November 24, 2014 · 4:20 pm

War Horrors manufactured by Norwegian Moral Crusaders to feed their Campaigns?

Erik Fau, courtesy of AFP, 15 November 2014, where the title reads “Syrian hero boy’ video hoax by Norwegian filmmaker”

A viral video showing a Syrian boy rescuing a girl under gunfire, watched online by millions of viewers, was faked by a Norwegian film crew, according to its director.

SYRIAN BOY still  A Syrian boy walks with his bicycle through the devastated Sukari district in the northern city of Aleppo, on November 13, 2014 (AFP Photo/Baraa al-Halabi)

Posted on YouTube on Monday, the “Syrian hero boy” video was shot on location in Malta last summer with professional actors, and directed by 34-year-old Norwegian Lars Klevberg, who hoped to provoke a debate on children in war zones. “The motivation behind the production and the Internet release of the film was to spur debate, urge action on behalf of innocent children all over the world who are affected by war,” Klevberg said in a press release posted on Twitter late Friday. “We are pleased that the film spread widely and that the debate has indeed focused on the children’s lives during war.” Continue reading →

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November 24, 2014 · 3:35 pm

Treachery and Ethnicity in Portuguese Representations of Sri Lanka

ALAN STRATHERNAlan Strathern a reprint of a chapter in Richard Roque And Kim Wagner (eds.) Engaging Colonial Knowledge, London, Palgrave, 2012, pp. 217-34.

Writing from the imperial capital of Goa in the 1630s, the official chronicler of the Portuguese East, António Bocarro, turned his attention southwards to ‘the enemy that we have in this island of Ceylon’. This bountiful island was the only place in Asia where the Portuguese had launched a successful project of extensive territorial conquest. They were now directly ruling the lowlands and engaged in a ceaseless attempt to defeat the island’s last independent kingdom, the highland bastion of Kandy[i]. Bocarro’s verdict was not flattering: ‘all the Sinhalese are by their nature treacherous and inconstant and for any advantage they would kill their own father’.

He was not only referring to the recalcitrant inhabitants of Kandy but also the lowland people who were considered vassals of the king in Lisbon. He lamented the ease with which these vassals would ‘cross from us to the enemy, and return from the enemy to us’. He went on to say, ‘But with a big difference, because when on our side they never refrain from being ready for any treachery against us, however obligated they may be to us for benefits received from the Portuguese. And also, so strong and firm are they in their hatred of us and their subjection, that even those who have showed themselves always faithful and have proved it with their own lives [in our service], confess that even unto the grave, they will not be able to give up that hatred…’[ii] Continue reading →

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November 24, 2014 · 3:03 pm

Explorations in Sri Lankan Archaeology with Raj Somadeva PART 3

Darshanie Ratnawalli, … being the third part of an interview with Professor Raj Somadeva published in  The Nation (print edition here) on Sunday, 23rd November 2014

6Somadeva and team at the site of the ‘yaksha’ inscription, a cave in Tamketiya, Nailgala, Kaltota.

The last part of the interview of Professor Raj Somadeva with Darshanie Ratnawalli continued from last week.

DR: To which period do you assign your ‘yaksha’ inscription?

RS: Frequently we used to ascribe the inscriptions written in early form (angular style) of the Brahmi letters found in Sri Lanka to 250 BCE which is contemporaneous with the reign of Emperor Ashoka in India.  In that conventional sense, our present inscription could also be ascribed to that date. But the thinking on the antiquity of the Brahmi script has now been gradually changing. I would like to quote a very particular case in this regard. Dr. Siran Deraniyagala, as you know, a well-known archaeologist in the country has unearthed a potsherd with an early form of Brahmi letters engraved on it found in an excavation carried out in the Mahapali refectory in Anuradhapura. The letters written reads as ‘ tayakute’ of which the meaning is uncertain. The soil layer where this particular potsherd was found has been radiometrically dated to a period between 600 and 500 BCE. This finding is stunning. It has provided an empirical framework to the early use of Brahmi script not only in Sri Lanka but also in the greater South Asian region. In 1970s, Professor Paranavitana has also concurred with the dating of the use of Brahmi letters before Ashoka. Anyway I suppose we need further research on this subject within a positive line of thinking. Continue reading →

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November 24, 2014 · 3:09 am

Asian Resurgence despite Western Media Misrepresentations, says Mabubhani

Kalinga Seneviratne, reporting on the Global Outlook’ conference  in Daily News, 24 November 2014, with title reading as “Asians need look NEAR EAST not Far West”

Speakers at the annual ‘Global Outlook’ conference on Friday (Nov. 21) organized by Singapore’s Straits Times group predicted a promising Asian resurgence in 2015 and called for Asians to learn to look to the Near East for inspiration and not the Far West.

