Yearly Archives: 2011

October 24, 2011 · 1:46 am

Incorrigible Watch-Dogs of the Human Rights World

Michael Roberts, an original article, 24 October 2011**

On the 30th September 2011 a grandiose function at the presidential residence in Colombo displayed to the world one step in the Sri Lankan

John Dowd

government’s programme towards the rehabilitation of former LTTE personnel captured and/or arrested during the last stages of Eelam War IV and its immediate aftermath. On this occasion 1800 were released in the presence of foreign dignitaries, while some ambassadors handed out certificates to some “rehabilitees’ as the government calls them.

 Kathy Klugman presents certificates — Pic from BCGR site

Kathy Klugman, the High Commissioner for Australia, was among those who presented certificates documenting skills training in such fields as carpentry and agriculture. As reported in major Australian newspapers Klugman was promptly hauled over the coals by John Dowd on behalf of the International Commission of Jurists in Australia (ICJ). He disparaged the programme as one of “re-education not rehabilitation;” and insisted that “Australia[should not lend] legitimacy to a regime that refuses to allow an investigation of alleged war crimes during the country’s vicious civil war.”

   The ICJ, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, are among the agencies in the West that can be depicted as “watch dog organizations” devoted to civil liberties. In recent years virtually all these agencies have blacklistedSri Lankaas an incorrigible offender of the same order asBurma. They are fixated on the ethical path of truth and justice withinSri Lanka. This lobby draws some of its information from a Tamil nationalist network that is motivated by vengeance (a motivational force with a potential for dubious ethics). Continue reading →

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October 23, 2011 · 9:56 am

Whatever happened to the Elections Commission? A Comedy of Errors

B. S. Wijeweera, in the Sunday Island,23 October 2011

Except for a few pockets of resistance likeJaffna,Colomboand Kalmunai, President Rajapaksa has consolidated his popular hold on the rest of the country; this no one can deny. Having won the LTTE war and the many electoral battles, he enjoys a position of strength from which he can improve his faltering image of good governance. Like King Dharmasoka before him it is time to move towards the Dhamma; not the public show of religious piety but a genuine concern for the establishment of a law abiding society. Nothing could have driven this point more poignantly than the shameless shoot-out at Mulleriyawa on 08 October 2011 between rival factions of his own political outfit. Continue reading →

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October 23, 2011 · 9:48 am

A Better Way to Reconciliation

Pradeep Jeganathan, in The Nation, 23 October 2011

Borella junction, 24/25 July 1983 –Pic by Chandragupta Amarasinghe

 Central Bank bombing by LTTE, 31 January 1996

There is view, very common internationally now, that ‘reconciliation’ in Sri Lanka will not come until there is ‘justice’ and ‘accountability.’ These arguments are well known now, but it’s worth delving into the basic assumptions that underlie them. It is assumed in the ‘reconciliation’ argument that there were two sides that fought for a long time and one side defeated the other side. Now, both sides must stand trial, so that charges, for which ‘credible evidence’ is available, can be proved. Once proved, the leaders or representatives of both sides must be punished. And then, all will be well. Really!
Since this is an argument about Sri Lanka and Sri Lankans, a very Sri Lankan analogy might help. Continue reading →

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October 21, 2011 · 1:20 am

Gaddafi killed … in the line of Osama and Pirapāharan

Michael Roberts

The reports and images attending the killing of Colonel Gaddafi  in the Libyan battlefront brings to mind the killing of Pirapāharan in  the swamplands of Nandikadal Lagoon during the final stages of Eelam War IV and, in between these events the US assassination-raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. There are both similarities and differences in these operations and contexts; and more differences will emerge in the way in which the western media organises its presentation of the latest event.

