Filed under landscape wondrous, the imaginary and the real, tourism
Philip Fernando **
The WikiLeaks that Dr. Michael Roberts crisply detailed in his Blog confirms that the US embassy in Colombo looked woefully uninformed during the last phase of Eelam War IV. The US ambassadors and their cohorts knew only an inkling of what they constantly thought they were on top of. Countering Sri Lanka’s drift towards an Asia-based (China in particular) alignment – away from US radar, the Colombo embassy changed gears from good intelligence gathering to a more subjective probing — and seems to have been sucked into a quicker ‘regime-change mode’. WikiLeaks indicates that the Rajapaksa administration—indeed the Sri Lankan polity- -and the US embassy were on two parallel lines that never met. Here are a few instances where the US embassy failed to grasp or interpret data …. With the WikiLeaks quotations being in italics and numbered 1 to 6 – and my comments following). Continue reading
Filed under accountability, american imperialism, authoritarian regimes, democratic measures, discrimination, governance, historical interpretation, LTTE, military strategy, politIcal discourse, power politics, Rajapaksa regime, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, slanted reportage, sri lankan society, Tamil civilians, the imaginary and the real, truth as casualty of war, world events & processes
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This set of books is the latest anthology from Michael Roberts that caters to the reading public in Lanka and elsewhere by collecting his essaying interventions in the public realm, usually on web, within one cover. These articles were written between 2009 and 2012. Two long articles, however, are new products drafted in 2012. One explores the significance of a Karaiyar caste coterie within the LTTE, while clarifying the ideological currents that inspired their opposition to the Sinhala-dominated state. The other clarifies the circumstances of the Tamil peoples within the de facto to state of Thamilīlam from 2002 onwards and especially within the crucible of war in “the Vanni Pocket” in 2009 and thence to the detention centres at Mänik Farm. Continue reading
Filed under american imperialism, authoritarian regimes, caste issues, constitutional amendments, cultural transmission, disaster relief team, disparagement, Fascism, historical interpretation, Hitler, IDP camps, island economy, life stories, LTTE, NGOs, photography, power politics, prabhakaran, Rajapaksa regime, security, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, slanted reportage, sri lankan society, suicide bombing, Tamil civilians, Tamil migration, tamil refugees, Tamil Tiger fighters, the imaginary and the real, TNA, truth as casualty of war, UN reports, unusual people, vengeance, violence of language, war crimes, world events & processes, zealotry
Michael Roberts
A friend in England recently gave me a set of photographs that he had snapped of a bus shelter for the general public along a road in the province of Uva. It had been constructed as a public charity by the parents of a young Sinhalese soldier who had died in combat during Eelam War IV. As I live abroad and my regular visits are mostly to Colombo I had not noticed such outcomes before; while my nourishment in non-Buddhist familial settings had not exposed me to this phenomenon (though I could make some conjectures about the motivations and purposes of such acts).
I decided to test these surmises and to seek data of an anecdotal kind by posing a question of fact-cum-interpretation before a number of friends and acquaintances. Some live abroad; a few are academics and a few are from urbanised middle class background. But a number also had deep roots in rural countryside arenas by virtue of upbringing and/or contemporary residence and/or occupational experiences. Continue reading
Filed under Uncategorized
Michael Roberts
During the course of my regular visits to Sri Lanka in the 2000s for familial and research purposes I happened to see a television programme that focused on the armed services of Sri Lanka in a captivating manner so as to encourage recruitment. That short burst of pictures and text surprised me. “Api Wenuwen Api” (“We for Us”) was a far cry from the wooden and prosaic campaigns associated with government departments. It was slick, catchy and motivating.
