Photos allege Sri Lanka masscre

Some viewers may find the footage in the report disturbing

By Tony Birtley | Al Jazeera
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Al Jazeera has obtained photographs which appear to show a massacre of Tamils during the final stages of the decades-long Sri Lankan civil war.

Many Tamil organisations have been calling for a war crimes tribunal to investigate alleged brutality by the Sri Lankan army.

Al Jazeera cannot verify the authenticity of the images, which were obtained from Tamils who said the photos were handed over by someone in the Sri Lankan military.

The Sri Lankan government has rejected the photographs saying they are not genuine

© Al Jazeera

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Feuds start in Sri Lanka's first family

By Sudha Ramachandran | Asia Times
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Sri Lanka's first family appears to be at war with itself. With its grip over power tightening substantially and the stakes increasing, feuds between family members are said to be growing.

The meteoric rise of President Mahinda Rajapaksa's 24-year old son Namal is reported to have irked several cousins, aunts and uncles.

Plump, baby-faced Namal is a neophyte in politics. He was elected this year as Sri Lanka's youngest parliamentarian. "A future leader with a friendly spirit, possessing good values ... the dashing and smashing, young Namal Rajapaksa," as he is described on his web site, is among a large number of Rajapaksas who sit in parliament or provincial assemblies, occupy key posts and ministerial positions, and wield enormous influence.

Neither nepotism nor dynastic politics is new to South Asia. The Nehru Gandhi family, which has given India three prime ministers so far, is the most well known of India's political families, but there are several others like the Thackerays, the Karunanidhis and the Gowdas.

Sri Lanka too has its political families, such as the Senanayakes, the Bandarnaikes and the Rajapaksas to name a few. Rajapaksa's predecessor, Chandrika Bandarnaike, is the daughter of two prime ministers. For many years during her presidency, her mother Srimavo was premier. Chandrika's brother Anura has held ministerial positions and was a speaker of parliament when she was president. The opposition United National Party (UNP) was often referred to as "Uncle Nephews Party".

But nepotism has been taken to new heights by President Rajapaksa.

Besides being president, Mahinda Rajapaksa is minister of defense, finance and planning, ports and aviation, and highways. His elder brother Chamal is speaker of parliament. Younger brother Gotabaya is defense secretary. Besides controlling the armed forces, the police and the Coast Guard, he is in charge of immigration and emigration.

Interestingly, Gotabaya is also in charge of developing prime state-owned land in the capital, Colombo. Basil, the youngest of the Rajapaksa brothers in politics is minister of economic development and oversees tourism and investment promotion. The president's cousin, Nirupama is deputy minister for water supply and drainage. His nephew, Shashindra, is the chief minister of the Uva province. Sri Lanka's ambassador to the United States, Jaliya Wickramasuriya is the president's cousin , as is its ambassador to Russia, Udayanga Weeratunga.

Besides, dozens of nephews, nieces, cousins and in-laws have been appointed as heads of banks, boards and corporations. Through their portfolios, the president and his brothers control directly around 70% of this year's budget. So vast is the influence of the family that almost all investment decisions in post-war Sri Lanka, which is aggressively engaging in reconstruction, must get the nod of a Rajapaksa.

What makes the Rajapaksa nepotism all the more dangerous is that unlike other democracies where it is possible to get rid of leaders through the ballot box, in Sri Lanka it seems that Rajapaksa rule is here to stay at least for the foreseeable future. Rajapaksa and several of his family members are hugely popular. Moreover, a recent constitutional amendment removed the two-term restriction for presidents.

during the war, the Rajapaksas and Sri Lanka's then-army chief, Sarath Fonseka, were united. They fell apart over the spoils of war and credit for the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). While Fonseka claimed that he as army chief had led the military operations that culminated in the LTTE's defeat, the Rajapaksas said it was the president's leadership that made victory possible. When Fonseka challenged the president in the elections, the Rajapaksas were determined to eliminate the threat he posed.

