Tamil Justice

BBC News (23/01) –  Sri Lanka campaign enters final day

by Charles Haviland

Although the war in the north of the island is now over, the campaign in other parts of the island has become bitter, violent and personal.

The two main candidates are both closely associated with the government’s defeat of the Tamil Tigers last May.

But now President Mahinda Rajapaksa and General Sarath Fonseka have fallen out bitterly.

Groups monitoring the conduct of the campaign say there have been hundreds of violent incidents, resulting in four deaths and many more wounded. More

The Hindu (23/01) – Fonseka alleges bid to rig polls

by B. Muralidhar Reddy

Hours before the close of the official campaign for the crucial January 26 Sri Lanka Presidential election, the common opposition consensus candidate and retired Army Chief Sarath Fonseka accused the incumbent President and his chief opponent in the polls Mahinda Rajapaksa of getting ready to rig the polls.

Claiming that he was far ahead of Mr. Rajapaksa, who is seeking a second endorsement for his office two years ahead of his first tenure, the retired General asserted that he would emerge victorious in the election. “I began this campaign with no political background and today I am confident that overwhelming majority of the people are with me. We know for a fact that 90 per cent of the votes in the postal vote are in our favour”, he maintained.

The main opposition leader Ranil Wickremesinghe of the United National Party (UNP), the ultra-nationalist Janatha Vimukthi Perumana (JVP) leader, Somawansa Amarasinghe and chief of Democratic People’s Front (DPF), Mano Ganesan present on the occasion declared that they would take to streets if the Rajapaksa Government attempted to rig the election. More

Transcurrent - The Two Elections in 2010: End of History for the NE Tamils or, A Fresh Beginning?

by Jolly Somasundaram

1. The Problem – The End of History

“War does not determine who is right: it just determines who is left,” wrote Bertrand Russel. The NE Tamils (who include those from this region living elsewhere in the island), never had it so bad. Toronto and London had replaced Jaffna as the two largest population centres of the NE Tamils. For twenty years, the NE had undergone de-development, becoming the most backward part of Sri Lanka (worse than Uva) under any criterion of development- poverty, educational achievement, health, infrastructure etc.The position of first minority, in numbers, has been ceded to the Muslims. For over two decades, the NE Tamils were unable to exercise their free franchise, a position to which they had fallen, after supporting the disenfranchisement of the Plantation Tamils.

They had been helpless- except to bleat- when 300,000 of their civilians were incarcerated in foetid military prison camps in the Wanni (jokingly called humanitarian centres by the government) without even their elected representatives having access to them, not to mention the media or the UNHCR. (The army would not dared have such massive camps in the South, after the end of the two southern uprisings.) More

Independent Minds (22/01) – Can the new King of Sri Lanka bring deliverance to the Tamils

by Richard Dixon

Also appears in The UK Telegraph

From North to the South, West to the East, the skies of Sri Lanka are now filled with the empty and virtual deceptive promises of two desperate presidential candidates. While the Sri Lankan politicians are beating their drums, While the so called war heroes of the nation are busy launching mudslinging campaigns against each other, while the strategic think tanks with geopolitical interests are making last minute manoeuvres to influence the outcome of the election, while the local business leaders, industrialists and bankers are speculating the election results, Sri Lankan Tamils are still on their knees praying what they have always prayed “Deliver is from the evil one”

Their voices are suppressed. They have lost their strength to fight back the oppression. But their heart cries are obvious. “Free thousands of our loved ones who are going through hunger and torture in the notorious Sri Lankan prisons,”, “Give us back our homes and lands”, “Give us the freedom to work in our own farms and fish in our own waters”, “Stop abducting our sons and daughters” “stop abusing, torturing, raping and murdering our children”, “Stop destroying our culture”, “Give us back the freedom that we were all born with as humans on this planet”

Can the new King of Sri Lanka bring deliverance to the Tamils? If we look at the history of Sri Lanka particularly in the last sixty five years, the answer to this question will be quite obvious. More

Transcurrents (22/01) – Why I am voting for Sarath Fonseka

By Samanmalee Unanthenna

University of Colombo / University of Heidelberg

When rumours started circulating some months ago of the possibility of Sarath Fonseka being a Presidential candidate, I was horrified. As the rumours at the time linked him to the JVP, I immediately contacted a couple of my JVP friends and berated them soundly for what I believed at that time to be a disastrous decision.

