Sri Lanka: President authorizes the verdict, General Fonseka loses military ranks

The Sunday Leader Online
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President Mahinda Rajapaksa today (14) authorised the verdict of the first court martial against former Army Commander and DNA parliamentarian General Sarath Fonseka.

The first court martial yesterday delivered an order sentencing General Fonseka for a dishonorable discharge from rank for allegedly being engaged in politics while being in active service.

Army sources said that following the President’s approval, General Fonseka would now lose all military ranks held by him.

General Fonseka and the DNA have however objected to the ruling claiming the court martial proceedings were held without the defence counsel present.

© The Sunday Leader Online

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Tamil families ‘desperate’ to reunite with relatives

By Kathryn Blaze Carlson | National Post
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Children, women and elderly Tamil migrants were among those who disembarked from the suspected people-smuggling ship near Victoria on Friday, and their Canadian relatives are “desperate” to make contact after months of worrying, according to the Canadian Tamil Congress.

The congress said dozens of families have called saying they believe their relatives — including a toddler, a six-year-old and an 80-year-old — were among the 490 Tamil migrants captured in “heart-wrenching images” on Friday.

A six-month-old baby and two pregnant women were believed to have been taken to a Victoria hospital, highlighting the concerns of callers who told the congress that they feared for the health of their loved ones.

A volunteer at the congress’s Toronto office, which sent representatives to British Columbia to offer the migrants temporary assistance, said phones started ringing a few days ago with news of the imminent arrival of the MV Sun Sea — a 59-metre Thai cargo ship that docked at Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt and which may be carrying Tamil Tiger terrorists alongside young children.

“We have heard from people calling about brothers, fathers, sisters, nephews, nieces and husbands, and there was one family that called about a two-year-old,” said Vathany Uthayam, adding that the team of 10 volunteers has fielded upward of 35 calls from mostly Toronto-based families. “There are two or three families that think they have 10 or 11 relatives on board.”

Manjula Selvarajah, spokesperson for the congress, said that while most callers are hopeful that their relatives were aboard, some people “know for sure” that the ship’s cargo included their family members.

Among the hopeful is a Calgary man who “strongly” believes that his father was aboard the crammed cargo vessel. The National Post spoke with the man through an interpreter on Friday morning, just hours after the asylum seekers disembarked.

“Months ago, I spoke to my father and he told me he might have an opportunity to leave Sri Lanka,” the man, who did not want to be identified because he feared for the safety of his mother and sisters in Sri Lanka, said in a conference call. “He used the word ‘ship’ and said he was coming by sea.… He told me that he was going to try to come to Canada and that if he did, that I please find him when he arrived.”

The man, who said he fled Sri Lanka three years ago after being kidnapped and beaten, said he had “no idea” whether his father paid to board the ship or who may have organized the journey.

He left his father’s name and date of birth with the congress, which was the first point of contact for many of the 76 Tamil men who arrived in Canada aboard the Ocean Lady, a migrant vessel that landed in B.C. last fall.

Ms. Uthayam said the congress received collect calls from dozens of Ocean Lady migrants who spent months in a Metro Vancouver jail while being questioned by authorities, and said the office was able to connect all but about a dozen of them with their families in Canada.

She said she expects to receive similar calls in the next few days from MV Sun Sea voyagers, who will receive a congress-issued handout similar to the one given to last year’s migrants shortly after they arrived at the jail.

“We found a number on the paper, which also told us what we could expect in terms of the legal proceedings, and many of us placed calls to the congress,” an Ocean Lady migrant, who cannot be identified because his immigration proceedings are ongoing, said through an interpreter.

The congress said in a statement on Friday that MV Sun Sea migrants will receive a Tamil-language notification detailing legal and medical information. The statement — which said “the men, women and children on board have taken enormous risks” to “flee persecution in Sri Lanka” — also said the congress will connect unaccompanied youth with host families from the community.

The Calgary man said conditions in Sri Lanka are indeed dire for Tamils, and that he "definitely" thinks Tamils need "a country of our own" because "we're not treated as humans" in Sri Lanka.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam — a terrorist group outlawed in Canada — have been fighting for a separate state for years, and the Calgary man said that "everything [the Tamil Tigers] had done was to help us, to help Tamils."

