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Contributing Editor for Military Affairs courrtey of The Weekend Australian, 1/2 April 2017, where the title is ‘There’s something worse in store once the ‘caliphate’ goes” … note 70 comments already on lineOn a cold rainy evening last week, I stood in the Jordanian capital, Amman, watching images of the terrorist attack in central London. One sequence, looping every few minutes on Al Jazeera, showed attacker Khalid Masood lying wounded on cobblestones outside parliament. A police officer covered him with a sub-machinegun while others treated his injuries before carefully placing him on a stretcher and, already dead, into an ambulance. In another sequence, Foreign Office minister Tobias Ellwood worked frantically — streaked in blood — to save police constable Keith Palmer, whom Masood had stabbed moments earlier. Ellwood — whose brother Jonathan was murdered by Jemaah Islamiah in the 2002 Bali bombing and who, full disclosure, is a friend and former army colleague — has been called a hero for rushing to Palmer’s aid. I would rather say that he did what he was trained to do. He did it bravely and well, without hesitation, as did many others that afternoon in a city that’s seen more than its share of terror and has some of the best public safety systems anywhere.
An Iraqi girl cries over her father’s body in the Al-Risala neighbourhood in Mosul.
Category Archives: women in ethnic conflcits
Traversing Lanka: Walking Woman emulates the Bike Man
Devika Casiechetty matches up to Rob, the British Bike-Man
Rob as in https://thuppahis.com/2016/03/21/a-british-bike-mans-bike-ride-in-sri-lanka/
Nushka Nafeel: “She stepped in where Angels feared to tread,” Daily News, 29 March 2017
Women today have progressed in a variety of fields and reached the pinnacle of achievement but yet when a girl informs her parents or elders that she would be travelling out of town, or even stepping out of the confines of her home, the first question everyone in Sri Lanka asks is “Who are you going with? Will you be safe? Are you not scared?” The premise is that girls are not safe going out on their own and this is the question that Devika Casiechetty set to answer when she decides to walk around Sri Lanka alone. Her mission is, “A Girl on a Solo quest.”
Casiechetty’s idea was simple as it was to walk around Sri Lanka on her own to prove that Sri Lanka is the safest place to walk around solo as a woman but with the course of time, her initial plan begin to change. “I have now decided to not only explore whether Sri Lanka is safe to walk alone as a woman but also to ascertain whether it is unsafe and how we could make it safer for women,” she said. Continue reading
Anguish as Empowerment … and A Path to Retribution
Michael Roberts, courtesy of Colombo Telegraph where it is presented with a different title …. https://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/histrionic-voice-as-spark-for-ethnic-violence-political-extremism/
Let me highlight the argument by presenting an unusual juxtaposition.
Expressive Grief displayed by a Sri Lankan Tamil woman at a protest demonstration before David Cameron by persons whose kin have been missing in the course of Eelam War IV
Filed under authoritarian regimes, Buddhism, communal relations, cultural transmission, disparagement, economic processes, governance, historical interpretation, human rights, Indian religions, Indian traditions, legal issues, life stories, modernity & modernization, nationalism, political demonstrations, politIcal discourse, power politics, reconciliation, religiosity, religious nationalism, riots and pogroms, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, the imaginary and the real, vengeance, violence of language, women in ethnic conflcits, world events & processes
Being an ex-Tiger Today. Where have all the roads gone, long time passing!
Arthur Wamanan & Ruwan Laknath Jayakody, courtesy of The Nation, 11 March 2017, where the title is “The battle after the war”
Life continues to be a struggle for 45-year-old Kathir, a former Tamil Tiger combatant, and his family. Kathir was one of the 12,000 Tiger cadres who underwent a rehabilitation process soon after the end of the war. Kathir was lucky to be released after a year of rehabilitation. “I was disabled due to the war and therefore my time at rehabilitation centres was just one year,” he said.
