Daily Mirror
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According to the newspaper CID officers arrived at the head office of 'Lanka Irida' Sunday newspaper last evening and obtained a statement regarding a news article published on the 'Lanka Irida' newspaper a few days ago.
The CID officers also collected personal information of the employees working in the office, the newspaper added.
© Daily Mirror
Saturday, July 17, 2010
CID grills 'Lanka' staff
Saturday, July 17, 2010
U.N. official to return to Sri Lanka after spat
By Patrick Worsnip & Chris Wilson | Reuters
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Neil Buhne "will conclude his visit to New York this week and he will return to Colombo," U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq told reporters.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recalled Buhne last week and ordered the closure of a U.N. regional center in Colombo during protests against a U.N. war crimes panel.
The United Nations said the protests hampered its ability to operate.
The demonstrations were led by Sri Lankan Construction Minister Wimal Weerawansa, who declared a hunger strike. Last Saturday, President Mahinda Rajapaksa ordered Weerawansa to end the fast.
The protests followed Ban's appointment of a three-member panel to advise him on "accountability issues" stemming from the Sri Lankan government's destruction last year of Tamil Tiger separatists, ending a 25-year war. Human rights groups have criticized civilian deaths in the war's final phase.
"It is important to continue U.N. efforts to assist the people of Sri Lanka, particularly with regard to reconstruction and rehabilitation in the (mainly Tamil) north," Haq said.
Buhne would convey to Sri Lankan leaders "the secretary-general's strong expectations for better treatment of the U.N. family in Sri Lanka," he said, as well as progress on resettlement of refugees, reconciliation and accountability.
© Reuters
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Sri Lankan central banker writes pro-poor book
Lanka Business Online
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"Money does not raise economic growth, but it is the fundamental cause of high rate of inflation that is detrimental to economic growth," H N Thenuwara, a former assistant governor of Sri Lanka's central bank says frankly in a newly released book.
"High inflation and low economic growth jointly account for the poverty of nations."
Many so-called 'third world' states which restricted the economic freedoms of their citizens and kept growth down also appropriated their wealth stealthily through an 'inflation' tax slashing the real value of people's salaries and lowering their living standards.
High inflation is usually created by using central bank credit (printed money) to finance budget deficits, by governments that do not collect enough revenue to finance its expenditures and also does not want to borrow at market rates.
Though increasing economic freedoms of people and reducing state controls (open economies and liberalization) can create real jobs, even the employed will remain poor in such countries if inflation is high and the exchange rate falls constantly.
By imposing draconian exchange controls a money printing central bank can also block citizens from protecting their property rights by shifting their savings into a stronger currency, again destroying real wealth.
South Asian Central Banks
The tool came from central banks which have the power to inflate without limit by increasing the money supply and depreciating the currency.
"Central Banks in South Asia were established as symbols of political independence," says Thenuwara in his book Money Inflation and Output, which pulls no punches or tries to cover up central bank mistakes in any country.
An exception to the rule was the Reserve Bank of India, which was established as a private corporation before independence from Britain.
LBO's economics columnist fuss-budget says India had a rich tradition in good money, both in the form of gold and silver. Its rupee was used widely in Africa and the Middle East as do 'dollarized' nations today by using the dollar, sterling or euro as their currency.
Sri Lanka's currency board also had the Indian rupee as the anchor currency for most of its life.
Fuss-budget says the Indian rupee started to lose its value after RBI was nationalized and made into a state entity following independence from British rule due to excessive money printing.
Middle Eastern countries, ranging from Kuwait, to Abu Dhabi, to Qatar soon dumped the Indian rupee and adopted Saudi currency or created their own.
The UK pound also lost value after the Bank of England was nationalized as a suspicious public that kept its excesses under check as a private corporation was lulled into a state of complacency under state ownership.
Thenuwara's book points out that a private central bank was abolished by an angry public in the United States, a country that had history of gold as money and free banking.
Sustained large scale inflation started in the US only after the establishment of the Federal Reserve, a semi-state institution in 1916.
India's rupee started to appreciate only after policies changed in 1991 following a severe balance of payments crisis and its Treasury secretary was no longer sitting in on monetary policy meetings.
Sri Lanka's central bank is also now starting to pursue low inflation policies with its current governor firmly committed to stability, though concerns remain about its ability to stay on the straight and the narrow given fiscal pressures..
Currency Board
Sri Lanka started a pegged exchange rate central bank in 1950 abolishing a currency board arrangement that kept the exchange rate stable from the previous century under British rule.
