Category Archives: women in ethnic conflcits

Meet Asra Nomani, a Muslim American who supported Trump

Asra Q. Nomani, in The Washington Post, 10 November 2016, where the title is “I’m a Muslim, a woman and an immigrant. I voted for Trump”

Asra Q. Nomani is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and a co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement. She can be found on Twitter at @AsraNomani.

A lot is being said now about the “silent secret Trump supporters.” This is my confession — and explanation: I — a 51-year-old, a Muslim, an immigrant woman “of color” — am one of those silent voters for Donald Trump. And I’m not a “bigot,” “racist,” “chauvinist” or “white supremacist,” as Trump voters are being called, nor part of some “whitelash.”

asra-q-nomani-twitter from Twitter

In the winter of 2008, as a lifelong liberal and proud daughter of West Virginia, a state born on the correct side of history on slavery, I moved to historically conservative Virginia only because the state had helped elect Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States. But, then, for much of this past year, I have kept my electoral preference secret: I was leaning toward Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Tuesday evening, just minutes before the polls closed at Forestville Elementary School in mostly Democratic Fairfax County, I slipped between the cardboard partitions in the polling booth, a pen balanced carefully between my fingers, to mark my ballot for president, coloring in the circle beside the names of Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence. Continue reading →

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Hillary Clinton: Contrasting Views and Information

ONE: Rajan Philips — “It was unthinkable that faced with choosing between the most qualified candidate and the most unqualified candidate in their history, the American voters would elect the unqualified candidate as their new president for the next four years. It was unthinkable too that having come so close to making history by electing its first female president, America would go off track to make a different history by electing a male charlatan and a political clown as president for the first time….” in the Sunday Island, 13 November 2016,  http://www.island.lk/index.php?page_cat=article-details&page=article-details&code_title=155418

TWO: Jeanine Pirro demands Indictment — See “Judge Jeanine Pirro Destroys Hillary Clinton , Private Email Server .Trey Gowdy , James Comey,”.. You Tube Video on Congress Hearing, USA TV, 10 November 2016, … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne57t4IBac0&feature=youtu.be

hillary-11-business-indider Pic fr BusinessInsider hillary-22-slate Pic fr Slate

clinton-in-gujarat Continue reading →

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Sri Lanka’s Grim Prospects with Hilary Clinton as President: Looking at Potentialities in June 2016

Padraig Colman, writing in Ceylon Today 30 June 2016, with the title “President Hillary Clinton and Sri Lanka”

It is hard to imagine what a Donald Trump presidency might bode for Sri Lanka because Trump makes a virtue of avoiding fixed positions on foreign policy – and he lies. We might surmise that Hillary Clinton as president would probably be bad for Sri Lanka because we can examine her track record as Secretary of State at the time that GOSL (Government of Sri Lanka) was trying to defeat the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

clinton-in-gujarat see https://www.gg2.net/news/usa-news/US+firm+to+build+reactors+in+Gujarat+/2913

Clinton chaired the UN Security Council session on September 30 2009 when it adopted Resolution 1888, which dealt with conflict-related sexual violence. The official transcript of her address contained this: “We’ve seen rape used as a tactic of war before in Bosnia, Burma, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere. In too many countries and in too many cases, the perpetrators of this violence are not punished, and so this impunity encourages further attacks.” This is not an off-the-cuff remark – she was reading a prepared speech to a session of which she was the chair. Continue reading →

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The Terrain of War: Ahmed and Thiranagama. From Outside and Inside

aa-bart-of-melbBart Klem, a Review Essay courtesy of South Asia Multidisciplinary Journal, at https://samaj.revues.org/3853 where the title is “Victory’s Categories, Contingent Histories: Re-visiting Sri Lanka’s Ethno-separatist War”  …the books under review being (A)  Ahmed Hashim (2013) When Counterinsurgency Wins: Sri Lanka’s Defeat of the Tamil Tigers, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 280 pages. (B) Sharika Thiranagama (2011) In my Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 320 pages.

aa-ahmed aa-thiranagama

Ahmed Hashim’s When Counterinsurgency Wins (2013) and Sharika Thiranagama’s In my Mother’s House (2011) may appear similar at first sight. Both books look back on Sri Lanka’s ethno-separatist war; both pay close attention to the rise and fall of Tamil militancy; and both are published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. However, in crucial ways, they are opposites. Hashim’s book is a military analysis focusing on the Sri Lankan government’s victorious campaign against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Thiranagama’s is an ethnographic account of how Sri Lanka’s Tamil and Muslim society were irreversibly transformed by the war.

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Homemade Culinary Art in Surviving the Eelam Wars

Vidya Balachander, 9 October 2016, whose chosen title is. “Cookbook Tells The Story Of Sri Lanka’s Civil War Through Food.” ….…. http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/10/09/496867198/cookbook-tells-the-story-of-sri-lanka-s-civil-war-through-food

Even if you knew nothing about Vijaya, her haunting portrait would likely give you pause. She peers out of the page, unsmiling, her silver hair pulled back and her eyes conveying an unspoken anguish. From the accompanying narrative, we learn that a few years ago, almost overnight, Vijaya became her granddaughter Anjali’s primary caretaker. Her daughter, Gayathri, set out to find nutritious food for the family amidst heavy shelling, at the violent end of Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war, and never returned home. In the years since, money has been scarce and fresh vegetables in limited supply. But Vijaya and her granddaughter survived on creamy, coconut milk-laced sothis, mild gravies that act as soothing antidotes to the scorching cuisine of Sri Lanka’s Tamil-dominated north. Sothis are a common part of everyday meals. But seen through the lens of war — and Vijaya’s lingering loss — this simple side dish acquires a new depth.