MAHBANIat conference“The export-led growth model of the past will no longer work for the major Asian economies” warned keynote speaker, Professor Kishore Mahbubani, Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, addressing a gathering of over 400 business people, bankers, academics and media practitioners. But he argued that Asia will experience a “new golden era of peace and prosperity” driven by its own burgeoning middle classes and visionary new leaders. Continue reading →

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November 23, 2014 · 1:37 pm

Meaningful Violence: Reflections on the Dynamic of Human Sacrifice

William Harman, reprint from Soundings An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. LXXXIII, No. 1, Spring 2000, pp. 119-35…. Note year of presentation, viz. 2000….. so that, clearly, this essay is not informed by any writings on the topic after 1999. See Addendum at end.

WILLIAM HARMAN

I  begin with two vignettes:

ONE. In April, 1989 in the Texas-Mexico border town of Mata­moros, Mexico, the remains of thirteen human bodies – mostly bones, boiled entrails, and chunks of flesh -were discovered in a large cooking cauldron inside a shed on property occupied by a group of drug smugglers who practiced a brand of religion and sympathetic magic called Palo Mayombe. The tradition, with roots we can trace to Africa, proposes that the vital forces of sacrificial victims offered to appropriate spirits will provide ritual practitioners with unusual powers. Members of the group were strict abstainers from alcohol and drugs. The “highs” they experienced, they said, came from the spirits they worshiped. The leader of this group, Adolfo Constanzo, had convinced members that their efforts to evade law enforcement authorities were guar­anteed success if they could sacrifice to the spirits carefully selected humans resembling the people the group sought to evade. The thirteen victims included five American college students on Spring Break in southern Texas. The others were Mexican. The sacrifices apparently involved ritual murders, usually stabbings, dismemberment of the bodies, cooking and ceremonial eating of portions of the remains. Authorities were able to apprehend the group partly because of the overconfidence the rituals instilled. Many believed that they had truly become invisible and invincible (Gallerne 1993).

a  Goat sacrifice in Tamilnadu–Pic by Harman Continue reading →

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November 23, 2014 · 9:58 am

Sacrifice Lost and Found–Colonial India and Postcolonial Lanka

Masakazu Tanaka, courtesy of  ZlNBUN 1999 No. 34(1) 127-146 …… http://www.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~shakti/%20preSacrifice.html — Readers should atend to the date of publication. The article is re-presented here because this essay is not widely known. Note, too, that Tanaka is the author of Patrons, Devotees and Goddesses, Kyoto, Kyoto University Institute for Research in the Humanities, 1991.

We came, we saw, we were horrified,  and intervened(1).
Notre societe n’est pas celled du spectacle, mais de la surveillance(2).

goat asacrifice ar Kamakhya temple a goat sacrifice at ar Kamakhya temple

1. The underlying viewpoint in the colonial and the postcolonial

This article analyses how the colonial government and the post-independence state viewed and dealt with rituals involving violence that were rooted in the regional community(3). I refer to these rituals as “sacrifice” for the reasons that I will give below. These rituals, of which animal sacrifice is a typical example, have almost always been negatively characterized as “savage”, “brutal” , “violent”, “unhygienic” and “superstitious”. Here I will consider the cases of hook-swinging, fire walking and animal sacrifice in South India (the Madras Presidency) as a 19th century British colony and in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) shortly after independence. Continue reading →

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November 23, 2014 · 5:08 am

Reconciliation and National Intergration demands the Widespread Use of Tamil

Eran Wickramaratne, from The Island, 22 November 2014, where the title is “Tamil must be more widely used for true national integration”

ERAN WDuring the colonial period the Sinhala speaking people were disadvantaged by the obstacles to communicate in their mother tongue. After independence and the adoption of the ‘Sinhala Only’ policy we disadvantaged the Tamil speaking people. This country has remained divided primarily due to the non recognition of the Tamil language. This situation was corrected when this assembly adopted Sinhala and Tamil as the official language of the country. Constitutionally it was a progressive move to put right that which was wrong.

