Groundviews, 14 March 2023, where the title reads “Military to Face a Day of Reckoning Over the Disappeared”
In a landmark case last month, the Vavuniya High Court ordered the army to produce three LTTE members who had surrendered to the military in May 2019 and have been missing ever since, in response to a habeas corpus case filed by their wives.
Filed under accountability, atrocities, authoritarian regimes, communal relations, discrimination, disparagement, Eelam, ethnicity, female empowerment, governance, historical interpretation, human rights, law of armed conflict, legal issues, life stories, LTTE, nationalism, patriotism, politIcal discourse, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, Tamil civilians, Tamil Tiger fighters, trauma, truth as casualty of war, unusual people, vengeance, war crimes, world events & processes, zealotry
Sidharth Monga, in ESPNcricinfo.com, 22 March 2023, “Zampa and Co stifle India to take series 2-1″
Reuters Item, 22 March 2023
The Solomon Islands has awarded a multi-million-dollar contract to a Chinese state company to upgrade an international port in Honiara in a project funded by the Asian Development Bank, an official of the island nation said on Wednesday.
The United States and its allies, including Australia, New Zealand and Japan, have held concerns that China has ambitions to build a naval base in the region since the Solomon Islands struck a security pact with Beijing last year.
Anoma Pieris presents her work on “Pacific War Incarceration Camps” …. to the world
While there have been many excellent studies on colonial penal environments in the Asia Pacific region, mainly prisons, very few scholars have approached the wartime internment and prisoner of war camps associated with the Pacific War as comparable carceral spaces that might offer deeper insights into imperial and national forms of political sovereignty and border conflict. There are few comparative studies across geographical areas or imperial regimes. Sarah Kovner’s book Prisoners of Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps (Harvard University Press 2020), though focused on Japanese military imperialism, is important for that focus, and increasingly, several anthologies have offered us a similar analytical breadth by juxtaposing numerous national perspectives. The Architecture of Confinement: Incarceration Camps of the Pacific War (Cambridge University Press, 2022) is similarly ambitious in its scope. It uses the arc of the Pacific Basin to frame a comparative study including Australia, Singapore, North America and Japan as important nodal points in the wartime incarceration camp geography. Its aim is to investigate the impact of the war on settler societies, more so than on the imperial contestants dominating both theatres of World War II.
Anoma Pieris and Lynne Horiuchi at former Cowra POW Camp site in 2016 … photo: Anoma Pieris.
Filed under accountability, art & allure bewitching, Australian culture, authoritarian regimes, British colonialism, centre-periphery relations, cultural transmission, economic processes, ethnicity, heritage, historical interpretation, landscape wondrous, life stories, meditations, military expenditure, Pacific Ocean issues, patriotism, politIcal discourse, self-reflexivity, travelogue, unusual people, world events & processes
A Vale in[1] Appreciation, From Miss Norah Roberts Fort, Galle, 10th July 1976
Letter to: The Editor, “Sunday Observer”, Colombo
T.W.ROBERTS ……………………………. An Appreciation[2]
At the age of 17 my father, Thomas Webb Roberts won the Barbados Scholarship from Queens College, Barbados, and entered the Oxford University where he passed both the Classical Mods and Grates in the first class before he was 21. He topped the list in the open competition for the Colonial Civil Service. He also found time to get married when he was only 18, to my mother[3] who was also 18. When he came out to the C.C.S. at 21 he had 3 children, Isabella, T.F.C and G. C. Roberts.[4]
Filed under art & allure bewitching, British colonialism, cricket for amity, cultural transmission, economic processes, education, ethnicity, heritage, historical interpretation, landscape wondrous, life stories, patriotism, performance, Sri Lankan cricket, sri lankan society, travelogue, unusual people
An Observer in a Georgian Black Sea Resort Town
The NED/CIA have been using soft power to target the youth and media institutions in countries around the world. Take Georgia and Hong Kong as case studies.
Protestors rally against the draft law outside the Georgian parliament in Tbilisi.
