government is proceeding apace with its plan to confine all of the internally displaced from Vanni into so-called “welfare villages”—while the army conducts the screening, clears areas in Vanni of remaining LTTE cadres, and demines the area. The “welfare villages,” according to the government’s plan, are supposed to have schools, banks, playgrounds, shops, and other facilities, yet those living there will not enjoy the right to liberty or the freedom of movement. Rajiva Wijesinha, the Secretary of the Ministry of Disaster Management and Human Rights, told the media, “Of course, it will not be voluntary - we need to check everyone."

Originally, the government proposed to keep the displaced persons in the “welfare villages” for up to three years, but following the protests from UNHCR, said it intends to resettle most of the displaced persons by the end of 2009. The Sri Lankan government’s past record with regard to the resettlement of persons displaced by armed conflict does not give cause for optimism that resettlement will happen quickly. On the contrary, it gives reason to be concerned that the government will end up interning those placed there indefinitely.

Inadequate medical assistance at the Vavuniya hospital

The situation of several hundred displaced persons receiving medical assistance at the Vavuniya hospital is desperate.

The majority of patients were brought to the hospital on January 28, when ICRC managed to escort 226 wounded civilians requiring urgent medical assistance, including 51 children, out of the Vanni. Others were either brought to the hospital earlier, by transport organized by the Ministry of Health, or sent to the hospital after they managed to cross to the government side and went through the screening procedures along with other displaced persons. While the medical staff in the hospital has been trying to do everything possible to assist the wounded, the influx of patients has been far beyond the hospital’s capacity.

When Human Rights Watch visited the hospital on February 11, 2009 — after some of the patients had already been discharged to the camps or transferred to other hospitals — there were still not enough beds for all the patients, and many of the patients, especially in the male ward, were lying on the floor in the corridor. The maternity ward was also overcrowded with no adequate accommodation provided for newborn babies and their mothers, many of whom were also injured.

Several sources told Human Rights Watch that due to the hospital’s lack of capacity, patients were being discharged—and sent straight to the camps—long before their injuries were healed, which has already led to at least two deaths.

Human Rights Watch interviewed two women in the hospital who just gave birth. Both of them were in despair as they were informed that they would be discharged and sent to the camp that day. One of the women had been injured by shelling in the Vanni and had one of her feet amputated. She gave birth through Cesarean section four days earlier and still could not even independently take care of herself, let alone her newborn baby. Another woman gave birth to twins a day earlier and was terrified by the prospect of moving into the camp with her two babies and no one to help her take care of them.

It was obvious that the hospital lacked even the most basic necessities. Many of the hospital beds had no bed sheets or blankets, and a number of patients, including at least two children, told Human Rights Watch that they did not have a change of clothes. Despite the obvious lack of capacity to handle all of the wounded and attend to their needs, the hospital personnel, according to several independent sources, were instructed by the authorities not to ask for any assistance from the international agencies, and very few agencies were allowed access to the hospital.

An international relief worker told Human Rights Watch that her agency tried to provide assistance to the hospital when the convoy with 226 patients arrived in Vavuniya on January 28, but the hospital did not allow them to. She said:

Authorities in the hospital kept telling us, “Go away, all needs are met.” Medical staff are under a lot of pressure they were instructed by the government not to ask for anything from relief agencies, not to speak about any of the needs, and not to provide any information. They were supposed to demonstrate that the government could handle the influx of patients. Now, however, the situation is so desperate that despite the government orders, medical staff confidentially approach international agencies, asking for medical supplies and other assistance.

The situation of patients is aggravated by the fact that their relatives—even the ones who were allowed to accompany them from the Vanni—have not been allowed to stay with them and have been sent to the camps instead. That has been true even of small children and severely injured patients who require constant attention and assistance. No patients were allowed to stay with their families—rather than in the camp—after their discharge, despite the hospital staff's efforts to make such arrangements.

Human Rights Watch visited all of the hospital wards and most of the patients were in a state of despair, often crying incessantly. One of the patients told Human Rights Watch: They promised they would allow us to go back after we get treatment. Now our families are back there, and we have no information about them. And we are not much better off. People are dying in the hospital as well; there are no relatives to help us, and there won’t be anybody once we go to the camps. Why did they bring us here? We could have just as well died there [in Vanni], because there is nobody here to take care of us, to feed us, and we are likely to die anyway, just through more suffering.

The hospital is essentially run by the military and guarded even more closely than the camps. Uniformed servicemen patrol every ward of the hospital, the corridors, and the hospital yard. They register all visitors and watch closely, especially when international relief workers enter the wards. Attempts to communicate with the patients have already led to problems for both patients and the people who tried to talk to them.

For example, a local NGO worker told Human Rights Watch that after one of his staff members talked to a young woman with a mental disorder in the hospital, the patient “had gone missing” the next day, and the staff member was approached by the CID and questioned about his conversations with the patient. Out of fear for his safety, he had to discontinue his visits to the hospital.

The NGO worker added that he was aware of three cases in which relatives of the patients “had gone missing” after their visits to the hospital. He also said that, according to the information he received in the hospital, in early February several men arrived in a white van to the hospital and abducted the hospital canteen owner “because he used to go to the wards and talk to the patients.”

The situation in the Vavuniya hospital raises serious concerns regarding the safety and wellbeing of patients not just in this hospital, but in other hospitals where injured civilians have been evacuated. After some 600 patients were evacuated from the makeshift hospital at Putumattalan to Trincomalee by the ICRC on February 10 and 12, initial reports from Trincomalee hospital suggest that it too has become militarized and access to the patients is
similarly restricted.

Recommendations

As a co-chair of the Tokyo Donors' Conference and one of Sri Lanka's key international partners, the United States has the power and the responsibility to address the current crisis. The United States has in recent years been outspoken on violations of human rights and international humanitarian law by both the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE. Given the dire needs of the civilian population in the Vanni, Human Rights Watch urges the Obama administration and Congress to bring new urgency to its concerns. Specifically, the US government should call upon the Sri Lankan authorities to:

• Cease all attacks that violate the laws of war, including artillery bombardment and aerial bombing that does not discriminate between military targets and civilians; attacks on hospitals, and attacks using weapons, such as multi-barrel rocket launchers and heavy artillery, that are indiscriminate when used in or near densely populated civilians populations;

• Facilitate, along with the LTTE, the immediate creation of humanitarian corridors to allow civilians trapped by the fighting to travel to areas away from the fighting;

• Immediately lift the September 2008 order barring humanitarian agencies from the Vanni conflict area in northern Sri Lanka and allow humanitarian agencies to return to assist at-risk individuals and reach all civilians in need; ensure that nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are able to perform their work without arbitrary government interference;

• Allow independent observers, including journalists, access to conflict zones so that accurate and timely information about the situation of civilians in such areas is publicly available;

• Immediately end the arbitrary and indefinite detention of civilians displaced by recent fighting at the internment camps in northern Sri Lanka;

• Permit international monitoring of the screening procedures to prevent arbitrary arrests and “disappearances” of the detained individuals;

• Otherwise abide by the United Nations General Principles on Internal Displacement, including by permitting the freedom of movement of displaced persons, respecting the right of displaced persons to return to their homes, and permitting humanitarian agencies access to displaced persons.

In addition, we call upon the US government to support a discussion of the humanitarian situation in Sri Lanka at the UN Security Council.

Posted by transCurrents at 07:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (20)

Jessica Schieder of The Hoya, Georgetown University's newspaper on record since 1920 - interviews People for Equality and Relief in Sri Lanka's (PEARL) advocacy director Tasha Manoranjan:

Tasha Manoranjan (SFS ’08) has volunteered in her family’s home country of Sri Lanka since the summer after her freshman year of college and has become an advocate for peace in the island nation’s civil war. As a member of PEARL, an organization that works to inform Americans about the suffering in Sri Lanka and the crimes preformed by the Sri Lankan government against Tamil civilians she is currently fasting along with seven other Tamil-Americans for the Sri Lankan Tamil population’s rights.

How did you first get involved with the situation in Sri Lanka?

Well, my family is originally from Sri Lanka. I was born in Columbus, Ohio, but growing up [my] parents would tell me what they experienced in Sri Lanka and how they were forced to flee the country and the discrimination they experienced, being a part of the Tamil minority there. It was more difficult for them to access education opportunities, based on the fact they were Tamil. It was something I knew, but hadn’t really absorbed, because I was just so far away in my daily life. It never really meant much to me, until I actually went and did volunteer work there.

I felt a part of me really needed to go to this country and see where I came from, and so I went the following summer, the summer before I started college, and spent a few weeks in a girl’s orphanage, teaching them English and getting their conversational abilities a little bit stronger, and that struck me. Hearing that and knowing the differences between their experiences and my experiences just really struck me, because it could have just as easily been me living there. It’s just because my parents were lucky enough to leave the country that I have this amazing life here, and it could’ve just as easily been my life there — in that orphanage, having lost family members, and without any support system, experiencing the devastation that they’re experiencing now. That first experience made me want to go back again and again. Every summer, I go and stay at that girls’ orphanage or another school in the area, just teaching English — and even learning some of their language, myself. I learn from them what their lives are like, and then conveying that to others to educate people about the suffering there.

Can you tell us a little bit about what you do here in the United States, as one of the leaders of PEARL?

PEARL is an organization in which we try to educate Americans about the suffering in Sri Lanka and about the crimes the Sri Lankan government has perpetrated against the Tamil civilians and try to elevate the dialogue, which is currently going on, regarding the conflict. The basic status quo approach to the situation is that it’s a conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE [the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a separatist group in Sri Lanka]. Tamil civilians are completely absent from that conversation, and for so long Tamil civilians have been silenced and ignored. The international community has supported the Sri Lankan government’s approach, that this is a war against terrorism, and according to the Bush doctrine, during wars of terrorism, you can attack innocent civilians, and mark them off as collateral damage. I think the Sri Lankan government has successfully rode on the coattail of that and has been able to portray this crisis and all the civilians, who have been killed over the past few years, as Tiger supporters or as LTTE supporters. The other stories aren’t being heard, so I… see this organization as a tool to utilize our own experiences… to convey that to policy makers and other Americans here, and foster a more educated dialogue, that includes Tamil civilians and respects the rights of Tamil civilians.

That’s our objective, and how we go about doing it is we have a membership of about 2,600 Americans and we e-mail them every week, asking them to forward the letter to their congressional representatives. The letter updates the congressional representatives about what Tamil civilians are currently experiencing.

We supplement the letter-writing campaign with advocacy days on Capitol Hill. We’ll go and speak with congressional offices that are handling foreign affairs, and educate them.

Why are you fasting?

On Monday, the government began bombing safe zones, after having told Tamil refugees they’d be safe there. Then, they began shelling those safe zones, including the refugee camps. When we found out about that, we were beyond outraged — these were people we know. We have friends there, we have family there, and we were so overwhelmed by a sense of urgency. As citizens of the most powerful nation in the world, we felt we should act as a voice for these people and stop this suffering. We thought the typical protests and rallies were insufficient. I know how long it’s been since I’ve eaten, but I have no idea how long its been since these refugees have eaten, slept, been nourished or had access to proper medical supplies — things we take for granted. We felt a fast shows how eager we are to bring an end to this genocide. [courtesy: The Hoya]

Posted by transCurrents at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

By Sarath Kumara

As fighting between the Sri Lankan army and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) continues in the northern Wanni region, the plight of civilians trapped in the war zone is worsening.

Military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara claimed yesterday that security forces had surrounded the town of Puthukkudiyiruppu over the weekend and confined the LTTE to just 73 square kilometres of jungle. There is no means of verifying these claims as the government and army block independent media access to the area.

Following international protests against the war, the government has been seeking to downplay the humanitarian crisis. It now insists that only 70,000 people are still in the war zone, not the 250,000 estimated by various international aid agencies. Government spokesmen continue to blame the hundreds of casualties on the LTTE for using civilians as "human shields," rather than on the military's indiscriminate use of artillery and aerial bombardment.

In comments reported by the Associated Press on February 13, disaster management and human rights minister Mahinda Samarasinghe tacitly admitted that the army regards Tamil civilians in the area as the enemy. "How do you identify a civilian and a terrorist?" he exclaimed at a press conference. According to Samarasinghe, all dead civilians are simply LTTE fighters out of uniform.

In bid to black-out unfavourable reports, the government has ordered all humanitarian agencies, except the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), out of the area. In the past few days, officials from the UN Human Rights Council left. Any media reports that provide a glimpse of the unfolding humanitarian crisis are immediately denounced by government spokesmen as helping the LTTE "terrorists".

Despite the media blackout, it is clear that the government's communal war has created a catastrophe. The ICRC has carried out four evacuations from an ad-hoc hospital in the coastal village of Putumattalan. So far, 1,477 injured and their relatives have been transferred to hospital in Trincomalee and many more are waiting. On Friday, 397 patients were evacuated.

The number of evacuees provides an indication of the extent of the devastation being created by the fighting. The makeshift medical facility was set up at Putumattalan after a hospital in Puthukkudiyiruppu came under repeated artillery fire. ICRC and UNCHR statements confirmed the attacks. While the military denied firing at the hospital, its spokesmen refused to guarantee the safety of patients and staff.

In a statement on February 18, ICRC spokesman Paul Castella described the desperate situation in Putumattalan: "We did save lives today [with the ferry] but many people remain behind, helpless and anxiously waiting to be evacuated. It is now a matter of life and death." ICRC spokeswoman Sarasi Wijeratne told the IRIN newsagency: "More and more people are coming to Putumattalan. There is a makeshift medical and triage facility there and we will keep arranging regular ferries to move the sick and wounded out."

Regional Health Director Dr. Thurairajah Varatharajah, who is working at the Putumattalan hospital, told the Associated Press on February 13 that around 40 civilians were being killed and more than 100 injured each day from intense shelling.

Most injuries were due to shrapnel but patients were also suffering from lung infections, fever and coughs, probably from inhaling fumes and smoke. Only eight doctors remain in the area but most staff have stopped coming to work due to the dangers. Varatharajah said the hospital was running out of essential antibiotics, including penicillin.

The government has severely restricted all supplies, including essentials such as food and medicine, entering the remaining LTTE-held territory. A load of 30 metric tonnes was sent on February 18, including 20 tonnes of flour, 6 of lentils and 4 of sugar—the first since January 29. Essential Services Commissioner General S.B. Divaratne justified the lack of supplies by saying there was no guarantee they would not fall into the LTTE's hands.

As in previous fighting over the past 30 months of renewed war, the strategy of the government and the army has been to use overwhelming superiority in numbers and firepower to wear down the LTTE and terrorise the population. Having confined the LTTE to a small pocket of land, the military wants to force civilians out so that it can turn the entire area into a free fire zone.

The military stopped releasing details of its own casualties last October, fearing that the rising death toll would inflame public opposition. Most soldiers are economic conscripts from poor rural villages where there are no jobs or other opportunities. While no casualty figures have been released, the government defence spokesman has acknowledged that 3,000 soldiers have been killed in the recent months of fighting. In rural areas, white flags and death notices for soldiers have become a common sight.

In the midst of international condemnation of the humanitarian crisis, Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse invited UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to visit the country. Ban declined the invitation but sent the Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes in his place last week.

After meeting Rajapakse and visiting Vavuniya in northern Sri Lanka, Holmes offered what could only be described as a whitewash of the government and its war. "It is hard to say how many of those killed are civilians and who is responsible for any particular incident," he declared. After calling on both the LTTE and the government to protect civilians, Holmes focussed on the LTTE, demanding it release civilians from areas under its control.

Amid criticism of its detention of civilians fleeing the fighting, Holmes praised the government for treating Tamil refugees "excellently". The government is currently proposing the establishment of huge "welfare villages" to compulsorily detain as many as 200,000 war refugees for up to three years and is seeking international money and support.

Last week, LTTE spokesman B. Nadesan expressed his surprise that the UN was not helping civilians. The LTTE, he said, was "deeply sad and puzzled" that the "United Nations [was] not taking effective measures to protect" the Tamil masses. His puzzled disbelief is simply one more futile appeal to the "international community" that has thrown its support behind the Rajapakse government's renewed war over the past three years.

Desperate to boost morale, the LTTE sent two light aircraft on a suicidal mission to attack the capital last Friday. One plane crashed into the Inland Revenue Department building in Colombo and the other was shot down near Sri Lanka's international airport at Katunayake. Such attacks, which will not alter the course of the war, highlight the dead-end of the LTTE's perspective—an armed struggle to pressure the imperialist powers to support a separate Tamil state.

The Rajapakse government's cynical indifference toward the plight of Tamil refugees trapped in the fighting is a warning to working people throughout the island. The military defeat of the LTTE will not bring democracy and prosperity, but will strengthen the position of Rajapakse's right-wing ruling clique amid the country's deepening economic crisis. An end to the fighting will only bring an intensification of class struggles, in which the police-state measures used against the Tamil minority will be extended to the working class as a whole.

Posted by transCurrents at 12:51 PM | Permalink

by Prof. M Sornarajah

It has been reported that the Sri Lankan government has rejected the appointment of Mr. Des Brown by the British Government as an envoy to deal with issues arising from the persecution by the state of the Tamil population in the country. As with all totalitarian governments, like those in Zimbabwe and Sudan, the Sri Lankan government takes refuge in its sovereignty to deny the competence of the international community’s concern with the plight of the Tamil civilians who have been confined to a small space and subjected to relentless bombings by the Sri Lankan army.

The brutality with which Tamils have been treated in Sri Lanka by successive Sinhalese governments has justified a claim to self-determination in the Tamil minority. It is an idea and a claim that cannot be extinguished by the killing of people, either the LTTE militants or the civilian Tamils. As with Palestine, the more killing there is, the more entrenched the determination and will of the suppressed people to continue the struggle, a fact lost both on Israel as well as the Rajapakse government. The history of the Tamil struggle shows that the more the repression, the greater becomes the resolve of the people to ensure their freedom.

In Sri Lanka, every government of every major party, from that of the two Bandaranaikes, the Jayawardene government and that of Chandrika Kumaranatunge kept themselves in power by stoking ethnic hatred and unleashing the army on the Tamil population, without making efforts at a political solution to an obviously political problem. That tendency has become more severe under the government of Mahinda Rajapakse, who finds in ethnic chauvinism, not only the means of maintaining the power of his family group but also of hiding the looting of the country and the economic decline that such plunder has created. Many civilians, largely Tamils but also Sinhalese, have suffered so that this coterie could be kept in power. Sinhalese journalists brave enough to question the fact that the government is bombing its own people out of existence have been murdered within security zones which the government itself has established. No one has yet been arrested in connection with any of these murders. Sinhalese of good will, who queried the conduct of the government, have been quelled through fear or have left the country under threats of violence.