"I don’t look at the Tigers as an organization that someone made, I look at the Tigers as my fellow people and citizens.... Women and men from families across Sri Lanka gave themselves up to fight for the protection of their families," he said. “I want Tamil people to have a country where they can live freely, and live like Canadians live here."

© National Post

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Adults, children from migrant ship taken to Victoria hospital

By Ian Shelton | National Post
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A six-month-old baby and two pregnant women were believed to be among those taken to a Victoria hospital on Friday as the first passengers from a migrant ship that arrived in British Columbia earlier in the day were taken to be checked out by doctors.

About five ambulances started delivering migrants from the cargo ship to Victoria General Hospital. Security screening prevented a clear view of how many people were exiting from the ambulances that started arriving late morning.

The cries of young children could be heard behind the security fence.

“That’s the shame of it,” said one of those watching behind the police tape as screams from what sounded like at least two toddlers built in volume.

Officials confirmed on Friday that 490 Sri Lankans were on board the ship that arrived in Esquimalt Harbour, near Victoria, around 6 a.m. local time amid tight security.

Intercepted on Thursday afternoon, the MV Sun Sea was led through the Juan de Fuca Strait by RCMP patrol boats through the night.

Every person from the ship will be assessed individually to ensure they are not engaged in criminal activity, including human-smuggling, said Public Safety Minister Vic Toews.

“Officials from the Canada Border Services Agency will take the time necessary to identify and process individuals aboard the Sun Sea in accordance with Canadian law,” Mr. Toews told reporters on Friday.

“Any individuals who endanger national security or who have engaged in the criminal enterprise of human-smuggling will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

Mr. Toews, who said Canadian authorities suspect Sri Lankan members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or Tamil Tigers, were aboard the ship “and indeed may well be co-ordinating this activity as part of a larger enterprise.”

“This particular situation we believe to be part of a larger human-smuggling and human-trafficking enterprise, and we believe there are others who are watching this particular situation to determine the reaction of Canadian authorities,” said Mr. Toews.

“Canada has very generous refugee and immigration laws and my concern is that individuals now take advantage of the existing law in order to further criminal or terrorist activities.

“Our goal is not to stall or stop political refugees, or refugees generally. Our goal is to ensure that our refugee system is not hijacked by criminals or terrorists.”

Defence Minister Peter MacKay praised the efforts of Canadian authorities.

“I commend the Canadian Forces for their swift and capable reaction to this incident,” he said in a statement.

“This operation is part the Government of Canada’s clear message to those who would take advantage of Canadian generosity that human-smuggling and illegal migration cannot and will not be tolerated.”

It’s expected that those on the ship will be processed and, if healthy, taken to Fraser Regional Correctional Centre for men and the Alouette Correctional Centre for Women east of Vancouver.

Mr. Toews said greater co-ordination between Canada and international allies is necessary to deal with the issue of human smuggling.

“We need to look at our laws to see whether they’re sufficiently strong, and also whether our intelligence agencies from various nations are properly co-ordinated,” said Mr. Toews.

Human smuggling was one way the Tamil Tigers funded their 25-year war with the Sri Lankan government.

The Tigers were crushed in a final May 2009 assault amid accusations of war crimes on both sides.

The International Crisis Group and other observers have said that, 15 months later, the heavily Tamil northern regions are still troubled by arbitrary detention, disappearances and other suspected security force abuses.

It has been widely speculated by Sri Lankan officials and some South Asian media publications that there are well-known Tamil Tiger figures aboard the Sun Sea.

The MV Sun Sea is the second Tamil refugee ship to arrive in Canada in the past year.

In October, the Ocean Lady, a rusting cargo ship carrying 76 Tamils, was intercepted by HMCS Regina and docked at Ogden Point, in Victoria.

Despite claims that 25 of those onboard were Tamil Tigers, the Canadian Border Service Agency was forced to release the last of them for a lack of evidence.

Most are now living in Toronto.

About 91% of Sri Lankan refugee applications were approved in 2009, said Richard Kurland, a lawyer who specializes in immigration and refugee issues.

