We are deeply sad, puzzled: LTTE Political Head

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 17 February 2009, 16:16 GMT]
"We are deeply sad and puzzled at the attitude of the apex institution of humanity, the United Nations, in not taking effective measures to protect the life, security and interests of innocent Tamil civilians," said LTTE's Political Head B. Nadesan on Tuesday. "Instead, the UN is engaged in fruitless exercises of accusing the wrong side, without coming and seeing what is happening by themselves," he said. When stopping the war is the need of the hour, allowing it and lamenting civilian sufferings is a faulty policy, Mr. Nadesan said, adding that indicting the defensive LTTE and exploiting the plight of civilians for the agenda of those who are waging the war will not bring in any positive results.
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UNICEF alarmed at plight of children in Vanni

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 17 February 2009, 12:23 GMT]
United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said Tuesday that it was extremely alarmed at the high number of children being injured in the fighting in the northern area of Sri Lanka known as the Vanni. “Scores of injured children have been evacuated in the past week,” said UNICEF’s Duamelle. “Children are victims of this conflict by being killed, injured, recruited, displaced, separated and denied their every day needs due to the fighting.” The main injuries to children have been burns, fractures, shrapnel and bullet wounds. UNICEF reiterates the call it has made time and again to Government and the LTTE – civilians, especially children, must be given every protection from the fighting.
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Indian historian intends well but slips in historiography

[TamilNet, Monday, 16 February 2009, 23:21 GMT]
Indian historian Ramachandra Guha intended well in saying if the defeat of the LTTE at the hands of the Sri Lanka army leads to a consolidation of Sinhala chauvinism it will be impossible to defend that. But the categorical statements he makes such as ‘ the Sinhala almost certainly migrated there (to the island of Sri Lanka) from eastern India, Tamil and other cultures influenced the island in later centuries, the LTTE is a terrorist organization, the civil war in Sri Lanka nears its end’ etc are not in accord with historiographical etiquette, says a Tamil academic based in Colombo.
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SLA, SL Police arrest 100 civilians in Colombo

[TamilNet, Monday, 16 February 2009, 22:43 GMT]
More than one hundred civilians, majority of them Tamils, and residents of North-East were taken into custody in combined cordon and search operations conducted by the Sri Lanka Police and Sri Lanka Army (SLA) in suburbs of Colombo from early morning till evening on Sunday. The arrested are being detained in police stations in the district and are being interrogated. The armed forces also took about three hundred motor bikes into their custody, police sources said.
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India mistaken on arms and talks - experts

[TamilNet, Monday, 16 February 2009, 19:43 GMT]
Indian Home Minister P Chidambaram’s call for the LTTE to surrender arms was not in keeping with international practice on conflict resolution, but an endorsement of the Sri Lankan government’s hardline position, scholars of conflict and peace said Monday. They pointed a number of successful peace processes, including those with the ANC, IRA and Nepal’s Maoists had proceeded without making arms surrender a precondition for talks. There had also been several peace processes involving the LTTE without this precondition, a scholar of Sri Lanka’s conflict pointed out. The Indian government was in effect supporting the Rajapakse government’s efforts to avoid negotiations on a lasting settlement by making talks conditional on a demand unacceptable to any party to a conflict, some academics opined.
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UN sheds responsibilities - NGO official

[TamilNet, Monday, 16 February 2009, 18:01 GMT]
The UN said 15 of its local staff and 75 of their dependents were not allowed to leave the conflict area by the Tamil Tigers, who had forcibly recruited one of the UN staffers, reported AFP on Monday. "The UN for the first time openly acknowledges its agenda of withdrawing even the remaining few local staff from the conflict zone, completely shedding its responsibility of caring for the civilians trapped here," said Velupillai Sivanadiyar, the president of the Tamils Rehabilitation Organisation (TRO), the only NGO working in Vanni. The latest UN stand implies that the apex security system of the world has written off the fate of more than 250,000 civilians to the discretion of Colombo’s hostile and encircling army of 50,000, a ratio of 1:5.
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RSF accuses Colombo of "War Crimes"