The plight of the Tamils at the present moment is grave. They are being decimated by bombings of hospitals and safety zones by the air-force and direction of artillery fire at these zones. The luring of these people into the safety zones and then bombing the zones smacks of genocide. This practice gives rise to the inescapable inference that ethnic cleansing is the clear purpose of what is being attempted. Taken together with the views expressed by the army commander about his mission to make the island under Singhalese rule and the obvious destruction of Tamil lives, there is genocide taking place in Sri Lanka. In the South, the torture of arrested persons, the disappearances of those opposed to the regime and the violence unleashed on the voices of dissent indicate that the whole of Sri Lanka is being subjected to colossal violations of a diverse category of vital human rights.

In the light of these circumstances, a responsibility to protect the Tamil civilians arises in the international community. The Responsibility to Protect is now well recognized in international law. It results from an international instrument which the General Assembly of the United Nations approved in 2005 at the World Summit. The Responsibility to Protect is a duty every state owes its minorities. The Responsibility requires that the minority not be subjected to atrocities involving genocide or crimes against humanity like torture. Where this duty is violated by the state, it is incumbent on other members of the international community to intervene and ensure that the persecuted group is protected. Such intervention is legitimate in international law. It is opposed only by a few states like China, Russia, Sudan and Zimbabwe, fellow travelers with the government of Sri Lanka and persistent violators of the rights of their own citizens.

There has been a history of violence against Tamils by the Sri Lankan government. The entrenched discrimination began with the independence of Sri Lanka in 1948 with a slew of legislative measures disadvantaging the minority Tamils. But, it soon turned into violence to dispossess them of their traditional homelands. This resulted in violent resistance which successive Sinhalese governments have sought to crush. Tamil men and women have been arrested and tortured. They have been transferred out of the main cities. Their homes have been taken over for construction of high security zones. Bombings of schools and hospitals in the Tamil region have been frequent. Women have been raped by the occupying forces. Children have been killed. Temples and churches have been demolished or desecrated.

Under Rajapakse, these practices have taken a more intense turn. Hiding under the war on terror initiated by a now defunct American government which also unleashed un-American practices in the name of the war on terror, the Rajapakse government has intensified atrocities on the Tamils. The Tamils have now been driven into a thin strip of land and are subjected to constant shelling by the government troops even in the designated safety zones. Independent verification for such shelling exists.

In these circumstances, a clear responsibility to protect arises. It is unlikely that the United Nations would act, as Russia and China, both Security Council members, have their own incidents of oppression of minorities in Chechnya, Tibet and Xiamen to hide. It is incumbent now on individual members of the international community who respect this Responsibility to protect the Tamil minority in its current plight of helplessness against atrocities. Britain has made a start in attempting to send an envoy. More requires to be done so that the gang of international criminals who rule Sri Lanka do not commit further atrocities. As with the British government, other Western states should insist on sending envoys to determine the situation that prevails in the hope of bringing help to a besieged people. The urgency of this situation is great as the people face decimation at the hands of the government troops.

One other urgent measure is to identify the coterie in power in Sri Lanka as international criminals who will have to pay for their crimes in the future in the same way Milosovic was expected to pay for his. What is happening in Sri Lanka is no different from what is happening in Dafur or what happened in Gaza. The equality principles requires these situations to be treated alike. As the impeachment of the President of Sudan is being contemplated by the International Criminal Court, it is necessary to think in terms of the prosecution of Rajapakse as well. Another is to ensure that the corrupt wealth the Rajapakse coterie has spirited away in Western banks is identified and returned to the people of Sri Lanka. The announcement of these measures by well-meaning states will deter the continued persecution of the people, both Tamil and Sinhalese alike, by the Rajapakse government.

It is important to remember that a right to self-determination has arisen in the Tamil people as a result of continued discrimination and oppression which cannot be extinguished through government violence. It will live on however many people of whatever combatant status - terrorists, armed thugs, civilians call them what you want - are eliminated. It can only be dealt with politically through discussion between the two parties. There is a possibility still, as the majority of Sinhalese people who refuse to be deluded by ethnic chauvinism believe, of resolving this issue peacefully through the search for a constitutional mechanism. It must be said that the LTTE itself was not averse to this idea. It is time that the international community intervened in order to ensure that a guranteed settlement comes about through peaceful means and that a problem which has befuddled the island for over a generation is ended.

(Professor M Sornarajah, teaches and works in the area of public international law.)

Posted by transCurrents at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)

Full Text of Speech by Dr. Ellyn Shander MD at the “Tamils Against Genocide”, Washington DC rally, Feb 20, 2009:

VANAKAM

First I want to say how honored I am to speak at this rally.

I want to thank the organizers of this event who have brought us all together. I am so impressed with the number of people , who have traveled great distances, taken off from work, and put their lives aside to be here.. Look at us, thousands showing up in solidarity and giving voice to the Tamil people in this terrible crises.

WE have the power to change the present anguish and despair in Sri Lanka! WE WILL NOT BE DEFEATED!!!

[Dr. Ellyn Shander at a "Tamils Againt Genocide" media briefing held at National Press Club, Washington DC, Feb 20, 2009]

I dedicate this speech

- to all those who have died in the senseless violence since 1948,
- to all the Tamil victims of targeted persecution and murder,
- to all the brave heroes that have fallen in the struggle for equality AND
- to all the Tamils in SL, who can’t be here today and are suffering now in unbearable circumstances.

Let us take a moment of silence to pray for the restoration of hope, peace and dignity to the Tamil people of Sri Lanka. (Silence)

Most of you know me, as an American doctor, I went to the Northern coast of Sri Lanka after the tsunami and helped in a fishing village north of Killonochi. After my second trip back to the North, the government broke the ceasefire. Since then the war on the Tamil civilians has increased to a heartbreaking devastation.

The genocide of the Tamil people is personal for me.

I met hundreds of beautiful people in the North, but now it is over run by government savages.

My memories of Tamil children playing in the villages are covered with death and destruction. What kind of evil government kills its own civilians???

Saddam Hussein, govt of Sudan, Burma and the GOSL. All members of the Killing club.

We have all been shocked , saddened and devastated at the news that comes daily from the Vanni region.

-Incendiary bombs burning whole families as they sleep,
-civilians lying on the streets bleeding to death.,
-forced abortions of Tamil women,
-torture and rape in the new concentration camps for civilian Tamils who escape to Vavunia.

This ethnic cleansing of the Tamils is spreading as a bloodstain across Tamil land. It is masterminded by the President of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa, guilty of war crimes against the Tamil people.

The Sri Lankan government apologizes to no one.
They do not say that civilian deaths are “collateral damage,”
They don’t apologize for using cluster bombs on civilian areas,
They don’t apologize for using incendiary bombs on densely packed civilians,
They don’t apologize for threatening doctors to leave,
They don’t apologize for ordering the UN and all NGOS to leave,
They don’t apologize for closing off the whole area under attack from journalists or observers,
They don’t apologize for starving and killing over 300,000 Tamil civilians who have done nothing wrong except be born Tamil in the country of Sri Lanka.

The similarity to the Jews being killed in Germany is chilling.

The GOSL is acting just like the Nazi regime with plans to exterminate Tamils !!

And just as we can’t imagine the GOSL’s evil to get worse, he orders the shelling of civilian hospitals and then states openly that it was justified!!

These cowards claim they are waging a war against terror.

That is insane… just look at the pictures of the casualties. Old people, women and children. They are not killing terrorists , they are using this an excuse to ELIMIANTE EVERY TAMIL THEY CAN GET THEIR HANDS ON. This is genocide.!!!!

But one thing the GOSL never counted on was us!!

The Tamil Diaspora and friends.

Look around at your neighbor. Look at the faces of the other people in this crowd. You are looking at the faces of people who are dedicated and loyal to truth and integrity for the Tamil people.

The time to accuse us as terrorists is over! We are thousands strong as humanitarians.!!

All of you who come out and tirelessly write letters, organize rallies, come here to march and shout , AND send photos to journalists: all to make sure this genocide can not be hidden, can not be buried, and cannot continue!! We will make sure that the world knows what is happening to the Tamils.

WE WILL NEVER BE SILENCED! AND
WE WILL NEVER STOP FIGHTING FOR JUSTICE.

The GOSL never thought we would show up and expose their lies, but here we are: and in this darkest hour we will continue to make sure that people SEE what is happening.. THEY CAN NO LONGER HIDE TAMIL GENOCIDE, by accusing us of being terrorist supporters.

Even if they try to kill every Tamil in Sri Lanka and take their land.

We will not let them succeed in extinguishing the Tamils.

Because in this darkness, we will fight for the Tamils to be a presence in the world and never be forgotten.
WE .. you and I can do this.

In these darkest hours, we will collectively move to our highest selves and say to those Sinhalese Nazis.

YOU WILL NEVER KILL THE COLLECTIVE TAMIL SPIRIT.
WE WILL SHOUT TO STOP GENOCIDE NOW!
AND WE WILL REBUILD!

Although there is silence in Sri Lanka
We will never be silenced
Although they control Tamils there
We will never be controlled here.

Although they are torturing and killing Tamils there.

They can never kill our collective regroup and stay on the highest moral ground.

WE HAVE GOD ON OUR SIDE, as we come here today: to the capital of our great country and ask for help

President Obama we have come to you for help
Secretary of state Clinton we have come to you for help.

Pres Obama your words on your inauguration day spoke directly to the heart of the Tamil people’s struggle!!

You said:

“We must carry forward the precious gift, the noble idea, passed on from generation to generation. The God given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.”

Pres Obama we are asking you to make that pledge to the Tamil people.

We need your help!

Pres Obama: We have come here today thousands strong to tell the government butchers and masterminds of the Tamil final solution.

We will never stop fighting for the Tamil people, no matter where and when it is. You cannot break our spirit..

And on inauguration day, we heard your words Pres Obama, mirror ours

You said:

“And to those who seek to advance their aims by……slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that, "Our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken. You cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you."

President Obama we are asking you to make that pledge to the Tamil people.

We need your help!

From the worst violent struggles have come free nations.
The US in the revolutionary war
Israel in the war of independence
Etria from Ethiopia
Kosovo and on and on.

And as we saw after WW2, the worse mass extermination of a people, 6 million and yet the Jewish state was born from the ashes.

Know this, the Tamils will rise from these ashes as well.

President Obama we heard you say to governments like the GOSL

To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history,

At this rally today we say to you. …Mahinda Rajapaksa … you are on the wrong side of history! We will overcome you!

President Obama we are asking you to make that pledge to the Tamil people.
We need your help!

PLEASE insist on an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.

Please send an international presence to SL to bear witness and stop the genocide of an entire people before it is too late.

Please pressure the GOSL to open the conflict areas to humanitarian aid, international journalists and human rights activists.

Sometimes in life we get the rare opportunity to fight for integrity, and truth, and we are forced to go outside, really outside, our comfort zone. That is when it is a privilege to do service for a people and a cause.

Tamils worldwide and their friends, we have been given this privilege.

We demand that the Sri Lankan government stop the genocide…..and
We demand that the international community pressure this Nazi regime to stop the ethnic cleansing and send in humanitarian aid. It is time for the Tamil people to have their own state

But in this fight, we need help.. and once again Pres Obama we found a promise of hope in your words on January 20th. You said:

“know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and we are ready to lead once more.”

President Obama we are asking you to make that pledge to an independent Tamil nation.
We need your help!

And finally, President Obama you said on Jan 20th in front of millions of Americans and the entire world that
“this is a new era of responsibility …on the part of every American, …we ( must) be …., firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task.”
Mr. President .. the Tamils are facing a very difficult task.. stopping the final solution .a genocide ..from a madness that is stalking their country.

You speak about giving America’s all to a difficult task.

Please,
President Obama we are asking you to make that pledge to the Tamil people.
We need your help!

And finally to all of you here today ….let me say, that I have met Tamil men, women and children. teens and elders from,
Sri Lanka, Canada, America, England, India and even Australia.

And what has impressed me most was their
Strength of character,
The tenderness of their hearts, and
The courage to go on under unspeakable sadness about the situation back home,
so one thing I know for sure

Tamils the world over and their friends
Will never give up the struggle
Tamils the world over and their friends
Will try and save every Tamil possible
Tamils the world over and their friends
Will overcome this darkness
And then Tamils the world over and their friends
Will rebuild in our hearts and then on the ground
A FREE INDEPENDANT STATE CALLED TAMIL EELAM

Thank you

[Dr. Ellyn Shander MD of Connecticut, USA is a humanitarian activist]

Posted by transCurrents at 06:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (24)

A boy with his father at a camp in northern Sri Lanka. The child broke his arm as he leapt into a bunker when the area came under attack.

By James Elder

VANNI, Sri Lanka, 23 February 2009 – Sennappu had a split second, a moment, literally a heartbeat to throw her body around her 18-month-old daughter before the bomb landed. Her reactions were enough time to save the life of her baby girl. Sennappu was killed instantly.

As Sri Lanka’s conflict has grown in intensity, so too has the number of civilians injured and killed. UNICEF has consistently called upon the Government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE (the rebel group known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) to give absolute priority to the protection of civilians. And yet mothers like Sennappu continue to die, as do children.

The main causes of death and injury to children have been shrapnel and bullet wounds, burns and fractures. Some have been evacuated and taken to hospitals out of the war zone, which are overflowing and desperately short of anaesthetic and essential medicines.

‘Fear defines their childhood’

In a statement last week, UNICEF said it was extremely alarmed at the high number of children affected by the violence in the northern area of Sri Lanka known as the Vanni.

“Hundreds of children have been injured in the fighting and evacuated in the past week,” said UNICEF Representative in Sri Lanka Philippe Duamelle. “Children are victims of this conflict by being killed, injured, recruited, displaced, separated and denied their every day needs due to the fighting. Instead of hope, fear defines their childhood.”

UNICEF was reiterating the call it has made time and again – to the government and the LTTE – to give children every protection from the fighting and allow them to move to areas where they are safe and can receive appropriate assistance.

Holmes on civilian casualties

That call was reinforced this past weekend by UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes.

At the end of a three-day mission to Sri Lanka, Mr. Holmes urged that combatants ensure the safety of tens of thousands of civilians who remain trapped within areas of heavy fighting in the north.

“We need to ensure that the civilian population can escape as soon as possible from the position they find themselves in, which is extremely dangerous,” he said. “Every effort should be made by the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam to avoid civilian casualties. That is the message.”

Assistance provided to 35,000

Thankfully, some civilians have found safety. UNICEF is responding to the needs of 35,000 people who have been able to leave the Vanni and are now receiving humanitarian assistance away from the conflict.

UNICEF’s emergency support for these children and their families includes tens of thousands of hygiene kits, emergency health kits, safe water, latrines and bathing facilities, nutritional supplies and educational kits for all children.

At the same time, UNICEF is supplying hospitals that are treating the wounded children. It is also providing crucial psychosocial support, as well as identification of unaccompanied children who have been separated from their families.

Appeal for emergency support

Many of the children who UNICEF is now supporting have been displaced multiple times as they fled the fighting over the past 12 months.

One mother, Ms. Paskaran, said her family members had been forced to abandon their homes and shelters nine times since January of last year. “The fighting got closer and closer, and more and more people were dying,” she recalled. “My children saw their friends killed. They spent days and nights in bunkers. They were petrified. But we are out of there now.”

They are out, but today tens of thousands of civilians remain in the Vanni, including a large number of children. They are caught in the crossfire, experiencing serious shortages of food, medicine and safe water. Many children have not been to school in almost a year.

As a part of the UN Consolidated Humanitarian Appeal for 2009, UNICEF is appealing for US$15 million for a broad range of emergency support in water and sanitation, nutrition, education and protection for children trapped in Sri Lanka’s conflict.

Posted by transCurrents at 11:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

by Aarvalan

“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity.
The optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty” - Winston Churchill

The fasts, rallies, marches and human chains organised by the Tamil Diaspora has been aimed at informing the International Community (IC) of the atrocities committed by the Sri Lankan government and urging the international community to stop the genocide of the Tamils in Sri Lanka. The author believes the International community is well informed of the ground realities (example recent HRW report and ICRC sources) and was informed of the fundamentals of the Tamil struggle from by the LTTE delegations which travelled around the world during the 2002-2006 peace talks.

[Awareness Rally in Geneva, Feb 20, 2009-pic by R. Paladin]

The Tamil nationalist movement need to understand that the reason behind the “silence” of the international community or it reluctance to intervene directly in Sri Lanka to stop the genocide. In the author’s view the International community wants to see the end of the LTTE’s military strength and have been successfully convinced by the Sri Lankan government that the end of the LTTE is near. Ironically and pathetically the mounting civilian casualties are perceived by the IC as “collateral damages”. The belief in the IC is that the Sri Lankan government will be able to implement a political solution to the ethnic conflict, without the LTTE being a major player and calling shots in the peace talks. The above assertion does not mean the author endorses this stand, but a reality the Tamil Nationalist movement needs to comes to terms with in developing its strategy to influence the IC.

An important question which has been left out of the above equation is who will the Sri Lankan government negotiate with? And in the absence of the LTTE, who will lead the Tamils? Sri Lankan government’s preference would be the EPDP and TULF for the North and TMVP for the East, there by dividing the Tamil community’s strength, the same old strategy of “divide and rule”.

As Kumar David wrote in his recent article “Tamil nationalist movement must put politics in command” published in www.tamilweek.com, “Tamil nationalism, indeed the Tamil community as a whole, subcontracted the national question to the LTTE during this period. Confidence in ‘the boys’ and the acclaimed military prowess of ‘thambi’ (later thalaivar) persuaded the community at home and more so in the Diaspora to sit back and subcontract out the national liberation struggle. Exclusive reliance on military methods was the consequence; it was not just an error of LTTE, it was also a failure of Tamil nationalism”

Kumar David concludes by stating “The Tamil nationalist movement must put politics in command and engage with broad struggles on social and economic issues”. “Emphatically, this is not the same as ‘joining the democratic mainstream’, the phoney approach that the regimes new found hangers-on, jaded left-opportunists and recently articulate petty-bourgeois quacks postulate”.

At present the LTTE is unable to actively influence the IC and be the public voice for the Tamil nationalist movement. Therefore there is a need for the Tamil Diaspora to form a transcontinental political body to advance the political aspirations for which we have paid a colossal price and provide leadership to the genuine Tamil aspirations. Failure to act now will lead to the Douglas Devanandas and Karuna Ammans playing a lead role with the IC as witnessed by the Pillayan lead TMVP dealing with US and Indian Ambassadors.

This political body should join hands with the Tamil leaders from Tamil Nadu (including the DMK, & ADMK), Malaysia, South Africa and Singapore to form a powerful Tamil lobby to effectively influence the IC. This is not an attempt to isolate the LTTE, but it is about providing a legitimate political voice for the Tamils in the current context.

The transcontinental Tamil lobby should influence the IC to endorse the fundamentals of the Tamil struggle and also develop a proposal to resolve the Tamil nationalistic struggle. The fundamentals of the Tamil National struggle are the Thimpu principles which were formulated jointly by all the Tamil liberation movements. The Thimpu Principles are as follows:

1. That the Sri Lankan Tamils be recognised as a distinct nationality;

2. That an identified Tamil homeland and the guarantee of its territorial integrity be recognised ;

3. That the right of the Sri Lankan Tamils to self-determination be acknowledged.

The LTTE’s supremo, Mr. Prabakaran, articulates the core ideology of the liberation struggle magnificently in his 2002 Heroes day message. He says, “Tamils constitute themselves as a people, or rather as a national formation, since they possess a distinct language, culture and history with a clearly defined homeland and a consciousness of their ethnic identity. As a distinct people, they are entitled to the right to self-determination. The right to self-determination has two aspects: internal and external. The internal self-determination entitles a people to regional self-rule”.