© National Post

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No reconciliation after Sri Lanka's civil war

By Jonathan Manthorpe | Vancouver Sun
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A little over a year after Sri Lanka's civil war ended with an orgy of bloodshed on the island nation's northern beaches, there are no convincing signs the government will address the ethnic frictions that started the conflict over 25 years ago.

There is intense international skepticism that President Mahinda Rajapaksa is at all inclined to embark on the kind of reconciliation and reconstruction program many believe necessary to overcome the sharp divide between Sri Lanka's ethnic Sinhalese majority and the minority Tamils who make up about 18 per cent of the 22 million population.

Rajapaksa's unwillingness to thoroughly address what happened at the end of the war in May last year when thousands of civilians died, victims of being used as human shields by Tamil Tiger fighters and targets of indiscriminate shelling by government artillery, has led to confrontations with the United Nations, the European Union and the United States.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's appointment of a three-member war crimes panel in June has been dismissed by Rajapaksa as an infringement of Sri Lanka's sovereignty.

He has ignored pointed suggestions by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that Sri Lanka take part in the UN inquiry, and do more toward reconciliation and accounting for human rights violations.

And last month the EU said Sri Lanka will lose its preferential access to the European market, worth $150 million a year, unless the government gives written undertakings to improve its human rights record.

In response Rajapaks a insists his own commission, which held its first hearings on Thursday, is all that is required to explore what happened in the latter stages of the civil war. But this commission has been dismissed by human rights organizations and observers at home and abroad as ineffectual and biased in its mandate.

The commission's mandate is, indeed, narrowly defined. It is to explore only why a ceasefire brokered by Norway and signed in 2002 by both the government and the Tamil Tigers collapsed in 2005.

Although both successive Sri Lankan governments and the Tamil Tigers, who are designated a terrorist organization by many countries, including Canada, have appalling human rights records, the 2005 collapse of the ceasefire is one of the few recent events that can be pinned on the Tigers exclusively.

The breakdown of the ceasefire led the Colombo government to decide to use military means to end the war once and for all.

Four years of intense fighting saw the slow and methodical subjugation by the army of the quasi-independent state created by the Tamil Tigers in northern Sri Lanka.

In May 2009 the war ended on the northern beaches when the army surrounded and destroyed the remaining Tiger fighters as they made a last stand among over a quarter of a million civilians. Tamil Tigers claimed the civilians were loyal supporters while government forces said the people were conscripted by the rebels to act as human shields.

The UN says 7,000 civilians died in the final assault, while other organizations such as the Brussels-based International Crisis Group say upwards of 30,000 people were killed as the result of war crimes on both sides.

Little that has happened since gives much reason for confidence that Rajapaksa intends to be either magnanimous in victory or to use the opportunity that war-weariness provides.

About 250,000 people captured by government forces at the end of the fighting were kept in detention camps for months as the authorities hunted for remaining Tamil Tigers.

International outrage at the detentions and the conditions in the camps were largely ignored.

In January this year Rajapaksa ran for a second four-year term as president and won conclusively in a disputed contest with Gen. Sarath Fonseka, who led the army in the final assault on the Tigers and then resigned to enter politics.

Not content with beating Fonseka in the election, Rajapaksa has now accused him of plotting a coup and the former general is facing a court martial.

Meanwhile Rajapaksa and his followers just failed in April's parliamentary elections to win the two-thirds of seats that would allow an unopposed change in the constitution.

The president's opponents speculate he wants to shift executive power to the Parliament, which would allow him to become prime minister and thus avoid the two-term restriction on holding the presidency.

In any event, Rajapaksa and his brothers already directly control 70 per cent of the government budget. One brother is the Speaker of Parliament and another is minister of state security with a special brief to develop state-owned property in the capital. A third brother heads the ministry of tourism, nation-building and investment. And Rajapaksa himself is also the finance minister.

© The Vancouver Sun

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Sri Lanka shares anti-terror experience with China

By Zhao Ran | Global Times
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Gamini Lakshman Peiris, Sri Lanka’s minister of external affairs, arrived in Beijing Thursday, where he attended a forum hosted by the China Institute of International Studies(CIIS). During his one-hour speech, he talked about the lessons Sri Lanka has learnt in defeating terrorism.

Sri Lanka is a small country with limited resources and population. It spent more than three decades combating the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a militant group based in the north part of the country.

