Colombo's paranoid secrecy

W hat Ranil, Mangala and Mano Ganesan said on 3 September at a Platform for Freedom Press Conference on the IDP issue was fairly widely covered in the print and electronic media, but three other contributors, Siritunga Jayasuriya, Nimalka Fernando and Herman Kumara failed to attract coverage. They were more sharp and interesting, but not being parliamentarians, I guess, less news worthy. I will focus on them to redress this imbalance. But first a Mangala snippet which was both catchy and accurate; he defined the Vanni interns as FDPs (Forcibly Detained Persons) insisting that calling them...

Missing the Enemy

Is the Rajapaksa regime caught in the grips of the ME Syndrome? - Missing the Enemy, that is. Over the last two weeks, the leading lights of the regime have warned of conspiracies to destabilize the regime and even to replace it and have used the state controlled media as well as the defence ministry website to launch propaganda attacks against alleged conspirators, this columnist included. It is the dirty nasty imperialist West and their local hirelings who are at the bottom of this. They tried to save the LTTE and failed. Now, they are determined to ensure regime destabilization and change...

Vaddukkoaddai and Thimphu

Calling for the creation of independent and sovereign Tamil Eelam, based on Vaddukkoadai Resolution was the last spontaneous and definite mandate by Eelam Tamils in a totally free and democratic atmosphere.

‘Paranoid Colombo machinates IDP human shield’

A whole world is duped in what Colombo is machinating in the name of resettlement of IDPs, Tamil circles in Jaffna commented, citing Sri Lanka Navy’s new internment camps around its installations in the island sector of Jaffna. Colombo’s aim is threefold: a human shield of civilians for its occupying forces, prevention of rightful owners reoccupying houses and lands around its military installations and eventually confiscating those lands in strategic areas for its expansion and other demographic conspiracies in the very heart of Tamil homeland, pointed out Tamil circles adding that a...

The politics of internment

Throughout the years of the island’s ethnic conflict, successive governments of Sri Lanka maintained that the war was against the LTTE and not the Tamil people. As such, with the end of the war in May, the world expected to see Colombo launch a process of reconciliation that would once and for all resolve the grievances and aspirations of all communities, and particularly the Tamil community. Then Sri Lanka could rebuild inter-community relations and settle into a path of democratic governance and economic prosperity. But such an opportunity and hopes are now being dashed by what is...

Life during peacetime

With Sri Lanka's war over, there is no excuse for anti-Tamil policies

Defeated, friendless Tamils face annihilation

On May 19, the Sri Lankan Government declared victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) who, for some 25 years, had led the struggle for autonomy for ethnic Tamils in their traditional region, the lowlands of north-east Sri Lanka.

Holding grounds is fundamental to everything

Professing defeatism or surrendering basic grounds are not the ways to begin or to sustain the struggle.

Sri Lanka - camps, media…genocide?

What kind of violence has the Sri Lankan state been committing against its Tamil civilian population as the island‘s civil war ended; on what scale and with what intentions? Martin Shaw explores the difficult terrain where war, atrocity and genocide meet.

Historic task awaits all freedom fighters

The Eelam Tamil nation doesn’t need words to explain the current situation because everybody feels it in the core of their heart. This is a situation that warrants no one else but only the members of the nation to rise up to the occasion. Unprecedented catastrophe awaits unprecedented response from the nation.

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