Colombo goes on all-out offensive against UN report as UNHRC disaster looms

[TamilNet, Saturday, 20 August 2011, 10:19 GMT]
At a time when the United States is awaiting a response from Colombo for its call for an “interactive dialogue” on the wide-spread credible allegations war crimes, before the UNHRC meets for its 18th sessions next month, Mahinda Rajapaksa government has said the UN Expert Panel Report is “not admissible at UNHRC” and warned that it could produce “dangerous results if entertained”.
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USA to conduct joint exercise with genocidal Air Force of Sri Lanka

[TamilNet, Saturday, 20 August 2011, 05:44 GMT]
The Pacific Air Command of the US Air Force will be conducting a joint air exercise with the Air Force of Sri Lanka, involving the bases at Ratmalana in Colombo and Ampaa’rai in the Eastern Province, media reports from Colombo said. Royal Australian Air Force, Royal Malaysian Air Force, and the Bangladesh Air Force also will participate in the exercise. The Air Force of Sri Lanka is accused of specific instances of war crimes against Eezham Tamils in the UN panel report. While talk of human rights and crimes against humanity is dubiously manipulated by some powers for their political benefits, their defence establishments and intelligence agencies are all out to promote militarism of genocidal Sri Lanka for their strategic benefits, political analysts in the island said.
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Hambantota port commercially not viable: Sarath N Silva

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 17 August 2011, 06:38 GMT]
"We have built a mega port in Hambantota, but it is not commercially viable yet," the Reuters reported Wednesday quoting former SL Chief Justice Sarath N. Silva at a JVP organised meeting in Colombo on Tuesday. “From the top to bottom, corruption has become a systemic issue... Foreign investors will be discouraged from investing here if this goes on,” Mr. Silva has said. "The anti-corruption law is ineffective. The anti-graft commission can investigate only if they receive a compliant and if the complaint is wrong, the complainant will be given an up to 10 year jail term," the former SL chief justice has said.
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Belated realisation finds fault with ‘brother’

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 16 August 2011, 06:11 GMT]
President Rajapaksa would be well advised to distance himself swiftly from his brother Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, said The Hindu in its editorial on Tuesday. The problem is not the brother but the confidence the Colombo regime gets from the stand of the big brother in New Delhi, is the opinion of political observers and the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Ms. Jayalalitha. The Hindu now scapegoats ‘Gotabhaya brother’ as a last resort to bail out Rajapaksa, New Delhi establishment and all those who contributed to genocide in the island, political observers in Chennai said. The Hindu could have contributed to pre-empt genocide had its journalism confuted the big brothers in New Delhi and Washington and appealed to the masses in India and outside by telling the truth about the intentions of state in the island, the political observers further said.
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Those who committed Genocide on Tamils should be brought to Justice: BJP

[TamilNet, Saturday, 13 August 2011, 04:18 GMT]
“We are not going to give up till all those people involved in genocide are brought to justice,” said India's former Foreign Minister and a top leader of the Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP) Yashwant Sinha Friday, questioning the motives behind New Delhi’s silence on the UN Chief’s expert panel report that found credible evidences for the wide-spread allegations of war-crime committed by the Sri Lankan troops. According to media reports from India, leaders of various mainstream political parties, including the BJP, on Friday have expressed solidarity with Eezham Tamils, saying that they would continue to raise their voice until everyone responsible for the “genocide” there were brought to justice.
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EPRLF Thurairatnam condemns Tamil ministers for failing to confront Sinhalacisation in East

[TamilNet, Friday, 12 August 2011, 15:34 GMT]
The Sri Lankan government led by Mahinda Rajapaksa is actively engaged in destroying historic places of worship and illegally acquiring lands belonging to Eezham Tamils and it is a pity to note some Tamil collaborators with ministerial positions in Rajapaksa government have no backbone in opposing the landgrab and the Sinhalicisation, said R.Thurairatnam, Eastern Provincial Councillor and the organizer of EPRLF (Varathar Wing) in Batticaloa district in a statement to media this week.
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Devil reading from scriptures, Jayalalitha derides Gotabhaya