[TamilNet, Monday, 16 February 2009, 17:36 GMT]
In an unprecedented move, Reporters sans frontières (RSF), a Paris-based media watchdog, in a press release issued today, expressed "revulsion at the death of Tamil journalist" Sathyamurthy in Sri Lanka Army (SLA) bombardment, and accused Colombo of committing war crimes, asserting "Army air strikes and artillery fire on areas where there are tens of thousands of civilians, including Tamil journalists, are war crimes." Sathyamoorthy was killed inside the "Safe Zone" demarcated by Sri Lanka late last week. Several hundreds Tamil refugees herded into the safe zone by the Government of Sri Lanka have been killed by targeted artillery and air-attacks inside the safe zone.
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Verbal shows fail to save lives in Vanni

[TamilNet, Monday, 16 February 2009, 15:09 GMT]
“War is also theirs, peace is also theirs; therefore the solution also should be theirs. Why don’t they come out with that and end the suffering?” asked a sulking school teacher in Vanni, frustrated at the diplomatic games and dilly-dallying of world powers in protecting the life and dignity of civilians, neither by themselves nor allowing the UN to do it. But the solution some of the powers envisage in what they call the ‘post-LTTE era’ goes back to the concentration camps of the Nazi times.
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Colombo uses firebombs setting ablaze civilian targets in Vanni

[TamilNet, Monday, 16 February 2009, 11:30 GMT]
Sri Lanka Army (SLA) and Sri Lanka Air Force (SLAF) have increasingly deployed incendiary bombs in several forms in recent attacks on Vanni civilians. A petroleum-derived liquid mixture is found used in SLAF bombardments. The same kind of bomb is also used in artillery and mortar barrage in addition to artillery-fired flying fireballs that ignite the bombed target. Recently, the makeshift hospital at Udaaiyaarkaddu was attacked with such bombs, as documented by a video, filmed from a building in the hospital.
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India in duplicitous, murderous collaboration with genocidal regime - SA Post

[TamilNet, Sunday, 15 February 2009, 15:00 GMT]
Noting that the "shelling of safe areas, the genocide massacre of the elderly, innocent women, and children," are war crimes "on a par with the worst of Nazism," an article in South Africa's popular daily, The Post, accuses India that it "has revealed a duplicitous and murderous collaboration with the genocidal regime in power in Colombo. Not only deaf to the pleas and cries of its own Tamil population to intervene in this murderous onslaught, it actively assists the regime in the supply of military hardware, the training of strike-aircraft pilots, the supply of military expertise, and the provision of military advisors on the ground."
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US Foreign Relations Committee to hold hearings on Sri Lanka

[TamilNet, Saturday, 14 February 2009, 03:25 GMT]
United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations is to hold hearings on "Recent Developments in Sri Lanka' on the 24th February, 2:30 p.m. at the Dirksen Senate Building, Committee's website said. The hearing will be presided by the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Kerry. Witnesses at the hearing are announced to be former US Ambassador to Sri Lanka, Honorable Jeffrey J. Lunstead, Ms Anna Neistat from Human Rights Watch, and Bob Dietz from Committee to Protect Journalists, New York.
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SL Police arrests Tamil youth in Kandy

[TamilNet, Saturday, 14 February 2009, 02:48 GMT]
The Kandy Police Tuesday arrested a Tamil youth and have detained him in the police station for further inquiry by the Terrorist Intelligence Division (TID). The Kandy Police said he was taken into custody on a report by the Colombo Terrorist Intelligence Unit that he had been a member of the LTTE intelligence wing.
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Herding people by terror: Intense shelling, dead bodies on roadside in Vanni

[TamilNet, Friday, 13 February 2009, 13:50 GMT]
More than 150 civilians were feared killed Thursday alone and around 90 in the preceding two days in Sri Lanka Army (SLA) shelling in Mullaiththeevu district. Most of the casualties are reported along the sides of two roads through which the civilians are forced to flee in yet another mass exodus to a new 'safety zone' unilaterally announced by Colombo. Dead bodies were lying along the roadside from Theavipuram to Puthukkudiyiruppu and the fleeing civilians were forced to bury their dead along the roadside amid intense shelling, initial reports from Vanni said. The new 'safety zone' declared by Colombo is nothing but an assembling ground to herd 300,000 civilians in a small stretch of land along the lagoon and the sea coast, north of Mullaiththeevu.
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India changes language with measured ambiguity

