“Are the “declinists” on the United States, focused on hard power and America’s falling share of global output, missing something?”

“U.S.-based global corporations added 683,000 workers in China during the 1999-2009 decade, a 172 percent increase, and 392,000 workers in India, a 542 percent increase. In all they added 1.5 million workers to payrolls in the Asia and Pacific region, while cutting 864,600 workers at home, according to figures from the Commerce Department.”

“The festival was in full swing. All the great writers from around the world were present, topping up their tan by the pool. Sorry I mean all the great white writers. The UK-returned natives were keen to stay out of the sun. Listen, you must understand, on this island paradise, the darker you were the harder it was to find a spouse and the more likely you were to be killed. It’s true.”

“The Festival sponsors strutted about and got lots of exposure. The organisers played at blind-man’s bluff. And the tan-toppers drank a lot. I’m telling you, all was as it should be.”

 “One or two people were a bit worried about security.

            ‘Did you hear a Russian girl was raped?’

            ‘No, no,’ SS told them, waggling his head. ‘That didn’t really happen! It was a play put on for the purpose of the Festival. It wasn’t the real thing!’

            ‘What about that Red Cross guy who was killed?’

            ‘That was in the play, too. Remember your Hamlet? The play’s the thing and all that…’

            ‘Oh okay,’ said the foreigners and off they went for a swim thinking, gosh, these people are incredibly friendly. They just smile and smile…. wasn’t there something like that in Hamlet, too?”

“In 2011, Sri Lanka ranked fourth worst in the world in terms of allowing murders of journalists to go unpunished, according to our global Impunity Index. As we noted in our report, "President Mahinda Rajapaksa has presided over a dark era of targeted media killings and complete law-enforcement failure in addressing the crimes. All nine journalist murders in the past decade have gone unsolved, leaving persistent questions as to whether authorities have been complicit in some of the crimes."

Writing in The Platform, Mario Arulthas from the TYO UK (Tamil Youth Organisation UK) argues that the end of the armed conflict has not brought peace, but instead as the ruling regime "attempts to consolidate the Sinhala-Buddhist fascism that has plagued the island for decades", the genocide of Tamils "continues unabated".

See here for article - 'Suffering of Tamils continues unabated' in full.

‘Footage shows photographs of sexually abused women upon whom the military exercise a further act of domination with the camera. In one film taken on a smartphone soldiers are recorded throwing the bodies of dead females into a truck, rating their bodies as they fling them into a pile.

This objectification and absolute disrespect for the dead is emphasised once again by the presence of the lens, which is said to be recording the acts as ‘trophy footage’. The filming of brutal executions by the perpetrators is another decisively symbolic act of power.

Columnist, Emil Van Der Poorten writes in the Sunday Leader, Everything from Soup to Nuts: "Defenders of The Realm" in Sri Lanka (04 Dec 2012)

Extracts reproduced below:

"I have in previous columns made passing reference to those whose well-remunerated task it is to defend the status quo in this country."

TYO-UK's address at Remembrance Day 2011

On this day, we, the Eelam Tamil nation, remember our heroes - our brave young men and women, who gave their lives to the struggle for Tamil Eelam.

From the flowers and tributes made by us here in the diaspora, to the secret thoughts and silent prayers of our brothers and sisters living oppressed in our homeland, the hearts and minds of our nation across the world turn to our heroes.

"All around us, people search to find their one true hero. In reality we, the Tamil nation, have thousands of heroes who have struggled for our freedom.

Tonight is special. Tonight is the night that we as students are given the opportunity to come together and remember those heroes. For the first time, students from all across London have joined hands to remember those that have made the ultimate sacrifice.

Sri Lanka’s present political predicament is already somewhat hastily being described as ‘post-conflict’ by both international and local actors, for example by both the Government of Sri Lanka and the IMF.

However, there are very good reasons for remaining sceptical about the use of this terminology, not just because of the nebulousness of definitions of conflict (and a simplistically assumed opposition with peace), and its injudicious past use in places like Afghanistan, but also due to present dynamics in Sri Lanka which are being deliberately papered over and viewed through a skewed lens.

Indeed, ‘post-conflict’ is a misnomer that flows from the predominance of a particular international common sense knowledge and the way it understands the power dynamics in the interface of the global and local that we find in Sri Lanka.