[TamilNet, Friday, 12 August 2011, 04:18 GMT]
Verbal feud between Jayalalithaa Jayaram, Tamil Naadu chief minister, and Sri Lanka's Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse escalated as Jayalalithaa hit back at Gotabhaya after the latter had asked Jayalalithaa to "mind her own business and not interfere in the internal affairs of Sri Lanka," saying, "Gotabaya claims that there were no war crimes and the reports are false and misleading. The Tamil Nadu resolution on Lankan Tamils is beyond politics," India Today reported. Jayalalithaa said that Lankan defence secretary's statement is like the Devil quoting from scriptures, and added that her government will not rest till the issue of atrocities on Lankan Tamils has got a permanent solution.
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Ratnajeevan Hoole ‘flees’ Sri Lanka

[TamilNet, Thursday, 11 August 2011, 05:53 GMT]
Professor Ratnajeevan Hoole, the unsuccessful candidate for the post of Vice-Chancellor of the University of Jaffna supported by a section of pro-Rajapaksa elements, had to flee Jaffna as well as the island in the wake of a criminal case filed by SL minister Douglas Devananda in the Kayts court, news sources in Jaffna said adding that Prof Hoole is on his way back to the USA via UK. Even though Hoole accuses Devananda for his miseries, informed circles are of the opinion that the issue is much deeper, associated to international power polity. Hoole, known for re-invoking the colonial idiom of confrontation between Protestant Churches and native revival movements as his ‘sociological’ approach, gets the rare distinction of not getting the trust of both Pirapaharan and Rajapaksa, despite his opportunistic approaches or denunciations, the news sources said.
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S.M. Krishna and his suo motu statement

[TamilNet, Monday, 08 August 2011, 01:09 GMT]
The Suo Motu statement of Indian foreign minister SM Krishna on Sri Lanka in the Indian parliament has led him into a controversy of filing a defamation case against the Press Trust of India (PTI), because the latter reported him reading the statement ‘absent minded’. The minister "appeared absent-minded and had to be prodded to make a statement," PTI reported. On Krishna’s response through a defamation case the PTI said on Friday: "This is perhaps the first time a minister has threatened a news organisation with... action for reporting [House] proceedings despite the Parliamentary Proceedings [Protection of Publication] Act." Meanwhile, Krishna’s statement was meant to mislead the parliament and to hoodwink Tamil Nadu, writes, a leading legal practitioner and human rights activist of Trincomalee.
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US Court rules Rumsfeld can be sued for torture

[TamilNet, Saturday, 06 August 2011, 14:02 GMT]
Federal judge, James S. Gwin, of the District Court of District of Columbia, ruled this week that former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld can be sued personally for damages by a former U.S. military contractor who says he was tortured during a nine-month imprisonment in Iraq. The lawsuit also accused four other US Government officials of a failure to secure the return of plaintiff's property seized upon his detention and of violations of his right to travel. Chicago civil rights law firm, Loevy & Loevy, argued for the plaintiff identified only as John Doe. A War crimes civil suit against Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapakse by three Tamil plaintiffs sponsored by a US-based advocacy group Tamils Against Genocide (TAG), is also pending in the same District Court but under a different judge Colleen Kollar-Kelly.
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Colombo rejects TNA’s ultimatum on non-existing devolution plan

[TamilNet, Friday, 05 August 2011, 11:54 GMT]
Rejecting outright the demands of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) in a typical Sinhala hegemonic manner, the militaristic government of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa on Thursday said that the demands set out in the TNA’s ultimatum for future talks have reflected the attitude of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
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SLA complicit in assisting Karuna's extortion ring

[TamilNet, Friday, 05 August 2011, 03:32 GMT]
Paramilitary personnel of the group led by Karuna working hand in hand with the intelligence personnel of the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) are engaged in extorting money from people who go to work in Paduvaankarai village, Batticaloa, according to complaints filed by the victims to authorities, civil sources in Batticaloa said. Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan, alias Karuna, currently holds the post of Deputy Resettlement Minister in Mahinda Rajapakse government.
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IFJ outraged by brutal attack on senior journalist in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 03 August 2011, 05:02 GMT]
Uthayan newspaper's editorial policy in backing the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) appears to be the direct provocation for the near lethal attack on its senior news editor in Jaffna on July 29, International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) said in a statement issued on Tuesday. "The IFJ is shocked at the viciousness of the attack on Gnanasundaram Kuhanathan, which extends a long sequence of targeted attacks on Uthayan," the statement further said listing attacks on Uthayan in recent years.
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Colombo deprives livelihood of 2500 Tamil, Muslim families in Kuchchave'li

