Courtesy of Tissa Abeywardene of Kirulapona, Colombo
JFK’S Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, was in France in the early 60’s when DeGaulle decided to pull out of NATO.
De Gaulle said he wanted all US military out of France as soon as possible.
Rusk responded “Does that include those who are buried here?“
Paige Taylor in Weekend Australian,30 May 2019, with this title “Peter Dutton warns more illegal boats may be headed to Australia”
Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton says the government is concerned more illegal boats are headed to Australia, after a vessel carrying 20 Sri Lankans was intercepted by Border Force. Anthony Albanese has demanded a security briefing today from Scott Morrison as it was revealed the first boat had arrived on the shores of Christmas Island in five years, and that the vessal had set sail weeks into the federal election campaign.
Mr Dutton said the Sri Lankan arrival was “very disturbing” and that people smugglers had been marketing a change of government to asylum seekers before the Coalition’s shock election win. “It’s a very disturbing development and, without going into all of the details, it’s not the only vessel that we’re worried about,” the Home Affairs Minister told Sydney’s 2GB radio.
Filed under accountability, asylum-seekers, Australian culture, australian media, economic processes, historical interpretation, immigration, Indian Ocean politics, life stories, people smugglers, refugees, security, sri lankan society, transport and communications, welfare & philanthophy, world events & processes
Outstanding University of Adelaide medical graduate Dr Claudia Paul has become the third Australian Indigenous person to be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, having been named the 2018 Rhodes Scholar for South Australia. Dr Paul, 24, a Wiradjuri woman from Broken Hill, will use her scholarship to undertake a Masters of International Health and Tropical Medicine at the University of Oxford from next year. The Governor of South Australia, His Excellency Hieu Van Le, AC, announced Dr Paul as the Rhodes Scholar for South Australia at a ceremony at Government House late yesterday.
Claudia Paul with Governor Hieu Van Le …. a dinky-die local with a Vietnamese refugee migrant from the 1970s … Hurray
Filed under Australian culture, australian media, cultural transmission, democratic measures, economic processes, education, female empowerment, heritage, landscape wondrous, life stories, medical marvels, meditations, people smugglers, self-reflexivity, unusual people, welfare & philanthophy, world events & processes
Greg Bearup, in The Australian, 31 October 2016, where the title is “In the Wash-Up Asylum Loser Wins” …. with emphasis in this presentation being t e work of The Editor, Thuppahi.
The crab-trapper of Jaffna is a happy man; he has a sturdy boat with a new Suzuki motor. Each morning he rises before dawn to motor out to a vast lagoon in his new auto rickshaw to fish for prawns and crabs — partly funded by the $5000 given to him by Australian taxpayers. In August 2012, when Marcus Pireesan fled Sri Lanka for Australia in search of a better life, Jaffna, the northern Tamil capital and his home town, was a very different place from what it is today.
Pireesan with some of his children — Pic Greg Bearup
The long civil war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam ended in 2009 – a UN report estimating that 40,000 people died in final months of the conflict, mainly civilians – but the Rajapaksa regime, which brutally obliterated the Tigers, was still in power; young Tamil men were still being bundled into government vans and never seen again. “We lived in constant fear,” Pireesan, 40, tells me, “just knowing information was dangerous. You could be stopped at a roadblock and kidnapped (by the government forces) and no one would ever know.” And fishermen like him were told where and on what days they could fish. Continue reading
Filed under asylum-seekers, Australian culture, australian media, authoritarian regimes, discrimination, economic processes, historical interpretation, human rights, landscape wondrous, life stories, LTTE, military strategy, people smugglers, politIcal discourse, population, power politics, Rajapaksa regime, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, slanted reportage, sri lankan society, Tamil migration, tamil refugees, the imaginary and the real, transport and communications, truth as casualty of war, welfare & philanthophy, world events & processes
Shamindra Ferdinando, in The Island, 22 June 2016, where the title is “Unresolved Indo-Lanka Issues”
One-time head of the Law Faculty, University of Colombo, Dr Nirmala Chandrahasan last Thursday (June 16) called for tangible action on the part of the Sri Lankan government to bring in Sri Lankan refugees, living in India, particularly in the state of Tamil Nadu. Dr Chandrahasan estimated the number of Lankan refugees in India at the peak of the conflict at 200,000. The appeal was made over seven years after the successful conclusion of the war with the annihilation of the LTTE leadership. The distinguished law academic insisted that special arrangements should be made to facilitate the return of refugees. Dr Chandrahasan was addressing a forum on India-Sri Lanka relations in the 21st century, organised by the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies (BSIS).