A currency board targets only the exchange rate and does not print money to manipulate interest rates, thereby eliminating foreign currency shortages or currency depreciation, giving a stable money to the people, provided the anchor central bank was keeping good policy.
"If there is a foreign currency outflow, the currency board has to absorb domestic currency from its economy which reduces the domestic money supply," writes Thenuwara.
"A central bank on the other hand, does not obey the rules followed by currency boards."
Thenuwara says countries that kept currency boards or re-established them including Brunei and Hong Kong in Asia have had low inflation and high growth.
Estonia and Lithuania have had very high rates of inflation prior to establishing currency board like systems after the end of the Soviet Union and a collapsing ruble.
"Their success is seen in the low interest rates seen since the 2000."
Soft Pegs
Sri Lanka's pegged exchange rate system was devised by John Exter, a US Federal Reserve official.
The bank which was designed to keep a peg with the US dollar and print money at the same time, targeted both the exchange rate and the interest rates in a policy contradiction an arrangement.
Some economists call the arrangement a soft peg as opposed to a 'hard pegged' currency board.
The US exported the model first to Latin America where it wreaked havoc and created massive inflation and wealth disparities by enriching landowners and real asset owners who were protected against inflation.
The model was exported to the rest of the world under the Bretton Woods system. In the early 1970s most of the so-called developed world exited soft pegs and became true floaters.
True floaters though not vulnerable to 'balance of payments crises' that comes from peg defence, can still be vulnerable to economic bubbles and bank runs when the bubble collapses as happened after 2007.
"In developed countries, crises have been caused by productivity slowdown, and insufficient attention paid to the formation of asset price bubbles," writes Thenuwara candidly.
"In developing countries, crises are driven by populist policies of governments, expansionary fiscal policies, and the pursuits of fixed exchange rate regimes by monetary authorities.
"In all countries, the monetary authority has always been either a part of the cause of the crisis or the part of the solution to the crisis."
© Lanka Business Online
Saturday, July 17, 2010
India bags contract to build rail line,communication system in Sri Lanka
The Economic Times
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The contract for reconstruction of Northern Railway Line and telecommunication system has been awarded to Indian Railway Construction International Ltd or IRCON at a total amount of $ 86.5 mn, an official statement said.
The northern railway line was destroyed during the decades-long ethnic conflict in the island nation which ended last year in May with the defeat of the LTTE.
The Sri Lankan government has also decided to ink a contract with China National Machinery Import and Export Corp (CM)l to develop the Matara-Beliatta railway line at a cost of USD 290 million.
The contract will also include signalling, telecommunication and ticketing systems and the maintenance of these systems.
It was not immediately known when the projects would be completed.
Talks are also underway for IRCON to construct the line from Omanthai to Pallai while the Peoples Republic of China is proposed to be awarded the contract for construction of the rail line from Pallai to Kankesanthurai in Jaffna peninsula.
© The Economic Times
Friday, July 16, 2010
Former Sri Lanka rebels 'abused in detention'
By Swaminathan Natarajan | BBC Tamil Service
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In letters and phone calls to BBC Tamil, ex-militants say they have been "tortured and beaten" in the centres.
They accuse camp guards of being corrupt and demanding bribes before releasing detainees.
The government says all those being held in custody following the end of the war are being well cared for.
It has consistently refused to allow any kind of independent investigation into allegations of human rights abuses in the final weeks leading up to the end of the war in May 2009.
Recently President Mahinda Rajapaksa said that "not even a single civilian was killed" during the conflict.
But human rights groups say thousands were killed or injured towards the end of the fighting and in the war's immediate aftermath.
Unsanitary conditions
"Military officers often call us dogs - even if we don't shave for a day we are beaten up badly," said one of the letters, which was written by a detainee being held at a Tamil school in Vavuniya.
"The detainees are forced to bear the expenses for electricity and cleaning charges," continued the letter.
"If we say we don't have money, they threaten to transfer us to the notorious Boossa prison."
Another letter said: "We don't know whether we will be released or... shot."
The claims - mostly made in letters to BBC Tamil but sometimes in telephone interviews - are difficult to verify as there is no direct access to the camps.
It is estimated that some 10,000 Tamil Tigers either surrendered or were captured at the end of the war; many of them remain confined.
Some of the camps are located in military bases, others in schools and colleges.
The government refuses to allow journalists, aid agencies and the UN to visit these camps - but in most cases, relatives are allowed to see their loved ones.
Their accounts and the letters written by those being held all speak of unsanitary conditions and shortages of water.
The government says it is giving technical and vocational training to the detained cadres to make them more employable. Detainees say "no meaningful training" has so far been provided.
