Tamil Justice

The Australian – Sri Lankan opposition activist’s home attached

by Amanda Hodge

THE Colombo home of a key opposition activist has been targeted in a bomb blast as violence escalated ahead of next Tuesday’s Sri Lankan presidential election.

The attack, which an opposition spokesman for presidential challenger Sarath Fonseka blamed on sympathisers of the ruling party, came just three days after President Mahinda Rajapaksa ordered a security crackdown amid mounting pre-election violence.

Wealthy Fonseka ally Tiran Alles and his family were not injured in the attack yesterday, but the pre-dawn blast caused severe damage to the house and a car parked out the front.

“The attackers are believed to have come in a van and carried out the attack and fled,” a police officer at the scene said.

On Thursday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged all parties “to show restraint and refrain from violence . . . and to avoid provocative acts throughout the election period”.

Sri Lankan independent election commissioner Dayananda Dissanayake said this week he had stopped giving directives to police and public officials because they were disregarding his orders for conducting a free and fair vote.

BBC News - Blast targets Sri Lanka opposition activist in Colombo

The home of an opposition activist has been attacked with a petrol bomb in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo, days ahead of a presidential election, police say.

The bomb destroyed the car and damaged the home of Tiran Alles, an ally of Sarath Fonseka, the main election rival to President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

Mr Alles, a businessman, escaped unhurt with his family.

Earlier this week the United Nations expressed concern over escalating violence ahead of the 26 January poll. More

Interesting commentary by Amanda Hodge

Weekend Australian – Little incentive to stop the asylum-seeker boats

IF the average Australian wonders how hundreds of Sri Lankans have recently managed to reach our waters without detection, there is no mystery on this side of the Indian Ocean.

In furtive conversations across the island nation, the finger is firmly pointed at the Sri Lankan navy, which is said to be at least complicit, if not an enabler, of the flotilla of fishing trawlers now making the perilous crossing.

More courageous- or conspiratorial- types have suggested complicity at far higher levels of bureaucracy, from provincial chief administrators to senior cabinet ministers who see the exodus as a neat solution to the problem of high unemployment and deep disaffection among the country’s Tamils.

While boats in the past decade or more have regularly left the relatively peaceful west coast of Sri Lanka, carting hopeful immigrants across the oceans in search of a better life, it is the recent exodus from the heavily militarised east that has raised eyebrows and diplomatic hackles.

Barely six months after it ended Asia’s longest-running civil war, the Sri Lankan government still holds about 250,000 civilians in barbed-wire detention camps, has effectively sealed off about a third of the country and appears to have heavily armed soldiers patrolling every kilometre of the country on foot.

So how is it that this fleet, which so recently ruled the waves, is suddenly incapable of detecting suspect trawler after suspect trawler, bobbing offshore as small speedboats ferry midnight passengers from the beach? More

The Australian -   Tamils fleeing Sri Lankan police state

Amanda Hodge, 21 October 2009

FIVE months after the Sri Lankan government crushed the Tamil Tigers separatists and ended Asia’s longest-running civil war, refugees are still pouring out of the country and washing up on the shores of sympathetic countries such as Australia and Canada.

Why, when peace has finally come to a nation dogged by 26 years of civil war, would so many people choose to leave behind their country and possessions and risk their lives on a perilous sea crossing to an uncertain future?

The easy answer lies in the swampy internment camps of the country’s north, said to hold somewhere between 250,000 and 280,000 war-traumatised Sri Lankans behind barbed wire while

the government weeds out suspected Tamil Tigers soldiers from civilians.

They have no jobs and no money. Most have lost their houses, their identification cards and loved ones. Thousands of children have missed out on months of school.