"The Rajapaksas worked like a fist to finish Fonseka," a member of parliament of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), the core of the ruling alliance, told Asia Times Online.

Having eliminated the threat posed by Fonseka - he is in jail serving a 30-month sentence - and decimating the opposition, the Rajapaksas have now turned on themselves.

Namal's growing profile in Sri Lanka and his parents' grand ambitions for him - reports say that he is being groomed to succeed his father - seems to be evoking resentment among the others in the family.

Chamal, who was earlier minister of aviation, irrigation and water management, was reportedly miffed when he didn't get a ministerial post in the present cabinet. He was appeased somewhat only after he was made the speaker.

However, he is reported to be unhappy with the way his sons have been treated. Along with being Uva chief minister, Shashindra was the president's private secretary. In May, Namal replaced him as the private secretary. Chamal's second son Shamindra was not given the chairmanship of the Sri Lanka Ports Authority, a post that would have cast the spotlight by putting him in charge of the multi-billion dollar Hambantota port project. He has had to remain content with the post of director of Sri Lanka Telecom.

It is "rivalry between Basil and Namal that is the far fiercer battle", the SLFP parliamentarian said. Basil has been Rajapaksa's pointman, his political strategist and adviser. It is his role that is under "great challenge" from Namal's growing ambitions.

If the Rajapaksas fell out with Fonseka over the spoils of war, the Basil-Namal feud is being played out mainly in the arena of post-war reconstruction. It is in the war-ravaged north that this uncle-nephew face-off is becoming the most tense.

Basil was appointed head of a presidential task force that is dealing with development and reconstruction of the war-ravaged north. Increasingly, Namal is seen in the north, interfering in who benefits from relief. He and his allies have got themselves plum projects. Tamilnet reports that he controls the highly lucrative boat transport to the north, among other things.

Millions of dollars are being poured into reconstruction by India and other countries. "Besides the money that is up for grabs, there are benefits to building their image," said the SLFP member. "The image of the victorious Sinhala extending largesse to the defeated Tamils could be reaped at future elections."

Besides the state machinery that Namal and other Rajapaksas deploy to further their personal interests, Namal heads two organizations, the Nil Balakaya (Blue Battalion) and the Tarunyata Hetak (A Tomorrow for the Youth). These are youth groups, really goon squads that he puts to use to mobilize support and crush rivals. Several members of the Nil Balakaya have been rewarded with senior positions as heads of corporations.

This has evoked resentment among several SLFP leaders.

But none dare speak up. After all, their prosperity, indeed their very survival, depends on their close ties with the Rajapaksas.

"Sahodara Samagama" (Brothers' Organization) was a term coined by the UNP to deride the Rajapaksa government. "It is now being used by a small clutch of SLFP leaders, albeit only in the barest of whispers," added the politician, admitting that he himself "would only dare think of the phrase" to describe the government.

A Sri Lankan official, a critic of the Rajapaksas, says that "the Rajapaksa clan" has been successful only because it has stayed together so far. "Mahinda, Gotabhaya and Basil work as a triumvirate. While Mahinda is the public persona of the Rajapaksa clan, and Gotabhaya the brawn that crushes their rivals, it is Basil who is the brains in the family."

"None will succeed without the other," he said, speaking to Asia Times Online on condition of anonymity. "They cannot afford to fall apart."

If it doesn't work as a fist, the family is finished.

Sudha Ramachandran is an independent journalist/researcher based in Bangalore.

© Asia Times

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Sri Lanka newspapers refuse to take part in porn crackdown

Agence France-Presse
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Newspaper editors in Sri Lanka on Tuesday refused to publish pictures of men and women who are wanted by police for appearing on porn websites in the country.

Under a crackdown on pornography on the Indian Ocean island, police are trying to trace local men and women pictured in compromising poses and had asked newspapers to reproduce mugshots of 83 of them.

"We were given the photos with a request to publish them, but we decided not to," said Siri Ranasinghe, chief editor of the mass circulating Sinhalese daily, the Lankadeepa.

