University undergrads assaulted by police while putting up posters

Colombo Today
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Kiribathgoda Police have assaulted a group of undergraduates who were putting up posters early this morning (July 27) against the death of the Ruhuna undergraduate, reports say.

Two students have been rushed to the Colombo National Hospital with injuries, hospital sources say.

One student has left the hospital after receiving treatment while the other is still at the Accident Ward, reports add.

Two more students were arrested by the police.

Yesterday, six university students were arrested by the Kirulpone and Welikada police for putting up posters.

Four of them were given bail after being producing before courts and the other two were released on police bail.

© Colombo Today

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The political lessons of the smilling assassin

By Publius | Groundviews
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Savouring the richly deserved cascades of press coverage last week of Muttiah Muralidaran’s retirement from Test cricket on the magnificent record of 800 wickets, it is difficult to resist a surge of heart-warming patriotism. It was not only the doosra-like sequence of events in the last day of the Galle Test against India – wholly implausible had it been a fictional plot – that precipitated this onrush of Sri Lankan pride in your columnist. For once, international media coverage was depicting Sri Lanka, due to the achievement of a man who epitomises the best in it, as it always should be: for world-conquering talent, effervescent spirit, generosity and humility in public, ebullient camaraderie in private, and unflappable good manners throughout.

In the field of Test cricket, we shall never experience again that delightful frisson of pregnant expectation in the images of Murali’s impish smile and devious, quizzical glances, disconcerting last minute field adjustments followed by devilish deliveries, nor the anarchic pleasures of his agricultural cameos with the bat. To be sure, we shall continue to see him in the shorter version, and also perhaps in that ultimate expression of vulgar populism in cricket, Twenty-20. But Test cricket is how cricket should be played, and it is the template that enabled the dazzling displays of stratagem and stamina, attack and attrition, subterfuge and intelligence that characterised his spin bowling.

The brilliant and controversial career of Muttiah Muralidaran has from the outset been underlined by an intensely political theme of identity. In the international contretemps over his bowling action, an argument that was frequently advanced by his supporters was the political one of latent racial prejudice; or in its more refined variation, that a Western individualist ideological bias informed the interpretation of the imprecisely drafted Law 24:2, which resulted in manifest injustice in Murali’s case. This was notwithstanding the fact that Murali’s most abiding (and graceless) detractor is Bishan Singh Bedi, an Indian, and one of his most ardent defenders has been the Englishman Peter Roebuck (Millfield, Cambridge, Somerset and England), who seems to exemplify the values of positivist liberal individualism given his Cambridge law degree (and that too, given his erstwhile advocacy of corporal punishment, of a veritably Edwardian variety).

The trauma of the chucking controversy was tangible, especially in Australia, where even Prime Minister John Howard joined the lynch mob with ill-informed comments patently designed for political mileage. He has since been suitably chastened, with his ambitions for ICC office peremptorily curbed.

Despite this, Murali underwent strenuous biomechanical tests which demonstrated the appearance of throwing as an optical illusion caused by a congenital deformity of his elbow. Perhaps as satisfyingly, this also showed that many other bowlers whose action had never been questioned were in fact bowling illegal deliveries, which led to a reform of the rules. The accomplishment of this ‘game-changer’ in the rules, in turn, has generated another kind of prejudice argument, viz., that if he were a white player, he would not have benefitted from such solicitous sympathy, or at least the fear of allegations of racism and neo-colonialism from Asian and African cricketing establishments, as to have had the rules changed. It would all have been, in Bedi’s words, a case of ‘tough luck.’ I think we were all rather lucky, if only for the sheer pleasure and entertainment Murali subsequently provided, that counsel saner than Bedi’s prevailed.

However, it is the symbolism of Murali being the first Indian Tamil in the Sri Lankan side that is of the much greater import in the politics of pluralism within the country. Of immediate cause for gratification is that he has ruled out a post-cricket political career, an irritating sub-continental tradition, and perhaps in this he drew a salutary lesson from the hero-to-zero metamorphosis of his fellow icon, Sanath Jayasuriya, if not from his former captain, the Schmittian Arjuna Ranatunga. To the extent he has made any public comments of a political nature, Murali has been at pains to make them as colourlessly unobjectionable as possible. That may be because he is uninterested in politics, but it may also be that he has the innate sense of pragmatism and survival that ethnic minorities develop in some types of majoritarian society, instilled through the baptism of fire his family experienced in the race riots of 1977. I suspect it is the latter. When a colleague of mine approached Murali to do a television spot in the 2008 campaign to commemorate the twenty fifth anniversary of Black July 1983, he declined, with disarming frankness, on the ground that his involvement would be perceived by the government as the espousal of an unacceptable political viewpoint, which would in turn harm his cricketing career.