Filed under historical interpretation, island economy, life stories, LTTE, meditations, politIcal discourse, reconciliation, rehabilitation, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, Tamil civilians, Tamil Tiger fighters, tolerance, unusual people, welfare & philanthophy, women in ethnic conflcits
Thomas Meaney, A Review Article, courtesy of the Author and the London Review of Books,… with emphasis by highlights added by The Editor, Thuppahi … SEE www.lrb.co.uk –
Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World by Steven Kemper, Chicago, 480 pp, £31.50, January 2015, ISBN 978 0 226 19907
Tamil: A Biography by David Shulman, Harvard, 416 pp, £25.00, September 2016, ISBN 978 0 674 05992 4
The Seasons of Trouble: Life amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka’s Civil War by Rohini Mohan, Verso, 368 pp, £16.99, October 2015, ISBN 978 1 78168 883 0
Independence was handed to Ceylon’s elite on a platter. ‘Think of Ceylon as a little bit of England,’ Oliver Ernest Goonetilleke, the first native governor-general, said. This was a point of pride. Don Stephen Senanayake, the country’s first prime minister, remarked: ‘There has been no rebellion in Ceylon, no non-cooperation movement and no fifth column. We were among the peoples who gave full collaboration while Britain was hard-pressed.’ After independence in 1948, Ceylon alone among the former colonies not only retained but promoted the monarchy: the Union Jack flew alongside the Ceylon flag; a new constitution was drafted by a former LSE professor, Ivor Jennings; Colombo debutantes were presented at Buckingham Palace; and, thanks to some genealogical ingenuity, George VI was recognised as the latest monarch in the ancient line of Kandyan kings. While the rest of the empire in Asia smouldered – in India there was Partition, in Malaya the Emergency, in Burma the civil war – Ceylon became Whitehall’s model for the transfer of colonial power. ‘There was no fight for that freedom which involved a fight for principles, policies and programmes,’ Solomon Ridgeway Bandaranaike, the anti-colonial head of state who took power in 1956, said when he reviewed the transition a decade later. ‘It just came overnight. We just woke up one day and were told: “You are a dominion now.”[1] Continue reading
Talaivar Pirapāharan embodied in Notebooks: One Mark of the LTTE’s Remarkable Propaganda Machinery
Michael Roberts
These three images adorn the cover of little notebooks, each 4 inches in height and 2.7 inches breadth, in my possession. They were purchased by me at Kilinochchi on 27th November 2004 when I visited the administrative capital of the state of Thamilīlam[1] during the ceasefire. The tale is recounted below as entry-point to a portrait of the LTTE’s remarkable innovations.
Filed under art & allure bewitching, authoritarian regimes, centre-periphery relations, cultural transmission, governance, heritage, Hinduism, historical interpretation, landscape wondrous, life stories, LTTE, martyrdom, military strategy, patriotism, politIcal discourse, power politics, propaganda, religiosity, security, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, suicide bombing, Tamil civilians, Tamil Tiger fighters, the imaginary and the real, travelogue, unusual people, war reportage, women in ethnic conflcits, world events & processes
The LLRC Sittings in Pictures
The recent presentation in Thuppahi of a specific proposal from the LLRC on national anthems as well as the issues raised by Thuppahi on the topic of DISAPPEARANCES prompt me to present a number of images from the sittings conducted by this peripatic body of personnel together with a brief officla report. the images have been helpfully provided by Kithsiri De Silva an old Aloysian class-mate who was an officer servicing the work of this august body. I am also tacking on an official report on the LLRC plus one dissenting note about its lopsided composition from Harshadeva Amarathunga. Michael Roberts
Filed under accountability, atrocities, communal relations, democratic measures, disparagement, ethnicity, gender norms, governance, historical interpretation, human rights, law of armed conflict, Left politics, legal issues, life stories, LTTE, mass conscription, military strategy, modernity & modernization, news fabrication, NGOs, patriotism, politIcal discourse, power politics, reconciliation, security, self-reflexivity, slanted reportage, social justice, sri lankan society, Tamil civilians, tamil refugees, Tamil Tiger fighters, terrorism, the imaginary and the real, tolerance, trauma, truth as casualty of war, vengeance, war reportage, welfare & philanthophy, women in ethnic conflcits, working class conditions, world events & processes
Kumari Jayawardena and her Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World
Meera Srinivasan, courtesy of The Hindu, 1 January 2017, where the title is “‘There was a gap about our part of the world’
The first draft, Kumari Jayawardena remembers, was all jagged. She wrote it on train journeys between The Hague where she was teaching and Brussels where she was living then. It was the early 1980s. As a visiting scholar at the International Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands, Jayawardena was preparing course material for the women and development programme she co-taught. The short manuscript later became the classic book, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. [Verso Books] The work is still considered a primer to understanding feminist movements in Asia and West Asia through specific struggles of women fighting against colonial powers, for education, suffrage and safety, and against poverty and inequality.