I have since discovered that it was initiated in 2007 and designed by a professional advertising agency located in Colombo: namely, TRIAD ADVERTISING. Their own resume of the programme Api Wenuwen Api is now featured as an independent posting in thuppahi.i
Commando units mark the capture of the LTTE’s mani stronghold at Thoppigala in the eastern Province in August 2007
President Rajapaksa and General Sarath Fonseka mark the victory in May 2009 with a symbolic handshake
Api Wenuwen Api is now known to have contributed to the continuing enlistment of volunteers to the Sri Lankan Army, Navy and Air Force in the late 2000s. An official letter of thanks from the Secretary for the Ministry of Defence, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, speaks of its “phenomenal success,” while explicitly refusing to specify statistics.ii However, figures from elsewhere indicate that the SL Army recruited as many as 36,021 and 33,457 personnel in 2007 and 2008 respectively (De Silva-Ranasinghe, “Good Education,” 2009g: 5). As the phrase highlighted in red indicates, in my conjecture many factors contributed to this tale of mobilisation and it may be erroneous to attribute a revolutionary impact to Api Wenuwen Api. Continue reading
Filed under accountability, authoritarian regimes, economic processes, education, Eelam, historical interpretation, island economy, life stories, LTTE, patriotism, politIcal discourse, power politics, prabhakaran, propaganda, Rajapaksa regime, security, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, Tamil Tiger fighters, the imaginary and the real, truth as casualty of war, world events & processes, zealotry
Ball-by-Ball through Wikileaks: US Embassy Despatches from Colombo, 2009: ONE
The issues associated with Eelam War IV and its last stages have drawn a huge array of reports, books, essays, video presentations and commentary. For a single mind to secure mastery of the material is a gargantuan task, well-nigh impossible in fact. Though I have essayed commentary on the topic from early 2009,[1] I meet new facts and useful new contentions on a regular basis.[2]
Recently, this problem has been exacerbated. An old treasure trove has reached me through the good offices of Citizen Silva.[3] This is the result of the espionage work of Julian Assange and those associated with WIKILEAKS: they have disclosed the whole range of American official documents from the Sri Lankan end. My store now has those in the years 2005-2010. As my initial foray I am slowly working through those for the first half of 2009.
Here I introduce a partially distilled summary of selected despatches from US ambassador Robert Blake (or his aides) to their superiors in the State Department in Washington. I do so in temporal sequence. More will follow from time to time. I encourage readers to essay commentary. In due course I will fashion an article myself. Continue reading
Filed under accountability, american imperialism, authoritarian regimes, centre-periphery relations, constitutional amendments, democratic measures, economic processes, governance, historical interpretation, Indian Ocean politics, landscape wondrous, life stories, LTTE, military strategy, nationalism, politIcal discourse, power politics, prabhakaran, propaganda, Rajapaksa regime, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, slanted reportage, sri lankan society, Tamil civilians, tamil refugees, Tamil Tiger fighters, terrorism, the imaginary and the real, truth as casualty of war, UN reports, war crimes, world events & processes
The year was 2007, the Sri Lankan Forces were facing their darkest hour. The ceasefire had been breached, dashing the hopes and dragging the morale of an entire nation down. The Tiger rebels were stronger, having reinforced and strengthened their positions during the ceasefire. The armed forces were taking a battering on the battlefront as well as in the media, and inevitably, in the hearts and minds of all Sri Lankans. Continue reading
Neil De Votta, in Asian Survey Vol. LXIX, No. 6, Nov-Dec. 2009 …. access via University of California Press and http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/as.2009.49.6.1021
Abstract: The ethnocentric policies successive Sri Lankan governments pursued against
the minority Tamils pushed them to try to secede, but the Liberation Tigers of
Tamil Eelam’s (LTTE) immanent contradictions—the quest for state-building and independence juxtaposed with fascistic rule and terrorist practices—undermined the separatist movement and irreparably weakened the Tamil community. The Sri Lankan government’s extra-constitutional counter terrorism strategies under Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa helped defeat the LTTE,
but the attendant militarism, culture of impunity especially among the defense forces, and political machinations bode further ill for the island’s democratic and polyethnic future.
Keywords: Sri Lanka, LTTE, eelam, terrorism, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalism Continue reading
thuppahi