“The LTTE group was defeated in May 2009, but the victory cost the lives of many civilians as well as damaged seriously the country’s economy”, he said.

"The most important lesson we have learned is that if a country wants to succeed in their war on terror, the effort has to be made by the country itself, not by a foreign army of another country. Because intuitively, people will support their own in-land terrorists and gang up against foreign armies as they will consider them an invading force. " Peiris said at the forum.

The minister told the Global Times, “however, the country is now safe and the areas affected in the conflict have been revived.” He also added that the country needs more investments from China in the areas of agriculture, tourism, and service industry.

“China, having extended material and moral support during our effort to combat terrorism, is today contributing significantly to the economic development of Sri Lanka”, he said.

Before landing in Beijing, he had visited Sichuan and Shanghai, where the country has consulates.

© Global Times

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DNA to protest against attack and arrest of its members

Colombo Today
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Sri Lanka's Democratic National Alliance (DNA) has organized a protest in Fort, Colombo at 4 p.m. today (14) evening against the police attack on a DNA protest in Galle on Thursday (12) and arrest of several party members including parliamentarians.

Meanwhile, Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) Leaders visited the DNA members who are currently in remand prison in Galle on Friday (13).

JVP Leader Somawansa Amarasinghe, former parliamentarian Bimal Ratnayake and DNA parliamentarian Sunil Handunnetti formed the delegation that travelled to Galle.

JVP sources told ColomboPage that the delegation of JVP leaders visited the DNA members including MPs Vijitha Herath, Ajith Kumara, and Provincial Councilor Nalin Hewage at the Galle remand prison on Friday around 2 p.m.

© Colombo Page

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Sri Lanka: GSP+ to end midnight today

By Sandun A. Jayasekera | Daily Mirror
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The GSP+ trade concessions given to Sri Lanka in July 2005 for its exports to member states of the European Union (EU) will come to an end when the facility lapses from midnight today.

However, EU delegation head Bernard Savage told Daily Mirror Sri Lanka was free to resume talks with the EU to re-negotiate or review the extension of the GSP+ facility. “We encourage the Sri Lanka government in this respect and are ready to facilitate further discussions between Brussels and Colombo,” Mr. Savage said.

Commenting on the withdrawal of the trade facility, Central Bank Governor Ajith Nivard Cabraal said there would not be much of an impact on Sri Lanka’s economy as the government had expected the facility to be withdrawn and was prepared to face such an eventuality.

“The government has brought down inflation to almost a single digit and the interest rates are between eight per cent and 12 per cent. This has helped boost the economy and absorb any negative effect on the industry after the GSP+ withdrawal,” Mr. Cabraal said.He said the government had granted a range of concessions including tax relief to the apparel and garment industry to face the challenge and added that garment factories in the free trade zones have in hand export orders for the next six months.

National Chamber of Commerce and Industry Secretary General E.M. Wijetileka said the withdrawal of the GSP+ concession would affect the rural sector in particular as many of the garment industry employees were from rural areas.“There is also the possibility that investors in the garment industry may move to countries such as Bangladesh and Myanmar because labour costs here may rise in the absence of the GSP+ concession. The industry will find it difficult to venture into new markets,” Mr. Wijetileka said.

Free Trade Zone Workers Union General Secretary Anton Marcus said the withdrawal of the GSP+ concession would have a negative impact on the apparel and garment industry.

“The GSP+ concessions have benefited 7,200 export categories and most of it was for the apparel and garment sector. Sri Lanka will find it difficult to expand the industry and find new markets in future. There will be a high level of lay offs in the industry,” he added.

Mr. Marcus said Sri Lanka can still reapply for the trade facility and resume talks with the EU.

In June the EU asked the government to fulfil 15 conditions including the implementation of the 17th Amendment, repeal of emergency regulations and the Prevention of Terrorism Act and certain clauses of the Public Security Ordinance if the EU were to reconsider the extension of the GSP+ facility beyond August 15.

The EU, among other matters also asked the Sri Lankan government to amend the Code of Criminal Procedure; allow citizens to submit complaints to UN Human Rights Commission; publish the list of LTTE combatants in custody, and ensure journalists can exercise their professional duties.

© Daily Mirror

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