It is also important the Tamil body develop a set of proposals. It is a fundamental failure on the part of the LTTE in 2002 to enter into negotiations without submitting a proposal with their demand for an interim administration (IA). Whilst it was repeatedly stated from Feb 2002 onwards that the negotiations will focus on IA it took more than 2 years for the LTTE to submit its own proposals on IA. As referenced in the author’s previous article the Devolution Proposals formulated by Neelan Thiruchelvam and G.L. Pieris could be a starting point for the new proposals as it was also endorsed by the LTTE’s Late Dr. Anton Balasingham.

The Tamil body should influence the International Community to endorse their proposals for devolution of power, with entrenched constitutional protection. The protection of minority rights in the constitution is vital as evidenced by the Supreme Court ruling the P-TOMS (Post Tsunami Operational Management Structure) and SIHRN (Sub Committee for Immediate Humanitarian Rehabilitation Needs) Proposals “ultra vires”. Also it safeguards against a future Sinhala regime changing the constitution as witnessed in the case of North East provinces being demerged by the Mahinda Rajapakse regime.

As a first step towards forming the Tamil political body a conference should be held in Chennai, Tamil Nadu with the auspicious of the Tamil Nadu government. This conference should unite the Tamils from the entire world together and speak in one voice for the Tamils. This will also send a strong message to the IC and demonstrates the political strength of the Tamils. The conference should endorse the proposals for the peaceful resolution of the conflict and should be a starting point to influence the IC, LTTE and the Sri Lankan Government.

The Tamil Nadu leaders’ input in this exercise is vital from two aspects. One, prior to the Tamils of Sri Lanka, it was the Tamils in India who demanded separate state post independence. However they settled for regional autonomy and in the past 15 years have increased their political influence on the central government. Despite being a minority in India, they have succeeded in becoming “king makers” in Indian politics and at the same time succeeded in channelling economic development to the state, thereby becoming a powerful state in terms of politics and economics.

Secondly, by absorbing the Tamil Nadu leaders the Tamil Nationalistic movement will be able to influence the central government of India effectively. The significance of Indian support or at least India not supporting the Sri Lankan state is very important.

The Tamil National movement needs to rebrand itself to advance its cause. It is time for the politically silent Tamil Diaspora to stimulate progress and end the bloodshed.

This doesn’t mean subjugation;

It means preserving the core and stimulating progress.
It means saving the lives of Tamils (both LTTE members and civilians)
It means providing an opportunity to people who have been displaced a life to live.
It means providing the next generation of Tamils to live in peace and prosperity.

“Do not dwell in the past,
do not dwell in the future,
concentrate the mind on the present moment” – Lord Buddha

Posted by transCurrents at 09:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

by N.Chelvakumar

Why did I have to become a Tamil again? Don't get me wrong, I was always a Tamil. I was born a Tamil. My family, as far as I can trace back, was Tamil. But I never consciously thought about it till it was thrust upon me. When I was just a little kid I was a Ceylonese. Then they said that I was a Sri Lankan. That I didn't mind, as Ceylon was a name that was crafted by our colonial masters, so why not another make-believe moniker. It just didn't matter. I was a citizen of the world.

The era of ‘The world is a village' caught my imagination, we all lived in an interdependent global village, working towards a glorious culmination, a dream of becoming one entity. But all dreams had to come to an end. 'How are you doing?' and 'I am doing great!' days did not ring true anymore.

One morning the whole facade erupted into an inferno. I was stopped by a murderous mob of rioters in the middle of a street. 'Are you a Tamil?' they screamed. 'No, I am a not' I pled in panic. It let me continue living, but created an inner crisis that I couldn't resolve. So I fled, I came to Canada.

Slowly I gave up my attachment to Sri Lanka and assumed all things Canadian. This dream of taking up a new identity was soon shattered. 'Where are you from?' I was being constantly asked. 'Sri Lanka' seemed to satisfy most. 'Are you a Tamil?' was the question I now faced from the enlightened. But that too changed. 'A Tamil Tiger?' was the new universal incantation, chanted to produce the expected result - a denial, a retreat.

What am I? Am I a Canadian, a Sri Lankan or a Tamil? Where I was a Sri Lankan I became an outcaste, where I thought I was a Canadian I was considered a Tamil Tiger. Being concerned about the plight of the Tamils in Sri Lanka had become a crime.

As I watch the news and see all those innocent people being maimed and killed they remind me of the neighbourhood I grew up in, the school I attended, the faces of my childhood. Fathers who should be going to work, mothers who should preparing their children for the future and kids who should be skipping their way through school were being slaughtered instead.

In the eyes of the myopic nation of democracies the separation between the Tamils and the Tigers seem to be fast disappearing. 'Its all your fault, you deserve what you are getting' is the mantra of the appeasers. We, the Tamils, have become a forgotten entity on the map of international political pussyfooting. Anti- 'terrorism' has become a catchall word for anything goes. The basic tenets of humanity has been suspended. The community of nations is sleeping. The echoes of ‘peace for our time’ reverberate again through the halls of transnational diplomacy.

So reluctantly, but by necessity, I have become a Tamil again. I need an identity that is irrefutable. A place from where I can make a stand, make my voice heard. The physical diaspora of the Tamils is spritually merging together in anger, frustration and desperation. But is it too late? Will history weep and wail about a holocaust that could have been prevented. Would we have created a nation of people that will never forget. A people who will say 'never again!' The day I become a Tamil has arrived, its today.

Posted by transCurrents at 09:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

by M.S.Shah Jahan

"Pakistan’s ISI sleuths with Sri Lankan passports and members of Karuna faction had crossed over to India and were stationed in places such as Egmore, Kolhikode and Bangalore, targeting the supporters of Eelam Tamils. It had come to light that recently, over 2,000 Islamic youths from the eastern province of Sri Lanka were trained in a Pakistan camp. The group might pose danger to India and vital installations such as power stations at Koodankulam and Kalpakkam. Sri Lanka seemed to be getting closer to China and Pakistan.

Dr. S.Ramadoss, founder of the Pattali Makkal Katchi, [Toilers party] the PMK, uttered the above and urged the Centre to order Sri Lanka to immediately end the war. If the latter did not do so, it should withdraw its naval ships, satellites, surveillance aircraft and the technical hands from the island nation, he added.

‘Save the innocent Eelam Tamils’ campaign was started in Tamilnadu by the Communist Party of India. The Marxists never interfered in Lankan issue but tacitly supported the governments and showed no sympathy for rebels. Marxism itself is based on revolution with a blend of terrorism, as Mao said, "Power comes out of the barrel of a gun." Look at the history how the Leninists in Russia, Maoists in China and Nepal, and the JVP here killed and tortured pro Government elements and the innocent civilians. The word revolution in the 19th centaury gradually became terrorism in the 20th centaury.

Compared to CPM- Communist Party - Marxist [pro China], CPI- Communist Party of India [pro Russia] is weaker in Tamilnadu and nation wide. Therefore it was natural for CPI’s Tamilnadu unit, headed by its State Secretary T.Pandyan, to take up the Eelam cause. But Pandyan rejected that CPI’s support to Eelam Tamils were not a political Manoeuvre. "It is a shame to think about forming political alliance over the dead bodies of Eelam Tamils" he added. Yet it is to be noted here that the CPM plays mild on Lankan issue and not that boisterous like the CPI.

If India had a nuclear deal with China or Russia, instead of US, the Communists would have supported. Now having broken the Congress alliance they are in negotiation with Jayalalitha. But last week Jayalalitha wooed the Congress saying, "Those who will come with us will gain and those who will not be with us will lose." Doesn’t "Amma" talk like Jesus Christ from Mount Hermon? But such alliance is unlikely.

The band wagon brought by Pandyan to Mount Road [Anna Salai today] was readily occupied by Tiger friendly politicians like Vaiko who has ruined his political career for his affection for the terrorists, Thirumavalavan, a young firebrand and a Dalit based party leader, Dr.S. Ramadoss, a medical doctor turned maverick politician, and Nedumaran, LTTE’s foster father in Tamilnadu.

Before forming PMK [1999], Dr. S. Ramadoss previously worked with Vanniyar Sangham [Vanniyar Association] a caste based violent movement like Shiv Sena of Mumbai. Cutting road side trees to block traffic, and placing head on railway tracks were their common way of protest in the early days. His political Mantra was - he should have his own way, or he goes to highway. At one stage he advocated the bifurcation of a Vanniyar cast state where he could become the Chief Minister.

Dr.Ramadoss is an over ambitious and unprincipled politician. His political antic was appreciated by none out of his community. On every election he see-sawed between the ADMK and the DMK, openly announcing that he would join the one who gives even one seat more than the other. That way he was a seat beggar.

For years he promised that none from his family would follow him in politics. But he snapped ties with Jayalalitha in 2001, for she refused to allocate a Rajya Sabha seat to his son Dr. Anbumani, an alumnus of Madras Medical College. Consequently, he joined hands with Karunanithi only after ensuring that his son was accommodated in the Rajya Sabha.

Westernised Dr. Anbumani, [41] played a major role in selecting the party candidates for the last Lok Sabha election and vigorously campaigned for them. The PMK won all the six seats allocated to them in the Congress-DMK alliance and Dr.Anbumani became the Minister of Health through Rajya Sabah. Anyone who questions his authority or grumbles about family politics in the party is either sidelined or thrown out. Such is the hold of Anbumani over the organization. He is indeed the future face of the party.

Lately, Dr.Ramadoss started a movement to save Tamil, which is readily salable in Tamil Nadu. He began with the movie industry by asking them to name movies only in Tamil. This also followed by some rallies and protests that brought conflict with actors like Vijaykanth and actress Kushbu. Both the doctors are accused of playing petty politics against top film personalities like Rajinikanth, smoking cigarettes in Tamil films while targeting Sharukh Khan for drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes in Hindi movies.

Last week Dr.Ramadoss said he had no links what so ever with the LTTE, knew no body there but fight for the innocent Tamil civilians trapped in the war only. Well, his party has a unique position in Indian politics as the one that made a resolution at the party’s high-level executive committee and general council meetings, presided over by Dr. S. Ramadoss, that the Central Government should not allow any other country to replace Norway as a peace negotiator in Lanka’s ethnic conflict.

Few of his party functionaries in the past were guests of functions held in Europe and North America by Tiger sympathizers. Did PMK Men talk about the civilian plight there which did not exist at that time, or glorify the Eelam struggle and praise the Sun God? Further, the ‘Makkal TV’ owned by PMK signed an agreement with LTTE sponsored Tharishanam TV to telecast selected Makkal TV programmes in Tharishanam and vise versa. Do we need further proof for PMK’s link with the LTTE?

Now Dr.Ramadoss, having failed in his numerous attempts to bring a ceasefire [after the air attack on 20th that looked like the last will of the LTTE, a ceasefire seems to be not possible even if the entire Tamilnadu goes on self immolation] to give a breathing space to his ardent brother, has turned his gun against Lankan Muslims and Pakistan. His bombastic speech that spies from Sri Lanka and Pakistan’s ISI are housed in the Buddhist temple opposite to Egmore railway station in Chennai is vituperative and puts the innocent Buddhist pilgrims, in and out of this Kenneth lane Vihara, and Lankan Muslims youths who roam about Egmore on business, at risk. Also his remarks will jeopardize the welfare of Tamilnadu Muslims too.

Pro Tiger politicians in Tamilnadu have been making baseless allegations. Well known Gopalsamy s/o Vaiyapuri alias Vaiko said last month that the Indian Government had sent 3,000 troops to assist Sri Lankan forces. May we ask him by which ship and at what port they arrived in Lanka? Is Vaiko repeating the BBC news of 10th October 1987? Inciting students to participate in demonstration is against law, but Vaiko does. Last week actor Vijaykanth said on stage, "Sri Lanka had Two Crores Tamils before" [20 million]. These are the people who want Tamilnadu’s mantle.

On the 21st instant when Nedumaran was questioned by SunTV about people’s protest in Jaffna for LTTE to release the civilians in Vanni, he said it was Sinhala government news, as if no such protest ever happened. Also he repeatedly said that India was the mother land to Lankan Tamils. Ever any Jaffna man said that before 1983? What is his answer to the allegation by the civilians that the LTTE carders fired at them when they fled to escape from them?

Today Tamilnadu is burning [as LTTE wanted] with shoot at sight order as the ceasefire demand to ‘Save the innocent Eelam Tamils’ has gone out of hand. In fact, it is the LTTE, like a shepherd driving his sheep, drove the people along with them as they lost territory after territory. This was the case in Jaffna in 1995 when they retreated to Vanni. Like in Israel they never took any steps to protect the civilians from aerial attacks.

Now Sri Lanka expressed willingness to accept India’s assistance in evacuating civilians. If the LTTE genuinely cares for the safety of the civilians, they should release them and continue their fight if they are still capable. Plight of the civilians is deplorable. Nadesan’s statement that ‘our people like to be with us’ is humbug. If the LTTE doesn’t, supporters of Eelam Tamils must demand the Tigers to do so. So far no such request was raised. Otherwise, it will be proved to the world that the LTTE held civilians for their own protection and all those demonstrations in India and emotional speeches made by pro LTTE leaders would be taken as being tantamount to save the Leader not people.

Sour not sweet news it will be to Dr. Ramadoss, whose election symbol is Mango.

Posted by transCurrents at 09:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Re­li­gion plays a role in su­i­cide bomb­ings—but it’s col­lec­tive wor­ship, rath­er than lev­el of de­vo­tion, that fos­ters sup­port for such deeds, a new study con­cludes.

The anal­y­sis found that among Mus­lims and Jews sur­veyed in the Mid­dle East, how of­ten people at­tended a house of wor­ship better pre­dicted their back­ing for su­i­cide at­tacks than did pray­er fre­quen­cy.

Su­i­cide at­tacks—today most of­ten as­so­ci­at­ed with acts against Amer­i­cans or Is­raelis by Mus­lims—seem to be one as­pect of a wid­er phe­nom­e­non in which col­lec­tive re­li­gious rit­u­al fos­ters a mind­set known as pa­ro­chi­al al­tru­ism, ac­cord­ing to psy­chol­o­gists. Pa­ro­chi­al al­tru­ism is a com­bina­t­ion of neg­a­tive at­ti­tudes to­ward an­oth­er so­cial group and sac­ri­fice for one’s own.

Su­i­cide at­tacks would be an ex­treme form of pa­ro­chi­al al­tru­ism, said the psy­chol­o­gists who con­ducted the stu­dy, from the New School for So­cial Re­search in New York and the Uni­ver­s­ity of Brit­ish Co­lum­bia. And when forms of pa­ro­chi­al al­tru­ism oth­er than su­i­cide at­tacks were con­sid­ered, the re­search­ers found many cul­tures and re­li­gions fol­lowed the pat­tern iden­ti­fied in the Mid­dle East.

The scientists proposed that col­lec­tive re­li­gious rit­u­als and ser­vic­es cre­ate a sense of com­mun­ity among par­ti­ci­pants and thus en­hance ad­mir­ation for pa­ro­chi­ally al­tru­is­tic acts. But “only in par­tic­u­lar geopo­lit­i­cal con­texts” do su­i­cide at­tacks arise from this, the sci­en­tists wrote in the study, which ap­pears in the jour­nal Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence.

The in­ves­ti­ga­tors sur­veyed Pal­es­tin­ian Mus­lims about their re­li­gious at­ti­tudes, in­clud­ing how of­ten they prayed and went to mosque. They found that de­vo­tion to Is­lam, as meas­ured by pray­er fre­quen­cy, was un­re­lat­ed to sup­port for su­i­cide at­tacks. But fre­quen­cy of mosque at­tend­ance did pre­dict sup­port for the as­saults.

In a sep­a­rate sur­vey of Pal­es­tin­ian Mus­lim uni­ver­s­ity stu­dents, the re­search­ers found again that those who at­tended mosque more than once a day were more likely to be­lieve Is­lam re­quires su­i­cide at­tacks than less fre­quent at­ten­dees.

The re­search­ers said they ob­tained par­al­lel re­sults from phone sur­veys of Is­rae­li Jews liv­ing in the West Bank and Ga­za. In this case, par­ti­ci­pants were asked about syn­a­gogue at­tend­ance, pray­er habits and wheth­er they would sup­port a per­pe­tra­tor of a su­i­cide at­tack against their Pal­es­tin­i­an foes.

The psy­chol­o­gists al­so sur­veyed mem­bers of re­li­gious ma­jor­i­ties in six na­tion­s—Mex­i­can Catholics, In­do­ne­sian Mus­lims, Is­rae­li Jews, Rus­sian Or­tho­dox, Brit­ish Protes­tants and In­di­an Hin­dus—to see if the rela­t­ion­ship be­tween at­tend­ing re­li­gious ser­vic­es and sup­port for acts of pa­ro­chi­al al­tru­ism held up. These re­sults al­so in­di­cat­ed sup­port for pa­ro­chi­al al­tru­ism was re­lat­ed to at­tend­ance at re­li­gious ser­vic­es, but un­re­lat­ed to reg­u­lar pray­er, the sci­en­tists found.

[Courtesy: Association for Psychological Science & world-science.net]

Posted by transCurrents at 09:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

by Prof Rajiva Wijesinha

The air raid by the LTTE that took place on Friday evening was an extraordinary event, with an added human interest inasmuch as it happened while the Minister of Disaster Management and Human Rights was entertaining Sir John Holmes to dinner. Sir John, like Colonel Fazackerley in the poem of that name, was magnificiently calm throughout the episode, while SMS alerts proliferated around the table.

Fazackerley in the poem is a colonel who is visited by a ghost while having dinner in a castle he has just bought. The ghost howls and rattles his chains but the colonel calmly continues with his meal, while telling the ghost that he really should not make such a nuisance of himself. The ghost, who had successfully frightened all previous tenants, gets more and more upset, but there is nothing he can do. If I recollect aright he finally vanishes up the chimney and is never heard of again.

The poem seemed particularly apposite since, apart from the horror of some people being killed, and more injured, the performance of the pilots, as surrogates for Mr Prabhakaran, was rather like that of the ghost. Ghosts, it should be noted, are generally frightening creatures, and the damage that might have occurred should not be dismissed lightly. After all it was a considerable achievement to have got two planes airborne from a small patch of jungle, to have flown them all the way to Colombo, and to have done much damage to the Inland Revenue Building with one of them.

But this certainly was not an embarrassment to the government of Sri Lanka, as one media outlet claimed, suggesting that it gave the lie to the government claim that the LTTE was almost finished. On the contrary, had it not been for the dead and wounded, one would have almost thought it was a performance the government had ordered, to make crystal clear what it has continuously asserted, that the LTTE is still a force for terror, and that we cannot relax.

