A young bhikkhu among demonstrators outside an UN office in Colombo, where some Sinhalese expressed virulent protests against Navy Pillai, August 2013 – Pic by Ishara Kodikara for AFP
Pic from the Nation
Anthony Loyd, in The Times and The Australian, 20 September 2013, where the title is” Will I die today? Face to face with jihadists fueled by hate”
A TEENAGE foreign fighter stepped out into the dusty road before us. Turbanned and wild-eyed, he stared into our car with a gun in one hand, jabbing a finger in repeated accusation with the other. Catalysed with anger, long hair falling over his shoulders, he spoke with a voice that was a tumble of loathing. “ISIS,” murmured our interpreter, alias “Hamza”, confirming we had just driven into a checkpoint controlled by al-Qa’ida’s affiliate in Syria. The very word seemed to suck the oxygen out of the vehicle. Infamous for abduction and torture of its enemies, hatred of Westerners and a radical interpretation of sharia, it is believed to be holding two dozen forlorn foreign hostages inside Syria. Continue reading
Filed under Al Qaeda, american imperialism, arab regimes, australian media, fundamentalism, historical interpretation, Islamic fundamentalism, jihad, law of armed conflict, life stories, martyrdom, military strategy, politIcal discourse, power politics, religiosity, suicide bombing, trauma, world events & processes
Courtesy of The Australian, 20 September 2013
ASYLUM-SEEKERS and refugee advocates are upset that the Abbott government has ordered the Immigration Department to stop granting permanent protection ahead of the reintroduction of temporary protection visas. In its plan to stop boatloads more of asylum-seekers arriving in Australia, the government will use the TPVs to force genuine refugees to reapply for protection every few years in case circumstances in their home countries improve to the point where they can safely return. The move has sparked outrage among refugee advocates, who described the reintroduction of TPVs as “vindictive”. Continue reading
Richard Koenigsberg
Douglas Haig was the British General who planned and executed the Battle of the Somme, which began on July 1, 1916. Visiting the battlefield on March 31, 1917, Haig reflected (De Groot, 1989) upon the hundreds of thousands of British casualties: “Credit must be paid to the splendid young officers who were able time and time again to attack these tremendous positions…To many it meant certain death, and all must have known that before they started.”
Sudharshan Seneviratne, with original title in The Island of 4th August 2001 being Situating history and ‘The Historian’s Craft’**
a review of The Institutions of Ancient Ceylon from Ins criptions (from 3 century BC to 830 AD) Volume 1
by Lakshman S. Perera, containing also an Introduction and supplementary notes by Sirima Kiribamune and Piyatissa Senanayake, ( Published by the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Kandy, Sri Lanka, 322 pages and hard cover, 2001).
The Antecedents: My first encounter with Professor Lakshman Perera was in 1974 when I visited the University library at Peradeniya as a postgraduate student. It was never a formal introduction-not even a personal meeting. Yet it was close enough for me to admire the man and his work. The silent space afforded by the Ceylon Room at the University of Peradeniya library was ideally suited for a dialogue with the past. I reached out to the past through the volumes of a doctoral thesis-so immaculately completed a year before I was born! Page after page three volumes of information unfolded a dimension hitherto less known in the history of Sri Lanka. This study, I thought, will always remain as a testimony to the ‘historian’s craft’ (apologies to Marc Bloch) so purposefully executed by a scholar with a sober perception to the study of history. Continue reading
Greg Sheridan in The Australian, 13 September 2013
GOTABAYA Rajapaksa and Selvarasa Pathmanathan used to be the deadliest of enemies. Now they have the same message. I meet the two within a period of 24 hours in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s largest city.
Pathmanathan, or KP as he’s widely known, was for several months in 2009 the supreme leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, for many years the world’s most ruthless and bloody terrorist group. For a long time before that he was effectively No 2 to the Tigers’ leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran. When Prabhakaran was killed in May 2009, Pathmanathan took over the LTTE leadership until he was arrested in September of that year. Continue reading
Filed under australian media, authoritarian regimes, communal relations, Eelam, governance, historical interpretation, Indian Ocean politics, Indian traditions, law of armed conflict, life stories, LTTE, military strategy, nationalism, politIcal discourse, population, power politics, prabhakaran, Rajapaksa regime, Rajiv Gandhi, reconciliation, rehabilitation, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, suicide bombing, Tamil migration, truth as casualty of war, world events & processes
I: Anoma Pieris: “Avian Geographies: An Inquiry into Nationalist Consciousness in Medieval Lanka,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 33: 3, 336—362…..presented here as Abstract….
Does the concept of a bounded national geography predate modernity and colonization in South Asia? Does it carry with it particular internal processes and prejudices that have withstood decolonization? Was it produced through an urban imagination? Continue reading
Courtesy of the Sunday Times, 7 September 2013 …. http://www.sundaytimes.lk/130908/plus/mozart-comes-to-mullaitivu-60941.html
On August 26, four busloads of children from three schools in Kurunegala travelled to Thunukkai in Mullaitivu to join the children of the north for a four-day long residential workshop as they prepared to work yet again as an orchestra. The children have worked together on three residential programmes over three years and so were seeing their partners in the programme yet again.
The children of Kurunegala stayed at Yohapuram Maha Vidyalayam, Thunukkai for the UNITE programme for 2013 which was sponsored by JICA Sri Lanka. Nearly 250 children of the 500 children on the programme gathered together in the farming hamlet of Thunukkai, which was a hive of activity. Continue reading
thuppahi