Despite the official language policy there is little visible signs of improvement in the implementation of the policy. Continue reading →

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November 21, 2014 · 7:49 am

The Poet Richard Murphy’s Account of Killings in the 1980s in Sri Lanka

Padraig Colman, Extracts from his “Rambling Ruminations of an Irishman in Sri Lanka,” at http://pcolman.wordpress.com/2014/11/20/richard-murphy-long-version/

MURPHY 2 ………. I was surprised to learn that Murphy spent a great deal of his childhood in Ceylon where his father, Sir William Lindsay Murphy was the last colonial Mayor of Colombo (and first Municipal Commissioner from 1937 to 1941). Richard was taken to Ceylon at the age of six weeks, having been born in a damp, decaying big house in the west of Ireland. The young Richard Murphy spent holidays in Diatalawa, which is not far from my home. After leaving Ceylon, Sir William succeeded the Duke of Windsor as Governor of the Bahamas. Continue reading →

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November 18, 2014 · 2:15 pm

The War in Sri Lanka and Post-War Propaganda

Michael Roberts, courtesy of Groundviews where it appeared on 7th Nov. 2014.    

Mike at great WALL This Memorandum was sent to Geneva on 14th November and again later and its receipt was acknowledged. The reproduction here contains additional hyperlinks – that is more than the original Memo/GV version. It is also embellished with specific cartographical and pictorial illustrations at one remove: the Cross-References marked “Pics” can be found in the sister-posting in Thuppahi. In my reading, no study of the last phase of Eelam War IV can be conducted by armchair-intellectuals or lawyers with no experience of battles and limited visual and geographical sensibilities. My emphasis on visual aids in the two-volume Tamil Person and State (Colombo, Vijitha Yapa Publications, 2014) is an attempt to overcome my own shortcomings in this area of expertise.

Issapriya and soldies -white flagIsaipriya captured –– Pic from http://white-flags.org/

Dear Sandra Beidas and OISL Team,  

As a Sri Lankan Australian and academic I have been collecting and analysing the material on the last phase of the war in Sri Lanka for six years now. I come across new evidence regularly in the midst of misinformation and dis-information that is a facet of the propaganda war that has been sharpening since the LTTE began to retreat in 2008. Since the volume of data is huge, a thorough investigation calls for assiduous work by a team which includes those who are culturally competent and able to discern manipulation. They must transcend the clever tactics of misinformation and fabrication from both sides, with the additional awareness that the Tamil migrant networks outdo the government (GSL) on this front by a proverbial mile.[1] Continue reading →

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November 18, 2014 · 2:04 pm

Cartographic & Photographic Illustrations in support of the Memorandum Analysing the War in Sri Lanka and Its Propaganda Debates

Michael Roberts

No survey of Eelam War IV — especially its last phase from late 2008 to May 2009 — can be pursued without some comprehension of the unfolding geographical context and some attention to illustrative pictorial details of the LTTE ditch-and-bund system of defense as well as the defensive deployment of a congealed mass of people and Tiger personnel from circa mid-February to mid-May 2009 within what is best referred to as the “Last Redoubt.”[1] Attention to pictorial evidence must obviously embrace evidence of shelling and casualties (both injured and dead) as well as prima facie instances suggestive of extra-judicial execution by both sides. These in their turn must sit alongside the graphic photographs of clusters of people streaming or struggling across the Nandikadal Lagoon or crossing sand and scrub terrain in April and May 2009 after the Sri Lankan Army infiltrated and penetrated the Tiger arena in the Last Redoubt…. and released them from their corralled situation.[2]

1-UNITED-NATIONS-SRI-LANKA-facebook+ Pic 1: The Fate of the Corralled Tamil Populace of  Thamilīlam = on the move constantly — from mid 2008 in some instances — Pic from en.wikipedia.com Continue reading →

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