Thursday, May 27, 2010

Amnesty's report condemns 'politicisation of justice'



By Caroline Hawley - Amnesty International has criticised the "politicisation of international justice" in its annual report, which documents torture in 111 countries.

The human rights group accuses powerful governments of subordinating justice to political self-interest and of shielding allies from scrutiny.

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Thursday, May 27, 2010

Sri Lanka Army occupies 80% of agricultural land in North



Sri Lanka Army (SLA) occupies around eighty percentage of agricultural land in Vanni and Jaffna peninsula in the name of High Security Zones (HSZs) and releasing this land back to the owners is the prerequisite to any attempt to explore possibilities of agricultural development in the North, representatives of agricultural organizations in Jaffna peninsula told the Deputy Minister of Agriculture, Jegath Pushpakumara, Wednesday in Jaffna Secretariat where he participated in a meeting related to the development activities in the peninsula, sources in Jaffna said.

Deputy Minister Pushpakumara, who is on a two-day official visit to North, had announced in Ki’lonochchi Tuesday that the government is taking steps to reopen the Agricultural Research Centres in Murungkan and Paranthan.

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Thursday, May 27, 2010

As Sri Lanka spins, UN silent on why stopped counting the dead



By Matthew Russell Lee - Eighteen hours after UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon met with Sri Lankan minister G.L. Peiris, Inner City Press asked him how the meeting had gone and what he had said. His associate spokesperson Choi Soung-ah cut in, "We'll get you a read out... We have a read out for today."

But Sri Lanka's Mission to the UN put out their spin on the meeting before eight pm on Monday, four hours after it ended. Why would the UN delay twelve hours and counting?

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Thursday, May 27, 2010

War-Affected Women Bewail Their Plight



By IPS Correspondent - Rajini Padamaraj, 32, is burdened with the responsibility of looking after the needs of her entire household, composed of her mother and two younger siblings.

The slightly built woman, who remains unmarried, is of Tamil ethnic origin and originally from the Jaffna peninsula in northern Sri Lanka. She found a job last October as a sewing instructor in a training centre for women funded by a Japanese women’s group.

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Thursday, May 27, 2010

Sri Lanka urges US to focus on business, not just rights



Sri Lanka's new Foreign Minister G.L. Peiris on Tuesday urged Washington to seize business and other opportunities in post-war Sri Lanka rather than focus only on alleged human rights abuses there.

Visiting Washington after Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse won a resounding reelection victory in April, Peiris parried criticism from human rights activists and others as he began a week-long visit to push for closer ties.

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Thursday, May 27, 2010

Sri Lanka, no Indian Ocean paradise



Robert Mahoney - Britons are again flocking to Sri Lanka. Tourist arrivals surged 47% last month from a year earlier and sun-seekers from the UK form the largest single group. That's an astounding turnaround for a country that for more than a quarter of a century had been a case study in ethnic warfare, terrorism and brutal repression.

This week the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, buoyed by recent wins in presidential and parliamentary elections, marks the first anniversary of its military victory over the separatist Tamil Tigers.

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Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Sri Lanka and its journalists : A country going wrong


Click here to read CPJ's new report In Sri Lanka

By Bob Dietz - CPJ has launched a new report, In Sri Lanka, No Peace Dividend for Press. It takes a close look at the media in Sri Lanka, one year after the government declared a decisive victory over Tamil secessionists that ended 30 years of bitter, often genuinely suicidal ethnic conflict.

In the years running up to that victory, Sri Lankan journalists who had dared to criticize the government found themselves under serious attack - ten have been killed for their work in the last decade, and many others have been harassed, arbitrarily jailed, temporarily "disappeared," or otherwise seriously harassed. The atmosphere has become so poisonous for journalists that CPJ counts more than 25 in exile. Some of them have asked for, and received, political asylum.

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Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Sri Lanka: Relatives of the disappeared protest



Many people have been disappeared in Sri Lanka since the end of the conflict with the Tamil Tigers, human rights activists say.

Convenor of Committee for the Investigation of Disappearances (CID) Chamil Jayanetti told BBC Sandeshaya that the government should reveal the names of nearly 12,000 suspected LTTE members currently detained.

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Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Is the U.N. complicit in Sri Lankan war crimes?



By Colum Lynch - Louise Arbour, the head of the International Crisis Group, called for an internal review of the U.N.'s conduct during Sri Lanka's bloody 2009 civil war, telling Turtle Bay that the organization's abandonment of national staff in a conflict zone and its failure to speak up more forcefully about abuses made it "close to complicit" in government atrocities.

Arbour said the United Nations compromised its principles for a lofty goal: to preserve the ability of aid workers to provide humanitarian assistance to those in desperate need of it. But she faulted the U.N.'s acceptance of "absolutely unacceptable" visa limitations on international staff and the U.N.'s decision to withdraw foreign staff from the northern Sri Lanka province of Vanni in September 2008, on the eve of government forces' final offensive against the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, leaving behind "very exposed" local Sri Lankan employees.

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Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Evicting poor in Colombo: Defence Ministry's new role



On the 8th of May, the Sri Lankan defence ministry deployed police and the army to evict 45 families from central Colombo and demolish their houses. Over recent days, police also have been mobilised to remove thousands of street hawkers in Colombo and its suburbs, in Kandy in the central hills and in the southern city of Galle.