My main argument was that a battle between SF and MR would leave ethnic minorities with no presidential candidate to choose between and more dangerously provide a clear signal of their increasing marginalisation from political power. The nomination of SF confirmed to me that the Sri Lankan state was unabashedly and arrogantly strengthening itself as a Sinhala state.

SF had not won my respect as a military commander. While I had always been a critique of the totalitarian and despotic nature of the LTTE, I did not believe that a brutal state military response that appeared to have little regard for civilians and was brutal towards dissenters was any better. More

AFP -Sri Lanka keeps up media ban on war refugees

Sri Lanka has maintained its ban on journalists reporting the plight of war-displaced civilians who have been allowed out of their internment camps, officials said Friday.

Foreign minister Rohitha Bogollagama declared in a BBC interview Tuesday that the media now had full access, prompting a flood of requests from reporters to travel to the former war zone in the north.

But restrictions on visits to the northern district of Vavuniya where the government maintains its camp complex remain in place despite them being declared “open” on Tuesday.

“The restrictions on journalists to visit displaced people in camps have not been relaxed yet,” Human Rights Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe told reporters. More

Reuters India – Sri Lanka: bulk of refugees still in transit camps

UNHCR – Sri Lanka Humanitarian Update

The Guardian – Sri Lanka announces limited freedom for detained Tamil refugees

… There have been two types of released person: one appears to be families who will be allowed to return to their birthplaces and have to make regular reports to the police; the other is a group of people who are expected to return to the camps after a set period of time.

The UN gave a cautious welcome to the move.

“We see it as a form of release … which is not ideal but is a step forward from having people encased in barbed wire,” said Gordon Weiss, a spokesman for the UN in Colombo. “We do expect everyone to be allowed home by the deadline set by the government of 31 January.”

The Independent - Farah Mihlar: A welcome step, but crisis of displaced people is far from over

…It is also not yet clear how the military plans to monitor the movement of the IDPs, who are only allowed to leave for some days. It is also not known what the consequences would be if a person does not return to the camp. Could they be arrested? Or would a family member be held responsible? In the past few months in Sri Lanka, according to local human rights activists between 13,000 and 20,000 people have been arrested in the camps on suspicion of being involved with the LTTE. Enabling IDPs to move freely should not lead to other human rights violations such as arbitrary arrest, detention or disappearances.

BBC - Sri Lanka war displaced ‘free to leave’ military camps

More than 100,000 displaced people in military-run camps in northern Sri Lanka will be allowed “free movement” from Tuesday.

Up to now, Tamils in the camps who were displaced by the war were not allowed to come and go at will.

The government says the camp-dwellers will now be free to leave after giving their details to the authorities.

But with northern Sri Lanka devastated and mined, some of the displaced will want to stay on in the camps for now.  More

The Independent  – Sri Lanka to release 136,000 war-displaced Tamils

Sri Lanka will release 136,000 ethnic-minority Tamil war refugees on 1 December, allowing the civilians to leave squalid and overcrowded government camps after a half-year detainment, a top official said today.

Some 300,000 war-displaced were forced into camps after fleeing the final months of the government’s decades-long war with the separatist Tamil Tiger rebels, which ended in May.

The ethnic minority Tamils are held against their will. More than half were released in recent months amid pressure from rights groups and foreign governments. Authorities say nearly 136,000 people remain detained in the camps, which are guarded by soldiers and strung with barbed wire. More

Pls see below email sent by the Independent Australian Jewish Voices

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Indep Aust Jewish Voices <contact@iajv.org>
Date: Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 12:16 PM
Subject: IAJV November Newsletter
To:

Dear friends,

After a brutal civil war that massacred tens of thousands in Sri Lanka, many Tamils are seeking to rebuild their lives in Australia and beyond. We have not only a moral responsibility to listen to their pleas as refugees, but legal obligations under international humanitarian laws to which Australia is a signatory. Above all, as Jews, we understand what it means when countries turn their back on asylum seekers looking for protection. The Jewish community should be raising its voice in support of Tamils seeking asylum and we should demand that the Australian government recognizes its legal and moral responsibilities to refugees.