The forces have almost wholly destroyed the pretensions of the LTTE to being an orthodox fighting force, and that is just as well, since they have for years been pretending to be precisely that, with a ‘national’ army and navy and police force and most recently an air force. They engage in formal training and, though this includes barbarous rituals, there is a veneer of orthodoxy about this training, even of children, that has taken in a number of gullible foreigners, in addition to the more gullible members of the diaspora who continue to fund what they think is the core of a future nation.

That game is now over and, if the President pursues swiftly his vision of a united pluralistic Sri Lanka, it is not likely to start again. But, as government has never hesitated to declare, the sudden surprise attacks of a ruthless and efficient terrorist outfit will not be got rid of so easily. That is why our security system has to be tight, that is why we still need our forces to maintain the vigilance and care that has lessened but not eliminated horrendously destructive acts. In that respect, the air raid was an object lesson for Sir John of the importance of security also in the Welfare Villages in Vavuniya where, amongst thousands of poor abused civlians finally escaping to freedom, there may lurk one or two suicide bombers, waiting to pounce. And even one suicide bomber is one too many, so we absolutely must take every precaution to prevent the type of slaughter that took place on February 9th, when women and children who thought they were on the threshold of freedom were killed by a woman who pretended to be like them, escaping from Tiger control into the safe haven of government territory.

The precautions we have taken, which should under no circumstances be reduced at this crucial stage, have however lessened the destruction that Tiger ingenuity had for so long perpetrated. And even the episode of the planes was in retrospect rather like the last rattling of his chains by the castle ghost, the damp squib with which the two planes exploded indicating that the ghost’s luck is fading. It may only have been good fortune that prevented the planes destroying an air force building, or the airport, but as it happened the destruction of some floors of the Inland Revenue Department building could not have brought much joy to Tiger hearts. After all that skilful flying over jungle and sea coast and city, a few tax files cannot be seen as feathers in the caps of the latest human sacrifices to the desperation of the ghost.

But a few more civilians have died, and sadly we know that the ghost will continue to kill civilians, Tamils now, but also Sinhalese and Muslims if he has half a chance. There may be no more planes left, but we cannot be sure, and we certainly know that there are hundreds of guns and heavy weapons still in terrorist hands. Given the entrenched habits of the ghost, using any weapon that lies to hand to kill any available victim, we cannot therefore relax in our efforts until all those arms have been surrendered. We must, as previously, take all care possible to avoid civilian casualties, knowing now from what happened from January 26th onward, as indicated by the UN report of the shooting that day as coming from LTTE territory, that the Tigers will happily sacrifice civilians if there is the slightest chance of the blame falling on Sri Lankan forces.

But, as the record of the Sri Lankan forces has shown over the past few years, we know how to take care of civilians, our civilians, which is perhaps what makes this natural to us, unlike in other contemporary theatres of war. Working with that knowledge we have to make sure that the struggle against the forces of terror continues, until the ghost vanishes up the chimney, and not only Sir John but all Sri Lankans can eat and sleep and work in peace.

(Prof Rajiva Wijesinha is Secretary - General, Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process and Secretary , Ministry of Disaster Management and Human Rights)

Posted by transCurrents at 09:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (26)

By, A.R.M. Imtiyaz

The anti conversion bill, introduced by the Buddhist Jathika Hele Urumaya (JHU) in 2004, was approved in January 2009, and thus Sri Lanka’s parliament is expected to vote on the bill either in February or March, depending on the impending re-occupation of the entire Northern region.

Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court in 2004 rules that the bill does not contravene the Constitution and it is arguably inconsistent with international law concerning religious freedom. The legislation with the blessing of the government by the Buddhist-Sinhala fundamentalists in Sri Lanka has raised profound concerns among the minorities, especially among Christians, a small minority of the population.

Anti-conversion legislation that alarms religious minorities states 7 years imprisonment and Sri Lankan rupees upto500, 000 ($ 4, 425) for conversion from one religion to another by using “force, fraud or allurement.” Briefly, any attempt to “persuade or influence a person to adopt another religion” would become a criminal offense and anyone convicted of offering “moral support [or] material assistance” leading to conversion could be imprisoned for up to seven years. (The Gazette of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, Part I: Section (I)—General Government Notifications, Ministry of Buddha Sasana. No. 1322/4-2004, January 5, 2004 at §2. (“No person shall proselytize or attempt to proselytize any other person nor shall any person aid or abet such proselytizing.”); §8(a) (1); §8(a) (2).).

The opinions flows from the minority communities confidently fear that the law will extinguish freedom of religion, expression, and association for all Sri Lankans. At the core of religious freedom, arguably, is the guarantee that one may change one’s beliefs. It is obvious that anti-conversion legislation aims to strength Buddhism, which receives foremost place in Sri Lankan society as a matter of constitutional law.

Secular forces believe this legislation as another draconian step toward curtailing human rights and another step toward building a therocracy in Sri Lanka at the expenses of weakening the interests of the group and individual rights. Liberals affirm that the Anti Conversion Bill, which is in the pipeline to pass, would be a very bad and unrealistic piece of legislation that would suppress the individual and human rights and urge the government not be a party to endorse the whims and fancies of religious fanatics and extremists. It is a credible claim that the legislation will 'seriously erode' the freedom of thought, conscience and religion guaranteed in the constitution and sanctioned by international conventions.

It is a fact that Sri Lankan Sinhala-Buddhist ruling has a long history to contain religious minorities’ rights. Since Sri Lanka’s judiciary has often bowed to Sinhala-Buddhist pressure, as it strikingly did in the last day or so, written laws on the constitution to safeguard, will no way help to rescue minorities. In the first week of August 2003, the Sri Lanka Supreme Court, interpreting Articles 10 and 14 (1) (e) of the constitution, categorically ruled that although it was permissible under the constitution for a person to manifest, observe and practice ones religion, it does not guarantee a fundamental right to ‘propagate’ religion. The judgment was in response to a petition field by Anula Irangani Fernando against a Bill titled ‘Provincial of the Teaching Sisters of the Holy Cross of the Third Order of Saint Francis in Menzingen of Sri Lanka (Incorporation)’.

The court concluded that clauses 3 (right to observe and practice a religion) and 5 (right to hold property) of the Bill are unconstitutional, because if a Christian organization owns property, that might induce others to convert, thus violating their freedom of religion. Clause 5 deals with the right of holding and receiving property both movable and immovable and or the power of disposing of such property. The court stated that this clause when combined with the objective of observance and practice of a religion or belief (clause 3), would necessarily result in imposing upon people who are defenseless, vulnerable or in need, improper pressure and inducement to adopt a religion or belief. This they stated would violate Article 10 of the constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion or belief

The Supreme Court further ruled that as Buddhism is the State religion, it is unconstitutional for Christian organizations that propose to carry out proselytization of the Christian faith to be able to be incorporated under an Act of parliament. Article 9 of the constitution guarantees Buddhism the foremost place and accordingly, casts a duty upon the State to protect and foster Buddhism. The Supreme Court held that the purpose of the Ministry in question "the spread of knowledge of the Catholic religion and to impart religious, educational and vocational training to youth" (clause 3) is inconsistent with Article 9 of the constitution; and therefore denied the right of incorporation. The object of clause 3 was seen as a threat to the very existence of Buddhism.

Conversion is equally the right of the person who is sought to be converted, as such it is of no consequence to her if it is not a part of the freedom of propagation of the religious group to which conversion is made, provided she/he is not subjected to force/fraud and inducement.

On examining the legislation and the Supreme Court judgment in light of the international instruments mentioned earlier, the Bill and the judgment seem to be encroaching upon the right to freedom of religion enshrined in those documents. There is a clear guaranteeing of the right to practice, teach and adopt any religion of one's choice and it cannot be denied that the proposed legislation, in effect, seeks to curtail the same right.

Sri Lanka’s Sinhala-Buddhist dominated security forces and their paramilitaries are on the verge of re-occupying the Tamil dominated Northern island of Sri Lanka. Strong pro-Sinhala agenda has been conceived at the elite level to de-Tamilize the North, in order Sinhalanize the region with a careful political agenda of the defense colonization agendas. When that happens with the silent approval minority quisling leaders, it is very likely that the Sinhala extremists would go for the religious minorities. The Sinhala extremists would begin the institutionalized racism with the anti-conversion legislation. In actual fact, anti-conversion legislation is an abridgment of fundamental political freedoms. The Sinhala extremists care neither for the sentiments of the religious communities, nor genuine religious piety.

It is credible to believe that the successful enactment of the anti-conversion law could lead to consequences similar to those of the “Sinhala-only” policy, which was engineered by former Prime Minister S.W. R. D Bandaranayake in 1956 to woo the Sinhala sympathy.

The writer, Dr. A.R.M. Imtiyaz, is a political scientist from Sri Lanka, currently attached to the Department of Political Science, Temple University, USA.

_________________________________

Note:

In November 2002, Mr. Maheshwaran, former Hindu Cultural Affairs Minister, who was brutally assassinated allegedly by a group attached to the ruling Sinhala class, made a visit to Tamil Nadu, one of five states in India with anti-conversion laws. On his return to Sri Lanka, Maheshwaran made a public statement vowing to introduce a bill in parliament to curb religious conversions. In subsequent months, Maheshwaran repeated his intentions to introduce the bill to parliament.

A draft bill closely modeled on the Tamil Nadu anti-conversion law was prepared, leading to increased attacks on Christian churches in the following months.

According to Don Asoka Wijewardena, (“Anti-conversion laws within 60 days” Sunday Observer at 3, 18 January 2004) the proposed anti-conversion laws were drafted by a special multi-religious committee appointed by former Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe in agreement with the former President Chandrika Banaranaike Kumaratunga. Prior to the dissolution of the Sri Lankan parliament in February 2004, Minister of Justice, Legal Reforms, National Integration and Buddha Sasana, W.J.M. Lokubandara stated that the act would come into effect within the next 60 days.). The JHU monks July 21, 2004 submitted a bill in Parliament seeking to outlaw religious conversions based on offers of cash or other incentives. - A.R.M. Imtiyaz

Posted by transCurrents at 08:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

by Dayan Jayatilleka

Velupillai Prabhakaran is about to be defeated but he has left a time bomb hidden in plain sight which must be defused if he is not to wreak a posthumous revenge. This is the time bomb placed under a strategic four lane intersection, that between the Sinhalese and the Tamils and Sri Lanka and the world. The time bomb can be seen in the epidemic of demonstrations by the Tamil Diaspora and the statements critical of Sri Lanka that flood the international media. Prabhakaran is hoping that the time bomb will go off in time to save him, his army and his project. It is unlikely to do so, though we must not take that for granted and must crush the LTTE before external political trends especially those in the neighborhood, turn hostile. However, even if we defeat the LTTE militarily before the external turns unpropitious, we still have to defuse the time bomb.

Things become clearer when we think back to Prabhakaran’s great gamble which has failed (or his Strategic Miscalculation as Shanaka Jayasekara put it in a thoughtful recent piece). Having milked the Ranil Wickremesinghe administration dry, Prabhakaran pulled out of peace talks in April 2003, and submitted a maximalist proposal – the ISGA - which was bound to politically weaken the UNP. He was geared up, by his own public admission, to go to war in 2004, except that the tsunami forced its postponement. As the Human Rights Watch report of late 2005 revealed, he was collecting funds for The Final War, as it was billed in Diaspora circles.

Well, it certainly is proving to be the Final War for Prabhakaran. His apologists and weak-kneed Sinhala critics, who forewarn – the former, gleefully the latter gloomily-about an unending or subsequent war, simply have not grasped that a Final War is just that: once you’ve upped the stakes, you either win or lose and there are no second chances. Prabhakaran fought the Final War and has lost it or is about to. There will be no other. The Final War doesn’t become the penultimate war or just one more war or the less than final war simply because the side that was supposed to win it lost and the side that was supposed to lose it, won. As for romantic notions that a war isn’t over until memory fades, just ask the Serbs or the Chechens: once you’ve lost a war, you’ve lost it. “Gone Baby Gone” as Denis Lehane put it. Memories of the US Civil War remained in myth and song among the Southern whites (“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”) for decades if not a century, but the war was long over, lost and won, done.

Prabhakaran sabotaged the election campaign of Ranil Wickremesinghe (who in his manifesto had promised to explore the Oslo understanding on federalism) having assassinated Lakshman Kadirgamar, because he preferred a Sri Lankan administration that would be or could be isolated internationally. What he failed to assess was the tremendous domestic mobilization effort that the populist-nativist administration of his “choice” was able to put in; a mobilization that has almost swamped Prabhakaran militarily. He completely overestimated his own military strength and prowess; an overestimation rooted in the Jaffna Tamil sense of superiority and racist underestimation of the Sinhalese (and also the North Indians, if one recalls the propaganda and hatreds of the IPKF days).

Let’s face it: they hate us. The bulk of the Tamil Diaspora hates us Sinhalese and this country, Sri Lanka . Their consciousness is almost pathological. They are racists and fanatics, among whom there are those who set themselves on fire. The hatred of Tamils the world over can be managed if only we unpack the problem and address its components. The 80 million Tamils that Prabhakaran appealed to in his last two Mahaveera day speeches can be disaggregated into four categories or groups:

1. The Tamils of the North and East, and outside those provinces but on the island of Sri Lanka , i.e. Sri Lankan Tamils

2. The Tamils of Tamil Nadu

3. The Tamils of the Western Diaspora

4. The Tamils of older immigrant origin in other parts of the world such as Malaysia , Mauritius and South Africa .

The key resides in Sri Lanka . If we are able to satisfactorily address the disaffection of the Tamils in Sri Lanka , the we can begin to make inroads into Tamil opinion elsewhere. Just as Home Rule of the 1920s split the Irish republicans between those who accepted it and those extremists who thought it a sell-out, Tamil nadu and the Tamil Diaspora will find themselves internally demarcated between realists and irrationalists; pragmatists and fanatics. At worst, even if this does not happen, Sri Lanka can ignore the Tamil Diaspora and manage Tamil Nadu, if the Sri Lankan Tamils are in the main, integrated. If the Tamil Diaspora insists that nothing short of a confederation or federalism can satisfy Tamil aspirations they are welcome to negotiate such a solution within Canada or wherever they are, or they can migrate to the only quasi-federal Tamil linguistic region in the world, Tamil Nadu.

However, we can take this stand only if we occupy the high ground. That high ground consists of the elimination of all forms of discrimination and privilege, and the coming into being of a society where all men and women have equal rights and equality of opportunity, together with adequate space for a measure of self government in the areas where they and their culture preponderate.

What does this mean concretely? For the Sinhalese it means implementing the 13th amendment that has been part of our Constitution for over two decades. “13 Plus”, emanating from the APRC, may require step by step implementation. The 13th amendment simply has to be activated fully and swiftly, perhaps with an interim or transitional arrangement until the election can be held in the North. For the Tamils this means acceptance that the 13th amendment is the start line and that the ceiling is maximum devolution within a unitary framework (as in the UK , China , Turkey , the Philippines , etc), while the modes of politics are strictly systemic: elections and the courts. Though legal, legitimate and understandable, the history of the Federal Party shows that nonviolent agitation in an ethnically polarized context soon triggers violence -- and is thus imprudent.

The Sri Lankan crisis today is a multiple one. One of its aspects is a failure to communicate. We just do not know how to talk to each other or to the outside world. The recent election results show that the President’s appeal has moved beyond the Sinhala Buddhist to the Sinhala as a whole and even wider, to the multi religious (Catholic majority areas in the Puttalam district), multiethnic and multi cultural. The fold-up of the Opposition (25-30% is a vastly diminished base vote) shows that the UNP is becoming representative of an enclave or antibody that cannot communicate with or even comprehend the sentiments of the large majority, the mainstream, which is nationalist. That mainstream is flanked by two minority enclaves, one large r than the other: the urban/UNP and the “class struggle” JVP. For its part the political and ideological representatives of that national and nationalist mainstream do not know how to communicate with the urban classes who are absolutely imperative for economic growth and prosperity. This disjunction is tolerable at the moment because the world economic downturn makes tight integration with the world economy less than imperative, indeed an unwise option. Thus Sri Lanka experiences the class struggle as a cultural Cold War and a mutual failure of social communication.

That failure is a multi-vector one. The smaller enclave can communicate with the outside world and the outside world communicates with it. In short the UNP and its anti-war civil society allies produce politically for an “export market” and a domestic “niche market” which is a silly thing to do in a competitive electoral marketplace. The SLFP wins because its political product is for a national mass market, which is sensible as an electoral option. However, the national mainstream’s failure in communicating with the outside world and the international community’s failure to communicate with the national/ist mainstream is a loss for both, and diminishes the prospect of an enlightened reformist outcome of our crisis.

The populist nationalist “pro-war” bloc is as organic as the Oppositional –NGO “antiwar” bloc is inorganic. The organic character of the nationalist bloc is the secret of its domestic political and military success, while the inorganic nature of the Opposition is the secret of its failure. Is its organic character also the secret of the external limitations of the pro-war patriotic bloc? That this is not inevitable is best evidenced by Cuba . But is it that, unlike the Cubans, the nationalists are culturally self-referential, or that our mainstream culture is self-referential? Have we as a country lost our capacity to communicate effectively in the outside world? Have we lost our voice or simply unlearnt the language? This is why History may judge Prabhakaran’s assassination of Lakshman Kadirgamar as one of the two most damaging blows he dealt Sri Lanka , equal to or perhaps surpassing the murder of President Ranasinghe Premadasa.

Sri Lanka does not have to live besieged, but it will unless we prudently yet generously address the question of building a nation while reconciling ethnic identities. Simply put, the question is this: are we ready to follow up our well deserved and hard earned military victory with reconciliatory reform, or are we not? Do we have the wisdom to avoid Prabakharan’s sin, of overweening and ultimately false pride, of what the Ancient Greeks called hubris? If the answer is no, then our fate will be isolation and social division, driving away or repelling our most educated; a fate which deprives us of the chance to fulfill our potential as a country. Fulfilling that potential requires unleashing the richness of our cultural diversity while forging a new unity. Many commentators rediscovering Donne have cautioned that “no man is an island”, but my old man Mervyn de Silva said it best when, extending the Metaphysical poet’s metaphor he warned snugly and smugly insular Sri Lankans that “no island is an island either”, noting in his last essay that “in this Age of Identity, ethnicity walks on water”.

(These are the strictly personal views of the writer.)

Posted by transCurrents at 08:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (44)

By Mark Magnier

Reporting from Kuliyapitiya, Sri Lanka -- The white tattered strips line the main road to Kuliyapitiya, hanging off telephone poles and fence posts, each one signifying another funeral, another loss, another hole punched in the heart of a family. A few miles away, in the center of town, ribbons of another sort decorate the chest of a commando at a recruiting post working to impress a group of teenage boys.