Hundreds of people at Mews Street in Colombo’s Slave Island area were confronted by police officers, including the riot squad, who had been mobilised to evict them. The families’ houses were located beside a school for the children of military personnel. When people refused to leave their homes, police dragged them away. Soldiers were deployed around the area. Bulldozers were brought in and started demolishing houses while local people looked on.

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Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Sri Lanka: Floods recede, affected continue to suffer



By Ishtartha Wellaboda - The torrential rains and the ensuing floods have now begun to recede, but those affected in the disaster continue to suffer.

According to the Disaster Management Centre 20 lives were claimed during last week’s rains and floods, while 546,247 others were affected by the floods.

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Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Rs. 202,220 mil for Sri Lanka's defence in 2010



According to the appropriation bill for 2010, the highest allocation continues to be reserved for the Ministry of Defence.

With recurring expenditure amounting to Rs. 191,290 m and Rs. 10,930 as capital expenditure, the total expenditure stands at Rs. Rs. 202,220 m.

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Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Sri Lanka: Kokilai nature reserve 'bulldozed'



A nature reserve in north eastern Sri Lanka is being bulldozed for development and for resettlement after the war, environmentalists say.

Sri Lanka Nature Forum (SLNF), said that over 40 acres of Kokilai nature reserve has been bulldozed during April-May this year.

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Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Probe war crimes in Sri Lanka: Boston Globe Editorial



At this time last May, the Sri Lankan government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa declared total victory over the secessionist Tamil Tigers. Since then, the outside world has received credible accounts of war crimes perpetrated on a large scale by Sri Lankan security forces as well as by the Tigers. Human rights groups are now calling on the United Nations to authorize an international investigation of humanitarian law violations in Sri Lanka. President Obama, who has drawn criticism for soft-pedaling human rights concerns in Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere, should insist that Sri Lanka’s government be held accountable for shelling civilians and hospitals and murdering fighters who surrendered on the battlefield.

The case for an international inquiry is not based solely on an abstract ideal of justice. If there is impunity for the horrors inflicted on civilians in Sri Lanka, other states confronting civil wars or secessionist rebellions will assume there is no price to pay for copying the Sri Lankan blueprint. This is a formula for scorched-earth repression, banning the international press, denying all charges of misconduct, and pretending the killers can conduct a disinterested investigation of their killings.

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Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Sri Lanka: War crimes defense tour begins behind closed doors



By Matthew Russell Lee - Sri Lanka's war crimes defense tour has begun. Sunday evening in Manhattan's Waldorf Astoria hotel, new Minister of External Affairs G.L. Peiris held interviews with selected reporters in the presence of the country's Permanent Representative to the UN, Palitha Kohona.

One reporter upon leaving his interview with Peiris told Inner City Press, "Well, he made his defense."

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Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Mixed response to Sri Lankan panel



By B. Muralidhar Reddy - The decision of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa last week to appoint an eight-member Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission on the the events ranging from the aborted ceasefire pact in 2002 to the military defeat of the LTTE in May last year has evoked mixed reaction.

While the government has said the Commission could provide the much-needed healing touch in the post-war nation, a section of the activists within and outside Sri Lanka have expressed reservations on its effectiveness.

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Sunday, May 23, 2010

Apologia for the persecution of journalists



By Emil van der Poorten - As if the outpourings of the Dayan Jayatillekas and Malinda Seneviratnes don’t adequately fill the bill for “apologia” for the Rajapaksa regime’s campaign against those critical of it, an English daily with pretensions to objectivity and non partisan journalism cuts loose its Political Correspondent, with two days worth of piffle about the disappearance of Prageeth Eknaligoda wrapped in a tissue of trivia, inclusive of suggestions that Mr. Eknaligoda’s wife and Sunanda Deshapriya (another journalist) are party to some scam of significant proportions.

The exercise appears to be intended to prove that Eknaligoda has not, in fact, been “disappeared” but is hiding somewhere pending his departure to a life of leisure and luxury in some foreign clime where he will be accorded all kinds of perks by virtue of his being a “persecuted journalist from Sri Lanka seeking asylum” in some bastion of Western democracy.

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Sunday, May 23, 2010

Sri Lanka: 250 acres of forest land cleared for Mullaitivu resettlement project



The government has sanctioned the clearing of 3,920 acres of jungle in the Mullaitivu district to make way for a large-scale resettlement programme, under the Uthuru Wasanthaya (Northern Spring) programme.

Resettlement Minister Milroy Fernando said the land had been set aside for 1,500 Mullaitivu families who were forced to leave the area because of the conflict, going back to 1985.

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Sunday, May 23, 2010

Sri Lanka: Attorney General under the president



By Kumar David - Peter the Great is widely thought to be the man who transformed Russia. Before him it was a backward landmass that Europe ignored if not despised. He dragged old Muscovy, kicking and screaming, out of barbarian medievalism into modernity and empire. He transformed country and culture, industry and army; in popular imagery he created the Empire and is Russia’s greatest emperor. When cruel winter ensnared powerful Sweden’s greatest soldier, Charles XII, Peter scorched the earth, and nature and Emperor conspired to defeat Charles’ invading army in 1709 at Poltava.

Europe had to wake up; a new great power had arrived. The Chinese are arriving differently, by exporting containers jammed chockfull of durables and inviting the whole world to come ogle the 2010 Shanghai Expo!



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