The recent head-to-head interview on Al Jazeera with Mehdi Hassan has brought Ranil Wickremesinghe back into the spotlight. The former Sri Lankan president was described as ‘childish’ and ‘callous’ in how he conducted himself. For many Sri Lankan viewers, as commentary flooded social media in the days after it aired, Wickremesinghe was simply an 'embarrassment'.
His…
The Supreme Court ruling demonstrates is the fragility of constitutional changes, even when underwritten by powerful international actors such as India.
In Sri Lanka a white van without a number plate is a symbol of terror and the disappearances that occurred in all parts of the country.
Commissions on Disappearances in the South during the last few years of the 1980s have documented at some length how armed men, travelling in white vans without number plates abducted thousands of people who were never seen again. These reports are available at www.disappearances.org.
Now such vans have reappeared and do so frequently in the Jaffna peninsular.
This is the statement issued by Co-Chairs of the Tokyo Donor Conference - Norway, the European Union, the USA and Japan – following their meeting in Brussels on September 12, 2006.
The arrests in the United States and Canada last month of a handful of Tamil expatriates in connection with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) shocked the Tamil Diaspora communities there and elsewhere. Those arrested were charged with a number of crimes, including attempting to buy missiles and rifles for the LTTE and, incredibly, with attempting to bribe US officials to lift the ban on the LTTE.