[in Dambulla-pic by Steve Weaver]

A recent surge by the Sri Lankan army, boosted by an aggressive expansion of its forces, has prompted the government to predict that victory is just around the corner in its 25-year war with the Tamil Tiger rebels who have sought to carve out a homeland in the north and east of this island nation.

Amid the rising euphoria, however, some question whether these hardened fighters will go away that easily, whether the human toll will really end, whether the white ribbons will stop fluttering at every turn.

Sri Lanka has paid a huge price, in economic loss, social and political strain, destroyed infrastructure and human lives, for its long civil war. Almost everyone in this nation of 20 million has been touched.

But it's the rice and coconut-growing areas such as Kuliyapitiya district with its 150,000 population that have paid the highest toll. The government's all-volunteer army has found fertile ground for recruiting in rural areas where job prospects are limited and the army offers adventure, a uniform and a decent paycheck of about $200 a month. "Join the winning side," says a nationwide radio advertisement.

Recently, funerals in these parts have been running about two or three a week, said Chandana Bulathsinhala, an aide to the local opposition lawmaker, adding steadily, relentlessly, to the area's estimated 5,000 casualties since the war's inception -- a staggering one in 30 people.

Bulathsinhala estimates that 99% of the recruits sign up for economic reasons, with many schoolchildren now wanting to be soldiers rather than doctors or lawyers.

"War is always cruel, but the media has promoted good war news, so more people are encouraged to join," he said.

As families in the community confront the human toll, the war machine continues to draw in new recruits. At the Kuliyapitiya Urban Council complex in town, a bus ringed with loudspeakers and posters of fighting men lures new enthusiasts.

"When you come to the interview, bring your stuff and be ready to go," advises a nearby poster showing a soldier in a Rambo-style pose.

A few miles away, Kusuma Gunawardana sits on a hard bed trying to make sense of it all, a cat curled at her side, tears running down her worn face. Her son, a soldier in the Sri Lankan army, has been missing since mid-January. Nationwide, the missing number in the thousands, the result of desertions, front lines that have shifted repeatedly and dense jungle that can decompose a body in rapid order.

Nor is she sure she can believe what the government news channels say. Her older son, also in the army, told her the situation is often significantly different from the rosy images beamed on the channels. She just wants her family back. "I can't think about what happened to my son," she said. "I believe he's still alive."

Down the road, Jayantha Perera, 33, has doubts about a quick end to the war, but for different reasons. It's been going on so long that to him the wrapping-up seems too fantastic. As he talks in a living room decorated with a military calendar and the family's foot-powered sewing machine, he remembers the pride he felt when his older brother Samantha left for the war.

Samantha hasn't been heard from in more than a decade and is presumed dead, one of the 4,000 soldiers and 12,000 Sri Lankan civilians and fighters with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam missing in the war, according to estimates by the Assn. of War Affected Women, a civic group based in the city of Kandy.

As he talks, Perera's aging father suddenly erupts into a wail of grief. It happens two or three times a day, Perera says; he's been on a downward slide since his son's disappearance. The family no longer keeps pictures of Samantha around, except for one fading shot of his regiment, to avoid upsetting his father even more.

Farther down the back roads of the community, posters glorify those who died as placards urge citizens to donate blood, using pictures of neighbors who have already signed up and shipped out as an incentive. "Brother you have not died, you bloom as a flower among us," reads a poster marking the death of a commando who died recently at Elephant Pass.

A few feet from the commando with a chestful of ribbons, Koolitha Manchanayaka, 19, waits by the recruiting bus talking to friends after signing up. The teenager is accompanied by his father and a cousin and is ready to fulfill a dream he's had since he was 17.

His parents were reluctant to let him go, he said, but he eventually persuaded them after promising to be careful. For added security, he wears a pirith cord, a string worn around the wrist, blessed by monks at a nearby Buddhist temple.

Sure, there is a risk that he will be captured or killed, he said. "It could happen to anyone, but I'm not scared," he said, his eyes alight with excitement. "This is the right time to go. If I'm not involved at this decisive time, there's no point."

The military added 40,000 recruits in each of the last two years, said Brig. Udaya Nanayakkara, a military spokesman, to reach the current 180,000 level for the armed forces.

Those with missing family members receive a death settlement after one year of about $750 for single soldiers and $1,500 for married, along with other pension and insurance payouts.

Laborer K.G. Salen Fernando, 63, of Galkapuyaya village, said his family didn't receive anything from the government when his son disappeared 17 years ago.

A decade or so back, the family finally conceded that their boy wasn't coming back, he said. But without ever seeing his body, the realization was very difficult to accept. "He died for the sake of the country, so I'm proud," the father said, through a toothless jaw. "But they didn't even give us 5 cents. We'd be happy if they paid us something."

Visaka Dharmadasa, the founder of the Assn. of War Affected Women, said the disappearance of one of her sons eight years ago was the catalyst for starting the group, which aims to make the government and the International Committee of the Red Cross more accountable on MIA issues.

The association now numbers 2,000 members. Even though it's been nearly a decade since she last saw her missing son, she said she still waits expectantly. "There's always hope," she said. "It's not going to help anyone when you deny the existence of a person."

Gunawardana's agony is still fresh, as she reflects on Tamil mothers on the other side who must be experiencing some of the same pain.

"In the north, they're going through the same suffering we have," she said. "We are running out of boys in this country. We don't need a war with the north to lose more children." [courtesy: LA Times]

Posted by transCurrents at 08:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

by Sam Jones

His life had taken him from the northern tip of Sri Lanka to a pebble-dashed semi in north-west London and finally to a cold square in Geneva. But it is for his death that the 26-year-old Tamil, Murugathasan Varnakulasingham, is likely to be remembered.

A little after eight o'clock last Thursday night, the computing graduate and part-time Sainsbury's shelf-stacker doused himself in petrol in Geneva and set light to his body outside the United Nations complex in the Place des Nations. Police officers rushed to try to save Murugathasan, who stood "burning like a torch", but he was too badly injured. A few metres away, they found a letter typed in Tamil and English explaining why he had chosen to die: "We Tamils, displaced and all over the world, loudly raised our problems and asked for help before [the] international community in your own language for three decades. But nothing happened ... So I decided to sacrifice my life ... The flames over my body will be a torch to guide you through the liberation path."

Seven Tamils - including Murugathasan - have burned themselves to death in the past month to protest about the treatment of their people by Sri Lanka's Sinhalese government. Most were in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, but on 14 February, another British-based Tamil allegedly tried to set himself on fire outside Downing Street, but was arrested before he could do so.

The wave of suicidal demonstrations has been provoked by the Sri Lankan government's latest attempt to crush the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam (LTTE). In an attempt to end the country's 30-year civil war, Colombo has dispatched 50,000 troops to the north-east of the island. However, the offensive has left 200,000 civilians trapped between the two sides, and some estimates say 40 civilians are being killed each day. Both sides stand accused of atrocities: the LTTE of using civilians as human shields and forcing people to join its ranks and the government of indiscriminate shelling and setting up internment camps for Tamils.

According to his younger brother, Velmurugan, Murugathasan had become obsessed with the suffering of the civilians and had begun to devour reports and images of what was going on in the country he left seven years ago. "He was a very emotional guy and it just made him worse. He couldn't eat and he just cried."

He added that the reports reminded his brother of the two years the family spent in a camp for displaced people in Kilinochi after the war forced them to leave their village in Jaffna. "He always worried about the people who were going through what he had gone through."

Although Murugathasan joined tens of thousands of fellow British-based Tamils on their protest march through London at the end of January, he could not shake a feeling of powerlessness. "He went to Geneva saying that he was going to participate in the protests," said Velmurugan. "He kept talking about the guys who had burnt themselves in India, saying: 'They're doing this for us. What are we doing for them?' "

But Murugathasan gave his family no hint of his intentions and they remain convinced that his suicide was a spur-of-the-moment decision. Velmurugan said: "He rang home last Monday, he sounded normal and said he would be coming back on Friday."

His brother, he added, was not a tough guy. "He was very soft. If he fell and hurt his leg, he would cry." The family learned about the death through the Tamil media and said they had had no contact with the Swiss or British authorities.

His mother, who has been inconsolable, sat weeping in the living room of the family's home in Harrow. A few feet away was a makeshift shrine with Murugathasan's picture on a table flanked by the television and stereo and surrounded by incense and flowers.

Thaya Idaikkadar, a local Labour councillor and chairman of the British Tamil Councillors and Associates, said: "He did not do this for himself or his family, he did it for his people. He was pushed into it because the media won't tell people what's going on." However, he was keen to add that Murugathasan's actions could not be condoned. "We do not support any form of suicide - our advice is that no one else should ever do what he did."

The family is now trying to plan what they think could prove to be "a small state funeral", with thousands of Tamils from all over the UK coming to pay their respects.

Velmurugan, though, is still struggling to understand what was going through his brother's mind as he stood in the Place des Nations. "Maybe he told himself: 'By losing my life I can save thousands of people.' These were the only weapons he had. He had only himself to burn." [courtesy: The Guardian, UK]

Posted by transCurrents at 08:06 PM | Permalink

by Nirgunan Tiruchelvam

For the first century of its existence, the Taj Mahal was unknown outside India. If there was a cricketing equivalent of this monument it would be Aravinda de Silva. For much of his career, Aravinda was not recognized abroad. The World Cup victory changed that, but not enough.

[Aravinda De Silva: career in pictures-BBC]

The Indian cricket historian Ramachandra Guha has argued that Sunil Gavaskar was a superior batsman to Viv Richards. Though Viv Richards was much more destructive, he never had to face his own bowlers. Gavaskar not only faced Garner, Marshall and Holding, but he mastered them. He scored a scarcely believable 13 centuries against the feared West Indian bowlers. That is by far the highest number of centuries against the Windies, which was the leading attack of that era.

By the same token, Aravinda was a superior batsman to Brian Lara and Sachin Tendulkar. Not many are aware that Aravinda is the top century scorer against Pakistan, the leading team of his time. As the scorer of 8 centuries against Imran Khan, Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis and Abdul Qadir, Aravinda should be placed on a pedestal.

Lara and Tendulkar never had to wallow in the darkness of playing for a minnow. So, their aggregate runs will be higher than Aravinda. But, neither of them have won the World Cup with their own bat.

The clincher in the comparison is that Aravinda vanquished the top team of his time. Sri Lanka has six test wins in Pakistan, most of them engineered by Aravinda's brillance.

I first heard whispers of Aravinda's batting in 1983, when I was 10. My coach was in awe of the merciless hitting of this tiny prodigy. Though he played for a minor school DS Senanayake MV, his batting was already the stuff of fables.

It was only in 1985, when Aravinda hit his first hundred against Pakistan that I understood why. I managed to watch the highlights on tape. There was no live coverage of the series in India, where I then lived.

He was cavalier but correct. The pint-sized Aravinda batted with an upright elbow, that ensured a straight swing of the bat. He could also play the cross bat shots with savage power.

Imran Khan was at his peak. He was fast, with an exceptionally fluid runup. Imran not only generated pace from his exaggerated jump, but he always landed the ball on its seam.

Aravinda ravaged him. Aravinda, then only 19, brought his first century by swinging him over mid-wicket. It was the first test in Faisalabad. Aravinda de Silva recalls expecting a bouncer as he neared his century in his autobiography (co-authored by Shahriar Khan):

"Sure enough, when I was on 94, a bouncer from Imran came my way. I could do nothing else but hook it for six. The ball cannoned back from the stands at about the same time Imran’s flowing locks came to rest in his follow through. He grunted a “well batted” as Asantha de Mel came down the wicket to shake my hand."

Abdul Qadir, the foremost spinner of his time, was at top of his game. The teenaged Wasim Akram could swing the ball at a rapid pace. But, Aravinda defied them. Another century followed in the series, though Sri Lanka were trounced 2-0.

Later in mid 1986, I caught my first glimpse of Aravinda close at hand. It was at the SSC nets in Colombo. Somebody was throwing the ball to him from a distance of 10 yards. The ball must have been coming to him at 100 mph. His reflexes were quick and devastating. He had all the time in the world for his shots. The SSC nets had to be cleared because the power of the shots was a threat to the onlookers!

Like George Headley (the Black Bradman), Aravinda was burdened by the fact that he was a maestro in the weakest team. The Sri Lankan batting in those days was vulnerable and impulsive. Aravinda stood out. He was not just a gifted batsman, but he had the gall.

George Headley averaged 60 in his test career, but like Aravinda he was often on the losing side. Aravinda and Headley careers are distinguished by the contrast between their batting prowess and their team's stature.

Like the West Indies in its first decades of test cricket, Sri Lanka played infrequently. They were treated like poor relations.

The poor relation conquered cricket's Mount Everest by winning the 1996 World Cup. There was only one result possible when Aravinda arrived at the fall of the first wicket. I vividly remember his trance-like concentration on that night.

He opened his scoring with perfect on-drive for 3. His footwork was nimble against Shane Warne. Warne huffed and puffed, but went wicketless. It was his stroke play against McGrath pin-point accuracy that sealed the match.

Soon after the 1996 World Cup, I got to know Aravinda. He was always courteous and humble. He spoke with a soft voice, that was completely unlike his batting.

Perhaps, the most fitting compliment given to Aravinda was by the physiotherapist Alex Kontouri. Kontouri was the Sri Lankan physio for many years and is now with the Australians. He said that "Aravinda is my best friend in the world and also the best batsman in the world".

Highest Number of Centuries against Pakistan:

Centuries Against Pakistan and Highest Score Against Pakistan
Aravinda de Silva 8 & 168
Alan Border 6 & 153
Greg Chappell 6 & 235
Rahul Dravid 5 & 270
Sunil Gavaskar 5 & 166
Polly Umrigar 5 & 117
Mohinder Amarnath 4 & 120
Ken Barrington 4 & 148
Ian Bell 4 & 119
Sanath Jayasuriya 4 & 253

Posted by transCurrents at 07:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

New York, 20 February 2009 - “The protection of civilians, especially children, must be the first priority in the ongoing conflict in Sri Lanka and both sides must act accordingly,” said Ms. Radhika Coomaraswamy, Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) must release the civilians to safety, especially the children. The Government must be more circumspect with regard to artillery fire and aerial bombardment to avoid civilian casualties. “Images of children killed, maimed and wounded from the Vanni area of Sri Lanka are truly disturbing”, said Ms. Coomaraswamy.

“Forced collective suicide is an option that cannot be tolerated”, the Special Representative added. The LTTE has a moral obligation to save the lives of children in its custody. Recruiting young children as combatants for almost certain death is a despicable strategy. The Government for its part must realize that these children are citizens of Sri Lanka and even if saving them requires a military strategy of forbearance, it is essential that their lives are protected.

The international community has a duty to work with the Sri Lankan Government to ensure that the treatment of internally displaced children meets international standards. Child soldiers must be rehabilitated and not punished.

News reports of IDPs languishing in camps in Mannar for over a year while new camps are being built gives cause for concern. “We hope that the present policy of resettling IDPs as soon as possible will be implemented fully and that they can exercise their freedom of movement,” concluded Ms. Coomaraswamy.

Posted by transCurrents at 07:58 AM | Permalink

by Shanie

The plight of the trapped civilians continues to worsen, despite denials by the contending parties. A few thousands have managed to limp away from the conflict zone and into government-controlled areas in the Vavunya district. The rest, some tens of thousands, continue to remain in the shrinking LTTE-controlled areas in and around Puthukudiyiruppu. There can be little doubt that, given a free choice, nearly all of them would opt to move into conflict-free area where their lives are not at risk. In the current context, it only means being placed by the Government in what are termed ‘welfare villages’ but which in reality are open prisons. Once placed inside, they cannot come out, not even to visit or move into the homes of friends or relatives.

While those in these camps continue to suffer trauma and indignity, the plight of those trapped in the LTTE held areas is infinitely worse. Their very lives are on the line. They lack adequate food and clean water and medical facilities are virtually non-existent. The LTTE contemptuously uses them as human shields with no concern for their welfare or safety. It is reported that the LTTE continues to conscript children in their last ditch do-or-die battles. While not all the stories attributed to the escaping civilians may have credibility, there seems to be pattern in some of the stories. When the LTTE cadres confront escaping families, their violence seems to be specifically targeted against families who refuse to allow their young children to be recruited into the ranks of the LTTE. But not all have the strength to confront the LTTE and many are compelled to succumb.

These civilians, nearly all of whom would prefer to lead violence-free lives and earn a livelihood to keep and support their families, are trapped between the two contending forces, neither of whom seem to consider the safety of the civilians as a priority. Civil society leaders and international humanitarian agencies have reacted with horror at the helplessness of these civilians. One can understand the apologists for the Government among the Sinhala nationalists and mandarins who, for different reasons, seek to justify the lack of respect for international humanitarian laws by the Government. One can also understand the apologists for the LTTE among the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora and the Tamil nationalists here and in South India who condone the LTTE’s abuse of civilians. One can even understand the apparent lack of concern among most Sri Lankans because most of them are kept in the dark about the uglier side of the war. But the recent veiled apology for the Government from an expatriate historian in Professor Michael Roberts was an unpardonable shocker.

Michael Roberts and humanitarianism

Professor Michael Roberts equates the British-French strategy of an economic blockade of Germany at the beginning of World War 2 with our own situation here in Sri Lanka. Apart from the inaccuracies about the blockade (which he covers up by referring to his ‘desultory knowledge’ and attributing his information to Professor Trevor Wilson but without any quotation marks), it a shocking for a historian to equate an inter-national war with a national insurgency. Surely, Roberts cannot be unaware of the difference between an insurgency such as we had by the JVP in the south and the LTTE in the north and an inter-national war or even a civil war such as in Spain in the 1930’s and in America in the 1860’s.

The British Government fought an IRA insurgency for many years. The Catholic areas in Northern Ireland, similar to the North and East here with the LTTE being the predominant force there, were virtually under the diktat of the IRA and many areas were no-go areas for the British Army. The Catholics, perhaps rightly, viewed some actions by the British Government as discriminatory. But there was no contemplation by the British Government at any stage that there should be any economic blockade of the Catholic areas. The British Government and her officials considered all, Catholics and Protestants, as equal citizens entitled to the same rights and to the equal protection of the law. It is astonishing that Roberts should think that the provision of Government facilities in areas under LTTE control was something extraordinary. Does he honestly believe that it would have been acceptable if the Government withdrew all its officials from these areas and imposed an economic blockade? No Government worth its name would have surrendered territory in this fashion to insurgents. And no responsible citizen, except a madcap chauvinist, would have supported such action.

But back to the Anglo-French blockade in 1940. As a historian, Roberts must know, despite his self-confessed desultory knowledge, that the Anglo-French use of the weapon of blockade collapsed when they attempted to extend the blockade in Scandinavian waters and the Germans responded by capturing Norway and Denmark to secure ore supplies. Roberts must also know the blockade had long been abandoned when the French signed an armistice with the Germans in June 1940. General de Gaulle left France before the armistice and it was the British who recognised him first as ‘the leader of the Free French.’