'Disappearances'
One letter written by a woman from the eastern town of Trincomalee said some young detainees had been "beaten black and blue".
"Some are hanged upside down," she wrote. "Some are made to lie down in the floor and beaten with belts and sticks. They don't take the injured to hospital."
Others accuse the authorities of providing no information on the whereabouts of their loved ones and of orchestrating "disappearances" from the detention centres.
They say that detainees taken away for questioning have not returned and no-one knows what has happened to them.
But these claims too have been strenuously denied by the government.
"I have visited Jaffna, Killinochi and Vavuniya where I met many people - including wives and relatives of the detainees," Rehabilitation Minister DEW Gunasekera told the BBC.
"No one made any complaints to me.
"Instead of writing letters to the BBC in London, ask them to write to me and I will look into it."
The minister said 3,000 people had been released from the camps in the past year and 8,000 former rebels - including 600 women and 1,300 men classified as "hardcore fighters" - remained in custody.
"Overall I would say we have been very magnanimous," added Mr Gunasekera.
© BBC News
Friday, July 16, 2010
"SL Government dominated by racist ideologues" says former UN Spokesman in Sri Lanka
By Gordon Weiss | The Australian
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The Tamil Tigers were the most ruthless, tactically efficient, destructive, and committed terrorist organisation in the world. Between 1990 and 2000, Tiger operatives using suicidal tactics killed thousands of innocent Sri Lankans. Their presence was an abomination, and a by-word for violence and fear among ordinary citizens.
Despite Sri Lankan government claims that it decisively defeated the Tamil Tigers in May 2009, they continue to suggest that the Tigers remain a danger. Yet analysis of the defeat of the Tigers, their methods, those in the Tamil diaspora that supported them, and the massive securitisation of the Sri Lankan state, contradicts that view. To internationalise violence by, for example, hijacking aircraft, would be pure folly to any narrow nationalist cause in 2010. For Tamil Sri Lankans who once supported the Tigers, there is no "military option" left to support. The Tamil Tiger is extinct.
The Tigers were a response to perceived state repression. This is true of all national liberation groups, many of which, like the Tigers, undercut sympathy for their cause by killing innocent people. In 1956, contrary to the constitution left by the British and agreed to by Sri Lanka's leaders, the Sinhala Only Act was passed. As incendiary in operation as its title suggests, this law compelled, for example, Tamils to seek judicial redress in the Sinhala language instead of English or Tamil. Things have never been the same since. In 1983, an orchestrated mob pogrom killed some 2000-3000 Tamils across the island. Within a year, the Tamil Tigers had mushroomed from a rabble of 50 men into an army of thousands who sought revenge.
In Australia, both the Tamil and Sinhalese communities include extremist elements. Both have organisations that have promoted radical politics and intolerant solutions to the ethnic divide that bedevils Sri Lanka. For example, Sinhalese-language programs on SBS are said (by Australian Sinhalese) to promote an extreme nationalist view of Sri Lanka that by definition excludes Sri Lankan Tamil claims to the island as also their home. This kind of nationalist narrative, nurtured from generation to generation in a new country (that often leaves emigre communities quite out of step with developments in their own countries) is true of all radical groups who now have deep roots in Australia, be they Kurds, Burmese, Palestinians, Armenians, or Croats.
Hundreds of thousands of Australians have direct memories of the murder of their family and friends in foreign lands. Rarely do they use this soil for the explicit manufacture of terrorism. But within these communities, identity and historical grievance remains a matter of the deepest pain, even as these Australians remain law-abiding citizens, grateful for the equitable justice this country has provided. Occasionally, such as with the Australian-Serb Dragan Vasiljkovic, who returned home during Yugoslavia's wars and allegedly killed and terrorised Croats, one will carry those memories to an extreme. But these are aberrations.
One must then ask why, with the fanciful claim that as many as half of all Tamil boatpeople have "links" to the Tigers, does the government of Sri Lanka seek to trigger alarm bells in our ears? What interest do they have in claims of links between al-Qa'ida and the Tamil Tigers? Why, as reported in recent days, do they incite Australians worried about illegal immigration with the suggestion that boatpeople are "taking advantage" of our asylum laws? And why do they play on Australia's poor understanding of this distant war by reducing the causes of their conflict to just the emergence and destruction of the Tamil Tigers?