Filed under accountability, asylum-seekers, disparagement, doctoring evidence, economic processes, governance, historical interpretation, human rights, immigration, life stories, LTTE, people smugglers, politIcal discourse, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, slanted reportage, sri lankan society, world affairs
Christina Lamb, courtesy of The Sunday Times & The Australian, 1 September 2015, where the title is “Europe’s asylum-seekers form a human tide of desperation
It took perhaps an hour for them to die. The children would have suffocated first: the baby girl of around 18 months, the three boys aged about eight to 10, watched by their anguished mothers, helpless to give them air inside the hot, sealed truck. By the time it crossed the border from Hungary into western Europe where the asylum-seekers must have hoped for a new life, all 71 were dead: 59 men, eight women, four children. The Austrian police who found them said their bodies were piled one on top of the other inside the vehicle as if they had tried to climb up. With four bodies for every square metre, they had been so desperate to get air that the side of the truck was bent out of shape.
Blankets hide the chicken delivery truck in which 71 people, believed to be Syrian, suffocated in Austria last week. Continue reading
ITEM ONE. David Corlett: “The Nightmare of Returning to Sri Lanka,” 10 September 2014
Tamil asylum seeker shows his wounds from being tortured. The Abbott government has all but claimed victory in stopping asylum seeker boats. Offshore processing and turning around boats at sea have been important elements in achieving this goal. Also important has been its efforts at returning asylum seekers, especially Sri Lankans. Continue reading
Filed under accountability, asylum-seekers, atrocities, democratic measures, discrimination, disparagement, immigration, legal issues, life stories, LTTE, patriotism, people smugglers, performance, politIcal discourse, power politics, propaganda, Rajapaksa regime, security, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, slanted reportage, sri lankan society, Tamil civilians, Tamil migration, tamil refugees, Tamil Tiger fighters, the imaginary and the real, trauma, truth as casualty of war, unusual people, vengeance, violence of language, war crimes, welfare & philanthophy, world events & processes, zealotry
Stefanie Balogh, in The Australian, 9 July 2014 in a news items i within the hard copy which has several images of Sinhalese asylum-seekers in line for court hearings after being brought ashore at Galle by a SL Navy vessel
THE Abbott government has no intention of sending 153 asylum- seekers at the centre of a High Court challenge to Sri Lanka where Tamil refugees claim they face persecution, as fresh doubts surfaced over the route of their voyage and the identities of those on board. After weeks of denying the boat’s existence, lawyers for the government yesterday revealed the group was being held on a Customs boat after it was intercepted outside the country’s migration zone.
Filed under accountability, asylum-seekers, Australian culture, australian media, cultural transmission, democratic measures, island economy, people smugglers, politIcal discourse, Rajapaksa regime, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, Tamil migration, truth as casualty of war, world events & processes
James Jupp, in Journal of Population Research, 2013, vol. 30: 387-88 — reviewing Laksiri Jayasuriya: Transforming a ‘White Australia’: Issues of Racism and Immigration, SSS Publications, New Delhi, 2012, 180 pp., ISBN 81-902282-9-3
This short study by an eminent Australian scholar covers the entire period from the initiation of the White Australia policy in 1901 until the asylum seeker controversies of John Howard’s government in 2001. It will be of considerable value to those outside Australia who have only a limited knowledge of the radical changes during this century of organised mass immigration. They include many Asians who still believe that Australia implements a “whites only” admission policy, which is far from being the case. It will also be of value to the many Australians who have only a distorted and populist view of recent developments. Continue reading
Rowan Callick, in The Australian, 12 August 2013, where the title is “A Different Destination“
THE drama of this especially intense election campaign is being shadowed by a more bitter struggle being played out in the tropical zone to Australia’s north, on perilous seas and in remote islands. The characteristically bold – or impetuous – Kevin Rudd solution to the asylum-seeker dilemma initially shook up the opposition as much as it did the people-smugglers, threatening to prise away Tony Abbott’s popular grip on the issue, as intended.
It may not fully unravel by September 7, nor is it likely on present evidence to demonstrate sustained success by then, despite the claims of Immigration Minister Tony Burke that asylum-seekers in Indonesia now “realise that what they have paid for is no longer available to them”. About 1900 have arrived since Rudd’s Papua New Guinea-Nauru solution was struck, but numbers have moderated in recent days. Continue reading
thuppahi
