SLA expands occupation of Mannaar with two new camps

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 16 May 2012, 23:42 GMT]
The occupying Sri Lankan Army in Mannaar has started constructing two new large camps in Murungkan in appropriated lands, civil groups in Mannaar mainland complain. Hundreds of SL Army soldiers have come into agricultural settlements occupying water supplies and appropriating lands adjacent to lakes. Tamil and Muslim females complain that they are unable to move in their villages in evening times due to the heavy presence of occupying Sinhala soldiers. Questioning why the SLA is constructing two large camps in the same village, civil activists expressed fear that the move was part of a larger design to occupy and Sinhalicise the entire area comprising fertile agricultural lands of Tamils and Muslims.
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Military GA constructs Buddhist stupa at historic Saivite site in Trincomalee

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 16 May 2012, 15:10 GMT]
The Sri Lankan Government Agent of Trincomalee Major General (retd) Ranjith de Silva has appropriated 15 acres of land that belongs to the Trincomalee District Young Men’s Hindu Associations Federation (TDYMHAF) in the traditional Tamil village Kanniyaa, situated 7 km north of the east port city, for the construction of a Buddhist Vihare. The appropriated land is located in the vicinity of the Kanniyaa hot wells, a revered place for Saivites. The administration of the historic Kanniyaa hot wells has also been handed over to a Buddhist monk who is the head of the Velgam Buddhist Vihare, which is located two km away from the site, according to a memorandum submitted to the All Ceylon Hindu Congress (ACHC).
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UK deportee killed while Tamil Nadu returnees arrested in Trincomalee

[TamilNet, Saturday, 28 April 2012, 11:41 GMT]
A 28-year-old Tamil man, recently deported from UK was found killed in Trincomalee on 18 April, news sources in the district told TamilNet Saturday. In the meantime, in a systematic combing operation launched by the special units of Colombo's military and police establishments, up to 300 Tamil males and females have been ‘arrested’ and sent to military detention camps in Welikanda and Vavuniyaa since last Saturday. Among the victims are also people who have recently returned from Tamil Nadu and they too have now ended up in Welikanda and Vavuniyaa, the sources in Trincomalee further said.
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Two children die in landmine explosion at Pazhai in Jaffna peninsula

[TamilNet, Thursday, 26 April 2012, 06:04 GMT]
Two children playing in front of their house at Mullaiyadi of Pazhai in Jaffna peninsula part of the Ki'linochchi district were killed Wednesday, when they found an unexploded ordnance and started playing with it. 4-year-old Thamilmaran Mukunthan and his younger brother 2-year-old Thanujan Mukunthan were the victims of the tragic incident. The family has resettled in their village recently when Pazhai and Ma'niyanthoaddam areas were declared free of landmines and were opened for resettlement. In the meantime, a leading de-mining group on Tuesday said that it was winding up its activities in Jaffna district and limiting its work in Ki'linochchi district. Independent de-mining groups, supported by international community are forced to close down services at a crucial time due to lack of funds while the SL military apparatus is seeking to dominate the agenda of the entire de-mining process.
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220 Tamils arrested in SLA combing in Trincomalee

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 25 April 2012, 17:53 GMT]
The occupying Sri Lanka Army and Police, backed by special teams of the ‘Terrorist Investigation Department’ from Colombo, have been entering selected houses in the villages of Trincomalee district, detaining ex-LTTE members since Saturday evening. The SL forces have detained around 220 Tamil males and females from their houses. The detained men have been taken to Welikande and the females have been taken to Poonthoaddam in Vavuniyaa, informed sources told TamilNet Wednesday. Ex-LTTE members who had left the movement more than 10 years ago have also been detained. The arrested also include returnees from Tamil Nadu and those who have been detained earlier and released for reunification with their families. While India and the West talk only about the North nowadays, the operations of genocidal Colombo in the East largely go unnoticed.
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Veteran Tamil activist and humanist reaches 88 in exile

