"Sri Lanka, stop" says Le Monde

[TamilNet, Friday, 11 September 2009, 11:44 GMT]
"After winning the war, the Sri Lankan regime is in the process of losing the peace. Following the historic, but bloody and distasteful victory, against the armed struggle of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapaksa could be magnanimous and reach out to the Tamil minority and open the way for national reconciliation. But Rajapakse has chosen another path, the path of domination...Under the tents of the refugee camps tomorrow's Tigers may already be rising to mount a future rebellion," warned France's popular daily, Le Monde in Thursday editorial.
Full story >>

Colombo pounces on its own diplomats

[TamilNet, Friday, 11 September 2009, 07:34 GMT]
Sri Lanka’s ambassador in Japan, Jayantha Palipane is the latest victim of Colombo’s 'panicked restructuring' of its foreign service, journalistic circles in Colombo said Friday. The recall of the ambassador may look as a response to an incident at the Narita airport involving the prime minister of Sri Lanka, but it is only a pretext, according to the sources. SL President Mahinda Rajapaksa was making use of career diplomats and academics to paint a deceptive picture of his government before and during the war. But now the government, either not trusting its own diplomats or considering them a spent force, replaces them with military and political appointments in the style of some totalitarian regimes, the sources further said.
Full story >>

TNA's meeting with Rajapaksa fails to resolve IDP crisis

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 08 September 2009, 12:24 GMT]
Tamil National Alliance (TNA) parliamentarians who held talks with Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his ministers Monday evening at Temple Trees on the issue of resettling Vanni IDPs in their own places, said that the talks ended in failure as Mr. Rajapaksa evaded the main issue by saying resettlement of Vanni IDPs is not immediately possible as demining in Vanni has to be completed before resettlement. The urgent request to resettle the Vanni IDPs in Vavuniyaa internment camps before the monsoon rains was not given any due consideration by Rajapaksa and his ministers, TNA parliamentarians said.
Full story >>

SLA massacred civilians in bunkers - medical worker

[TamilNet, Monday, 07 September 2009, 08:57 GMT]
The advancing Sri Lanka Army massacred civilians by paving their bunkers with tanks, by throwing explosives inside the bunkers and by shooting the injured, says a medical worker who came out of Mu’l’li-vaaykkaal during the last days of the war, became incarcerated in a camp and now escaped the island. "Around a hundred thousand captured civilians herded to Mullaiththeevu were kept in rows within barbed wires, most of the time without water or food under the hot sun, and were bullied and ill treated with arrogance," he writes in a lengthy note that reached TamilNet this week. The note in Tamil was provided by the Norwegian Tamils Health Organisation (NTHO), urging TamilNet not to reveal the identity of the health worker for reasons of his security.
Full story >>

JVP to decide on its stand in supporting extending emergency

[TamilNet, Sunday, 06 September 2009, 16:48 GMT]
The politburo of the Sinhala Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) is to decide this week whether to support the Extension of Emergency in the country any more in view of the arrest and detention of three journalists working in its official paper “Lanka” under the Emergency Regulations (ER) and Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), JVP parliamentary group leader Mr. Anura Kumara Dissanayake told media in Colombo. Police arrested three journalists of JVP in Deniyaya on 2nd September while they were taking pictures and videoing Bewarali estate bungalow.
Full story >>

Sri Kantha meets fellow MP Kanagaretnam in detention

[TamilNet, Sunday, 06 September 2009, 03:07 GMT]
N.Sri Kantha, Jaffna district Tamil National Alliance (TNA) parliamentarian Friday met with the fellow parliamentarian Mr. Sathasivam Kanagaretnam who is currently being detained under the Emergency Regulations (ER) in the sixth floor of Sri Lanka's Criminal Investigation Department (CID), sources in Colombo said. Mr Kanagaretnam was arrested from a camp in Omanthai by CID officiers when the MP sought refuge after fleeing from Mullaitheivu in the last leg of military operation against LTTE. The TNA MP was trapped for several months in Mullaitheivu due to military operation.
Full story >>