[TamilNet, Friday, 13 February 2009, 01:30 GMT]
Indian President Prathiba Patil in her address to the joint sitting of Indian Parliament on Thursday declared that India continued to support a negotiated political settlement in Sri Lanka within the framework of an undivided Sri Lanka acceptable to all the communities, including the Tamil community. Ms. Prathiba Patil urged Colombo and the Tigers to return to negotiating table.
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Sri Lanka rejects Britain’s appointing of Special Envoy

[TamilNet, Thursday, 12 February 2009, 20:57 GMT]
Sri Lanka swiftly rejected as “an intrusion into internal affairs” Britain’s appointment Thursday of a Special Envoy to help settle the island’s protracted conflict. Sri Lanka's Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama was quoted by the AFP as saying that the British move was tantamount to "an intrusion into Sri Lanka's internal affairs" and was "disrespectful to the country's statehood. Earlier Thursday, the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told a parliamentary committee that he had asked former defence secretary, Des Browne, to be an envoy for Sri Lanka.
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British ex-defence secretary appointed special envoy to Sri Lanka

[TamilNet, Thursday, 12 February 2009, 15:44 GMT]
Britain named a special envoy to Sri Lanka on Thursday to help bring about a political solution to the island’s long-running conflict and to ease hardships to Tamil civilians trapped in the Vanni warzone, UK press reports said. "I've asked Des Browne, our former defence secretary, to be an envoy for Sri Lanka," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told a parliamentary committee. Brown said the priorities were to achieve a ceasefire and to get a political settlement, Reuters reported. Meanwhile, US Ambassador to Sri Lanka, Robert Blake was quoted by the Washington Post as saying the Sri Lankan military’s capture of the Vanni region – which he expects within weeks – will not end the LTTE’s armed struggle and that Colombo must reach a political settlement with the Tamils.
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Singapore Tamils protest newspaper misreporting

[TamilNet, Thursday, 12 February 2009, 13:57 GMT]
Singapore Tamils have protested misreporting of a news in the headlines of the country's Tamil daily Tamil Murasu last Thursday, which read that the LTTE had claimed they would even attack Tamil Nadu, media circles in Singapore said.
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ICRC evacuates 360 more patients to Trincomalee

[TamilNet, Thursday, 12 February 2009, 12:41 GMT]
The ICRC on Thursday evacuated second batch of 360 injured and sick patients from makeshift hospitals in Puthumaaththa'lan and Thaevipuram in Vanni to Trincomalee in chartered vessel 'Green Ocean', according to medical sources. The foreign officials of the ICRC who came to Vanni, have also returned in the ship, the sources further said. Meanwhile, informed sources in Colombo said that the ICRC was not allowed by the GoSL to have foreign officials to operate in Vanni as it would no longer guarantee their security. Colombo government is also pressing the remaining health workers to leave Vanni with ICRC escort.
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Civilian refugees imprisoned in internment camps in Vavuniyaa

[TamilNet, Thursday, 12 February 2009, 11:55 GMT]
The civilian refugees who either fled the war zone or caught by the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) are denied not only the freedom of movement to go out of the buildings in which they are detained under 'near-prison' conditions, but are also denied freedom of movement inside the camp itself after 6:00 p.m. by the SLA, even for the call of nature, on grounds of condemnation that they were linked to the LTTE, said NGO activists on condition of anonymity.
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Tamil youth arrested in Anuradhapura

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 11 February 2009, 20:25 GMT]
A Tamil youth was arrested Tuesday in Neriyaku'lam in Anuradhapura district by a special team of the Terrorist Intelligence Division (TID) and is being detained in the police for further inquiry, said Senior Superintendent of Police Ranjit Gunasekara, Police spokesman in Colombo district. The youth is a resident of Maangku'lam.
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