The answer lies in another little understood creature that is far from extinct. From an easygoing island paradise in 1948, Sri Lanka has been transformed into one of the most militarised societies in Asia. Its government is dominated by racist ideologues who promote the notion of the Sinhalese as a "chosen people" (the words of their first prime minister). Government death squads have snatched thousands of people from the streets over the years. The country's highest court has explicitly rejected the role of international human rights instruments in Sri Lanka's affairs. And the government continues to deny that it killed civilians during the recent war, that there were battlefield executions, that it bombed hospitals, or that there is anything wrong with the sham democratic machinery of the state. The repressive creature of extreme nationalism is alive and well in Sri Lanka.
The UNHCR reported recently that there was a vast improvement in Sri Lanka, and hence it has raised the bar for refugee status for a large number of people. But this is so after any war. The refugee agency also noted that large numbers of Tamils still have grounds to fear persecution. By way of an example, the government of Sri Lanka has yet to make good on the three key points of an agreement it made with the UN Secretary-General in May 2009.
It still holds tens of thousands of civilians in internment camps. It shows no sign of instituting a political process to redress the half-century-old grievances of the Tamils, and thus remove the causes for any future conflict. And it shows no sign of seriously investigating allegations that both sides committed war crimes.
It broke every guarantee that it gave Ban Ki-moon not to use heavy weapons in civilian areas. Its interests lie in repression, not confession, and it has no interest in potential witnesses reaching these shores.
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Gordon Weiss was UN spokesperson in Sri Lanka during the war. He is the author of forthcoming The Cage; The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers, Pan Macmillan
© The Australian
Friday, July 16, 2010
Child abuse rampant in Sri Lanka
By Achalie Kumarage and Madushika Gunawardane | Daily Mirror
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“We direct the complaints to relevant authorities at national, school and provincial levels,” Commissioner D.M.S. Abayagunawardana said and added that the department had dealt with some 150 cases during the past six months.
He said most of the complaints related to the employment of underage children and children who were not sent to school.
The Police, Provincial Child Care Commissioners, Divisional Secretariats and the Education Ministry carry out the necessary investigations into the complaints.
He said as a means of dealing with the complaints at a Divisional level, the department had appointed Child’s Rights Promotion Officers at all the Divisional Secretariats.
“Last year we set up a help line – 1929 for the lodging of complaints, which is being handled by the National Child Protection Authority. We are also monitoring the counselling programmes set up in schools,” Mr. Abayagunawardana said.
© Daily Mirror
Friday, July 16, 2010
Sri Lanka: A Massive Naval base under construction in Eastern Province
Tamil Net
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The reason for people not using the said area was that Sri Lanka Army (SLA) during war had not allowed the local people to enter the area and had shot and killed the people who happened to enter, the minister was told.
The construction of the SLN base continues despite the protests of the elected representatives of the area.
Construction of new camps of SLA and SLN in Batticaloa district even after the war had ended and the SLA restriction on travel and harassment continues to keep the public gripped in fear, the sources added.
© Tamil Net
Friday, July 16, 2010
Sri Lanka Prime Minister leaves for China
Colombo Page
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During his visit the Premier is expected to hold discussions with the high ranking Chinese officials on bilateral economic development. He is also scheduled to meet investors in China to discuss ways to develop Sri Lanka's export sector and attend several business forums.
Among the business items to be discussed is the possibility to increase the frequency of national carrier, SriLankan Airline flights to Beijing to meet the increasing demand.
The Prime Minister will discuss matters regarding signing of several agreements in the fields of Education, Tourism, Energy and Agriculture with Chinese leaders and in addition, he will also discuss on areas of technology transfer and training between the two nations, the Government Information Department said.
Jayaratne will also deliver a speech on the possibilities of Asian Approaches to Poverty Alleviation.
However the main event of the visit will be the Expo 2010 Shanghai held under the theme "Better City, Better Life." Sri Lanka is among the 246 countries and international organizations participating at the event.
© Colombo Page
Friday, July 16, 2010
Sri Lanka gives rail contracts to India, China
Lanka Business Online
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It said the Cabinet had approved a deal to rebuild the Northern Railway Line signaling and telecommunication system to be given to the Indian Railway Construction International at a total cost of 86.5 million US dollars.
The track was destroyed during the 30-year ethnic war which ended in May 2009.
The state-owned Ceylon Government Railway is also to enter into a contract with China National Machinery Import and Export Corp (CM) l to develop the southern Matara – Beliatta railway line at a cost 290 million dollars.
The contract will include the signaling and telecommunication system, the ticketing system and their maintenance, the statement said.
Sri Lanka is rebuilding and extending the railway network with the end of the war.
The government intends to make the railway carry a bigger share of the passenger and cargo load to ease congestion on roads.
Indian and Chinese firms have already been given contracts to rebuild or modernize other parts of the rail network in the north and south of the island.
© Lanka Business Online
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