Sri Lanka will not allow reporters into Vavuniya and Jaffna to cover the local government elections to be held there on Saturday, the Associated Press reported.
The head of an all party panel set up by Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse to seek an ever elusive southern consensus on the Tamil national question and buy time to conduct war has said the panel has come up with a home grown solution with no absolute devolution.
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.
Government of India has announced 66 million Sri Lankan Rupees scheme to 'develop' communication between the eastern coastal cities, Trincomalee and Batticaloa, in such a way that the two traditional Tamil cities will be effectively linked to the Sinhala districts than with each other, reported TamilNet.
"Tamil militancy was a part of the political struggle of the Tamil people to achieve the right to self-determination in the traditional homeland of the Tamil people in the northeast. The Sri Lanka government says that the armed struggle has been completely defeated. But the political struggle of Tamil people would go on till the legitimate political aspirations of the Tamil people are achieved," said R.Sampanthan, leader of the TNA parliamentary group
Sri Lanka has cancelled a $200 million purchase of ammunition from Pakistan and China after the end of its war with the Tamil Tigers, the island nation's new top military commander said on Wednesday, July 15.
The International Monetary Fund has announced it has reached a $2.5 billion loan accord with Sri Lanka, which will be presented to the IMF board for approval on Friday, July 24.
More than 2,000 years ago, a Sinhalese king named Dutugemunu saddled up his elephant and headed north to fight and kill Elara, an invading Tamil king from India.
Meningitis and encephalitis have erupted in Sri Lanka's northern Vavuniya district where over 300,000 Tamil civilians forcibly held in temporary shelters behind barbed wires, a local newspaper has reported.
Five Sri Lankan doctors who witnessed the bloody climax of the country’s civil war in May and made claims of mass civilian deaths as a result of government shelling of Tamil Tiger positions recanted much of their testimony.
Sri Lanka has asked aid agencies to scale down operations on the island. The government claims that now it has claimed victory over the LTTE, there is no longer a need for agencies like the Red Cross.
US and Canadian law makers have called for Sri Lanka’s request for an IMF loan to be linked to unimpeded access to refugee camps and adherence international human rights rules.
India has long aspired to a role in redefining the global order. Ask why they deserve it, and most Indians will point to their nation's size, its rich culture and tradition, and its special legitimacy—the product of the nonviolent freedom struggle against British rule and India's triumph as a secular democracy.
Hundreds of thousands of Tamils remain locked in camps almost entirely off-limits to journalists, human-rights investigators and political leaders. The Sri Lankan government says the civilians are a security risk because Tamil Tiger fighters are hiding among them.
