Namal Rajapaksa’s Mullaiththeevu operative detained on human trafficking allegation

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 09 April 2014, 21:47 GMT]
A key operative of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s ruling UPFA and two of his close associates have been arrested in Mullaiththeevu by the SL police on 05 April following reports from Australia that they were operating a human trafficking agency. The UPFA operative, who is a close confidante of Namal Rajapaksa, was identified as 45-year-old Arul Jenyberd, who lost in the NPC elections on UPFA ticket. In the meantime, the Terrorist Investigation Division (TID) has arrested a group of fishermen on the following day at Polika’ndi in Point Pedro on allegations that they had bought a boat from money obtained from overseas, in an attempt to project them as having ‘LTTE’ connections. More than 50 people have been arrested within the last 5 weeks on various allegations by the TID.
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UN wants cooperation despite Colombo’s rejection of Geneva resolution: ICP

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 02 April 2014, 19:55 GMT]
Having Sri Lanka’s genocidal military commander Major General Shavendra Silva as an adviser to UN Peacekeeping and giving more significance to Syria and North Korea than to the crimes Sri Lanka, the United Nations Secretary General and officials under him are encouraging Sri Lanka to work with the UN Human Rights Council’s mechanisms in Geneva despite Colombo categorically stating that it will not cooperate with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) after the resolution passed last week in Geneva. Mr Ban was recalling the commitments made to him on accountability by the SL President Mahinda Rajapaksa in their “Joint Statement of 2009” through a “pre-prepared answer” to ICP’s question on Tuesday. In the meantime, Colombo has extended an invitation to Mr Ban Ki-moon in May 2014 to visit the island, the ICP further reported.
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Tamil Nadu prisoner under Colombo’s PTA custody begins hunger strike

[TamilNet, Sunday, 30 March 2014, 10:02 GMT]
An Indian citizen from Tamil Nadu, who has been jailed in Colombo for five years, has launched hunger-strike unto death demanding his fate known to the world, after he has been subjected to severe harassment by the Sri Lankan ‘Terrorist Investigation Division’ and the prison authorities, reliable sources told TamilNet on Sunday. The victim, John Peter Vijayendran, is a political prisoner, who has been jailed in Colombo’s Magazine prison and recently transferred to a prison in Negombo, the sources further said.
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Activists from homeland, diaspora address UNHRC

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 25 March 2014, 15:34 GMT]
The Deputy Chairman of Valikaamam North Piratheasa Chapai (PS) and the president of Vali North Displaced Peoples Rehabilitation Organisation, S. Shageevan spoke at UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Tuesday demanding global focus on the ideology-driven genocide against Tamil people in the North and East of the island. In the meantime, Tamil diaspora activist Krisna Saravanamuttu from the National Council of Canadian Tamils (NCCT) addressing the Council on the same session said that Tamil people are enduring a slow, but relentless, genocide. “The Tamil struggle today is about the survival of our people against genocide by the Sri Lankan state to destroy our sovereign national existence in the island’s NorthEast,” Krisna Saravanamuttu said.
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Journalists in North receive death threats over phone

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 18 March 2014, 23:49 GMT]
A section of Tamil journalists in North, who have been subjected to investigations and harassment by the Sri Lankan military intelligence in the recent past on Tuesday said they were receiving phone calls with death threats this week. The Sri Lankan military was using a projected image of ‘LTTE regrouping’ to silence the journalists and civil activists, especially during the 25th session of the human rights council in Geneva. In the meantime a top commander of the Sri Lanka Army has told a rights activist in Colombo that the whole Geneva discourse would end as the talk of USA sending ship to evacuate LTTE political leaders while brokering a surrender-deal at the end of Vanni war in 2009.
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Time for International Investigations, says Camp

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 18 March 2014, 01:03 GMT]
Sri Lanka "looks to be drifting toward authoritarianism. Journalists are terrified and intimidated by arrests and mysterious assaults on those critical of the government....The once-independent judiciary has learned not to challenge the government's edicts. The war-heavy defense establishment carries out many internal security functions, and "white vans" have become synonymous with the disappearance of dissidents who speak out against the government," writes Donald Camp, a retired foreign service officer at the US Department of State, adding, "after five years of stalling by the government [Colombo], it is time for an international investigation to do what Colombo has been unwilling to do."
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Emboldened Colombo ‘mobilizes’ Ampaa’rai Tamils in favour of Rajapaksa

[TamilNet, Sunday, 09 March 2014, 16:18 GMT]
While Tamil Naitonal Alliance (TNA) parliamentarians are asked by the Washington and London to lobby Australia and India to gain support to the watered-down resolution to be tabled in Geneva later this month, the occupying Colombo has managed to mobilize 750 Tamils, through various manipulations, to march in a rally carrying placards in support of SL President Mahinda Rajapaksa, news sources in Ampaa’rai said. Sri Lankan military operatives, extremist Sinhala Buddhist Bodu Bala Sena (Buddhist Power Force) activists, Samurdhi and Devineguma ‘development’ workers were deployed to bring Tamil people from various villages of Ampaa’rai district to the pro-Rajapaksa rally staged in Kalmunai. In an orchestrated move, media personnel were brought from Colombo to witness the manipulated rally at Kalmunai.
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Weak resolutions embolden Colombo: civil society activist