Pic from Daily News

What I wish to mark here is the manner in which the corpse is likely to be displayed …or not displayed. So please note the previous thuppahi items on this topic [click on name]: namely, Death and Eternal Life: contrasting sensibilities in the face of corpses by Michael Roberts, 29 June 2011

…. and Poetic Musings on the Fate of the Pirapāharan Family by Shelagh Goonewardene, 24 July 2011 Continue reading →

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October 20, 2011 · 10:18 am

Laksiri Jayasuriya’s Dissection of Social Development in Sri Lanka over the Decades

Sharon Bell, in The Island, 19 June 2011

Whilst not an expert in comparative social policy my research interests have revolved for many years around the focus of this volume, Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka was the site of my two years PhD fieldwork in the late 1970s – the time Professor Jayasuriya quite appropriately identifies as the turning point in Sri Lanka’s post-colonial social development and welfare state evolution. I experienced firsthand the shortages of essential goods and rural hardship characteristic of the last days of the Bandranaike government; the 1977 election that brought to power the neo-liberal UNP government that turned a blind eye to post-election violence directed at the Tamil population – the harbinger of the civil war that was to embrace the island for over two decades from the early 80s; and the frustration of the educated rural youth in Sri Lanka’s south whose aspiration, to eschew primary production and find white collar employment commensurate with their educational attainment, was palpable.

Taking Social Development Seriously covers three broad fields. Part One: Social Development and Social Policy provides an overview of the key conceptual and theoretical issues relevant to social policy as social development. Importantly this section links the theory and practice of social policy with development theorizing. Particular attention is given to the work of Amartya Sen and his long-standing engagement with the conceptualisation of equality (42). In Part Two: The Evolution of Social Development in Sri Lanka the focus is on the development of the Sri Lankan welfare state. This social development is seen largely as a consequence of British colonial policy and in the early colonial phase (1833-1931) the importation of modernity via colonialism (70), which created a vibrant export economy (tea, rubber and coconut) and a favourable political and social climate for sustained social development. Continue reading →

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October 19, 2011 · 12:49 pm

John Holt’s Sri Lanka Reader: History, Culture, Politics over Time

John Clifford Holt, Bowdoin’s William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the Humanities in Religion and Asian Studies, has edited a new anthology that brings to life the epic history, cultural richness and political turbulence of the island nation of Sri Lanka. The Sri Lanka Reader (Duke University Press, 2011), is one in a series of World Readers published by the press. Reviewers have described the book as a comprehensive work that is “unprecedented” … one that “will undoubtedly become the standard collection of documents on Sri Lanka and its history.”
  The Sri Lanka Reader is 772 pages in length and includes more than 105 classic and contemporary texts by and about Sri Lankans, including monastic chronicles, short stories, cutting-edge newspaper journalism, and modern and ancient poetry. There are 15 new translations from Sinhala and Tamil that are being published in English for the first time, and 54 images of paintings, sculptures, and architecture. Holt introduces each section with an informative overview essay, and each individual entry with a brief description of its wider significance. “Sri Lanka is an island unto itself, but one that has been influenced from many directions throughout its long and varied history,” notes Holt. “It remains an enormously complicated society. The point of the book is to trace out the political history of the island through cultural sources. WhatSri Lanka actually is remains a contested issue today, so the task of being representative and balanced also proved to be challenging.”

Sri Lanka’s historical records stretch back more than two and a half millennia, and include waves of immigrations from various regions of the South Asian subcontinent, as well as the arrival of Arab Muslim traders, and later, colonial interventions by the Portuguese, Dutch, and British.
Holt says he worked through a great variety of sources for engaging material that would be “fair to all of the contesting identities in Sri Lanka and have a bearing on the contemporary conflicts in the country.” In one entry, Ibn Batuta, a famous Muslim 14th century traveler, writes of flying leeches, gem mines and encounters with sultans. A section on the British colonial presence includes diary entries and a short story about caste written by Leonard Woolf during his years as a colonial civil servant on the island. Continue reading →

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October 19, 2011 · 1:12 am

A bilateral approach to reconciliation

Somapala Gunadheera, in The Island, 19 October 2011

I had despaired of writing on national reconciliation due to lethargy, prevarication and lack of vision on the part of protagonists of the ethnic conflict. But I could not help reverting to the subject after reading the following articles published in the Island over the last few days, two of them on the same day.

