“The failure of [Sri Lanka's] policing system to protect victims and witnesses - and its tendency to undermine rather than reinforce their rights - precludes the development of public trust in law enforcement, the judicial system, and the state.”

Singapore will introduce a new Tamil-language elective next year for high-ability secondary and junior college students who want to go deeper into the language, its literature and culture, the Straits Times reports.

The National Elective Tamil Language Programme (NETP) will be similar to the existing Chinese and Malay language electives, but will not be amongst examined options.

The all-pervasive climate of terror being engineered in the Jaffna peninsula is intended to stifle the revival of Tamil political and economic activity there.

The brutal killings, abductions, ‘disappearances’ and intimidation are not random or manifestations of ‘lawlessness’, but a deliberate campaign of targeted violence with specific political and economic goals.

The wave of terror in Jaffna by Sri Lanka Army-backed paramilitaries serves to undermine planned international efforts to restore normalcy in the peninsula.

Despite assertion of an inevitable ‘post-conflict boom’, Sri Lanka’s growth in 2010, according to the Central Bank, was 7.6%. The Bank says growth in 2011 will be 8%.

By way of comparison, the bank’s figures during the final phase of the war were: 2009(3%), 2008 (6%), 2007 (6.8%) and 2006 (7.7%).

27 journalism students from Jaffna University received a warm welcome from the Vice Chancellor of the University of Madras this week when they attended a two-day seminar there.

University links between the island's Tamils and south India began over 150 years ago, but were largely disrupted by Sri Lanka’s Sinhala-first policies after independence.

The doubling of Sri Lanka’s main stock market index in 2010 has led to some effusive news reports, most recently in The Guardian. Inevitably, these reports have been lauded in Sri Lanka’s state-owned press, alongside its own hype.

But, as other recent analysis shows, these reports make two mistaken assumptions: [1] that the index’s rise is entirely due to fundamental improvement in the stocks, and [2] that the market is indicative of the wider economy’s progress.

Firstly, the index has been driven up by Sri Lankan government buying, while foreigners are exiting. Secondly, the Colombo bourse is unrepresentative of the wider economy.

This is what the Sri Lankan Sunday Times’ economic column warned last October about the mistaken presumption:

“There is little doubt that the recent [stock] market performance is not directly related to either economic performance or market fundamentals. It has been guided by market sentiments, speculation and government intervention.”