[TamilNet, Friday, 07 March 2014, 19:08 GMT]
The draft resolution to be tabled at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) sessions this month in Geneva has not only disappointed the Tamils by failing to demand an international investigation, it has also failed to recognise the domestic failures despite two rounds of similar resolutions at the UNHRC in 2012 and 2013, said Tamil Civil Society Forum (TCSF) representative and Jaffna University law academic Kumaravadivel Guruparan this week at a press briefing to journalists in Jaffna. Pointing out four major flaws in the latest resolution and comparing the draft with the recent report by the High Commissioner of Human Rights, Mr Guruparan explained the positive and negative aspects of Navi Pillay's approach. The SL State has in fact been emboldened with the weak resolutions year by year, he said.
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BIMSTEC having Eelam territory gets secretariat in Dhaka

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 05 March 2014, 09:50 GMT]
The Third Summit Meeting of BIMSTEC States held in Myanmar concluded on Tuesday, with its heads of governments deciding on operating a permanent secretariat based in Dhaka in Bangladesh. A career diplomat of Colombo will be its first Secretary General. Originally formed in 1997, as Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Thailand Economic Cooperation (hence BIMST-EC), and was joined by Nepal and Bhutan in 2004 to become known as Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation, the BIMSTEC is viewed as India’s alternative for SAARC, to have a regional alliance without Pakistan. It is also viewed as an expression of India’s ‘look to East’ policy to balance China's ‘push to South’.
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Tamil politicians demand international investigation at Jaffna protest

[TamilNet, Sunday, 02 March 2014, 23:36 GMT]
When Sinhala prisoners protested in Kandy, Namal Rajapaksa, the son of SL President went to the prison and ordered a report on the condition of prisoners. But, when Tamil political prisoners and prisoners of war, subjected to torture on a daily basis, stage protests, no one from the SL government cares about visiting them, said Sundaram Mahendran, the head of the Colombo based Committee on Missing Persons on Sunday when addressing the people protesting against the mysterious death of a Tamil prisoner Gopithas Visuvalingam, a British citizen who was imprisoned in Colombo since 2007. The protest was staged in the morning of the funeral day of the victim Gopithas, who is a father of two from the UK.
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EU terror ban on LTTE challenged

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 26 February 2014, 17:51 GMT]
The European Union's ban on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) hangs in the balance today after a hearing at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg exposed serious flaws in the original evidence used to proscribe the movement in 2006. Judges expressed concern at the European Council's use of an Indian anti-terror law as a suitable precedent for banning the LTTE, saying there was no evidence that the Council checked if terror suspects had access to a fair trial in India. The court was also dismayed by the Council's use of Wikipedia as a credible source for keeping a terrorism ban on the LTTE. Lawyers for the LTTE left the court in a positive mood, expecting a judgement within the next six months.
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Civil servants in Jaffna threatened to withdraw their support to NPC

[TamilNet, Sunday, 09 February 2014, 22:58 GMT]
Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who has been refusing to extend his cooperation to the repeated pleas made by the Northern Provincial Council (NPC) Chief Minister C.V. Wigneswaran to appoint a non-military governor and to install a Chief Secretary capable of extending allegiance to the elected representatives of the NPC, has now gone to the extent of allowing the occupying Sinhala military in Jaffna to harass and threaten the other senior civil officials to render the NPC defunct. While escalating the rift between the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) councillors and the SL governor-installed chief secretary on one hand, the SL military on the other hand subjects the civil servants who extend cooperation to the elected NPC to systematic harassment and intimidation.
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Families of missing persons subjected to threats, intimidation

[TamilNet, Thursday, 06 February 2014, 20:24 GMT]
The intelligence wing of the occupying Sri Lankan military and the ‘Terrorist’ Investigation Department (TID) operatives in the North intimidate and threaten the families of the missing persons as many of the victims were not prepared to give up their complaints. The latest harassment comes in the wake of the so-called ‘independent’ Presidential Commission on Investigating Missing Persons had its first sitting in Ki’linochchi district last month. The current drive of genocidal Colombo, intimidating the kin of the missing to receive Rs 100,000 and withdraw the complaint or to face the fate of those who were ‘missing,’ raises question on what was actually meant by the US Asst Secretary of State reiterating ‘reconciliation’ last week.
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30,000 troops try imposing ‘SL Independence Reconciliation’ in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 04 February 2014, 20:19 GMT]
Explicitly proving that Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa was lying on the number of troops in Jaffna peninsula and that the country of Eezham Tamils is under occupied and colonial rule, more than 30,000 Sinhala soldiers were deployed to impose the ‘Sri Lanka Independence Day’ in Jaffna on Tuesday. As armed soldiers were posted throughout the streets and public buildings, the scenario depicted the times of war and such a paradigm was the one that was endorsed and blessed by the US Assistant Secretary of State talking of ‘reconciliation’ and imposing the ‘Sri Lankan’ identity, two days ago, commented political observers in Jaffna. Despite the terrorization, people responded by hoisting black flags and turning the SL Lion Flag upside down at several places in Jaffna.
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Tamil Nadu should be welcomed to give jolt to Indian foreign policy