Refugees in boats fleeing persecution ought to remind Jews of the St. Louis and the Exodus. For Jews of all people today, turning a blind eye to the Tamils is unacceptable. For this reason, we congratulate the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) for their public stance and we encourage Jews to show support for its recent statement that calls on the Rudd government to exercise compassion when dealing with refugees. The statement is here.

We also encourage you to sign the 300,000 Reasons campaign, an Australian-wide initiative to pressure the Rudd government to “draw attention to the plight of 300,000 Sri Lankan Tamil citizens – men, women and children who are being forcibly held in military camps in their own country for no reason other than their ethnicity.”

In other news, the UN Goldstone report over Israel and Hamas war crimes in Gaza has caused an international outcry. It makes sober reading and deserves serious reflection. Leading Jewish historian Tony Judt has praised Goldstone for braving “personal vilification and institutional mendacity to describe the crimes committed by Israeli forces in the course of their invasion of Gaza in December 2008.”

A petition launched by American Jews to support the Goldstone report is here.

Finally, the following stories are recent news and views about the Middle East:

- Dispatch from J Street, Huffington Post
- US State Department: Israel is not a tolerant society, Haaretz
- Israeli settlements could cause one-state solution, Salon
- America, Stop sucking up to Israel, Haaretz
- Is using aid to Israel as leverage becoming a mainstream idea?, Salon

Best wishes,

Independent Australian Jewish Voices
Peter Slezak
James Levy
Antony Loewenstein
Eran Asoulin
http://www.iajv.org/

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 National Council of the Maritime Union of Australia moved the following resolution in Sydney on the 5th November;

“That the responsibility for the Sri Lankan refugees is in part Australia’s own doing. We are the second largest investor in Sri Lanka, yet we have brought no pressure to bear on the government of Sri Lanka to stop the persecution of Tamil people in that country. The Sri Lankan government still hold over 300,000 Tamil’s in a concentration camp and do not allow Red Cross or international observers to monitor the situation. People will always try to escape from persecution. While we remain silent on the injustices in Sri Lanka we will continue to have to deal with people who seek refuge from it. We call on the Australian Government to withhold investment in Sri Lanka, until humanitarian aid is allowed to those areas still under military control and the entrenched persecution of the Tamil population ceases.”

MUA Resolution 05 11 09.pdf

Sri Lanka Guardian – Situation in SL absolutely grim – Arundhati Roy

By Nilantha Ilangamuwa

… Q. So how do you summarize the present political developments in Sri Lanka six months after the elimination of the Tamil Tiger rebels? 

A: The situation sounds absolutely grim. I have not visited the camps myself, but from the reports that are emerging it is obvious that there is an unconscionable humanitarian crisis unfolding which the world seems to be turning it’s eyes away from. For hundreds of thousands of people to be herded into camps and held there by a government that is so blatantly gloating over its military victory over them is a terrifying situation. Mind-numbing. The use of the term ‘concentration camp’ does seem appropriate given the few testimonies that have made their way out of the steel wall of silence the government has erected around them. If these testimonies are untrue, and if the Government of Sri Lanka has nothing to hide it should allow the media free access to the camps so they can see what is going on. More

Guardian UK – The heart of India is under attack

Taken from the Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice blog :

The Australian Government says it enjoys ‘warm’ bilateral relations with Sri Lanka.

Does this mean that Mr Rudd’s Government has used the good relationship between the two countries to make sure Colombo hears a clear “let the near quarter of a million people in the camps go”? After all, even the mild mannered UN has now called for this.

According to TamilNet, the answer is no. It quotes senior Australian officials as saying “Australia is reluctant to call for a closure of these camps and release of the innocent IDPs as soon as possible“.

Rather, it turns out that the Government is using Australian tax dollars to pay for leading ad agency, Saatchi and Saatchi, to help scare off potential asylum seekers to Australia.

Using state of the art “social control” tactics, the campaign uses “street drama to take its message directly to the people. Actors will play people smugglers, and warn locals their efforts to escape from Sri Lanka will end in disappointment.”

9news reports that Catholic Churches are also being targeted, with literature and pamphlets being distributed around parishes warning asylum seekers they will not be welcome in Australia. The push has been dubbed the “Stay the Bloody Hell Away” campaign by media, in reference to Tourism Australia’s much-maligned “Where the Bloody Hell Are You?” campaign.

Saatchi and Saatchi can be expected to do something clever, creative and certainly not cheap. But how effective will this campaign be?

Click here to read blog post