Kate Shellnutt, in Christianity Today, 3 May 2019, where the title is “Sri Lanka’s Christian Refugees Displaced by Retaliation Threats”
Pakistani asylum seekers in Negombo fled terrorist attacks in their home country, only to fear retribution for more deadly violence in their place of refuge.
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Filed under accountability, asylum-seekers, atrocities, charitable outreach, discrimination, fundamentalism, life stories, politIcal discourse, racist thinking, refugees, rehabilitation, self-reflexivity, sri lankan society, the imaginary and the real, trauma, unusual people, welfare & philanthophy, world events & processes
Tisaranee Gunasekara, whose choice of title has been “Secularism or Faith” — in an article which appeared in Groundviews as well as Sri Lanka Guardian
“And even here
Lies the other shore
Waiting to be reached.”
Tagore (My Reminiscences)
The blue, red, yellow, orange and white lights are on, as are the makeshift stalls selling lanterns. Yet few pause to see, haggle, buy. Vesak, so near chronologically, had never seemed so far away spiritually. After the Easter Sunday Massacre, fears were raised about Vesak too being turned into a bloody spectacle by the IS, working through its local adherents. As it turned out, neither the IS nor its local adherents were necessary to turn Vesak into a season of violence. The Sinhalese managed the task on their own.
Filed under accountability, atrocities, Buddhism, cultural transmission, education policy, fundamentalism, historical interpretation, Left politics, life stories, political demonstrations, politIcal discourse, racist thinking, religiosity, self-reflexivity, sri lankan society, the imaginary and the real, unusual people, vengeance, world events & processes, zealotry
General HMHA Herath, in Island, 15 May 2019, where the title is “Who was behind the Easter terrorist attacks?”
While the Islamic State has claimed responsibility, the real story is a bit more complicated than that. To millions of Sri Lankans the Easter Sunday tragedy must have seemed a nightmare come true, a frightening déjà vu of the rampant violence this island nation has known for thirty years of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) terror. The horrific attacks in which an estimated 253 lost their lives and many hundreds were wounded, signaled that the decade’s calm that prevailed after LTTE’s 2009 destruction by Sri Lanka’s Army is over.
1 What went wrong?
At the time, victory over the LTTE inspired confidence and heady optimism. A 2012 defense seminar in Colombo heralded “Peace and Stability” as its core theme and the five ‘Rs’ (Reconstruction, Resettlement, Rehabilitation, Reintegration and Reconciliation) as the imperative agenda for Sri Lanka. The mood at the time was upbeat and the country’s future seemed bright. The safety of the post-war period brought to the country millions of tourists (2.1 million in 2017 alone), and the reconstruction of Sri Lankan economy and infrastructure commenced apace. With the horrific Easter disaster, this process has come to a grinding halt. And the troubling question is what developments allowed it to happen. Continue reading
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Michael Roberts
My thoughts are organised in point-form in order to assist succincttness.
A = I recall seeing a news item a day or so back which indicated that Sri Lanka was in the process of acquiring sophisticated cyber-technology from China in order to pursue its intelligence work the better. Quite logical that — though late in the day.
Mecca at Hajj 
Pilgrims at St Peter’s Basilica
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Asiri Fernando, in Sunday Times, 12 May 2019, “Easter Sunday bombers used high-tech communication: Army Chief”
The terrorists who carried out the Easter Sunday bombings used a Swiss developed, highly encrypted mobile communication App named “Threema”, Army Chief Lt. General Mahesh Senanaayake told the Sunday Times. The mobile phone App boasts ‘best in the class’ end-to-end encryption and allows a user to generate a random Threema ID, thereby giving anonymity to the user, the product website claimed. The level of encryption used by the said App makes intercepting or decrypting such communications very difficult for Sri Lankan authorities with available technologies.
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Merril Gunaratne, in Island, 11 May 2009, where the title runs “Carnage and complacency:An intelligence standpoint”
A way of identifying failures of the national security network to prevent the carnage would be to examine what actually took place as the intelligence received from India moved forward or upward, from the point where it was received. The State Intelligence Service (SIS) was the initial recipient of the information. The SIS is actually the pivot or axis rotating the cogs of the defence machinery, which in a collective sense, is identified as the National Security Council (NSC).
Anbarasan Ethirajan, BBC news, 11 May 2019 — with this title “Sri Lanka attacks: The family networks behind the bombings”
For many Sri Lankans, it was a horrific shock to learn that local Muslims could have been behind the suicide attacks that killed more than 250 people last month. How could a smalL group have planned such a devastating wave of bombings undetected? The clues were there in mid-January, when Sri Lankan police stumbled upon 100kg (220lb) of explosives and 100 detonators, hidden in a coconut grove near the Wilpattu national park, which is a remote wilderness in Puttalam district on the west coast of the country.
Zahran Hashim has been identified as the ringleader of the bombers
FACEBOOK – Inshaf Ibrahim (R) and his father (C) accepted an award in 2016 from a Sri Lankan minister
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Nigel Kerner to Nigel Farage and the BREXIT & UKIP PARTY = A Letter entitled “To a Land of Dope & Gory. The Farage Balloon”
What hypocrites so many white Brits are. So many of us positively stink of racism and that brand of cowardice that hides behind contrived mental devices that are designed to try to fool the world that we are decent fair objective people. Just look at the faces on any football terrace any weekend if you want to see what many Brits are really like. Animals snarling in an open terraced Zoo. Shouting racist slurs and chants at black athletes and football players whose skill often surpasses those of white players. So much for the once vaunted ‘British gentleman’ that once justifiably announced our better senses.
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thuppahi