[TamilNet, Monday, 23 April 2012, 20:06 GMT]
Solomon Arulanandam David (S.A. David), popularly known as Gandhiyam David, who presided the Gandhian movement which spread simple agriculture, self-sustenance, and importance to early education as a way of life in the deprived villages of Tamil Eelam for nearly a decade from 1972, reaches 88-years Tuesday as he spends his older years among his friends in Chennai. TamilNet extends its wishes to Mr David as it recognizes his unique and selfless contribution to Northeast Tamils and the hill-country Tamils displaced by Sinhala intimidation, riots and pogroms in the 1970s and 80s. David was assisted by another humanist of the 70s, the late Dr Rajasundaram. Rajasundaram was killed in the Welikade prison massacre in 1983, whereas his friend, David, escaped, re-incarcerated in Batticaloa jail to escape again in the famous Batticaloa jail break.
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‘Development’ gives no light to people while SL cantonment gets electricity in Vanni

[TamilNet, Monday, 16 April 2012, 21:41 GMT]
More than 30 months have elapsed since the Sri Lankan government was promising electricity link to the resettling people in Ki'linochchi under the so-called Spring of North ‘development’, which is nothing but a camouflage for the structural genocide committed by Colombo in the country of Eezham Tamils. Electricity posts were put up creating hope among the people that power would be supplied. Many trees were also felled in Vanni jungle in the name of putting up infrastructure. Renewed hopes were again given during the civic elections held a year ago by SL Power and Energy Minister Champika Ranawaka, the theoretician of the JHU, the Sinhala Buddhist extremist monks party, who declared opened a transformer at Chalvaa-nakar, a suburb of Ki'linochchi. The suburb is yet to see the light promised by the ‘Spring of North’, while the power lines are directed only to illuminate an SL cantonment.
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India to wage documentary war countering West’s exposure of Sri Lanka crimes

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 27 March 2012, 18:48 GMT]
The Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi has embarked on deploying India’s expertise in cinematography to campaign against recent exposures of Sri Lanka’s war crimes by Western documentaries and to defend the partnership efforts of the two Establishments in the island. Leading film makers in India have been hired by the ministry to produce a documentary that will be showing an interview with Rajapaksa, de-mining work by Indian teams and footages of Tamils ‘praising’ India, news sources in Colombo told TamilNet on Tuesday. Meanwhile, India’s Bollywood is set to produce a ‘politically charged’ commercial film, “Jaffna,” directed by Shoojit Sircar carrying the theme of ‘extremism’ to another level compared to his earlier film on Kashmir, and the actor John Abraham is going to visit the island often to get a hang of the milieu, IANS reported early this month.
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Ram journalism faces criticism in JNU for pro-Sri Lanka bias, endorsing genocide

[TamilNet, Thursday, 15 March 2012, 06:04 GMT]
Activists of Delhi Tamil Students’ Union, Democratic Students Union, Students for Resistance and other common students raised slogans against N. Ram accusing him of being a ‘media fascist’ and ‘a stooge of Rajapaksa’ at a public meeting in JNU after his reply to a question on The Hindu’s role in whitewashing the Sri Lankan state genocide of the Eezham Tamils, wherein he had extensively blamed the LTTE. The meeting on ‘Paid news and media ethics’ was organized at JNU on Wednesday by the Student’s Federation of India, which is the students wing of the CPI(M). The fact that N.Ram and The Hindu have unethically manipulated news to cover up the war crimes of Colombo makes them complicit in the genocide committed on the Eezham Tamils, a Tamil Nadu research scholar in JNU told TamilNet.
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Marie Colvin remembered in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 28 February 2012, 21:06 GMT]
Tamil journalists from various media organizations came together on Monday in Jaffna with civil society members and student representatives of various faculties of the Jaffna University, to pay tribute to the slain war correspondent in Syria, Marie Colvin, who had been in the island covering the conflict earlier. Paying floral tribute, the event, organized by Nimalarajan Memorial Foundation, remembered the late Marie Colvin as a Journalist Friend of Tamils. Meanwhile, remembering Marie Colvin in the diaspora, the London-based International Association of Tamil Journalists came out with a tribute last Thursday, saluting her courage, discipline and commitment to her work and to humanity.
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Women groups protest against SL militarisation move in Mannaar