Click here to read full article

Sri Lanka ranked 162 in the latest press freedom rankings

Obama effect in US, while Europe continues to recede Israel in free fall, Iran at gates of infernal trio

Tamilnet:   Time to support the Tamils, say British Conservatives

20 October 2009

Increasing involvement in British politics and reciprocal openness of the British political parties was marked by a part-televised event held in Essex Sunday where several incumbent and prospective parliamentarians from the British Conservative party reached out to their Tamil constituencies and articulated their positions on the conflict and its consequences in Sri Lanka .The event was the first one in a series planned by the recently formed British Tamil Conservative Association (BTCA). Members of Parliament from the British party were keen to stress both their sense of fairness as well as their orientation towards action over rhetoric, according to a BTCA attendee. Conservative candidate, Robert Halfon, echoed in his website, the sentiments expressed Sunday stressing the need for autonomy for the Tamils saying they deserved nothing less.

Green Left on the line -  Tamils flee genocide — refugees should be welcomed!

Jay Fletcher, 19 October 2009

On October 15, almost 260 Tamil refugees were stranded at an Indonesian port in west Java. They were refusing to disembark from the boat that had carried them from Malaysia and pleaded for the Australian government to hear their case. That evening they declared a hunger strike.

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“We have run away from a war, a 26-year war against our people and we are fleeing genocide”, he said.

Tamils are victims of war crimes in Sri Lanka. Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka have released reports of widespread abductions and executions at the behest of Sri Lankan officials.

Three hundred thousand Tamils remain imprisoned in government concentration camps. Alex told ABC journalists, “there is not the opportunity for Tamils to survive in Sri Lanka”.

He told GLW the asylum seekers were devastated by Australia’s actions.

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Watch video here: Canadian tamils speak

Human Rights Watch -  Sri Lanka: Government Breaks Promises That Displaced Can Go Home

19 October 2009

The Sri Lankan government’s recent statements that it aims to return only 100,000 of the original 273,000 displaced civilians confined to camps by the end of 2009 breaks a promise to camp residents and the international community, Human Rights Watch said today. In May, the government announced that 80 percent of the displaced people would be able to return home by the end of the year.

Since the end of the fighting in May, the government has released or returned fewer than 27,000 people, leaving about 245,000 civilians in the camps.

“Enough is enough,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “It is well past time to release civilians detained in the camps. Sri Lanka’s international friends should tell the government that they will not accept any more broken promises.”

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Celebratig Tissinayagam – watch full video here

A ceremony was held with the participation of J.S Tissinayagam’s father Jayaprakash Tissinayagam, celebrating the imprisoned journalist receiving the Journalist’s Peter Mackler award for courageous and ethical journalism. The ceremony was celebrated with his family, fellow journalists and well wishers.

U.S. believes the claims in the report submitted to Congress on Sri Lanka are credible

All the alleged human right violations cited in the report submitted to the U.S. Congress by the State Department are believed to be credible, a spokesman for the State Department said on Thursday.

Responding to a question from media at the daily press briefing, State Department Spokesman Ian Kelly said the report doesn’t attempt to verify all the claims but believes the claims, mostly based on the mostly on the reports from the US Embassy in Colombo and from the NGOs and media in Sri Lanka are credible.

“This report was mandated by the Appropriations Committee. They requested that the Administration report on – I want to get this right here – report on what happened in Sri Lanka during the fighting in the north there. I think that what this is an attempt to do is to – we wanted to lay out all of these credible allegations of human rights violations. But like I say, we don’t try and verify them,” Kelley said.

The spokesman said the as a first step U.S. calls on the Government of Sri Lanka to open up the area to international organizations to be able to come in and understand better the facts on the ground and what happened there during the final phases of the conflict.

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Doctors in detention and the hippocratic oath

Every year, many newly qualified doctors recite the Hippocratic Oath upon graduating. But how many of us would actually put those words to the test if our own lives were in jeopardy? Half a world away, three

physicians faced this dilemma.

During the first five months of 2009, an intense war played out in the densely populated coastline of northeastern Sri Lanka. More than 300 000 civilians were trapped between battle lines. A government-imposed media blackout meant the world was largely unaware of what the United Nations called a “blood bath.”

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The Australia – Aussie James Elder the second to face expulsion from Sri Lanka

AnSL Australian aid worker facing expulsion from Sri Lanka is the second Australian this year to be threatened with deportation from the ethnically divided nation for speaking out against human rights violations and war casualties.