Kumari today
Filed under authoritarian regimes, British imperialism, historical interpretation, island economy, Left politics, life stories, modernity & modernization, nationalism, politIcal discourse, power politics, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, social justice, sri lankan society, Tamil civilians, the imaginary and the real, unusual people, women in ethnic conflcits, working class conditions, world events & processes
The Muslims in Sri Lanka: Trends, Dangers, Failures
ACL Ameer Ali, courtesy of Colombo Telegraph where the title is “Paranoia & Paralysis: The Buddhist-Muslim Tragicomedy” … Note that the highlighting emphasis below is that of the Editor, Thuppahi
The military victory led by an overwhelmingly Sinhala-Buddhist army over the tyrannous LTTE in 2009 has, among other things, injected in the minds of certain sections of the Buddhist community that Sri Lanka belongs only to the Sinhala Buddhists and others are permitted to live here only at the behest of the Buddhists. This twisted ideology which is now developing into an anti-Muslim, anti-Christian and anti-Tamil paranoia is totally contradictory not only to the noble teachings of the Enlightened Buddha but also and more significantly to the millennial historical tradition of ethnic and religious tolerance indelibly engraved in the long legacy of the island’s Buddhist monarchs. To deny this historical truth is to court intellectual dishonesty.
Filed under historical interpretation, Islamic fundamentalism, life stories, Muslims in Lanka, plural society, politIcal discourse, power politics, reconciliation, religiosity, riots and pogroms, security, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, the imaginary and the real, tolerance, violence of language, women in ethnic conflcits, world events & processes, zealotry
Disappearances and Torture in Sri Lanka, 2011-13 … or Thereabouts: Soundings and Question-Marks
Michael Roberts
In studying the blog-comments on “Sinhala Mind-Set” and presenting the lot for public scrutiny a specific claim by a person identifying himself as “Flloyd” caught my attention. Whether Flloyd is a Tamil is of lesser moment than his allegation. It is the sort of claim that is widely peddled by reporters and VIPs who drop in and fly out after short stays and have the clout to reach a worldwide audience – for instance Roger Draper in the National Geographic and Greg Bearup in The Weekend Australian recently. Thus prodded, I took the initiative to test the degree of validity that we could attach to this type of assertion by approaching a selected body of personnel (mostly Sri Lankan) via a one-on-one letter presenting the QUESTION repeated here [in blue].
“I came across a blog comment from one “Flloyd” in April 2013 which adopted a reasonably moderate stance on the ethnic situation in the country but which also presented this assertion: “The presence of an organized rebel group is no more, but the Tamils continue to be tortured, raped, and killed by the state. Many still mention the brutality of the rebels, but in no way can that justify the current situation, as the rebel activity is gone.”
Filed under accountability, communal relations, disparagement, doctoring evidence, governance, historical interpretation, human rights, life stories, LTTE, politIcal discourse, Rajapaksa regime, reconciliation, rehabilitation, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, slanted reportage, social justice, sri lankan society, Tamil civilians, the imaginary and the real, truth as casualty of war, welfare & philanthophy, women in ethnic conflcits, working class conditions, world affairs
