This last month sees the official marking of three years after the end of the 28 year old war that plagued Sri Lanka, killing thousands and setting the country back in terms of development and prosperity. Yet three years on, it seems that not much has changed. Whilst Sri Lanka has tried to portray [...]
April has been an educative month, so far. In the first week of April, white-vanning reached new levels of omnipotence and omnipresence. The sudden disappearance and the equally unlooked for reappearance of Premakumar Gunaratnam and Dimuthu Attygala has compelled even the generally soporific opposition to bestir itself, and ask for a parliamentary debate on abductions. [...]
The contemporary Estonian composer, Arvo Pärt, has developed a compositional system that—reduced to its sparest minimum—consists of the dynamic interplay of two musical lines in a field of silence. The melody, which proceeds mainly in steps up and down the scale, might be compared to a child tentatively walking. The second line underpins each note of [...]
It was a Deepavali day on 21 October 1987, 68 innocent Tamils were shot and killed by the IPKF inside the Jaffna Hospital compound, including 3 Doctors, 3 Nurses, 17 Hospital staffs. The next morning Dr.Sivapathasuntharam, who unknowingly came into hospital premises in an attempt to save his injured staff, was killed by the ‘peace [...]
At the end of June, Google Ideas, a new thinktank set up by Google, hosted the Summit Against Violent Extremism in Dublin. The event was slick, and it was clear that a great deal of time, effort and money had been expended in making the event look and feel like a glamorous Hollywood operation – and [...]
This is the Friday Sermon given by Dr Mustafa Ceric on the Occaision of the 16th Anniversary of the Srebrenica Massacres. On the Occasion of 11th of July, 2011, the Day of Burial of the Shahids (Martyrs) of Srebrenica Genocide, 1995 Dear brothers and sisters in Islam and in humanity around the world, This is [...]
After 26 years of war which cost thousands of innocent lives and the displacement of an equal number, with the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Sri Lanka is at a cross roads. Yet despite the victory, there has been widespread international criticism about how the war was handled coming from many [...]
This post originally was published in Groundviews. It has subsequently been published in the Island, Transcurrents and the Asian Tribune ———————— The recently telecast Channel 4 documentary on ‘Killing Fields of Sri Lanka’ sheds no new light (despite claims to the contrary), in terms of groundbreaking evidence, regarding the incidents related to the end of [...]
This was a letter sent to the Guardian Newspaper in the UK by a Sri Lankan Tamil Activist living in London, to protest an article being produced in the newspaper regarding Sri Lanka and the end of the war in 2009 —— Dear Sir/Madam, I am writing to express my disappointment and disgust with the [...]
The protests outside the British High Commission in Sri Lanka last December over actions undertaken by a small section of the Tamil Diaspora during President Rajapaksa’s recent UK visit, can be described as the wrong answer to the question ‘Who should be more appropriate to respond to the protests that took place in [...]