It is this virtue of public ethnic neutrality that has made Murali a poster-boy for a widespread notion of ethnic harmony and general wellbeing, as some of the embarrassingly inept, if well-intentioned, commentary in the local press has shown over the years. The basic idea here is to interpolate from Muralidaran’s success in a national sporting endeavour, and his universal popularity among all Sri Lankans, a certain model of national identity as well as national success. If the minorities plight their troth with the majority as unequivocally as Murali seems to have done, the argument goes, what is there to stop us achieving great things, as we have shown the world in the field of cricket?

Without a doubt, in societies such as ours, the representation of diversity in national sporting teams is of enormous symbolic value. But to stretch the analogy too far is not only absurd, but also dangerous, for a cricket team is neither a country nor a democracy. The presence of Tamils, Moors, Malays, Burghers, and Hindus, Muslims and Christians together with Sinhalese and Buddhists in the national cricket team is a welcome symptom of the potential for inclusiveness and pluralism we retain in our society despite generations of discord and conflict, but it cannot serve as a model of national identity and statehood. It is as ridiculous as arguing that our cross-communal enthusiasm for arrack and baila, or love of political melodrama – between Thileepan and Weerawansa, demonstrably a shared weakness – can be contrived somehow into a basis of ethnic cohesion.

It should also be remembered that for those in the chauvinistic end of the political spectrum who subscribe to this model of unity in diversity, Murali’s apolitical tact in public utterances as a professional cricketer also denotes exactly how a Tamil should behave: recognised and even venerated for his talent, as long as he knows his place within the firmament and desists from making impertinent and awkward claims. That is, after all, the conclusion to be drawn from the mentoring relationship with Arjuna Ranatunga that gained so much for Murali in his formative years on the national side.

For the moment though, it is perhaps far more agreeable to just indulge in a bit of forgivable nostalgia on that footage from The Oval in August 1998 when Muttiah Muralidaran arrived upon the world stage, taking sixteen England wickets in the match (seven of them on the last day), and raise a glass to The Smiling Assassin, not only for the immeasurable joy he gave us for eighteen years, but also for the fact that, as the London Sunday Telegraph pointed out, throughout the vicissitudes of his career he ‘has always shown himself a pukka gent.’

© Groundviews

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'SL Government controlled by international rulers’ says Left Front leader

News First
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This government is controlled by companies, American, Indian, international and Israeli rulers, says Dr. Wickremabahu Karunaratne, party leader of the Left Front.

Dr. Karunaratne was addressing a media briefing convened by the Palestine - Sri Lanka Friendship Society in Colombo yesterday on a statement alleged to have been made by the Sri Lankan ambassador to Israel, Air Chief Marshall Donald Perera, during an interview to a newspaper.

“This proves where our government stands today. There is no need for doubt. The truth is that this government is purely controlled by Companies, International, American, Indian rulers, and rulers of Israel.

“These actions are designed to achieve their own ends by tricking the Muslim community and the poor community of Sri Lanka and the international community too. Therefore, we must strongly object to this,” said Dr. Karunaratne.

Mujibar Rahman, Secretary of the Palestine - Sri Lanka Friendship Society, addressing the media briefing said that the Sri Lankan Ambassador to Israel, Air Chief Marshall Donald Perera had made a special statement claiming that the Sri Lankan government would extend support to Israel in order to eliminate terrorism between Israel and Palestine.

“The biggest issue faced by us now is that we know that the whole world including Sri Lanka accepts that there is a problem concerning Palestine.

“Our current President was the first Chairman of the Sri Lanka Committee for Solidarity with Palestine.

“Today we have an ambassador of this government who has gone to Israel and made statements against the Palestine freedom struggle,” said Mujibar Rahman.

Shafeek Rajabdeen, former MP of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress said that as Sri Lankans we had to call back the ambassador concerned.

“If this is the opinion of the government, we condemn him. We totally reject this. As Sri Lankans we must bring him back to the country. We must appoint a Sri Lankan with good principles to that position,” said Mr. Rajabdeen.