[TamilNet, Sunday, 19 February 2012, 23:54 GMT]
The occupying Sri Lanka Army in Mannaar has been allocated a vast area of lands in Ezhuththoor GS division of Mannaar Piratheasa Chapai (PS), where uprooted families, most of them who had lost one of their parents in the war and are from Mullaiththeevu, Ki'linochchi, Vavuniyaa and Mannaar districts, have been provided lands to resettle. The families, mostly run by females, have come together and shown their objection to the move to construct SL military cantonment, obstructing the normalcy needed for the families. The resettled women have formed civil groups and urged the civil authorities at all levels to take immediate step to stop the move which would threaten the peace of life in their new village.
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TNA tries to sell Indo-US pre-emption to Eezham Tamil civil society

[TamilNet, Saturday, 18 February 2012, 14:45 GMT]
Accepting the implementation of the 13th Amendment that is already in Sri Lanka’s constitution and failed to meet Tamil aspirations, was the subject matter the TNA was trying to impress upon the representatives of the Eezham Tamil civil society, in a meeting that took place in Vavuniyaa for five hours on Saturday. Eezham Tamils should not ‘hang on’ to their right to self-determination was the argument of a Colombo-based lawyer backing the stand of TNA leader R. Sampanthan, while this right was the very basis of the struggle of Eezham Tamils in the last sixty years, democratically as well as militarily, civil society circles told TamilNet. Many of the civil society representatives, especially from the East and Mannaar requested the TNA to conceive better ideas to bring in an interim administration for the North and East to face the current situation.
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Tamils must remind Britain of its obligations on February 04: Brian Senewiratne

[TamilNet, Saturday, 04 February 2012, 12:05 GMT]
February 4th, the day Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) got so-called “Independence” from Britain in 1948, is a day for action, not regret or mourning. “The betrayal of the Tamils by the British cannot be ignored. If it is, then Britain must be reminded of its moral, legal and ethical obligations, to ‘do the right thing’, by the Tamils even belatedly,” says Dr. Brian Senewiratne in an article he has authored on the so-called independence of Ceylon on 04 February 1948. “It is no exaggeration to say that on 4 February, 1948, ‘Independence’ was granted to the Sinhalese to do what they wanted to the Tamils. Britain could not care less, as long as the military bases were secure and the (British) tea estates remained under Sinhalese capitalist control, to supply tea at absurdly low prices to fill the British cup.”
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TID arrests two Tamil fishermen in Mannaar

[TamilNet, Thursday, 02 February 2012, 02:51 GMT]
A group of persons, arriving in a white van and identifying themselves as from the Sri Lankan ‘Terrorism Investigation Division’ (TID), arrested two Tamil fishermen in Mannaar on January 19th, sources in Mannaar said. The TID officers had later had informed relatives of the fishermen after inquiry that TID police had detained the fishermen on reports that they had helped he LTTE.
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Tamil couple knifed to death in Vavuniyaa resettled village