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 02 August 2011, 01:44 GMT]
Nearly two thousand five hundred Tamil and Muslim families in Periya-karaichchi village in the Kuchchave'li Divisional Secretariat division in Trincomalee district have been deprived of the their permanent livelihood following the construction of a saltern by a southern based firm with the permission of the Colombo government. The project is named Raigam Saltern employing Sinhalese from South. “Nearly 2000 families of Tamils and Muslims who were doing prawn farming on this Periya-karaichchi land and another five hundred families who benefited from the subsidiary employment related to prawn farming have been pushed out and some outsiders from other districts have come started a saltern. This is extremely unfair,” said R.Sampanthan, Trincomalee district Tamil National Alliance (TNA) parliamentarian in a letter to the Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa.
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Gotabhaya denies role in white flag surrender killings

[TamilNet, Monday, 01 August 2011, 12:55 GMT]
Rattled and ravaged by the widespread credible war crime allegations, Sri Lankan Presidential sibling and Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa on Monday denied his role and responsibility over the killing of LTTE’s political wing leaders, Nadesan and Puleedevan while surrendering to the 58 Division troops in the final days of the war in May 2009. In the meantime, a disinformation report released by his ministry has come with a comically low figure of major offences committed by Sri Lanka Army personnel between 2005 and 2010 in the North and East: 8 murders, 4 rapes and 1 sexual abuse. The only year with no major offenses by the SL Army was, according to its own report, none other than the year 2009, the year when SLA ironically adhered to the policy of Gotabhaya's “Zero Civilian Casualty”.
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Hundreds remember Black July in Australia

[TamilNet, Monday, 01 August 2011, 10:45 GMT]
Hundreds of Australian Tamils marched through Central Sydney this weekend to remember victims of Black July and urge support for an independent war crimes probe into the Mu'l'livaaykkaal massacre. Police closed major roads on Saturday as Australians from all walks of life joined members of the Tamil community to commemorate the event.
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Colombo unable to bury facts of ACF massacre

[TamilNet, Sunday, 31 July 2011, 21:15 GMT]
Fifth anniversary of the massacre of seventeen staffers of the French NGO, Action Contre la Faim (ACF), by the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) soldiers falls on the 4th of August. Later investigations established that the workers, trapped inside their Moothoor branch office residence of ACF located close to Moothoor Cultural Centre, were shot and killed at point blank range, by SLA soldiers. Colombo has continued to sabotage investigations, failed to provide protection for witnesses, and has failed to make public findings of the Commission of Inquiry (CoI) report on the ACF killings. Meanwhile, a former wife of slain ACF worker, Premas Anandarajah, has filed a civil suit in the District Court of District of Columbia, U.S., against Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapakse as responsible for the crime, claiming damages of $30m (all three plaintiffs).
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Stop treating Tamils as minority: Premachandran MP

[TamilNet, Sunday, 31 July 2011, 20:37 GMT]
Tamil National Alliance parliamentarian Suresh Premachandran on Sunday touched on an important conceptual issue related to the national question in the island that affects equality between Tamils and Sinhalese, when he criticized those who treat Tamils as a ‘minority’. “We will not allow the government or anyone else to treat the Tamils as a minority anymore. If the Sri Lankan government thinks the Sinhalese are the majority and the Tamils are the minority, then they are mistaken,” Mr. Premachandran told The Sunday Leader.
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Rajapaksa to visit China for fourth time since 2007

[TamilNet, Sunday, 31 July 2011, 07:30 GMT]
Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa is scheduled to make another official visit to China in the second week of August, Colombo media reports. Rajapaksa's last visit to China was in November 2010 as a special guest to attend the Expo 2010 Exhibition in Shanghai. Since 2007 Mahinda Rajapakse had visited China thrice and the oncoming visit would be his fourth, Colombo media reported quoting foreign ministry sources.
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Nirupama, India’s ambassador-designate to US, meets Rajapaksa

[TamilNet, Saturday, 30 July 2011, 17:29 GMT]
India’s Foreign Secretary Nirupama Menon Rao who will be retiring on Sunday is on a three-day visit to Colombo. Arriving on Friday night she had a breakfast meeting with Mahinda Rajapaksa on Saturday. The Hindu, saying that the meeting was a result of spontaneous invitation from Rajapaksa, cited officials describing the meeting as a “farewell” Rajapaksa had wanted to accord her because of the special relationship she shared with the country. But political observers said Nirupama’s fascination with Colombo on the eve of her retirement is connected to her new assignment as India’s ambassador to the US.
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