Unicef spokesman James Elder has been ordered to leave Colombo by September 21 by the Sri Lankan government, which claims statements he made highlighting the suffering of children during the war and in post-war internment camps amounted to supporting Tamil Tiger separatists.

Mr Elder’s expulsion notice, signed by former Australian diplomat turned Sri Lankan foreign secretary Palitha Kohona, came just three months after the UN’s spokesman in Colombo, Gordon Weiss, also faced deportation threats.

The two men are notable in Sri Lanka’s aid community for speaking out on human rights abuses on both sides of the conflict and highlighting civilian casualties. Their comments were in defiance of government denials that heavy bombardment of the Tamil Tiger-held north earlier this year killed civilians.

Mr Weiss became the subject of mass demonstrations in Colombo and vitriolic newspaper editorials from government mouthpieces in May for describing the last weeks of the three-decades-long conflict as a “bloodbath”.

Mr Weiss said yesterday: “There was some talk of (visa being revoked) but it never happened and my visa was ultimately extended.”

The Sri Lankan government had made no secret of its position that “you’re either with us or against us”, he said.

Local journalists have been arrested for reporting human rights concerns, others have been murdered, and the media are still refused independent access to camps where more than 280,000 war refugees are being forcibly detained.

Dr Kohona told The Australian this week Mr Elder should be treated no differently to any other Australian caught breaking the rules of a sovereign nation, and accused him of “supporting a terrorist organisation”.

His comments have raised fears for the safety of Mr Elder, a NSW-born father of three, in a nation riven with ethnic chauvinism and post-war tensions.

Unicef has strongly defended Mr Elder, labelling the allegations against him as “bordering on ludicrous”.

“Through Mr Elder, Unicef has consistently spoken out against the suffering of children on both sides of the intense hostilities earlier this year and called for their protection,” executive director Ann Veneman said in a statement yesterday. “Unicef unequivocally rejects any allegation of bias.”

Dr Kohona is a dual Australian-Sri Lankan citizen who worked as an Australian diplomat in Geneva and Canberra, as well as for the UN, before accepting a ministerial post with the Sri Lankan government. He takes up a new post today as Sri Lanka’s ambassador to the UN in New York.

Sydney University’s Centre of Peace and Conflict Studies director Jake Lynch said recent statements by Dr Kohona that no victor ever faced war crimes charges rendered him “an entirely inappropriate candidate to represent a UN member state”.

“For Kohona to be seemingly boasting that he and his colleagues will not face war crimes charges and then be sent straight to the UN is an indication of the contempt the Rajapakse government has for the UN and its authority,” he said.

The Australian : Tamils fear bout of ethnic cleansing
In the wake of President Mahinda Rajapakse’s declaration of victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam last month, Sinhalese Sri Lankans danced and waved the national flag, which bears the Sinhalese lion.

Most Tamils stayed behind closed doors. In the town of Trincomalee – part of the eastern province liberated from the Tigers in 2007 – reports emerged of bashings and of Tamil families and businesses being obliged to donate money for a celebration feast.

…”The LTTE killed off a lot of moderate Tamil voices,” the diplomat said. “A lot of Tamils hated the LTTE but it was the strongest voice for Tamil rights, and now that it’s gone there’s a fear that they are powerless against what many might see as a different form of terror.”

…Rights campaigners and aid workers have reported large numbers of people, including at least 80 former LTTE child soldiers, have gone missing from internment camps in the northeast, which now house more than 280,000 displaced people. “The problem in this country is terror and impunity,” an exhausted aid worker said. “There are never investigations.”

…Observers fear the Government will see the mass displacement of Tamils as an opportunity to change the demographics of the north by offering incentives to Sinhalese people.

…Statistics from the government Census Department show the Sinhalese population in the east rose from 5 per cent in 1921 to 25per cent in 1981, after decades of state-sponsored irrigation and land policies that offered state land to tens of thousands of Sinhala peasants from the south and the central hills.
Read more here.