Tamil leaders of Sri Lanka have rejected the island nation government’s devolution package aimed at ending the 25-year-old ethnic conflict saying the move was ‘a joke played on Tamils’.

The All Party Representation Committee (APRC), formed by the Mahinda Rajapakse government to counter LTTE’s struggle for separate homeland for Tamils in Sri Lanka, had submitted its report to the government last month.

Sporting red T-shirts, with an Eelam map Australian Tamil youth from Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne gathered on February 12 in the Australian capital, Canberra, to voice support for the Tamil struggle and to highlight the worsening humanitarian situation in the northeast of Sri Lanka.

The 200 fans arrived wearing red "Voice of Tamils" T-shirts bearing the slogan "Where is the Humanity", and set up a party outside the gates with drummers, dancers and whistles before play.

India has not only announced its continuing economic support for Sri Lanka this month, it has also put numbers, and signatures on the table.

During a business focussed visit to Colombo, an Indian Minister announced that over 2 billion dollars of investment was being lined up from businesses in his country who wished to invest in the island nation.

Western countries this month called for a political process as the only means to end the bloodshed in Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka's former colonial ruler Britain has called for a "political process" to end Sri Lanka's spiralling violence and condemned the latest wave of bombings against civilians.

Unless Sri Lanka’s hardline government abandons its militarist path, the EU should impose sanctions, Germany said this week, adding that an EU-Troika will travel to Sri Lanka in early March to assess the situation.

A high-level team of officers from the Sri Lanka military intelligence corps (MIC) and army were taken stealthily into Pune in early February for advanced intelligence training at Indian Army's various high-security institutions there.

The initial phase of the training at the National Defence Academy (NDA) finished on February 8, the Times of India newspaper reported.

India and Sri Lanka agreed last Wednesday on a timetable to build a 500 MW coal-fired power plant in Veloor, near Nilaweli, in the eastern Sri Lankan district of Trincomalee.

The power plant, which is to cost $250 million, will be a joint venture between the Indian power utility giant, National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC), and the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB).

A thematic history of the causes of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lankan was set out in the Appendix to the 2003  report on Sri Lanka by the World Bank. This is reproduced below.


Background

Constant reports of widespread thieving are circulating in Sri Lanka, particularly around suburban town centers. This has gone so far as to affect even the dressing habits of women travelling in buses or three-wheeled vehicles.

Hundreds of journalists marched Thursday in Sri Lanka's capital to protest harassment and suppression of the media.

The march was organized by members of the Movement Against Media Suppression, who say media personnel have been killed, abducted and jailed by government-backed paramilitary groups.

The group says 14 journalists and media workers have been killed in Sri Lanka in the past two years, while eight have been abducted and four others imprisoned.

Based on field trip between 10 and 14 December 2007, the author continues to query the much heralded liberation of the East in this the second of a three part series.

Applying the "self-evident" truths celebrated in the Declaration of Independence, the United States should recognize the right of Sri Lanka's long oppressed Tamil people to independent statehood from the racial supremacist Sinhalese.

To deny the statehood right — sought by the Tamil people since 1976 — would mark one of the United States' most ill-conceived hours. Double standards beget enmity or contempt, a steep price even for a superpower.

The decision of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) to select Razeen Mohamed Imam as a national list member of the Sri Lanka parliament on February 8 has been received with wide appreciation from different sections of the Tamil-speaking people, including the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress. Mr. Razeen Mohamed, 60, is a lawyer from Jaffna and has been a member of the Ilankai Thamizh Arasuk Kadchi (the Federal Party started by the late S.J.V Chelvanayakam) for more than 30 years.

One million signatures submitted to Indian defence minister