"It is a question of privacy. We don't know who these people are and under what circumstances the police got these pictures. Technology can be used to manipulate pictures, so we decided to leave them out."

The police won court permission last week to release the images and seek public help to identify and question those pictured over possible violations of obscenity laws.

The men and women face up to six months jail or a fine of 10,000 rupees (90 dollars), or both if convicted of violating obscenity laws, police say.

All national dailies refused to print the photographs except for the Lakbima Sinhalese newspaper, which published the mugshots at the bottom of page two, without any reference to the allegations against them.

Authorities say the wanted individuals were found portrayed on 180 Sri Lankan pornographic websites that have since been blocked by telecommunications regulators.

Other porn sites featuring non-Sri Lankans remain available, however.

The government of President Mahinda Rajapakse has also ordered the removal of bill boards featuring scantily-clad women and launched a campaign to discourage the use of alcohol and tobacco in conservative Sri Lanka.

The crackdown was launched in July last year when a court ordered the blocking of a dozen porn sites, including an international porn video sharing site, for allegedly featuring Sri Lankan men and women.

© AFP

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War crimes whitewashed: Why human rights groups reject Sri Lanka’s reconciliation commission

By Louise Arbour, Kenneth Roth, Salil Shetty | The Nation
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While we would welcome the opportunity to appear before a genuine, credible effort to pursue accountability and reconciliation in Sri Lanka, the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) falls far short of such an effort. It not only fails to meet basic international standards for independent and impartial inquiries, but it is proceeding against a backdrop of government failure to address impunity and continuing human rights abuses. Our three organisations believe that the persistence of these and other destructive trends indicates that currently Sri Lanka’s government and justice system cannot or will not uphold the rule of law and respect basic rights.

We have highlighted our concerns in a number of reports. Of particular relevance are Crisis Group’s May 2010 report “War Crimes in Sri Lanka” and its June 2009 report “Sri Lanka’s Judiciary: Politicised Courts, Compromised Rights”; Human Rights Watch’s February 2010 report “Legal Limbo: The Uncertain Fate of Detained LTTE Suspects in Sri Lanka” and its February 2009 report “War on the Displaced: Sri Lankan Army and LTTE Abuses against Civilians in the Vanni”; and Amnesty International’s June 2009 report “Twenty Years of Make Believe: Sri Lanka’s Commissions of Inquiry” and its August 2009 “Unlock the Camps in Sri Lanka: Safety and Dignity for the Displaced Now”. Unfortunately, Sri Lanka has made no progress since the end of the war in addressing our concerns detailed in these reports.

In addition to these broader failings of the government, we believe that the LLRC is deeply flawed in structure and practice. Of particular concern are the following:

Inadequate mandate

Nothing in the LLRC’s mandate requires it to investigate the many credible allegations that both the government security forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) committed serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights law during the civil war, especially in the final months, including summary executions, torture, attacks on civilians and civilian objects, and other war crimes. The need to investigate them thoroughly and impartially is especially urgent given the government’s efforts to promote its methods of warfare abroad as being protective of the civilian population, when the facts demonstrate otherwise.

Nor has the LLRC shown any genuine interest in investigating such allegations. Instead, it has allowed government officials to repeat unchallenged what they have been saying without basis for months: that the government strictly followed a “zero civilian casualty policy”. Indeed, during the testimony of Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa on 17 August 2010, the primary intervention of the Commission chairman, CR de Silva, was to prompt the secretary to provide the Commission with a February 14 2009 letter from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) thanking the Navy for assisting in a medical evacuation.

While highlighting that one letter, the chairman and his colleagues failed to ask the defence secretary about any of the ICRC’s numerous public statements between January and the end of May 2009 raising concerns about excessive civilian casualties, violations of international humanitarian law and insufficient humanitarian access.