Roberts accuses the ‘do-gooders’ cloistered in Colombo or New York of a lack of comprehension of the pragmatics of war. Their political naiveté, he says, cannot be excused. Is Roberts of the view that the only realists are those ensconced among the academia of South Australia? And of course the Sinhala supremacists in Sri Lanka.

The future of the Internally Displaced

We must continue to re-express our concern for the helpless civilians who face danger and harassment from all sides. It is difficult to accept that the civilians who are now being herded into what are euphemistically referred to as ‘welfare villages’ are in only for a short stay. If they are going to be re-settled, as Government spokespersons have stated, in their original homes within three or four months, what then is the need for building schools, banks, post offices, etc in these villages? President Rajapakse must resist the temptation to acquiesce to majoritarian supremacist agendas and prevent these civilians from returning to their places of original habitat or to settle outsiders in those areas. Instead of ensuring peace, that would be a certain recipe for continuing conflict. If sustainable peace is to achieved, not only must these civilians be re-settled as quickly as possible, within weeks or months, but also a comprehensive political settlement must be put forward. The UNP is already on record stating that such a constitutional amendment would receive their support. (It cannot be forgotten that they reneged on their commitment to President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s proposals of 2000). But a UNP-SLFP consensus is vital and President Rajapakse would be wise to follow up on the UNP’s offer.

The ‘welfare villages’ must not turn into our version of the Guantanomo Bay detention centre. President Obamo has now made the decision to close this centre but while it existed it remained a blot on US democracy. Terrorist suspects were detained without any charges being brought forward against them. In a challenge brought forward by one of the suspects two years ago, the US Supreme Court in its judgment stated, ‘Even assuming (this suspect) is a dangerous individual who would cause great harm or death to innocent civilians given the opportunity, the Executive nevertheless must comply with the prevailing rule of law.’

Sir John Holmes, who was once called, in a fit of arrogant pique, a ‘terrorist’ by one of our cabinet ministers, is now back in the country at the invitation of the Government. We trust he will be able to visit the IDP camps and the ‘welfare villages’ and that the displaced persons will be able to talk freely to him through Holmes’ own interpreters. One also hopes that President Rajapakse will receive this senior UN diplomat’s (even critical) advice in a spirit of humility as behoves a responsible Government. In dealing with humanitarian issues and with international diplomats, it is always counter-productive to exhibit boorishness.

Ethnic Polarisation

While the Government is entitled to bask in the glory of its successful win in the recent two Provincial Council Elections, an analysis of the results shows that the Government has totally failed win the support of the minorities. In fact, the results show a polarisation between the ethnic majority and the minorities. The vast majority of the Sinhala voters have voted for the candidates of the UPFA. This is perhaps the result of the war rhetoric and the media hype about the rout of the LTTE. It is a moot point if this will continue to be such a strong factor once the euphoria dies down and economic issues begin to take precedence.

But the disturbing factor, not only for the Government but also for the country, is that the Government appears to have lost the Tamil and Muslim voter. The CWC (of Thondaman) and the UPF (of Chandrasekeran) are by far the two largest Tamil parties in the Central Province. They both contested under the UPFA banner. Yet between them, they had only three members elected while the opposition UNP had six Tamil members elected. Among the Muslims, there are eight already declared elected but not one of them is from the UPFA. This surely must be a cause for concern. The Government may win the war against the LTTE but it seems to be losing the peace. This ethnic polarisation is not at all good for the country and President Rajapakse has to change direction if he is to bring about real sustainable peace in the country. [courtesy: The Island]

Posted by transCurrents at 07:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Dr Thaya Thiagarajah

Though I have been following the news about the war in Vanni, and the damages made to human lives and properties, I never thought it would be so bad until I went in person. I got a call from one of our (JDCSI) parish members from one of the interim camps saying our foster son was killed in the war. The first time I experienced the steps in grief, which I had lectured several times to my students. “No, No, it can’t be” I cried. I straightaway went to the Anglican Bishop’s office. I couldn’t control my tears when I saw Rev. Nesakumar. They told me that he was safe and is in one of those camps.

The next day I booked the seat and took the train to Vavuniya. I started early morning and reached Vavuniya in the afternoon. My foster daughter was waiting for me at the station. We straightaway went to the camp. Nobody was allowed to get into the camp.

The schools are being used as the interim camps. But they were putting up sheds which I would call tents about 5-6 meters in length. They had put barbed wires around the camps like those around the army camps. People could see those inside only from the other side of the road. The security was very tight. I went to the army person who was in charge of the camp ignoring the shouts from other soldiers, “You dare not get closer… run away, run away!”

I approached him, and spoke in English as my Sinhalese was very bad. I told him I just wanted to see my son who is a priest and that I was sure he was in that camp. He was kind enough to send word for him, but asked me to wait on the other side of the road, and said he would give me only five minutes. In ten minutes time Danny came out. He looked haggard tired and traumatized.

They had been running for their lives from place to place. The shelling was so intense that they hardly came out of the bunker. Every now and then there was bombing and gunfire. He was in charge of Karunanilayam. They had mentally handicapped inmates along with the young school going girls as well. On Sunday morning (15th Feb.2009) they had short worship service, and in the evening they had decided to leave. However they left around 1.30 a.m. I could just imagine how terrified they would have been.

Since we worked in Vanni, I could imagine the dangers they faced besides the rain of shells and bombs. They had to watch out for ‘all creatures great and small’ from elephants to poisonous snakes in the thick jungles. They walked for hours in the dark, trying not to stumble on the dead bodies of those who got killed and the parts of the limbs of the human here and there. They finally saw buses which could take them to Vavuniya. As they got into one of the buses, here comes a shell and the other bus got blasted. Fourteen of the inmates were missing he said. (Later, I heard six of them were found).

As we were waiting, luncheon packets were brought in a van. We noticed the packets looked very small for a lunch. Later I heard from a reliable person that they were expected to give a parcel of minimum 650 grams. But each parcel weighed not more than 300 grams.

As I went to the other camps, I noticed of course from the other side of the road, hundreds of men were having shower, may be for the first time after a long time. Ten showers were there in the open space and they all had to push and shove each other to get to the water. After some time the water would be stopped. I wondered how the women were going to manage! In the open space in the presence of the men and army! What would they do for toilet facilities!

The hospital visit was heart breaking. Almost all of those in the accident wards had undergone amputation. By standers were not allowed to many. The patients didn’t know where their family members were. They looked traumatized. In the nights used to scream and cry because of pain and of nightmares. Many had lost both legs, and some had lost their hands.

A pregnant mother had lost both legs and both hands, and was lamenting that the nurses should help her die. Quite a few had been paralyzed because of the severe damage done to their vertebras. I was drawn to one of the boys. His head was shaved. When I went towards him tears started to roll down his cheeks.

He had undergone surgery in the brain. He asked me whether I could find out where his father and youngest sister were. His mother and two brothers got killed. He didn’t have any one with him. “Now that I have survived, what is my future going to be like? They say they are going to transfer all of us to Trincomalee” he said. I had no answer for him except to listen to him empathetically.

Once the patients are ready to go, they would be sent to the camps. Permission was denied to those who had relatives in Vavuniya who were willing to take them. Hardly any had all their family members living. They were being sent to different places like Kinniya, Polannaruwa, Mannar etc, which means even the slightest chance of a family reunion was questionable.

A mother sat with a blank look. As they started to run, one of her children got killed. She had the guts to wait there, got the mammotty (shovel) and buried the child. She didn’t want her child’s body to be eaten by the wild animals. She didn’t cry but sure she was in the stage of dissociation. There are incidents where shells landed directly into the bunkers. I have no doubt that thousands would have got killed. Those who remain in Vanni are scared to come out for various reasons. For them getting killed is better than getting tortured.

Elsewhere in the island, especially in Colombo, the army checking has been increased. If a person has the national identity card, with the birthplace from Vanni or Mullaitevu or Kilinochchi or even Jaffna, he/she will be in trouble. Our apartment was checked thoroughly last week, and my 16year daughter’s room was checked including her wardrobe and her cupboard and she was questioned. So even if the people want to come out of Vanni, they are aware of this problem as well.

Now, what is happening here is genocide in many forms. Needless to say scattering people all over to unknown and unfamiliar places will ultimately lead to a weak population and result in damages done to our culture, education, and relationships. I can foresee a maimed Tamil generation with no hope in the future. The international community can make statements. But none will pay heed. For me the future looks dark and gloomy!

(Dr Thaya Thiagarajah, is a psycho-social consultant and also the wife of the Rt Rev Dr Daniel Thiagarajah, Bishop of the Jaffna Diocese of the Church of South India. This is a first - hand account of her experiences)

Posted by transCurrents at 07:51 AM | Permalink

by B. Raman

"The LTTE must be trying hard for mounting kamikazee type attacks on military---particularly Air Force ---targets in Colombo similar to itsraid on the SLAF base in Anuradhapura. The fact that it has not succeeded so far would indicate that the physical security for suchestablishments is strong and that the LTTE is facing shortages of the required materials for such attacks. One notices that the LTTE hasnot yet used all the weapons in its arsenal. It has apparently retained for itself an element of ultimate surprise."

---- Extract from my comments of January 1,2009, in response to a query from a Sinhalese journalist.

According to web accounts of pro-LTTE websites, two so-called Black Air Tigers of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) carried outkamikazee style suicide 'dives" into the Sri Lanka Air Force (SLAF) Headquarters on the Slave Island in Colombo and into the SLAF base atKatunayaka between 9-20 and 9-45 PM on February 20,2009, killing two persons and injuring 51 others. The pro-LTTE web site Tamilnet hasreleased a photograph of the two so-called kamikazee pilots----- Col. Roopan and Lt. Col. Siriththiran---- with Velupillai Prabakaran beforethey embarked on their kamikazee mission. According to the LTTE version, the maximum number of casualties was in the Slave Island---twokilled and 45 injured. Only six were injured in the attack on the SLAF establishment at Katunayake.

2. There are no reports of either of the aircraft involved in the mission having carried explosives in order to add to the destruction effect.Whatever damage was caused was by the remaining fuel in the aircraft---- which could not have been much--- and the resulting fire. Theaircraft, which had been tasked to crash into the SLAF headquarters, actually crashed into one of the top floors of a building located in frontof the SLAF headquarters building in which the offices of the Inland Revenue Department of the Government are located. It is evident fromavailable details that heavy anti-airaft fire from the SLAF building made it difficult for the pilot to crash into the building. He, therefore,crashed his plane into the building of the Inland Revenue Department.

3. While pro-LTTE web sites have projected the crashing of a second aircraft into the SLAF base in Katunayake also as a kamikazee styleattack, the Government's version that the plane was actually shot down by anti-aircraft fire from the ground before it could reach itsintended target carries greater credibility.

4. During the current offensive in the North, the advancing Sri Lankan Armed Forces could not lay hand on the remaining LTTE arsenal atKilinochchi. The LTTE's withdrawal from Kilinochchi was pre-planned and orderly. Before the Army captured it, the LTTE managed to removefrom Kilinochchi everything that it had accumulated there, including not only its arsenal, but also the electrical and other fittings in itsoffices.

5. The LTTE's subsequent withdrawal from Mullaithivu was less orderly. It did not have the time to remove the fittings. While it managed toshift most of its arsenal, it could not move some heavy items such as artillery pieces and boats under construction. These fell into the handsof the army.
6. It managed to move well in time its aircraft holdings and its reserve of aviation fuel. Though the Army claimed to have captured from thewithdrawing LTTE all but one of the air strips, which it was suspected to be using, it could not lay hand on the aircraft and the fuel reserve.The assumption was that the area under the effective control of the LTTE having been reduced to less than 100 sq.kms, it would no longerbe able to assemble the aircraft and send them on an offensive mission without its preparations for doing so being detected by the ArmedForces. The Armed Forces must now be having their electronic intelligence (ELINT) collecting stations at Kilinochchi and Mullaithivu. If theywere functioning satisfactorily, the LTTE pilots should not have been able to assemble their planes, take off and reach Colombo.

7. The fact that they were able to do so would indicate that the ELINT capability of the SLAF is poor or that the Black Air Tigers had takenoff from a place not within the ELINT range of the SLAF stations. Such a place could be in one of the uninhabited islands in the seasbetween Sri Lanka and the Maldives group.

8. Many of the analyses on what are the options available to Prabakaran and the LTTE if and when the Army ejects the LTTE from theshrinking territory under its control have been focussing on the possibility of Prabakaran and his officers shifting to some place in S-E-Asiaor in South Africa. Even if individual leaders and officers manage to sneak in there, they would not be able to shift their remaining arms andammunition, planes, artillery pieces and other equipment there.

9. For the LTTE to be able to stage a come-back one day, it needs a beach-head out of the reach of the Sri Lankan Armed Forces where itcan re-group, re-train and re-plan and wait for an opportunity to strike back from the beach-head. The jungles in the Wanni area couldprovide such a beach-head for a small number of men with light arms and ammunition. They cannot provide a beach-head for planes andartillery units. Only an uninhabited island out of the reach of the SLAF can.

10. If one presumes for analysis sake that the LTTE planes that attacked the SLAF set-ups in Colombo must have come from an uninhabitedisland, the question would arise whether the limited fuel they would have carried could have helped them to reach up to Colombo. Since itwas a kamikazee mission, they would not have needed fuel for a return journey.

11. Whatever be the fact as established ultimately, it is important that all the uninhabited islands in the Maldives area and in theLakshadeep ( Laccadives and Minicoy) area of India are kept under effective watch to prevent the LTTE from setting up a beach-head onany of them.

( The writrer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For TopicalStudies, Chennai E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

Posted by transCurrents at 06:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

By Col R Hariharan

The ability of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to shock and surprise once again came into play when two light aircraft of its air wing made a daring bid to bomb the headquarters of the Air Force in Colombo and the Katunayake air base near the capital around 9.45 PM on February 20, 2009. But unlike the LTTE's earlier six bombing raids this time the two aircraft did not return home. Both were shot down by the much maligned Sri Lankan air defence system that got into action quickly on spotting the aircraft.

The LTTE reported that the "successful" air raids were carried out by two elite Black Air Tigers Col Rooban and Lt Col Sirithiran, both decorated pilots having flown earlier bombing missions of the LTTE. The pro-LTTE TamilNet website reporting the news displayed a photograph showing the two smiling pilots standing with the LTTE chief V Prabhakaran in the middle with his arms around them. Of course, there was no smile on his face.

The army reported one of the aircraft dropped a bomb on the Internal Revenue building near Air Headquarters, but crashed between third and twelfth floors breaking into pieces. Body parts of the pilot and parts of the air craft debris have been recovered. . According to the government newspaper Daily News, 50 people injured (including two of them who died later) in the incident were admitted to a Colombo hospital.

The other aircraft on the mission to bomb Katunayake air base was hit and crashed nearby. It was later found in a badly damaged condition with the dead pilot inside the aircraft. Bombs and explosives it carried were found intact in the aircraft according to defence sources.

The air raid has come at a time when the operations weighted heavily against the LTTE so far are in the last lap. In fact, the security forces, encircling the last patch (less than 100 sq km according to defence website) northwest of Mullaittivu, reported further gains in nibbling into the LTTE territory both in the north and west of Puthukkudiyiruppu.

Though the missions appear to have failed they give some useful pointers into various aspects of the situation:

* Planning and carrying out an air raid after losing seven air strips shows that the LTTE has not lost its nerve yet. So any call to the LTTE to abandon its fight and surrender its arms is unlikely to yield any results. And that means the unwelcome baptism of fire of civilians trapped in the war zone is likely to continue. This is grim news for everyone. It also means the security forces operations will further be slowed down.

* The failure of the air raid has shown that the security forces air defence system was not lulled into complacency when the LTTE went on its last legs of fighting. This would indicate that the security forces had an inkling of residual air capacity of the LTTE as the aircraft were not recovered so far. More importantly they had factored in the possibility of the LTTE surprising them.

* One of the important question remaining to be answered is from where did the two aircraft emerge. I had written about the possibility of mothballed aircraft hidden in underground defences for future use. Apparently it was not done like that. That would indicate the LTTE had the confidence of safely taking them out and launching them on a mission, even though it might sound like its last hurrah.

* Lastly, the Vanni area east of A9 highway is saturated with troops. If the aircraft had taken off from one of the secret airstrips remaining in the jungle between the A35 Paranthan-Mullaittivu road and A32 Mankulam-Mullaittivu road it might have been detected early by troops on the ground. It is not known whether air defence got such a warning. If not, is there a secret airstrip outside the Vanni area say south of Mannar, which is lightly policed, from where they could have taken off? When the air force pieces the details together, would probably be in a better position to answer these questions in the coming days, I presume.

Even in this is the first take one thing appears to be certain. The war is not going to end so easily; so probably Karuna is correct in his assessment that it would drag on say for a year or more.

(Col. R Hariharan, a retired Military Intelligence specialist on South Asia, served as the head of intelligence of the Indian Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka 1987-90.He is associated with the South Asia Analysis Group and the Chennai Centre for China Studies. E-mail:colhari@yahoo.com)

Posted by transCurrents at 06:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

Army and Tigers Must End War Against Civilians says Human Rights Watch

(New York, February 20, 2009) – The Sri Lankan government should immediately cease its indiscriminate artillery attacks on civilians in the northern Vanni region and its policy of detaining displaced persons in internment camps, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Since early January 2009, civilian casualties have skyrocketed in the fighting between the Sri Lankan armed forces and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

The 45-page report, “War on the Displaced: Sri Lankan Army and LTTE Abuses against Civilians in the Vanni,” is based on a two-week fact-finding mission to northern Sri Lanka in February. The government has prohibited journalists and human rights monitors from going to the battle zone in the Vanni, making access to information difficult.

“This ‘war’ against civilians must stop,” said James Ross, legal and policy director at Human Rights Watch. “Sri Lankan forces are shelling hospitals and so-called safe zones and slaughtering the civilians there.”

Human Rights Watch also called on the LTTE to allow civilians to leave the war zone, stop shooting at those who try to flee to government-controlled territory, and cease deploying forces near populated areas.

Human Rights Watch said that both the Sri Lankan army and the LTTE were responsible for the dramatic increase in civilian casualties during the past month – approximately 2,000 killed and another 5,000 wounded, according to independent monitors on the ground.

As the territory held by the LTTE has decreased – now a short, narrow strip on the northeast coast of the island – displaced persons under their control have been dangerously forced into a smaller and smaller space. In violation of the laws of war, the LTTE has refused to allow civilians to flee the fighting and repeatedly has shot at those who have tried to reach government-held territory. The LTTE continues to subject civilians under their control, including children, to forced recruitment and deadly forced labor on the battlefield.

“With each battlefield defeat, the Tamil Tigers appear to be treating Tamil civilians with increased brutality,” said Ross. “They’ve shot at those trying to flee and stepped up forced recruitment and forced labor.”

The Sri Lankan government has indicated that the ethnic Tamil population trapped in the war zone can be presumed to be siding with the LTTE and treated as combatants, effectively sanctioning unlawful attacks. Sri Lankan forces have repeatedly and indiscriminately shelled areas crowded with displaced persons. This includes numerous reported bombardments of government-declared “safe zones” and of the remaining hospitals in the region.

