Rowan Callick in The Weekend Australian Magazine, 27 September 2013, where the title is “All the Right Moves“
HOW did Julie Bishop, the epitome of political polish and today the most powerful woman in Australian politics, wind up skulling beers from the bottle to wash down a $3 curry on the rickety wooden veranda of a bar in the Tamil badlands of Sri Lanka? Continue reading
Camelia Nathaniel in the Sunday Leader, 22 September 2013 where the title reads “We Have No Role In Politics – Maj. Gen. Mahinda Hathurusinghe”
Q. What is your view of the mindset of the Tamil people in the North and their political preferences?
A. The Tamil people are voting for the symbol. They are not particularly concerned about who the person is. The change of mindset of the Tamils between the post independence period and the period just prior to independence took place in different backgrounds. The caste issue in Jaffna is a very big issue, and percentage wise, the lower caste Tamils comprise around 52% to 55% of the population. So, although the TNA and the TULF were gaining power at the time and going to parliament, the disparity in shared resources and the distance between the two segments of the population escalated to a sizable proportion. Prabhakaran’s ideology caught on to a vast majority as he too was not of the upper caste Tamils. They used this as their platform to convert people to their terrorist mindset and that still prevails in some as they identified with him. These are all politics. The distance between the South and North was further strained and widened. It is very difficult to undo this overnight and it takes time for their suspicions and concerns to change given the brainwashing they have been through to think that Southerners are not willing to share power with the Tamils, and their dream of a separate state. Although we have defeated terrorism, the ideology is very much engraved in their minds; it is not impossible to erase that, but it takes time. Continue reading
Filed under accountability, authoritarian regimes, caste issues, economic processes, governance, historical interpretation, legal issues, life stories, military strategy, politIcal discourse, power politics, propaganda, Rajapaksa regime, reconciliation, rehabilitation, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, Tamil civilians
A young bhikkhu among demonstrators outside an UN office in Colombo, where some Sinhalese expressed virulent protests against Navy Pillai, August 2013 – Pic by Ishara Kodikara for AFP
Pic from the Nation
Courtesy of The Australian, 20 September 2013
ASYLUM-SEEKERS and refugee advocates are upset that the Abbott government has ordered the Immigration Department to stop granting permanent protection ahead of the reintroduction of temporary protection visas. In its plan to stop boatloads more of asylum-seekers arriving in Australia, the government will use the TPVs to force genuine refugees to reapply for protection every few years in case circumstances in their home countries improve to the point where they can safely return. The move has sparked outrage among refugee advocates, who described the reintroduction of TPVs as “vindictive”. Continue reading
Greg Sheridan in The Australian, 13 September 2013
GOTABAYA Rajapaksa and Selvarasa Pathmanathan used to be the deadliest of enemies. Now they have the same message. I meet the two within a period of 24 hours in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s largest city.
Pathmanathan, or KP as he’s widely known, was for several months in 2009 the supreme leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, for many years the world’s most ruthless and bloody terrorist group. For a long time before that he was effectively No 2 to the Tigers’ leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran. When Prabhakaran was killed in May 2009, Pathmanathan took over the LTTE leadership until he was arrested in September of that year. Continue reading
Filed under australian media, authoritarian regimes, communal relations, Eelam, governance, historical interpretation, Indian Ocean politics, Indian traditions, law of armed conflict, life stories, LTTE, military strategy, nationalism, politIcal discourse, population, power politics, prabhakaran, Rajapaksa regime, Rajiv Gandhi, reconciliation, rehabilitation, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, suicide bombing, Tamil migration, truth as casualty of war, world events & processes
I: Anoma Pieris: “Avian Geographies: An Inquiry into Nationalist Consciousness in Medieval Lanka,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 33: 3, 336—362…..presented here as Abstract….
Does the concept of a bounded national geography predate modernity and colonization in South Asia? Does it carry with it particular internal processes and prejudices that have withstood decolonization? Was it produced through an urban imagination? Continue reading
Courtesy of the Sunday Times, 7 September 2013 …. http://www.sundaytimes.lk/130908/plus/mozart-comes-to-mullaitivu-60941.html
On August 26, four busloads of children from three schools in Kurunegala travelled to Thunukkai in Mullaitivu to join the children of the north for a four-day long residential workshop as they prepared to work yet again as an orchestra. The children have worked together on three residential programmes over three years and so were seeing their partners in the programme yet again.
The children of Kurunegala stayed at Yohapuram Maha Vidyalayam, Thunukkai for the UNITE programme for 2013 which was sponsored by JICA Sri Lanka. Nearly 250 children of the 500 children on the programme gathered together in the farming hamlet of Thunukkai, which was a hive of activity. Continue reading
thuppahi