Meanwhile, the Sri Lankan ambassador to Israel, Air Chief Marshall Donald Perera has said that he had not made any remark against Palestine during the interview to the newspaper.

He said that during the interview in question, he had only spoken about how Sri Lanka had defeated terrorism.

© News First

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Sri Lanka: War over - But women wage battle for survival

By Amantha Perera | Inter Press Service
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It was a typically hot, humid day in this eastern coastal village. The sun burned down from a cloudless sky, roasting the skin as an angry sea breeze swatted the faces of the few foolish enough to venture out onto the deserted main road that runs through town.

But it was far from a typical day for some 100 people who sat, waiting patiently by the side of the road in front of the main government office here in Vaharai, some 65 kilometres north-west of Batticaloa.

Most of them were women of a diverse mix of ages. Some mothers cradled their children, gently soothing young nerves frayed by the smouldering sun. Seeking shelter under a large tree, they clutched forms – filled only minutes before – as they awaited their turn to meet the divisional secretary, the top government official in Vaharai.

"I have to get these documents cleared so that I have some kind of ownership to the land I live in," said Navunad Sudha, a 29-year-old mother. "We also have to register here before we can move about easily."

Sudha’s story is typical of many in Sri Lanka’s east, which along with the north are where many of the Tamil minority live, and are the areas most affected by the separatist war waged by the Tamil Tigers.

It is only now that people like Suhda feel they can breathe easy, after the war ended more than a year ago.

With her family and then five-year-old son, Sudha fled her home in the middle of 2008, when Sri Lankan government forces began their final, decisive push into areas in the north and east controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). After months of running and near-death horrors, she finally crossed the battlefront and moved to safety behind the government line in May 2009. Just two days after her escape, the military crushed the Tigers.

Civilians like Sudha bore the brunt of the LTTE’s conflict with successive Sri Lankan governments since the early 1980s, demanding a separate Tamil homeland.

But even after the end of the war, the battle for survival continues for many women here.

Most of the available work here, especially in construction of buildings, clearing of jungles, fishing and farming, is almost exclusively male- dominated. To make matters worse, many women are struggling to cope with having to head the household after losing their husbands and sons – the traditional breadwinners in this patriarchal society – to the war.

Sudha was born in the village of Kadiraveli just north of Vaharai, but fell in love with a man from northern Jaffna. They married, moved to the north, and finally settled in Puhtukkuddyiruppu – a Tiger stronghold for over a decade before government forces wrested control last year.

Sudha had no say when her husband joined the LTTE. He fought with them, Sudha admits, but left the movement years before the final bout of fighting erupted in mid-2007.

After crossing over to government-held areas, Sudha’s husband was arrested for possible links with the Tigers, and is still in detention. "I have written to ministers, to the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) and to others with this, but so far I have not heard anything," she said.

While trying to convince authorities that her husband is a family man and not a hardcore separatist, Sudha also has to make a living. She returned to her native Vaharai and has set up small sewing business. "I have had to pawn all my jewellery. I’m trying to get a loan or a grant to start a small boutique," Sudha said.

Sudha’s woes are far too common among women in the war-affected areas. In Pillumalai, about 80 km from Vaharai, 20-year-old Sarojadevi Ramanathan is trying her level best to put the past behind and begin anew – an uphill battle, given that her life was at a standstill for two years beginning mid- 2006.

At that time, Sri Lankan forces had begun launching large-scale, sustained military forays into areas held by the Tigers in the eastern province of Sri Lanka. The Tigers – notorious for forced conscription of underage civilians – were desperate for new recruits.

At 16, Ramanathan would have been a perfect choice for the Tigers, so her parents took the drastic decision of never letting their daughter out their sight. The young girl stopped attending school and spent most of her life indoors. "That was the only way they could save me from being conscripted," she said.

The family fled the fighting in early 2007 and returned about a year later. But now, Ramanathan finds herself in limbo. Too old for school, too young and inexperienced for any other job, she is still stuck mostly at home. "What can I do? I can’t help my father who is a fisherman, so I help my mother in the kitchen," she said.

Marriage might appear to be her best bet, but there is no guarantee that life will become easier.

There are hardly any jobs to speak of here, and even less for women. Ramanathan’s neighbour, 18-year-old Ravindranathan Valarmadu, earns about 17 U.S. dollars a month, working six days a week at a milk collection centre. "This is the only job I could find," she said.