The Commission also has not required officials to explain the government’s public misrepresentations during the war. Particularly disturbing are the government’s repeated claims that there were under 100,000 civilians left in the Vanni at the beginning of 2009 when officials later conceded there were some 300,000, and that Sri Lankan forces were not using heavy weapons in civilian areas when the military eventually admitted they were.

Lack of independence

A fundamental requirement for any commission of this type is that its members are independent. The membership of the LLRC is far from that. To start, both chairman de Silva and member HMGS Palihakkara were senior government representatives during the final year of the war. They publicly defended the conduct of the government and military against allegations of war crimes.

Indeed during two widely reported incidents - the shelling of the first “no-fire zone” declared by the government in late January and the shelling of Puthukkudiyiruppu (PTK) hospital in February - Palihakkara, then Sri Lanka’s representative to the UN, told CNN that government forces had confirmed that even though the LTTE was firing out from the “no-fire zone”, the government was not returning fire; and that the military had confirmed they knew the coordinates of PTK hospital and they had not fired on it.

Beyond his public defence of government conduct during the war, there is also evidence that as attorney general, CR de Silva actively undermined the independence of the 2006-2009 Presidential Commission of Inquiry that was tasked with investigating allegations of serious human rights violations by the security forces.

Most other members of the LLRC have some history of working for the Sri Lankan government. None is known for taking independent political positions, and many have publicly declared their allegiance to the president and government.

Absence of witness protection

Equally worrying is the absence of any provisions for the protection of witnesses who may wish to testify before the Commission. Sri Lanka has never had a functioning witness protection system, nor has the Commission established any ad hoc procedures for witness protection.

The lack of witness protection is particularly crippling in the current atmosphere in Sri Lanka in which government officials label as “traitors” persons making allegations that government forces might have committed violations of international law. Only a brave few have testified before the LLRC about war crimes in the north despite that threat.

Moreover, even though the war is over, the country is still operating under a state of emergency, with laws that criminalise political speech and where there is no meaningful investigation of attacks on government critics. This clearly undermines the Commission’s ability to conduct credible investigations of alleged violations of international or national law. Until effective protection of witnesses can be guaranteed, no organisation or individual can responsibly disclose confidential information to the Commission.

Past commission failures

Our decision to decline the LLRC’s invitation to testify also stems from Sri Lanka’s long history of failed and politicised commissions of inquiry. Amnesty International’s report, “Twenty Years of Make-Believe: Sri Lanka’s Commissions of Inquiry”, documents the failure of successive Sri Lankan governments to provide accountability for violations, including enforced disappearances, unlawful killings and torture.

Today Sri Lanka has no credible domestic mechanisms able to respond effectively to serious human rights violations. The Sri Lankan Human Rights Commission lacks independence and has itself acknowledged its lack of capacity to deal with investigations into enforced disappearances. At the international level, Sri Lanka has 5,749 outstanding cases being reviewed by the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances, several hundred of which have been reported since the beginning of 2006.

Should a genuine and credible process eventually be established - featuring truly independent commission members, effective powers of witness protection, and a mandate to explore the full range of alleged violations of national and international law; and backed up by government action to end impunity and ensure that police and courts launch effective and impartial prosecutions - we all would be pleased to appear.

Louise Arbour is president and CEO of International Crisis Group; is executive director of Human Rights Watch; Kenneth RothSalil Shetty is secretary general of Amnesty International.

© The Nation

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Sri Lanka extends war commission by six months

By Ranga Sirilal | Reuters
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Sri Lanka on Monday extended the mandate of a commission probing the final years of a three-decade separatist conflict, which it says is a crucial mechanism for reconciliation after the end of the war in May 2009.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa has resisted external pressure for an international probe into allegations that both the Tamil Tigers and the military committed war crimes in the waning months of the conflict, during which thousands of people died.

He has also said that what Western diplomats and Tamil parties have called a "political solution" to the underlying grievances that fuelled the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam's fight against the government will be homegrown.

Sri Lanka's mechanism to find that solution will be direct negotiations with Tamil parties along with guidance from the recommendations of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), which he appointed.