[TamilNet, Friday, 20 January 2012, 12:27 GMT]
A husband and his wife were knifed to death on Thursday at a resettled village, Pan'rikkeitha-ku'lam in Vavuniyaa district. Kanthaiah Muthiah, 67, and his wife were living in a temporary hut with tin sheets, and have been doing paddy cultivation in the resettled village when the murder occurred.
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EPDP accused of post-2006 killings as SLFP-EPDP feud escalates in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Sunday, 01 January 2012, 23:58 GMT]
Pandemonium prevailed and Police was called to manage the altercation during a Jaffna Municipal Council meeting Friday when Nishanthan, an ex-member of the Eelam People Democratic Party (EPDP), and currently functioning under ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) label, accused EPDP of carrying out abductions, extortions, and gruesome killings that occurred in Jaffna after the breakdown of the peace process in 2006 under Sri Lanka military occupation, sources in Jaffna said. Nishanthan was a key activist within EPDP when EPDP was functioning as an armed-paramilitary unit under the command of Sri Lanka military intelligence. The exposé of EPDP complicity in killings was a manifestation of brewing infighting between the members of the EPDP and SLFP within the Jaffna Municipal Council, political observers in Jaffna said.
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‘ICG report fails to cover genocide-intended sexual violence’

[TamilNet, Sunday, 25 December 2011, 05:42 GMT]
The International Crisis Group report titled ‘Sri Lanka: Women’s Insecurity in the North and East’ that was released on Tuesday touched upon problems faced by the Eezham Tamil women in their homelands at the hands of the occupying Sri Lankan military apparatus. While the report has been welcomed by some for its revelations, Eezham Tamil civil society activists in the homeland, academics and feminists came down heavily on the report for studying the gender problem in isolation without addressing either the national question of the Eezham Tamils or the process of structural genocide, which necessarily includes use of sexual violence, which is being carried out by the Sinhala majoritarian state to crush the Eezham Tamil nation. They also questioned the motives and practical effectiveness of such reports that seek to push the principal contradictions under the carpet.
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No infrastructure to take care of floods displaced genocide victims of Vanni

[TamilNet, Thursday, 22 December 2011, 06:47 GMT]
11,000 people belonging to 2,556 families have been displaced from the low-lying lands of Ki'linochchi district this week following heavy rain and floods, according to District Secretariat officials in Ki'linochchi. Of these, only 1,443 persons of 349 families have been provided refuge by the SL administration. The remaining families have been struggling to find space with their relatives and friends elsewhere. Most of the ‘re-settled’ victims of genocide were living in temporary huts in the low-lying lands. But, the floods have taken away even their huts while destroying their agricultural produce, the livelihood for which the people had to borrow money from the SL banks. Despite the claims by the SL government that people have been resettled and their infrastructure restored, the district remains roofless to accommodate people affected by the floods, even after two years of the war.
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Death threat issued to 8 student activists, 3 lecturers of Jaffna University

[TamilNet, Thursday, 15 December 2011, 14:10 GMT]
“There will be ‘maximum punishment’ [assassination] for those who disturb the ‘freedom’ that we gave to Tamil people by shedding our blood,” say posters and notices distributed by helmet-wearing unknown operatives who entered the premises of the University of Jaffna Thursday. The poster, titled “last warning” and issued in the name of “Naam Ilangkaiyar Security Force” (We Sri Lankans Security Force), names 8 students from 4 districts and 3 lectures of the University of Jaffna. The elected leadership of the student union this year and the newly elected leaders for the coming year are named in the list. One of the students is Mr. S.Thavapalasingham who was recently attacked by a group of men believed to be SL military intelligence operatives and one of the lecturers is Mr. S. Raveendran, who was abducted in Colombo in March 2009 and released after two weeks.
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Abducted JVP organiser in Jaffna feared killed

[TamilNet, Sunday, 11 December 2011, 18:02 GMT]
Lalith Veeraraj, the Jaffna district organiser of the Movement for People’s Struggle, a JVP dissident group and his friend Kugan Murugananthan, who were reported missing in Achchuveali on Friday are feared killed, according to the MPS faction of the JVP which staged a press conference in Jaffna on Saturday. Lalith Veeraraj has been involved in bringing out the news regarding the missing persons, political prisoners and abductions in Jaffna, Ki'linochchi, Mullaiththeevu, Mannaar and Vavuniyaa during the past months and had been warned several times by the SL intelligence operatives not to get involved in the missing persons issue.
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