The plight of the region’s civilians has been made worse by the government’s decision in September 2008 to order most humanitarian agencies out of the Vanni. Government efforts to bring in food, medical supplies, and other relief – with a minimal role for the United Nations – have been insufficient. Continued fighting, lack of oversight, and the manipulation of the delivery of aid by government forces and the LTTE have all contributed to the continuing humanitarian crisis.

Displaced persons in the Vanni who escape to what they hope is safety within government-controlled areas are instead put in internment centers masquerading as “welfare villages” in Vavuniya and nearby locations. The displaced persons, including entire families, detained in these military-controlled, barbed-wire camps are denied their liberty and freedom of movement, Human Rights Watch said.

“All civilians who manage to escape the Tamil Tigers are held by the government in squalid military-controlled camps and hospitals with little access to the outside world,” said Ross. “The government seems to be trying its best to keep its role in their ordeal away from public scrutiny.”

The government for security reasons should be openly screening new arrivals, but it is instead secretly taking away apparent LTTE suspects to arbitrary detention or possible enforced disappearances. Impartial humanitarian agencies should be permitted to monitor the screening process.

The hospital in Vavuniya mirrors the town’s internment centers. When Human Rights Watch visited, it lacked even the most basic necessities: many of the hospital beds had no sheets, blankets, or pillows. Despite the obvious lack of capacity to attend to the needs of the wounded, the hospital personnel reportedly were instructed by the authorities not to ask for any assistance from the international agencies, and very few agencies were allowed access. Relatives have had difficulty seeing patients, and some have later been visited by the security forces.

Human Rights Watch called on both the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE to act immediately to stop the ongoing slaughter of civilians. Both parties should establish a humanitarian corridor and respect the laws of war. The LTTE should allow civilians to leave the war zone, and the army should stop shelling near densely populated areas, safe zones, and hospitals. Displaced civilians who reach the government side should be assisted but not interned. And the government should permit independent media and human rights organizations to go to the conflict area.

Accounts from “War on the Displaced”:

One man described shelling of the “safe zone” that came from Sri Lankan army positions on January 22:

· “There was heavy shelling, especially where people gathered – near the hospital and where the UN distributed food. People were running around, crying. There was no shelter. Some were trying to hide under trees, like animals. Two shells landed 50 meters ahead of me. I was very afraid. When I reached the place where the shells landed, I saw that one person had been injured and was being carried away. Two people were lying by the roadside, one young man and one man about 55. They were both dead and covered in blood. The shelling continued during the day. Later I heard that many people were injured and killed.”

A 35-year-old father of three described how LTTE cadres fired upon his group trying to flee to government-occupied territory:

· “Some 150 people started out together, but when we tried to leave, at Suthanthirapuruam, the LTTE tried to stop us. There was only a narrow path to leave by. The LTTE caught us. There was fighting, arguments. They were shooting at us. Many people were injured and killed. It was shocking to see. Only 65 were in my group when we came out. One father was carrying his child on his back. As they were running from the LTTE, he was holding him by the arms so hard – in order not to lose him – that he broke both of the child’s arms.”

A local resident described LTTE forced recruitment:

· “The workers were taken to the front line to dig bunkers, collect weapons from killed cadres and Sri Lankan Army soldiers, and so on. It was very dangerous for civilians – about 25 of my neighbors were killed while doing this work. They did not receive any training – the LTTE cadres fetched them from their homes and the next day brought their dead bodies back.”

A local relief worker described a visit to a government “welfare center” for displaced persons:

· “I spoke to one woman in the camp – she was crying and screaming. It turned out that her elderly mother, who had been injured and admitted to the hospital, died there on February 7. The elderly woman’s body was given to the son, who lived in Vavuniya, but her daughter was not allowed to leave the camp even to attend her mother’s funeral. She was in agony because she couldn’t pay respects to her mother.”

To read the Human Rights Watch report, “War on the Displaced: Sri Lankan Army and LTTE Abuses against Civilians in the Vanni,” please visit: http://www.hrw.org/en/node/80901

Posted by transCurrents at 05:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Full Text of Press Release:

COLOMBO, 20th February 2008 – Women and girls caught up in the ongoing warfare in northern Sri Lanka are at grave risk. UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, is assisting civilians who have escaped the combat area but remains greatly concerned for the health and safety of the tens of thousands who remain, particularly those who are pregnant.

Some 32,000 displaced persons have reached Vavuniya district this month; among them an estimated 700–800 are women at different stages of pregnancy. Pregnancy-related disabilities and death often rise in conflict situations when reproductive health services, including prenatal care, assisted delivery and emergency obstetric care, are disrupted and often unavailable. Many women lose access to family planning services exposing them to unwanted pregnancies in perilous conditions.

UNFPA, in cooperation with district health authorities, is supporting Vavuniya and Mannar districts by providing emergency transport for life-saving obstetric care. Surgical instruments for caesarean operations have been provided to the Vavuniya General Hospital which serves displaced women with pregnancy complications. At the same time, safe delivery kits are being distributed to pregnant women in camps for the displaced.

Mobile reproductive health clinics offering a range of reproductive health services – including prenatal and postnatal care and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases and HIV – have also been set up in these two districts. Sanitary towels and undergarments are being provided to allow women and girls of reproductive age to maintain their basic personal hygiene. UNFPA is also working closely with health authorities to ensure that camps for the displaced have separate bathing and toilet facilities for men and women and well lit paths to ensure the safety of women and girls.

“Women do not stop getting pregnant or giving birth to their babies even when on the move or when living in camps,” said Lene K. Christiansen, UNFPA’s Representative in Sri Lanka . “Being able to maintain personal hygiene is not only a matter of health but also one of individual dignity,” she noted. “We try hard to make sure that these women and girls have access to needed services”. She also emphasized that the health authorities in Mannar and Vavuniya are doing an admirable job under very difficult circumstances.

With the influx of civilians to Mannar and Vavuniya expected to continue in the coming weeks, UNFPA together with other UN agencies plans to increase its support in response to the growing needs. It seeks additional donor support for this effort as part of the United Nations Common Humanitarian Action Plan for Sri Lanka , launched on 18th February 2009.

***

UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, is an international development agency that promotes the right of every woman, man and child to enjoy a life of health and equal opportunity. UNFPA supports countries in using population data for policies and programmes to reduce poverty and to ensure that every pregnancy is wanted, every birth is safe, every young person is free of HIV/AIDS, and every girl and woman is treated with dignity and respect.

For more information, please contact UNFPA:
Ms. Lankani Sikurajapathy, tel. 11-2580840, mob. 77-3411614, email: sikurajapathy@unfpa.org

Posted by transCurrents at 05:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

by Col R Hariharan

Recently, there is a perceptible change in New Delhi as far as Sri Lanka is concerned. It is trying to clearly articulate what it can do and what it cannot. And asking Sri Lanka to enforce a ceasefire is one of the things it cannot do as stated in Parliament by Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee on February 18. But that is not enough. With thousands of civilian population trapped in the war zone increasingly falling victims of a shooting war, the first thing India should be doing is to make vigorous efforts to get the trapped population out. As this is a humanitarian effort, the four co-chairs and India along with the UN should evolve a joint strategy to achieve this on a priority. Mere appeals will not do.

However, even if an international methodology is evolved, the warring sides will have to accept it. While the Sri Lanka government can be pressurised because it has legitimate national and international obligations, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is a loose cannon. It might not be amenable to their effort without garnering some advantage. This is where the Tamil Nadu politicians, who have been agitating for an immediate halt to the war to save the Tamil population, can constructively contribute. All Tamil parties should jointly appeal to the LTTE to accept international effort to extricate the beleaguered population. Parties in touch with the LTTE grapevine should use these links usefully to persuade it for this purpose. That would be a visible testimony of Tamil politicians? real concern for Tamils suffering death and destruction every day as the war closes in.

This is the first thing all the stakeholders must be doing if they really want to save lives of people not fighting the war. Other rhetoric can be hyped up when the election fever heats up.

War, ceasefire and peace

There had been repeated calls for resuming negotiations between the Sri Lanka government and the LTTE ever since the talks were stalled in the peace progress 2002. The international calls for finding peaceful resolution of the conflict is getting louder as the LTTE?s fighting its battle of survival. The callers? ranks include India, UK, Canada, many members of the EU and the U.S. Of course, these countries have an abiding interest in Sri Lanka for their own reasons. Though pillorying them has become a popular pastime in Sri Lanka, it should not be forgotten that these nations generally wish well for the country.

In the corridors of power in Colombo such calls for negotiations are viewed as treason. Though these days the government is speaking in many voices on other issues, it is a unanimous NO on the resumption of talks with the LTTE. Their suspicion is typical of a climate of war that prevails now in Colombo. The armed forces despite the unexpectedly stiff LTTE resistance at Puthukkudiyiruppu are on the brink of neutralising the LTTE?s power base in the country. And any call for peace that would halt the last lap to success is bound to be suspect. But that in no way diminishes the need to examine the question ?what to do after the war??

The drastic pruning of LTTE?s military power is likely to marginalise its influence on Tamil population. So strategically it would be unwise now for the government to announce a ceasefire as a prelude to negotiations with the LTTE, without some strategic gain. That was why President Rajapaksa had repeatedly offered to talk to the LTTE after it lays down the arms. India?s Home Minister P Chidambaram and Foreign Minister Mukherjee have given similar calls a few weeks. The LTTE has also shown its readiness for talks but laying down arms is not acceptable to it. That would be a very big loss of face to Prabhakaran. Such a move would make it a political orphan when it loses the war. The LTTE has not given up its option to pursue its war on the unconventional mode. Of course, it will have to scale down in scope and content of such operations in keeping with its adverse circumstances.

This is the one big reason why the government should start negotiating with the representatives of the Tamil constituency now, when the LTTE is down. With the loss of military power the LTTE automatically loses its ability to call the shots in any peace process as it did in 2002. If the government can initiate and successfully progress such a process, the LTTE will lose its toehold on the Tamil issue. Is President Rajapaksa?s invitation to all Tamil parties, including the pro LTTE Tamil National Alliance TNA) for talks the beginning of such an initiative? There is no harm in hoping for such a positive development, though other indications are not so encouraging.

In Sri Lanka parliament nearly 20 percent of the members speak Tamil. Yet they have never been able to take a united stand on any issue. Of course in a democracy it is not necessary for linguistic groups to do so as they can do it through their parties. But on the devolution issue, lack of unity has weakened the Tamil political clout. It is unlikely that things would be different now much as the Tamils might wish. Take the TNA for instance. Even though the LTTE guns at its back are being silenced, members of the polyglot alliance are unlikely to agree among themselves even on their future course of action, let alone other major issues.

Given this setting, talks with Tamil parties may not go through to produce worthwhile results. And the President probably knows this. To achieve results, he has to use the devolution package Mr Tissa Vitharana is putting together in the all party committee. And it has to be sold to Sinhalas and Tamils. If this is not done, the political impasse is likely to continue as the Tamil and Sinhala divide has widened over the years.

During the 30 years of struggle since Tamils took up the Tamil Eelam option, there are a number of influences and vested interests that have intruded between Tamil and Sinhala communities. These included the issue of separatism, international powers and expatriates, selfish political interests and the LTTE usurping Tamil leadership. Operating on their own at various levels, these influences have turned what was essentially a political dialogue into a military confrontation as shown in the thematic diagram above.

To reverse this process, the three riders (international involvement, militarization of society and the LTTE dominance) will have to be turned into productive channels for peace. For achieving this everyone will have to work hard. Both communities must decide to abandon violence as the means of settling issues between them. To do this, entrenched prejudices on both sides need to be set aside. The idea of separatism must be buried by Tamils just as Sinhalas should show in their deeds readiness to consider Tamils as equal partners in building the fractured nation. A dynamic leadership is required to initiate this process. Who else can provide that other than politicians and civil society? They have to rise up to the occasion. They have no other choice. No external power or agency can do this because the process has to have Sri Lankan ownership to succeed

Internationalisation of the issue had contributed to the continuation of the armed conflict to a certain extent. The failure of the peace process 2002 has shown the limitations of the four co-chairs ? the European Union, Japan, Norway and the U.S. and their well intentioned effort to end the war. It failed because the two warring sides had their own doubts about the credentials of the foreign powers involved. Moreover, they did not believe the process of negotiated peace would succeed.

Unlike others, India is one external power that could have made a difference. It had been on a listening watch after its unsavoury experience in its earlier spell of active intervention in Sri Lanka. But there are changes taking place in India as well. In Tamil Nadu all the three major political parties ? the DMK, the AIADMK, and the Congress ? have made clear that while they support the Tamil struggle for equitable powers, they do not consider the LTTE as their sole representative. India should actively work with the Sri Lanka government to trigger the political process. That will be in India?s interest as much as Sri Lanka?s. And Tamil Nadu politicians can stop sloganeering and make a positive contribution for peace by working on the representatives of Tamil constituency and politicians in the island to use the political opportunity meaningfully to arrive at a win-win situation.

Time is a valuable resource in showing visible results. In the past, many political efforts to resolve the Tamil question had floundered when key decisions were delayed or allowed die by procrastination. One of the reasons for the failure of the peace process 2002 was lack of visible results on a time-bound basis. This has only reinforced the suspicion among the aggrieved parties; it also generated a lot of cynicism about the intentions of such peace exercises. A well structured devolution process with clear bench mark of actions on a pre determined time schedule only can bring back trust and security between the Tamil and Sinhala communities.

The LTTE is likely to tap afresh the nearly million-strong Sri Lankan Tamil expatriates through its overseas network for bouncing back as a reckonable force. In its vocabulary, that means growth of its military power sans political content. Failure of a renewed political process would act as an incentive for LTTE?s military revival. That would be a tragedy for all the other stakeholders trying to move away from a military solution to achieve a political resolution of the problem.

Nations with strong LTTE front organisations and large ethnic Tamil populations in their midst like Canada, the U.S., UK, other EU nations, and India must ensure the resurgence of LTTE is halted in its tracks in their soil. Some of the political constituencies in these countries take up any cause for garnering a few more votes; they have ended up recycling the LTTE cause as the Tamil cause. They will have to do some soul searching if they want to do their bid to build peace. Tamil expatriates have a moral responsibility to rise up to the occasion to make peace possible just as they showed they can progress war. That would be a fitting tribute from them to all the souls of many hues martyred in the seemingly never ending conflict.

(Col. R Hariharan, a retired Military Intelligence specialist on South Asia, served as the head of intelligence of the Indian Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka 1987-90.He is associated with the South Asia Analysis Group and the Chennai Centre for China Studies. E-mail:colhari@yahoo.com)

Posted by transCurrents at 09:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (52)

By Rajan Hoole & Kopalasingham Sritharan

The focus now is rightly on the civilians in the Vanni dying and being injured, caught between the LTTE’s determination to use them as a buffer and as corpses in statistics, and a government intent on crushing the Tigers with the free use of heavy weapons. The civilians have not been given a meaningful way out. The glass case behind which these helpless civilians were held and paraded as willing martyrs for the Tiger cause, with the connivance of an articulate expatriate lobby, is being shattered, more tragically now than in 1990 and 1995. It becomes all the more important to have in place an institutional mechanism to protect them.

The right way to deal with the problem was to place the primary onus on political means by meeting Tamil aspirations and exposing the Tigers. This has been tried only half-heartedly because of an extremist but vocal Sinhalese minority intent on crushing the Tamils as a political entity, habitually undermining every effort at a mildly federal settlement. They are now in control, with help from the LTTE and its provocations. The Tigers suppressed dissent with harsh repression holding that there should be no criticism of their means until Eelam is attained.

Likewise, Lankan defence spokesmen have branded critics of their often criminal actions as traitors who strengthen the LTTE. While President Rajapaksa tries to reassure the world by saying nice things, masked gunmen on motorcycles or in white vans who began targeting Tamils in 2006 have now become the dread of all Sinhalese who defer. Several journalists have been killed, attacked or have fled the country. The social, political and economic cost of ‘crushing the Tamils with numbers’ is being hid from the Sinhalese. Dissent still survives perilously.

One writer wrote, “Count the number of [disabled] Sinhala youth who are permanently limping around you…Count the number of young widows who are staring blank into the future, with a fatherless infant on her lap. Count the little children who are often used as ‘exhibits’, standing in rows for politicians to grin at them, the children of ‘war heroes’. [Observe] all those teenage village girls who frequent the Anuradhapura town for a living, waiting to be picked up by vacationing young soldiers.”

A senior left leader said recently, “[President] Mahinda uses this opium [of Sinhalese chauvinism] to drug the masses to forget hunger and misery…” A respected woman columnist warned of mounting repression, ‘The President sounded an ominous note in his Independence Day speech when he said, “We are today a nation that has defeated a powerful enemy (the LTTE) that stood before us. Similarly we should have the ability to defeat all internal enemies that are found in our midst’. That ‘internal enemy’ could be a political opponent, a journalist, a Christian priest…any citizen who questions the regime’s omnipotence.’

This is the culmination of a history in which the State’s violence and obduracy in the face of legitimate Tamil demands for autonomy and security led to the Tamil militant response. The State tried to address this with violence and massacres killing, for a start, 7,000 Tamil civilians from 1983 to 1987, triggering the usurpation of the Tamil struggle by the LTTE for whom negotiation was anathema — a luxury whose terrible cost was imposed on a hapless people. The Sinhalese as a people have learnt much more than they are given credit for. Once the war ends the government would find it hard to sustain present levels of impunity and repression and many Sinhalese would want a fair political settlement for the Tamils.

Meanwhile the challenges before India are immediately to contribute towards the protection of Tamils in the Vanni and to a fair political settlement. Given that the LTTE decimated the Tamil leadership, India would have to ensure the emergence of a new Tamil leadership within a genuinely democratic process. In this regard India’s basic stand that it has no sympathy for the LTTE and at the same time the Tamil people are distinct from the LTTE, and should be protected at all times, is the correct one. But in practice its actions that amount to seeking assurances from President Rajapaksa and promising aid for reconstruction, have no effect on the ground.

To all those who look to India to have a benign influence on the situation, it is important that she maintains its credibility. Today many civilians are afraid to leave the LTTE area because of the government’s record in killing sympathisers and family members of the LTTE, and most civilians have, frequently conscripted, close kin in the LTTE. These are also persons being killed without ever having wanted to fight. President Rajapaksa has after all formally invited Tamil Nadu leaders to come and an all-party delegation could do a great deal of good. Civilians would also have far greater protection if India plays its rightful role in lending its weight and personnel in international efforts to monitor and ensure that proper standards are observed with regard to civilians fleeing the LTTE.

It is India that could prevail upon the Sri Lankan government to return the displaced to their homes expeditiously and not hold them in camps for years to establish Sinhalese settlements on their lands. They are traumatised by their calamity and their future cannot be trusted to the present regime.