The president's office said in a statement on Monday the LLRC's mandate has been extended to May 15 "in view of the large number of persons from Sri Lanka and abroad still to give evidence before it."

Rights groups have criticised the presidential panel, saying it is stacked with Rajapaksa allies, lacks transparency and is being conducted without any kind of witness protection.

Watchdogs Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group and Amnesty International have refused to testify before the panel. The government has said the groups are biased and have not produced any evidence to back their claims.

"The whole thing is a fake," said Kusal Perera, an analyst with the Centre for Social Democracy in Colombo who is a frequent government critic. "This will allow the commission to go on without any substantial proposals or measures to be made public."

Sri Lanka has a long history of local commissions that have produced little, if any, concrete action or recommendations against wrongdoing in the separatist war, and in two bloody Marxists uprising in 1971 and 1988-89.

© Reuters

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Sri Lanka's 'bread battle' bankrupts 2,000 bakers: industry

Agence France-Presse
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A Sri Lankan government campaign against bread and other wheat products has forced some 2,000 bakers out of business and left many more under threat, an industry body said Tuesday.

The All Ceylon Bakery Owners' Association said more than a quarter of bakers in the island had closed down this year because of high taxes and other government moves to discourage imported wheat.

"The government has intensified a campaign against bread," association president N.K. Jayawardena said. "One minister has equated eating bread to 'terrorism'. This is absurd."

The government has raised taxes on wheat imports twice in the past three months in a bid to discourage bread and encourage the consumption of locally-produced rice, the staple food in the island of 20 million people.

Colombo argues that eating rice is healthier than consuming bread and other wheat-based products, which earlier this month it ordered should not be served at state hospitals, prisons and schools.

The country, led by all-powerful President Mahinda Rajapakse, spent over 250 million dollars on wheat imports in 2009.

A senior government official said there was no official ban on wheat, but the authorities were considering health and price factors as well as the need to dispose of surplus rice production.

Jayawardena said bakers were lobbying government ministers and key officials in a bid to save thousands of jobs in the bakery and confectionery industry.

"We can use rice flour to make bread, but the quality of what is available is not good enough," Jayawardena said, adding that bakery products were popular because they were more convenient than cooking rice.

© AFP

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Sri Lanka declares war on an unlikely enemy - wheat

By Charles Haviland | BBC News
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Some 2,000 bakers across Sri Lanka have been forced to close their businesses, the industry says.

The closures come as the government campaigns against the consumption of products based on wheat flour.

Eighteen months after defeating Tamil Tiger militants, the government seems to be intensifying its struggle against an unlikely enemy.

In recent days it has been banning wheat products from various public institutions.

Nationalistic elements of the governing coalition even speak of "wheat terrorism".

Wheat products enjoy great popularity in Sri Lanka - whether it is the rotis, widely eaten with curry, or breads, cakes and savoury pastries which are common here.

Now, though, wheat products have been removed from government hospitals, and fast foods - many made of wheat - have been banned from schools.

The government has also slashed a subsidy it used to apply to the wheat price.

It says this is because wheat is a foreign import, alien to an essentially rice-eating society and costly for its economy.

Opposition politicians like Sunil Handunetti accuse it of piling on the misery as food prices rise in general - and they object to the rhetoric the government is using.

"The cost of living is shooting up," he said.

"They've put up the milk powder price and increased the bread price four times. They even labelled bread-eaters as terrorists."

All Ceylon Bakery Owners' Association President NK Jayawardena, told the Colombo-based Sunday Times newspaper that hundreds of people who depended on the bakery industry, including bakers, have lost their jobs.

The National Freedom Front, one of the government parties, is leading the anti-wheat campaign.

The strongly nationalist faction says wheat is part of a "conspiracy" by multinational companies to undermine Sri Lanka's food security.

It is urging bakers to use wheat flour and rice flour in making bread - something bakers say is difficult to do.

The government also says phasing out wheat-based products will lead to healthier diets.

© BBC News

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