In the last few weeks, the Georgian parliament, the elected representatives of the country, tried to introduce a Foreign Agent’s Register Act just like the one Australia introduced in 2018. The Georgian version used very similar language to the US foreign agent’s registration law which was passed in the 1930s. Suddenly, the Georgian youth came out on to street demanding the government reject this draft law. EU leaders labelled the proposed Georgian foreign register law as being “against EU values”, even though almost all EU countries have the same law. This is a repeat performance of what happened in Hong Kong in 2018-2019.
Filed under accountability, american imperialism, art & allure bewitching, centre-periphery relations, conspiracies, cultural transmission, discrimination, economic processes, education, foreign policy, governance, heritage, historical interpretation, Indian Ocean politics, landscape wondrous, legal issues, life stories, meditations, modernity & modernization, performance, politIcal discourse, power politics, propaganda, self-reflexivity, slanted reportage, sri lankan society, the imaginary and the real, truth as casualty of war, unusual people, world events & processes
Michael Roberts … Content of His Talk on this topic at the National Trust in Colombo in June 2018
The National Trust’s brief was for me to present motifs from the book People Inbetween. The Burghers and the Middle Class in the Transformations within Sri Lanka, 1790-1960s, (Ratmalana, Sarvodaya Book Publishing Services, 1989) and more specifically its first chapter viz. “Pejorative Phrases: the Anti-colonial Response and Sinhala Perceptions of the Self through Images of the Burghers”
Many think People Inbetween is a history of the Burghers. Not so. It is multi-faceted. It describes (a) the rise of the middle class in British times, an influential force within which the Burghers were a critical element and a vanguard in the questioning of British rule; (b) the initial strands in the development of Ceylonese nationalism and (c) the development of Colombo into a metropolitan hub that became the island’s hegemonic centre.
Filed under anti-racism, authoritarian regimes, British colonialism, centre-periphery relations, Colombo and Its Spaces, commoditification, communal relations, cultural transmission, demography, disparagement, economic processes, education, electoral structures, ethnicity, governance, heritage, historical interpretation, island economy, landscape wondrous, language policies, life stories, literary achievements, patriotism, performance, politIcal discourse, power politics, self-reflexivity, sri lankan society, taking the piss, unusual people, world events & processes
Serge De Silva Ranasinghe, in The Diplomat, 20 May 2010,*** where the title runs thus “Reflections on the Tigers”
A year after the LTTE’s defeat, evidence shows criticism of Sri Lanka’s army is misplaced, says Sergei DeSilva-Ranasinghe.
Tamil civilians reach safety across Nandhikadal Lagoon —Pix by SL army
A year ago this week, the Sri Lankan government officially declared victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in one of the most extraordinary counter-insurgency campaigns in recent times.
Filed under accountability, atrocities, authoritarian regimes, counter-insurgency, Eelam, ethnicity, historical interpretation, human rights, landscape wondrous, law of armed conflict, life stories, LTTE, martyrdom, military strategy, nationalism, politIcal discourse, propaganda, Rajapaksa regime, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, Tamil Tiger fighters, the imaginary and the real, truth as casualty of war, unusual people, war crimes, war reportage, world events & processes
Hemant Brar in Cricinfo, 17 March 2022 ... where the title reads “Rahul, Jadeja stay cool to seal tough chase of 189”
India 191 for 5 in 39.5 overs (Rahul 75*, Jadeja 45*, Starc 3-49) beat Australia 188 (Marsh 81, Shami 3-17, Siraj 3-29) by five wickets
Filed under cricket for amity, life stories, nationalism, performance, photography
VERITE Research Debt Update …. mid-March 2023
Sri Lanka is currently experiencing a financial crisis on an unprecedent scale. In May 2022, Sri Lanka defaulted on its debt servicing obligations for the first time in its history since independence. Against this backdrop, the Verité Research Debt Update provides a regular update for investors, policy makers and analysts, on the latest debt related financial news together with a brief analysis on the latest developments.
thuppahi
