With global outrage and distress at Russia’s actions, however, there has also been growing dismay around the world at the radically different lens through which Western states have viewed Moscow’s offensive and Ukraine’s resistance to it. The past week has made it abundantly clear to many peoples around the world; it is not that Western states do not understand the politics of resistance to oppression. It is that they deem some nations or people as apparently unworthy of practising it.
In their book Dialectic of Enlightenment , Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote about the role of popular culture in “seducing the masses into desiring their own domination”. The current situation in Tamil Nadu certainly has echoes of that. Throughout the state’s history, the people of Tamil Nadu have proven susceptible to ignoring their political rights for the altar of mass entertainment and hero-worship. Cinema has been the most influential medium of popular entertainment and MGR’s example has inspired subsequent super-stars to consider parlaying their popularity into a career in...
Today we meet at a critical conjuncture when efforts are being made to water down the Tamils’ demand for political rights and a political solution to the toothless provincial council system created by the 13th amendment to the Sri Lankan constitution. When we speak of a political solution, many of us fail to understand that it should be a means of preventing genocide.
The first and most important thing to understand about the Sri Lankan flag is that every version of the lion flag is, definitionally, racist and fascist in symbolism, including the official one. It was intentionally designed that way, by committee.
Writing in The Morning, Ambika Satkunanathan, former Human Rights Commissioner of Sri Lankan (HRCSL), explains how most of the recently announced proposed 'reforms' to the notorious Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) "already exist and are not new."
Over the last decade, Australia has gone to disturbing lengths to ensure asylum seekers do not seek refuge in their country; most of which have been slammed around the world as inhumane. Chief amongst the dozens of critiques that Australian authorities have come under are the conditions in which asylum seekers are held in.
Last week several refugee supporters, including myself, were arrested after dropping a banner off the rooftop of the Park Hotel in Naarm/Melbourne in protest of the plight of approximately 30 refugees who had been imprisoned onshore.
People are starving in Sri Lanka. The economy is in freefall as the cash-strapped government struggles to pay off its debts. The country has been forced to sell over half of its gold reserves and the prices of basic foods have skyrocketed. The pandemic has undeniably devastated Sri Lanka, but this is a crisis of the government’s own making. Instead of pursuing a “people-centric economy”, Sri Lanka’s insular policies have been military-driven, unaccountable, and detached from the struggle of citizens.
Writing in the International Crisis Group (ICG), senior consultant Alan Keenan slams Sri Lanka's "One Country, One Law" Presidential Taskforce as a means by which the Rajapaksa can "divert discontent among the government’s Sinhala Buddhist base toward an embattled minority". "The Rajapaksa government is deeply unpopular, including among large sections of its core Sinhala Buddhist constituency, and desperate to divert public attention from its economic mismanagement. There is thus a clear if deeply unfortunate logic for it to bring back to the fore the best-known proponent of a theme that was...
Writing in the Guardian, Tamil human rights lawyer at MTC Solicitors, Naga Kandiah, slammed the British government’s proposed Clause 9 to the nationality and borders bill which could see dual nationals stripped of their citizenship without notice. The New Statement’s research, based on the 2011 census, reveals that as many as 5.6 million people living in England and Wales could be affected by the rule change. Kandiah’s piece follows the case of Shamima Begum which has been in the public focus with regards to this rule change. Begum was stripped of her citizenship when she left the UK to join...