Economist: EU report places Sri Lanka's GSP+ concession in jeopardy

[TamilNet, Friday, 04 September 2009, 02:06 GMT]
"Its [Sri Lanka's] alleged wartime and other abuses make a grim catalogue: thousands of Tamil civilians allegedly killed by army shelling during the rebels’ last stand; scores of Tamils disappeared; nearly 300,000 Tamil war-displaced callously interned; murder and intimidation of journalists—including J.S. Tissainayagam, sentenced to 20 years hard labour on August 31st for criticising the army’s tactics," says an editorial in The Economist in its 3rd September edition, and points to a damning 130-page report by the European Union which concludes that "Sri Lanka has failed to honour important human-rights commitments, and is ineligible for GSP Plus."
Full story >>

Arrest Sri Lankan state racism to meet norms of International governance - paper

[TamilNet, Friday, 04 September 2009, 00:13 GMT]
A future peace in Sri Lanka rests on the international community being willing and able to contain and constrain the now rampant, but long-embedded, Sinhala chauvinism gripping the island, the Tamil Guardian said this week. “Racism, especially when entrenched thus [in the state], cannot be effaced by suasion and engagement, but by making it utterly impossible for it to hold sway,” the editorial said. “In short, as in the case of [past] racist regimes in other parts of the world, the international community must be prepared to isolate and exclude the Sri Lankan state until it is prepared to adhere, no matter how reluctantly, to international norms of governance.”
Full story >>

UK Tamils welcome Conservatives’ concern for Tamils in Sri Lanka

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 02 September 2009, 10:00 GMT]
Tamils in Britain have welcomed the statement last week by the main opposition Conservative Party highlighting the ongoing suffering of over 280,000 Tamils held in barbed-wire ringed, militarised detention camps in Sri Lanka. Noting the Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague’s expressions of “serious concern” over the confinement of Tamils in the camps, and those by the Shadow Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox, during his recent visit to Sri Lanka, the British Tamils Forum (BTF) said Wednesday it will continue to engage with all political parties and others in Britain to bring a permanent end to the suffering of the Tamil people in their traditional homeland.
Full story >>

Ban under fire, Sri Lanka performance said key failure – Washington Post

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 01 September 2009, 18:22 GMT]
Amidst controversy surrounding Ban Ki Moon’s visit to Norway, Washington Post, in a critical article, published Tuesday, critiquing Ban’s performance, said, “halfway through his first term, Ban is facing a leadership crisis as U.N. civil servants and diplomats here increasingly portray him as an ineffective administrator whose reluctance to hold outlaw leaders to account for bad behavior has undercut the United Nations' moral authority.” Faulting Ban’s approach to quiet diplomacy with “despots and dictators,” the paper pointed to the engagement with Sri Lanka as a major failure of Ban’s tenure, for “not pressing hard enough to hold Sri Lanka accountable for its actions,” and for dropping “U.N. push for an independent investigation into war crimes, leaving it to Sri Lanka to determine whether its military was responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians in the final offensive.”
Full story >>

Liam Fox meets Mahinda Rajapakse, Sampanthan

[TamilNet, Sunday, 30 August 2009, 11:35 GMT]
The government of United Kingdom (UK) is seriously involved in finding a political solution to the legitimate aspirations of Tamils in Sri Lanka and the early resettlement of the hundreds of thousands of internally displaced as well as ensuring a better future for them, Mr. Liam Fox, British Conservative Party parliamentarian, is reported to have told President Mahinda Rajapakse when he met the latter on Saturday.
Full story >>

HRW: UN must investigate Sri Lanka atrocities

[TamilNet, Thursday, 27 August 2009, 11:16 GMT]
In the wake of a mobile-phone footage of Sri Lankan soldiers executing bound, blindfolded, and naked prisoners, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has again called on the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to create an independent international commission of inquiry to investigate atrocities during Sri Lanka’s war against the Tamil Tigers. “Ban should stop relying on the [Sri Lankan] president's promises [to the UN] of domestic action and make it clear that an international commission is needed if the victims of Sri Lanka's bloody war are to find justice," Steve Crawshaw, UN director at HRW said in a statement Wednesday.
Full story >>

900 million rupees allocated for constructing NPC secretariat in Maangku'lam

[TamilNet, Thursday, 27 August 2009, 11:01 GMT]
The Cabinet of United Peoples Freedom Alliance (UPFA) led by President Mahinda Rajapakse Wednesday approved 1525 million rupees to establish the Secretariat of the Northern Provincial Council (NPC) in Maangku’lam in Ki’linochchi district. The allocation is also to be utilized to repair destroyed or damaged local government offices in the cleared areas.
Full story >>