Those in Tamil Nadu who use the plight of the Sri Lankan Tamils for their narrow political ends, and blindly defend the LTTE, are inadvertently advancing the latter’s doom. Playing to emotions without engaging with the Sinhalese to work for concrete measures has been the bane of Tamil politics on both sides of the Palk Strait. This is a role that civil society and human rights activists in Tamil Nadu could take on by engaging with their counterparts in Sri Lanka, through seeking constructive means to defend the rights of all the communities in Sri Lanka.

Judging by newspaper columns there are Sinhalese opinion makers, who though not sympathetic to Tamil aspirations, do not want to see the Sinhalese branded as barbarians. One suggested a week’s truce to allow the UN to go in, ascertain the plight of civilians and do what they can. Given such sensitivities, there is great scope for India in multilateral action. Every effort should be made to give the unwilling conscripts — prisoners — a chance.

Part of the paranoia in Sri Lanka results from a perception in defence circles that any foreign concern is designed to breathe new life into the LTTE. India and the leaders of Tamil Nadu have a clear position on this and could without any ambiguity make the distinction between defeating the LTTE and criminal actions against unarmed civilians by the state security apparatus, and see that the distinction is observed. That would help to ensure that the cause of democracy in Sri Lanka is not lost.

(This article appeared in New Indian Express of Feb 18th 2009 under the heading "Sri Lanka's Twin Despair".)

Posted by transCurrents at 06:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

by Jayadeva Uyangoda

With the impending total defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, this secessionist group will cease to be a political force in Sri Lanka. But will there be a political solution to the ethnic conflict in the aftermath of the government’s military success? Events in the coming weeks and months will show the extent to which President Rajapakse can open up a new political process to lay the foundation for a new polity in which the majority as well as the minority communities can live in dignity, equality and coexistence. However, in the short run it is difficult to envisage a situation where the government will give priority to any extension of the existing devolution framework towards greater regional autonomy. Usually, one-sided military victories are not followed by major political reforms.

The present phase of Sri Lanka’s war seems to be coming to an end with the impending defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Even if the remaining LTTE fighters go underground to launch a guerrilla campaign, the Sri Lankan state has become militarily so strong that the armed struggle phase of Tamil politics has now reached an end. Rehabilitation of the LTTE as a post-armed struggle movement does not seem to be possible in the near future. With the defeat, the LTTE will also cease to be a factor in Sri Lanka’s politics. With this significant change of balance of forces in inter-ethnic relations, the future of Sri Lanka’s Tamil nationalist politics might remain uncertain for some time to come.

The ending of Sri Lanka’s long drawn-out civil war poses both opportunities and challenges for the island’s government as well as the people. Many Sri Lankans are likely to breathe a sigh of relief on the possibility of the prolonged bloodshed coming to an end. The war has for the past two and half decades brought immense suffering and misery to the people of all communities. Death and injury for combatants as well as civilians, displacement, outmigration, falling victim to artillery shells as well as suicide or roadside bombs, destruction of communities – all these affected Sri Lankan citizens with no distinction about their ethnic identity. Violence devoured many political leaders belonging to all communities. The democratic process also suffered severe setbacks. Communities became polarised and suspicious of each other. The country’s economic and social progress too suffered. Sri Lanka needs to recover from all these setbacks. Past military as well as political attempts to end the conflict had repeatedly failed. It now appears that the present Sri Lankan government’s determination to crush the LTTE in war has produced a decisive outcome.

Yet, there is probably no direct co-relation between a military triumph over the LTTE and resolving the country’s accumulated problems. The latter requires a range of new initiatives to politically rebuild Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka’s post-civil war future will depend on how the government succeeds in laying a firm foundation for a pluralistic, democratic and inclusive polity in which war and violence will not be required to highlight either group grievances or suppress resistance to the state emanating from the marginalised ethnic and social groups.

The central question that will occupy the world attention concerning Sri Lanka is: will there be a political solution to the ethnic conflict in the aftermath of the government’s military success over secession? Sri Lanka’s president has repeatedly emphasised that once the LTTE is defeated, his government would introduce a political solution.

However, moving in that direction will not be an easy proposition. A one-sided military victory in an ethnic civil war is not likely to open up new political space for the government to initiate political reforms giving the ethnic minorities any measure of self-rule, which had dominated the agenda of the defeated rebellion. Branding the LTTE insurgency as terrorism and crushing that “terrorism” should not obviate the fact that the secessionist rebellion, despite its defeat, represented Tamil political aspirations for equality and autonomy.

Making the prospects for early political reforms narrow is the influence exercised by the hard line Sinhalese nationalist parties and groups on the policy agenda of the Rajapakse administration. In their thinking, Sri Lanka does not have an “ethnic problem” as such. What exists is a terrorist problem, spearheaded by the “terrorist” and “fascist” LTTE. In their argument, the military victory over the LTTE is adequate to resolve that problem. But very few outside Sri Lanka are convinced of this reading of the island’s prolonged civil war, although major world powers backed President Rajapakse’s own “war against terrorism”. International actors, from India to the US, seem to be very keen that Rajapakse moves quickly to politically consolidate the military gains by offering a “devolution package” to the Tamils. Events in the coming weeks and months will show the extent to which Rajapakse can open up a new political process to lay the foundation for a new polity in which the majority as well as the minority communities can live in dignity, equality and coexistence.

Inter-community reconciliation is the other complex challenge. The war and violence has pulled the three main ethnic communities – the Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims – apart. It has also intensely ethnicised visions of political imagination. In the intensity of the conflict, driven forward by violence and more violence, strong arguments had developed on all sides to the conflict for unilateral, zero-sum solutions which only a military victory could ensure. Peace was seen as the outcome of war only. Negotiated peace through compromise, although attempted a number of times, ultimately became a proposition both undesirable and illegitimate. These are positions shared in both Sinhalese and Tamil societies. Politicians, ideologues and the media thrived on reinforcing politics of polarisation and hatred. Now, the State has achieved a unilateral military victory. The challenge facing President Rajapakse and his government is to inaugurate a new phase in the island’s political life, based on the principles of pluralism, inter-group equality and power-sharing. That requires the recognition that the members of the Tamil community, even after having been caught up in an armed rebellion against the State, are citizens of the country with a right to equality and dignity.

Political reform in a framework of ethnic pluralism has not been easy in Sri Lanka. Political parties have never forged a consensus on reforms. Undermining reforms has been a part of the inter-party political competition. In a way, the war and military solution are the direct outcomes of the unwillingness of the Sinhalese political establishment to initiate meaningful state reforms to resolve the ethnic problem. Can an unreformed political system be reformed when the internal pressure for reform is no longer there, or against a backdrop where reforms had been resisted even when a secessionist insurgency had made state reform an urgent historical necessity?
That probably is the question to which India and the international actors should be keen to find a satisfying answer.

Considering the failure of the 2002-03 peace initiative and the LTTE’s agenda of returning to war, the international actors seem to have decided to back the Sri Lankan government’s strategy of defeating the LTTE militarily as a necessary first step towards creating a new “post-conflict” situation in Sri Lanka. Unlike in the past, the LTTE this time around faced a formidable international alliance that backed the Sri Lankan government. The thinking among the international actors seems to be that the LTTE had become the main obstacle to peace, security and development in Sri Lanka. This was a decisive shift from their strategy in the 2002-03 peace process in which they acted on the assumption that the LTTE should be made a co-partner in peace-building.

From the perspective of the internationals, Sri Lanka will now offer a new model of post-conflict peace-building and development achieved by means of a military victory by the State. But, many international actors, including India, would want to link post-conflict development assistance to political reforms to ensure devolution for the Tamil minority. With regenerated nationalism after the military victory over the LTTE, the Sinhalese nationalist forces will carefully monitor the actions of the international actors in Sri Lanka. Can the external actors play a role in reforming the Sri Lankan state through post-conflict economic assistance? The answer is not yet clear. But, what is somewhat clear is that external involvement in state reform can provoke Sinhalese nationalist resistance. In the mid-1980s, the Indian initiative for devolution in Sri Lanka was seized by the radical nationalists to launch a “patriotic” insurgency.

Even while the LTTE is facing military defeat, the civil war is not yet over. The remaining LTTE fighters are likely to continue their fight in the form of a guerrilla war. However, it would be extremely difficult for the LTTE to return as a significant military or political force. On the other hand, even assuming that the LTTE is totally defeated in the coming months, the ethnic problem will continue to remain. The government’s strategy for a post-LTTE Tamil society in Sri Lanka would be to work in alliance with the non-LTTE Tamil parties who are already in, or supporting, the ruling coalition. The Eelam People’s Democratic Party (EPDP) which has also been fighting the LTTE along with the Sri Lankan army will make strong claims to control the provincial council of the north if the elections are held. The EPDP leader is a minister in the present cabinet.

In the Eastern Province the provincial council elections were held last month. The Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Pulikal (TMVP – Tamil Eelam Liberation Tigers), which broke away from the LTTE and then partnered with the army in chasing the LTTE out of the Eastern Province, is running the provincial administration there.

Dim ProspectsAs all this clearly suggests, the question of political solution to the ethnic problem will certainly be approached by the government from the perspective of state security and the unitary state. Thus, in the emerging framework political configuration in post-LTTE Sri Lanka, the government will give utmost priority to the goal of politically consolidating the military gains against the LTTE. The government’s strategy would be to ensure that the administrations of the northern and eastern provincial councils would remain in the hands of Tamil political groups that are loyal to, and controlled by, the Sinhalese political establishment. Therefore, in the short run it is difficult to envisage a situation where the government could give priority to any extension of the existing devolution framework towards greater regional autonomy. Usually, one-sided military victories are not followed by major political reforms. However, in the long run, the Sinhalese political establishment might learn that regional self-rule under unarmed, non-secessionist and integrationist Tamil political parties might not be a bad idea altogether.

While the armed forces of the Sri Lankan state and the LTTE are engaged in what appears to be the last stage of the war, two distinct political outcomes of the war need to be noted. The first is the immense historical setback which the Sri Lankan Tamil people as a community are now compelled to accept as the only major outcome of the 25 years of armed struggle and suffering, the trajectories of which have been largely defined by the LTTE. The second is the reassertion of the unreformed Sri Lankan state with unprecedented strength and global legitimacy, an outcome made possible in the post-9/11 world. Sri Lanka’s ethnic minorities as well those who are committed to multi-ethnic democracy and pluralism in the island need to reckon with the implications of these two developments before launching any new minority rights campaign.

(This article appeared in the Economic and Political weekly of India dated February 14th 2009 under the heading "Sri Lanka sans the LTTE")

Posted by transCurrents at 06:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Report by UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

Just nine years old, Thevaki was trapped in the crossfire between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and barely escaped with her life.

"I don't remember anything. I just remember the blood," she said, gesturing to the bandaged shrapnel wound on her head.

After six days in a government hospital in Vavuniya - a humanitarian hub for more than 30,000 ethnic Tamil civilians fleeing southward - she is back with her family in one of 16 transit sites in the northern Sri Lankan town.

But while doctors say her physical wounds will heal, they warn that the memory of what she saw, including 10 days of constant shelling in a "no-fire zone" outside the town of Mullaithivu, could take longer.

Children are suffering the most in the ongoing conflict in Sri Lanka, says the UN.

Because of problems of access to the conflict zone where fighting continues, there are no reliable figures of the numbers affected.

"Children are bearing the brunt of a conflict which is not theirs," James Elder, UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) spokesman in Sri Lanka, told IRIN. "They are being killed, they are being injured, they are horribly traumatised, and they are short of clean water and medicines," he said.

Until recently, many of the children were living in bunkers and trenches for weeks on end. Many had seen family, including their parents, killed. Others suffered horrific injuries, including burns, fractures, shrapnel and bullet wounds, and lost limbs, Elder said.

Separated children

In addition, there are reports of children being separated from their families during the government screening process in Kilinochchi and Omanthai, the former frontline about half-an-hour's drive north of Vavuniya.

To address this, UNICEF has established a data base to help track separated and unaccompanied adults, but as there is no independent observation of the screening process, it remains a source of concern.

Reports suggest there have been a number of instances when children are placed in one transit site in Vavuniya while their parents are placed in another, as well as the issue of unaccompanied minors arriving.

According to mental health experts, this brings a whole new level of trauma for the children as it is generally the family that can provide the greatest support in the recovery process.

"If we could prevent separation in the first place, that would help a lot," Elder stressed.

UNICEF is working closely with local authorities to reunite families, as well as seeking ways to mitigate the number of families being separated.

In addition, the agency is working to provide play and psycho-social activities at transit sites to give children a greater sense of normality; however, access for UNICEF's implementing partners remains difficult to negotiate.

"These children need a safe and secure environment, which is key to their long-term recovery," Elder said. "What they need most is to be with their families, to know that they will be safe."

Yet while fighting continues and more and more Tamil civilians make their way to Vavuniya, Elder emphasised that much of the Vanni's population are still trapped.

"We mustn't forget that there are tens of thousands of children who are still in the Vanni [in the north] and have to live out this nightmare on a daily basis," he said.

According to government sources, some 100,000 civilians remain in the Vanni while the UN estimates the number to be nearer 250,000.

Forced recruitment

Meanwhile, UNICEF on 17 February raised another concern over reports of a growing number of children being recruited by the LTTE.

"We have clear indications that the LTTE has intensified forcible recruitment of civilians and that children as young as 14 years old are now being targeted," Philippe Duamelle, UNICEF's representative in Sri Lanka, said.

"These children are facing immediate danger and their lives are at great risk. Their recruitment is intolerable," he said.

From 2003 to the end of 2008, more than 6,000 children were recruited by the LTTE, the UNICEF statement said.

UNICEF reiterated calls to the government and the LTTE that civilians, especially children, must be given every protection from the fighting.

Posted by transCurrents at 06:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In an exclusive conversation, via satellite from Colombo, Sri Lanka, Foreign Secretary Dr. Palitha Kohona responds to comments about the Sri Lankan government made by Oscar- and Grammy-nominated hip-hop artist M.I.A. during her recent appearance on the Tavis Smiley show.

[Aired on PBS stations on Feb 18, 2009]

Before talking to Sri Lanka's, Foreign Secretary Dr. Palitha Kohona, Tavis Smiley talked with Ravi Nessman:

Ravi Nessman has been covering events there for the Associated Press. He is the Colombo bureau chief for the AP

Tavis: Let me start by asking, for those here who do not understand what this civil war is all about, what's going on with regard to the back story of this civil war, take a minute or two just to explain to me what this civil war's all about.

Nessman: Sure. There's been ethnic tension in this country for a very long time - since independence, in fact, between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority, who make up less than 20 percent of the population. After independence, there were quite a few laws passed by the Sinhalese majority that the Tamil minority felt marginalized - their culture, their language, their religion.

Basically, it created a situation where, by the 1970s, a lot of independence movements rose up. And right now what we're seeing is the culmination of a 25-year civil war between a militant faction that rose up in this foment of independence in the '70s called the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or the Tamil Tigers, and the government.

And what the Tamil Tigers have been fighting for is an independent Tamil state in the north and the east of this island.

Tavis: So what's the state of the civil war as we speak? You referred to the culmination of this ongoing war that we are witnessing now, but what's the status of the civil war as we speak?

Nessman: As soon as a couple months ago they used to control quite a large area of the north. They had a basically conventional army with artillery guns, with soldiers, with a small air force and navy. In the past couple of months, though, the government forces have overrun nearly all of that territory, so right now what's left of the Tamil Tigers are sort of boxed into a very, very small area on the northeast coast. It's about 100 square kilometers. Along with them, there are tens of thousands of civilians also trapped in that area.

Tavis: So does that mean that the civil war is about to come to an end?

Nessman: It looks like the conventional phase of this war is pretty close to over. It's hard, though, to write off the Tamil Tigers. This is a group that began as a guerilla group. They've carried out suicide bombings, hundreds of suicide attacks they've been blamed for across the country. They assassinated former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

So even if they lose their artillery pieces, they lose their conventional component, they still will be pretty likely able to carry out suicide bombings and other guerilla attacks for at least months, maybe years, to come.

Tavis: And what's the government's response going to be once they, beyond having them boxed in, have succeeded to the point where the civil war is over? What will the government do then?

Nessman: They want a political resolution to the ethnic tension in the country, meaning - traditionally what that's meant is that they devolve some of power down to the provinces, which would let Tamil majority provinces have some form of self-rule within the framework of Sri Lanka.

How that compromise comes about, whether it's enough to satisfy the Tamil people, remains to be seen. You have to remember that these people were angry enough 25 years ago to begin a civil war, and they haven't gotten less angry over the past 25 years.

Tavis: They haven't, Ravi, got any less angry, but to the earlier point you made, they're, in terms of the war, at least, boxed in, to your earlier point, in such a way where it appears, at least, that they can't win this militarily. So if they can't win it militarily, why not accept some sort of power-sharing arrangement?

Nessman: One thing that a lot of people don't recognize is that the Tamil Tigers themselves are not the only representatives of the Tamil community. There are political voices that are not this militant group, and it remains to be seen whether the government, being victorious on the battlefield, will be able to be magnanimous and to give what the Tamil community would see as a legitimate compromise, or will say, well, we've just crushed you on the battlefield; we'll give you the absolute bare minimum, and the Tamil community will find that objectionable.

Or perhaps they'll accept it and, another generation down the road, another conflict like this could flare up.

Tavis: The government there has been accused of targeting civilians. The U.N., in fact, has had something to say about the strategy of the government in Sri Lanka. What's your sense as a journalist of how that part of the story is being covered with regard to these accusations against the government?

Nessman: This is a very difficult story to cover as a journalist. The war zone is a black hole, Tavis. We're barred from going in, most aid workers are barred from going in. So all of these accusations that fly back and forth, a lot of it is based on scattered reports that we're getting - the very few reports we're able to get.

And from what we're able to get from doctors up there who are the very few people with telephones that still work, from some of the witnesses who've fled, some civilians who've left, is that the government appears to be shelling in this very small area with tens of thousands of civilians, and that seems to be causing a lot of civilian casualties.

On the other hand, the Tamil Tigers have been accused by some of the civilians who've fled of shooting at the fleeing civilians. The government says that they're being used as human shields to prevent the government offensive from taking that last bit of land. Both sides deny all the accusations against them, but what seems clear from the reports is that civilians are being killed, and they're being killed by both sides.

Tavis: So given, again, that the Tamil people, at least those who are fighting, are boxed in now to this area in the northeast part of the country, do you have any sense of how much longer it will be before at least the official, if I can use that word, the civil war that's underway, how long before this part of this story is over?

Nessman: We can't get up there, and the information is so scattered that we're getting. We hear reports of battles that are rumored that may or may not even be happening, massive casualties on one side, massive casualties on the other. I can't tell you if the Tamil Tigers even retain a conventional fighting component right now or still maintain a massive army up there. We have absolutely no idea.

The president himself said on February 4th we were just days away, the government was just days away from victory over the Tamil Tigers. But this is more than two weeks later, and there's still fighting going on. So it's very difficult to know what's exactly going on in the north, how long it's going to go on for, what kind of fighting is actually happening, what the capabilities are of both sides.

Tavis: Ravi Nessman is the bureau chief for the Associated Press in Sri