© Inter Press Service

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Afghanistan war logs: Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation

By Nick Davies and David Leigh | Guardian
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A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.

The disclosures come from more than 90,000 records of incidents and intelligence reports about the conflict obtained by the whistleblowers' website Wikileaks in one of the biggest leaks in US military history. The files, which were made available to the Guardian, the New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel, give a blow-by-blow account of the fighting over the last six years, which has so far cost the lives of more than 320 British and more than 1,000 US troops.

Their publication comes amid mounting concern that Barack Obama's "surge" strategy is failing and as coalition troops hunt for two US naval personnel captured by the Taliban south of Kabul on Friday.

The war logs also detail:

• How a secret "black" unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for "kill or capture" without trial.

• How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.

• How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

• How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.

In a statement, the White House said the chaotic picture painted by the logs was the result of "under-resourcing" under Obama's predecessor, saying: "It is important to note that the time period reflected in the documents is January 2004 to December 2009."


"Wikileaks' story is a softened version" - Watch the report on the Russia Today

The White House also criticised the publication of the files by Wikileaks: "We strongly condemn the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organisations, which puts the lives of the US and partner service members at risk and threatens our national security. Wikileaks made no effort to contact the US government about these documents, which may contain information that endanger the lives of Americans, our partners, and local populations who co-operate with us."

The logs detail, in sometimes harrowing vignettes, the toll on civilians exacted by coalition forces: events termed "blue on white" in military jargon. The logs reveal 144 such incidents.

Some of these casualties come from the controversial air strikes that have led to Afghan government protests, but a large number of previously unknown incidents also appear to be the result of troops shooting unarmed drivers or motorcyclists out of a determination to protect themselves from suicide bombers.

At least 195 civilians are admitted to have been killed and 174 wounded in total, but this is likely to be an underestimate as many disputed incidents are omitted from the daily snapshots reported by troops on the ground and then collated, sometimes erratically, by military intelligence analysts.

Bloody errors at civilians' expense, as recorded in the logs, include the day French troops strafed a bus full of children in 2008, wounding eight. A US patrol similarly machine-gunned a bus, wounding or killing 15 of its passengers, and in 2007 Polish troops mortared a village, killing a wedding party including a pregnant woman, in an apparent revenge attack.

Questionable shootings of civilians by UK troops also figure. The US compilers detail an unusual cluster of four British shootings in Kabul in the space of barely a month, in October/November 2007, culminating in the death of the son of an Afghan general. Of one shooting, they wrote: "Investigation controlled by the British. We are not able to get [sic] complete story."

A second cluster of similar shootings, all involving Royal Marine commandos in Helmand province, took place in a six-month period at the end of 2008, according to the log entries. Asked by the Guardian about these allegations, the Ministry of Defence said: "We have been unable to corroborate these claims in the short time available and it would be inappropriate to speculate on specific cases without further verification of the alleged actions."

Rachel Reid, who investigates civilian casualty incidents in Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch, said: "These files bring to light what's been a consistent trend by US and Nato forces: the concealment of civilian casualties. Despite numerous tactical directives ordering transparent investigations when civilians are killed, there have been incidents I've investigated in recent months where this is still not happening.

Accountability is not just something you do when you are caught. It should be part of the way the US and Nato do business in Afghanistan every time they kill or harm civilians." The reports, many of which the Guardian is publishing in full online, present an unvarnished and often compelling account of the reality of modern war.

Most of the material, though classified "secret" at the time, is no longer militarily sensitive. A small amount of information has been withheld from publication because it might endanger local informants or give away genuine military secrets. Wikileaks, whose founder, Julian Assange, obtained the material in circumstances he will not discuss, said it would redact harmful material before posting the bulk of the data on its "uncensorable" servers.

Wikileaks published in April this year a previously suppressed classified video of US Apache helicopters killing two Reuters cameramen on the streets of Baghdad, which gained international attention. A 22-year-old intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, was arrested in Iraq and charged with leaking the video, but not with leaking the latest material. The Pentagon's criminal investigations department continues to try to trace the leaks and recently unsuccessfully asked Assange, he says, to meet them outside the US to help them. Assange allowed the Guardian to examine the logs at our request. No fee was involved and Wikileaks was not involved in the preparation of the Guardian's articles.

© Guardian

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