Eelam and the new 'super power' Sri Lanka

[TamilNet, Sunday, 23 August 2009, 04:46 GMT]
In their petty geopolitical and corporate interests, India and the West have created a Frankenstein monster of a state in Sri Lanka that disgraces the whole world. What fears them now is this monster in its frenzies making their labours lost in the island. This is what impels them to tell the victims to reconcile, not to anger the monster and not to say genocide even when it takes place for decades. A general excuse they come out with is that the present world has no appetite for new nation states. Colombo makes the best use of this weakness. No justifiable norm of polity could be seen in why India and the West should labour so hard to uphold a united Sri Lanka and to appease it beyond all limits, writes TamilNet political commentator in Colombo.
Full story >>

Australian politicians troubled by deteriorating conditions in Sri Lanka

[TamilNet, Saturday, 22 August 2009, 08:54 GMT]
A group of Australian parliamentarians have expressed concern for the plight of thousands of refugees being held in Sri Lankan military run camps at a meeting with members of the Tamil youth at Parliament House on Tuesday. In a free flowing discussion covering conditions faced by displaced civilians and a lack of independent access to refugee facilities, the panel also condemned reports of intimidation directed at the Tamil Diaspora from the Sri Lankan Government, before citing the promised resettlement of the 300,000 refugees within a 6 month period as the basis for future engagement.
Full story >>

JVP to launch campaign against continuing executive presidency system

[TamilNet, Monday, 17 August 2009, 20:05 GMT]
Sinhala nationalist Marxist party Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) Monday announced that it would launch a campaign to obstruct the holding of presidential election without first abolishing the executive presidency. JVP leader Somawanse Amarasinghe made the announcement at a press briefing held Monday in Colombo. JVP was one time ally of the ruling United Peoples Freedom Alliance and now a critic from the opposition.
Full story >>

EPC Chief Minister, ministers demand removal of Governor

[TamilNet, Monday, 17 August 2009, 06:37 GMT]
The wrangling between the elected administration of the Eastern Provincial Council and the Provincial Governor is reported to have reached its climax with Chief Minister Mr. Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan and four other provincial ministers reportedly sending a petition to President Mahinda Rajapakse demanding the removal of Governor Mohan Wijewickrema and replacing him with a person supportive of power devolution, according to reports in Colombo media Monday.
Full story >>

Creeping Talibanization in Sri Lanka - Prof. David

[TamilNet, Sunday, 16 August 2009, 10:13 GMT]
Noting several trends in Sri Lanka point to "early steps in [reaching for] totality of power," Prof Kumar David in a column in the weekend edition of "The Island" asserts that the cultural control exercised by the current Rajapakse regime are no different to those of "the Mullahs of Teheran and the iconoclastic Taliban fundamentalists." Prof. David summarizes the views of six lawyers expressed at a Lawyers’ Press Conference organised by the Platform for Freedom (PfF) early August where one notes that the scene is set for ever expanding authoritarianism as Sri Lanka's President flagrantly violates the "supreme law, the public [is] apathetic and the judiciary [is] powerless," and another points to the holding of 300,000 people "against their will, in defiance of local and international law" as "obscene infringement of the constitution."
Full story >>

Landmine recovered from Badulla stadium

[TamilNet, Saturday, 15 August 2009, 09:40 GMT]
Badulla police recovered a powerful landmine weighing 15 kg from Badulla Football Stadium in the Uva province Thursday night. A senior official of Badulla Police said they carried out a search operation in the area on information from a 'terrorist' already in custody and recovered the landmine.
Full story >>

US stresses ‘political reconciliation’ with Tamils for peace in Sri Lanka

[TamilNet, Friday, 14 August 2009, 17:38 GMT]
The US State Department met Tuesday with US-based Tamil Diaspora groups to discuss the ongoing humanitarian crisis and the prospects for “political reconciliation” in Sri Lanka, a government press release said. US Assistant Secretary of State Robert Blake and Chargé d'Affaires in the US embassy in Colombo, James Moore (participating by video link) held discussions with representatives of sixteen Tamil groups. The US officials had welcomed the opportunity to discuss the Tamils' concerns and perspectives and had "underscored the importance of political reconciliation," the US statement said. The US government has meanwhile stressed to the Sri Lanka government that "to achieve a lasting peace, it must promote justice and political reconciliation for all parties" the statement also said.
Full story >>