[TamilNet, Sunday, 02 February 2014, 00:44 GMT]
“The running of foreign policy by federal units is not advocated, but they can and should make benign inputs into its making. Think-tanks specialising in foreign relations and Area Studies Departments in Universities can play a meaningful role in this direction,” writes Chennai-based former South and Southeast Asian Studies Professor V. Suryanarayan, who was also a member of the National Security Advisory Board of India during the Vanni War. Claiming that his “essay is a perspective from Chennai,” Suryanarayan was particularly elucidating and detracting the moves of Tamil Nadu on the cause of Eezham Tamils in his foreign policy discourse that appeared in the website of New Delhi-based Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS), on Friday.
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UNHRC urged against considering PSC route

[TamilNet, Thursday, 30 January 2014, 12:33 GMT]
Genocidal Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s submissions to the UNHRC seek international pressure on the TNA and the UNP to take part in the deliberations of the deceptive Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC). Rajapakse has not implemented even a single recommendation of his own Commissions and Committees so far. On what grounds can the International Community guarantee that a future for the Tamils lies in Sri Lanka, questioned a media release of the Tamil Action Front, New Zealand, on Tuesday. The media release signed by Mr. A. Theva Rajan reminded Tamils and the international community to never subscribe to the continuity of the catalogue of deceits.
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Current realities of demographic genocide in Batticaloa

[TamilNet, Sunday, 26 January 2014, 22:52 GMT]
The demographic genocide of the East is carried out in determined and orchestrated ways by the occupying Sinhala military, Buddhist monks, Sinhala land-grab settlers, police, home guards, so-called civil coordinating officers of the military, SL Ministers and by a Provincial Council that is put into the scene by all the actors, both local and international, say farmers in Batticaloa on the lose of their pasture lands and cattle to the Sinhala genocidal settlers. The occupying Sinhala military is pivotal to all the miseries that are taking place, they complained. The height of the current genocidal realities could be seen in the example of a Tamil minister of Rajapaksa refusing to speak to them in Tamil and in demanding them to speak through translators at a meeting in Colombo, the Batticaloa farmers further said.
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Veteran lawyer urges China to ensure UN investigation on Tamil plight

[TamilNet, Friday, 24 January 2014, 23:49 GMT]
A veteran legal and social activist in Malaysia, Mr A. Kanesalingam urged the government of China on Thursday to ensure international conventions that could facilitate an independent international investigation conducted by the UN on the genocide in Sri Lanka. “I ask that China as a world leader and permanent member of he UN Security Council propose that an investigation be conducted by the UN under Chapter 7 of the Charter of the United Nations,” said, Mr A. Kanesalingam, in a letter sent to the Foreign Minister of China, Mr. Wang Yi. The Malaysian Tamils beseeching China on the issue is significant, commented diaspora Tamil political observers.
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SL military steps up monitoring patrols in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Friday, 24 January 2014, 23:37 GMT]
The latest innovation by the US-trained SL military commander of Jaffna, Major General Udaya Perera, is the introduction of 7-member teams patrolling every interior village in the peninsula. The Sri Lankan State, while waging a propaganda campaign to the outside world that it has reduced military deployment in the North, has seized thousands of acres of public and private lands for the establishment of Sinhala Military Zones in the Jaffna peninsula. Permanent camps, built larger than ever before, have been ceremonially opened recently by the SL presidential sibling and Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa at several places under the propaganda of relocating the camps away from civilian properties, while the SL President Mahinda Rajapaksa who visited Jaffna came with an open lie on the figure of the occupying SL troops present in the North.
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SL military robs IDP registry from Thellippazhai DS Secretariat

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 21 January 2014, 16:56 GMT]
The occupying Sinhala military in Jaffna on Monday evening entered the Divisional Secretariat of Valikaamam North, situated at Thellippazhai, and robbed the registries containing the details of uprooted civilians from the civil officials at gunpoint. The SL military officers then instructed the DS and his officials not to talk about the incident. Informed sources told TamilNet that the robbery was carried out on the instruction by the new Jaffna commander of the occupying Sinhala military, Maj. Gen. Udaya Perera, who is trying to manipulate the statistics of uprooted people of Valikaamam North, the area where former ‘High Security Zone’ is being transformed into a Sinhala Military Zone by the SL military permanently seizing the fertile lands and properties of the Eezham Tamils.
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