1.   If 13th Amendment is implemented: Subliminal proclivities of communal exclusivity bound to find undisguised expression, Demos, October 11,

2.   Land reforms in the North and East of Sri Lanka, Sebastian Rasalingam of Toronto, Canada (October 14)

3.   Could the TNA learn from the Catholics? Arjuna Hulugalle, (Oct. 1). Continue reading →

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October 19, 2011 · 1:03 am

Hitchens on “rules for treason”

Christopher Hitchens. courtesy of The Australian, 18 October 2011

THE first thing to say, when reviewing the question of what the US should do about those of its citizens who advocate the murder of random numbers of its civilians is that it is flat-out astonishing to see the debate being conducted at all.  Faced with jeering, sniggering, vicious saboteurs who hide from the daylight and pop up on blogs and cheap CDs, calmly awarding religious permission for the capricious taking of life, what do we imagine Vladimir Putin would do? Or the police and security forces of the People’s Republic of China? Or Israel or Saudi Arabia? To ask the question is to answer it.

Pic from WireImage

The US happens also to be almost uniquely generous in conferring citizenship: making it available to all those who draw their first breath within its borders. For comparison purposes, try looking up what it takes for a subject of the “commonwealth” in establishing that he or she has the right of residence in Britain. Continue reading →

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October 19, 2011 · 12:36 am

Missing the Boat: Australians at Sea on Asylum-Seekers

Michael Roberts, original article, 18 October 2011**

The Australian politicians, media and public have deluded themselves. They have consistently underestimated the force of chain migration networks as a pull-push factor in promoting migration whether legally or illegally by air or boat. This is an educated conjecture. If valid, it means that policies geared to the deterrence of people smuggling will have a limited influence on the steams of migration by any route.

Pic courtesy of the Christian Science Monitor

Surveys of in-migration that restrict themselves to either push factors in the homelands of out-migrants or the pull-factors of Western countries sought out by migrants simply neglect a major force: a combined pull-push factor of a specific kind. I refer here to the power exercised by previous migrants whose networks of kinship and monetary remittances finance the migration ventures of loved ones back in their homelands. This process is also a snowballing process because the more migrants from place X enter any Western country, then the more of their kin gain the means to penetrate any sought-after Western destination. Continue reading →

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October 15, 2011 · 12:29 pm

Susan Kurozawa’s Magnificent Seven tourist havens

Susan Kurozawa, in The Weekend Australian Magazine, 15-16 October 2011

In our big,  broad contemporary world of travel, taste and opportunity are everything. One person’s campground is another’s castle, one’s lofty art gallery is another’s high adventure. No list of wonders is definitive; maybe no two travellers’ choices would be the same. In ancient times, the fabled Seven Wonders of the World, from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to the Colossus of Rhodes, ultimately proved to be fragile accomplishments. In 2007, a Swiss foundation ran a controversial New Seven Wonders of the World survey and claimed more than 100,000,000 unexamined votes from across the world. In order, the winners were Chichen Itza in Yucatan, Mexico; the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; the Colosseum in Rome; the Great Wall of China; Machu Picchu in Peru; Petra in Jordan; and the Taj Mahal in India.

 Ask any engineer and the list would be very different; I imagine the Panama Canal would be there, and the Empire State Building, perhaps the Eiffel Tower and even a few of the thrusting skyscrapers that rise ever taller from the deserts of Dubai. I can’t argue with any such listings, nor can one airily dismiss UNESCO’s World Heritage sites, each a gem of preserved merit and continuing tradition. How not to include Cambodia’s Angkor Wat or Easter Island’s hulking statues on any line-up of wonderments? Continue reading →

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