James D'Alwis The government has announced that 2012 will be the year of trilinguality; a key plank of the platform of Mano Ganeshan who placed third in the preference vote tally in the recent Colombo Municipal council elections, was equality of language. It is rare for a government and opposition to agree on anything, but in relation to the this ...

Dr. Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri is right to point out in his recent essay, “History after the War: Challenges for Post War Reconciliation,” that “[t]here is an important factor that gives an extra advantage to the (sic) Sinhala-Buddhist historical consciousness. The historical narrative that is linked with the latter is generally compatible with the dominant paradigm of the modern historical scholarship ...

What about the beginning and middle, is my question, though simple in construction, grave and serious in its import. Surely, from the burning of the public library in Jaffna, to the massacre of pilgrims at the sacred Bo tree in Anuradhapura, to the massacre of women and children in Sathurukondan, to the killing of worshippers in the mosques in Kattankudy, ...

“The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else,” V. S. Naipaul’s narrator muses in A Bend in the River, his classic, subtle rewriting of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “but at the same time, they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.” And so it is with Pawns of Peace, ...

“Police have opened investigations into an attack on a Buddhist centre in Wanduramba, Galle, where tear gas was used to control crowds on Sunday evening,” says a news report published in a National news paper website on Monday last, going on to tell us that, “[t]he protest was launched against a group alleged to be practising Buddhism against the ...

The Sinhala service of the BBC, reported a few hours ago, of an "alarming rise of sexual abuse in Jaffna." They quoted Dr S Sivaruban, the Judicial Medical Officer (JMO) of the Jaffna Teaching hospital: "There were 102 cases of sexual abuse reported in Jaffna in 2010 and it has increased to 182 in 2011," said Dr Sivaruban. This, sad, ...

Dr. Pradeep Jeganathan & Dr. Malathi de Alwis The broadening of the Colombo Biennale’s themes from “Imagining Peace” to “Becoming” is indeed a welcome development. Narrow themes, we feel, produce mechanical, conceptually repetitive art in a cloying, superficial attempt to be ‘political’ in a narrow way. This is not an argument against the politics, implicit or explicit, of an aesthetic ...

I have been asking myself, again and again, my question of last week, and other weeks in different ways – why is there a demand for an inquiry into the final stages of the civil war, but no demand for an inquiry into previous moments of the war. In fact, when the evaluation of the Norwegian peace efforts was published, ...

The Court of Appeal today issued an order on writ application C.A (writ) Application 411/2012, filed by attorneys of the Chief Justice, seeking writs of certiorari and prohibition to quash the findings of the PSC constituted to report on the articles of impeachment framed against her by members of the house of parliament. It has been widely been reported that ...

Sanath Jayasuriya, then, began to feature on this team, after he, with some reluctance, retired from the other team. It is not his enunciation, articulation, or use of the definite article that draws my ear to his voice when he speaks, but the deep, careful, and concisely put meta descriptions that add value to the images we see. No doubt ...

In any event, those who are investing in the North should understand the special responsibility placed on them; help build a real civil society in that province. Support fundamental rights; and make the possible suturing of economic growth to constitutional freedoms a strong one. This doesn’t take tub thumping or flag waving. It’s quiet work, and it needs to be done.

I think I was supposed to debate the right and left of it. I didn’t. I proposed, all out of the blue, that if we have a cabinet of 27, let’s say, each province would elect 3 members. One of these must be from a poorly served, under build area in the province. We have nine provinces so it would ...

There were, and I suppose still are expectations, The channel four video, “Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields: Unpunished War Crimes,” it’s going to go ‘viral.’ My sense is, no not really. But it’s pretty close to that viral edge though, and I think my tips are really going to help the next show in the series. I must say I ...

There were, and I suppose still are expectations, The channel four video, “Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields: Unpunished War Crimes,” it’s going to go ‘viral.’ My sense is, no not really. But it’s pretty close to that viral edge though, and I think my tips are really going to help the next show in the series. I must say I ...

For our part, as Sri Lankans, we need to own our own democracy, which is, beyond any doubt withering in the winds. There is a need, as I have been saying, to make our fundamental rights our business. While elections to the Northern Provincial council under the 13th amendment should be held sooner, rather than later (there is now some ...

The much touted C4 show, Killing Fields 2: Unpunished War Crimes is out. I’m calling the first one C4KF and the second C4CU. Indi Samarajeewa has a great review of it; where he re-frames the whole thing; another review in the UK Telegraph just repeats the C4 stuff, and I will get to that at the end of this ...

For our part, as Sri Lankans, we need to own our own democracy, which is, beyond any doubt withering in the winds. There is a need, as I have been saying, to make our fundamental rights our business. While elections to the Northern Provincial council under the 13th amendment should be held sooner, rather than later (there is now some ...

(Photo by Chandragupta Amarasinghe) The modern history of Sri Lanka is punctuated by two massive events that we are yet to fully understand; the civilian led anti-Tamil violence of July 1983, and the armed forces led destruction of LTTE in May, 2009. Other events that might claim to be such ruptures in temporality, events that structure both time and ...

The pages of fiction, said Gunadasa Amarasekara at the launch of his new novel Rupantharanaya, are enabled by the sensitively lived life, and the hundreds who had gathered at the SLFI, to hear half dozen intellectuals speak on his writing seemed to agree. I do too; it is difficult think of any other writer who exemplifies this art, who ...

I never agreed with Neelan Tiruchelvam, all that very much. And that was from the very beginning, the very first time I met him in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in '84 or '85. He was visiting Harvard to give a lecture and was of course a renowned Tamil liberal intellectual of great stature. I, a lowly but angry undergraduate at MIT, ...