aa-vijaya After losing her daughter during the war, Vijaya cares for her granddaughter Anjali. Despite not being able to afford freshvegetables, she cooks nourishing sothis or stews made of coconut milk.–Palmera

It is this exploration of food — both as a source of sustenance and a repository of memories — in the context of war that makes Handmade, a cookbook published by Palmera, a not-for-profit organization based in Australia, different from the other Sri Lankan cookbooks to have come out in recent times. Continue reading →

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Mahinda Rajapaksa meets “The Hindu” in July 2009

I. Preamble by Michael Roberts

I was in Colombo from mid-April 2009 to early June and observed the local coverage of Eelam War IV at its bitter end. I was invited by Muralidhar Reddy[i] to write articles for Frontline on aspects of the politics surrounding the war. Though Frontline is a magazine produced by The Hindu consortium, I was not a regular follower of that newspaper on web — even though I had once been introduced to its owner and chief executive, N. Ram, way back in time by Chandra Schafter and had also had an extended chat with him in Delhi in 1995.[ii]

n_ram_20120625_350_630 N Ram talking to Mahinda Rajapaksa, mid-2009 mahinda-with-ram

Thus the receipt of a Hindu report on President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s thoughts in mid-2009, expressed in an extended session with him conducted by N. Ram, serves up new material from my position. In step with my policy of raising significant episodes in the course of Eelam War IV to public notice,[iii] I  hasten to place this exchange in the public domain. Continue reading →

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Moving to War: Critical Events that hardened Mahinda Rajapaksa’s Resolve in 2006

 Michael Roberts, courtesy of Colombo Telegraph, 27 September 2016, where the title is “From Hesitant Compromise to Resolve: Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2006”

 fig-2-keb-bus The carnage caused by the LTTE’s claymore mine attack on a civilian bus at Kebithigollewa was a major factor in hardening Prsident Rajapaksa’s resolve …keb-22-archives-dailynews-lk

Delineating the fault lines and events that generated the ethnic conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese Sri Lanka since 1948 will demand careful historical work that builds upon the many studies by a battery of scholars thus far — referring here to a whole line of intellectual work extending from Howard Wriggins through Robert Kearney, KM de Silva, SJ Tambiah and AJ Wilson to Nira Wickremasinghe. Historical causation is usually multi-factorial not singular. It is also marked by critical episodes and temporal moments. Each episode and/or phase is likely as not to be generated by several causes involving a multiplicity of factors. Continue reading →

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The Rajasingams and Their Profound Legacies

Rajan Hoole, being the text of speech delivered at Trimmer Hall, Jaffna, 22 September 2016… and reproduced in the Daily News with the title “The Rajasingam Legacy: A Quest for Quality”

  rajasinghamsin1990parentsofdrrajani aaa-rajasingambavinck-rajasingham

After nightfall on 21st September 1989, Rajasingam Master called on his bicycle at my mother’s home quite unexpectedly and delivered his pithy message, “Rajini has been shot.” His voice showed no evident emotion. After a brief exchange of words, he turned back. He was stoic, incorruptible, who lived by his strong sense of duty. Master, his wife MahilaAcca, and their daughters, Nirmala, Rajini, Sumathy and Vasuki were familiar to us from childhood days in the St. James’ Church choir. Had Master been more ambitious during his university days, he would have left his mark as an outstanding mathematician in our university. What he did as a school master at Hartley and Jaffna College was no less important. His zeal for catching hold of students who seemed to be in need of inspiration and getting them to work Mathematics problems remained a passion with him to the end of his life.  rajani-t Rajani Thiranagama nee Rajasingam

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Lakshmi de Silva: An Inspiration as an Academic

KS Sivakumran in Daily News, where the title is  “Lakshmi de Silva – an academic to reflect upon”

aa-lakshmiA remarkable translator, teacher and a poet in English and perhaps in Sinhala too is the unassuming and scholarly Lakshmi de Silva. She is one who had encouraged me to write and was persistently asking me to bring some of my articles in the press to be collected in book form. Last year, Vijitha Yapa Publications published a collection of 26 poems of her under the title Reflections running to only 35 pages qualifying its stature as a booklet. Invariably a printed book should have at least 50 pages according to the National Library Services Board. And yet the quality of her poems is uniquely of a high standard in the classical sense. Continue reading →

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Lili Marlene — All about That 1944 Documentary

The True Story of Lili Marlene (1944 documentary) , 23 February 2015

 This is the full version of the famous documentary film laying out the background story of the song ‘Lili Marlene’ which was made in 1944 by Humphrey Jennings using actors as well as authentic war-time footage and personalities with connections to the song. Hans Leip wrote the words of ‘Lilli Marleen’ in 1915 when he was just 22 but the music, by Norbert Schultze, to the poem was not composed until 1938 and the first recording was by Danish singer Lale (pronounced ‘Lahlay’) Anderson in 1939, then titled “The Girl Under the Lantern”, and sung in German. The song was adopted by the Nazis and was broadcast on a propaganda radio programme for some 500 continuous nights and was eventually heard by the Eighth Army who tuned in to the programme having no other entertainment and then adopted it as their own, so it became the most popular war-time song for both sides of the conflict. Arguably the most famous version is by Marlene Dietrich who changed the spelling to her name, but there have been many different lyric versions written in translation… There are interesting clips in the film of Lale Anderson herself singing her famous song, though nowhere is there mention of the poem written by Hans Leip in 1915.

The copyright of this film belongs to the original owners.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbnHaOUWE-E

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