All photos by the author. See full set of photos here. Snippets from hearings of the Presidential Commission to investigate into complaints regarding missing persons Sathurukondan, 09/09/1990 Q: Who is the missing person? A: Father, mother, brother, grandmother, grandfather, younger sister, older sister and her three children. An eerie silence followed these words that was only broken by the ...
Describe the group of people who curate MIXED RICE. Who are you? Where are you located? What are your ages? Educational and professional backgrounds? The people behind MIXED RICE are a collection of Sri Lankans from various backgrounds who are scattered across the globe from Sri Lanka to Australia, Japan, the US and UK. There are 10 active members ...
I have two Tamil friends. Their names are SriLankan Tamil and Tamil Sri Lankan. “Aren’t they the same?” you ask. No, the order in which the identifiers appear is significant, and is crucial for the rest of my story. My friend SriLankan Tamil (SLT for short) has the following take on the politics of Sri Lanka. History started on ...
Photo courtesy Club Madrid May 2014 marked the fifth anniversary of the brutal end of Sri Lanka’s civil war, amidst massive human rights violations by rival armies that killed thousands of civilians. While many Sri Lankans felt relieved to be free of the fear of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, communalism has since been allowed to flourish and ...
Image via 350 dot org It is very gratifying to see Pope Francis declare in his encyclical that, in terms of the Earth, “We have grown up thinking that we were her owners and dominators, authorized to loot her” he states that “The violence that exists in the human heart, wounded by sin, is also manifest in the symptoms ...
Photo courtesy Business Today Recently, the media reported that the Defence Secretary held a meeting in the Defence Ministry with a number of NGOs who had worked with the GOSL and the Commonwealth Foundation on the Peoples” Forum which was part of the activities of the 2013 Colombo CHOGM. These NGOs included representatives from the National Peace Council, the ...
On Sunday, for some unfathomable reason, Lakbima – a newspaper with high circulation – decided to run this cartoon. Lakbima currently has no Editor. Whether it’s acting editor, a senior journalist, saw and approved this cartoon before publication is not known. What is a matter of public record is the response to this cartoon after it was discovered by ...
Mohammed Usuff Mohammed Salie was born in 1877. He was the grandson of Mohamed Usuff, the Alim of the Kandawatte mosque in Galle, who was responsible for handwriting a Quran he knew by memory for his mosque. Prince Salie was sent at a young age to Madras for his religious education. Like generations before and after him he learned ...
Photo by DushiYanthini Kanagasabapathipillai I first visited Sri Lanka in 2003. I took leave from the Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship for a short humanitarian stint with a Sri Lankan NGO during a Norwegian Peace Initiative-ceasefire. The civil war spanning over 25 years ended with the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009. During my ...
Photo courtesy ABC The governments of Sri Lanka and Australia have recently reached an agreement over how to define the flow of undocumented migrants between these two countries. Both governments seem to agree on the benefits of using the category of “economic migrant” to refer to the thousands of young people who board small vessels to sail the long and ...
Photo by UN/Myriam Asmani, via World Education Blog The Grotius Lecture 2014[1] PREFACE Sometime at the end of 2012, while I was still the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary General for Children and Armed Conflict, I met an ambassador from an Asian country just before a United Nations Security Council meeting on children and armed conflict. He ...
Up until just two years ago, I have only known a Sri Lanka at war. And it was possibly just over a decade ago when I came about to comprehending that we were in fact, at war with ourselves. Having recently just returned from yet another visit to my ‘island of birth’, I found it quite upsetting to witness for ...
Photograph via VOA News It had to happen that way, and the break was only possible with a serious split within the regime. The moment had come for members of the SLFP to take the plunge. And when finally Vasantha Senanayake, MP, crossed over (the first member of the brave ‘suicide squad’) and mentioned that he knew who the ...
Photo courtesy New York Times ‘Her discourse, even when ‘theoretical’ or political, is never simple or linear or ‘objectivized’, universalized; she involves her story in history’. – Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement, The Newly Born Woman, 1986. My first meeting with Sunila Abeysekara was unforgettable. It was July 1976 and I was being held at Slave Island police station. I was ...
Priyanga Hettiarachi is the director and founder of RightsBusiness, founded after Priyanga’s return to Sri Lanka after a number of years working in Australia, The Netherlands and England. Given Priyanga’s award-winning work and experience, we begin our conversation around why he chose to come back to Sri Lanka, post-war. Given how loaded and contested a term human-rights is in ...
Image courtesy Brisbane Times by Laksiri Jayasuriya, University of Western Australia Introduction The 2010 Sri Lankan Presidential and Parliamentary elections that took place shortly after the end of a debilitating 25 year-old civil war in 2009 constitutes a watershed in Sri Lanka’s politics. Despite the unsettled conditions over the last two decades emanating from this turbulent environment created by ...
Photo by AFP PHOTO/Ishara S. Kodikara/AFP/Getty Images, via The Baltimore Sun Sri Lanka celebrated that very first victory day one day later than it has been marked in the four years since. It was the 19th of May, 2009. Vellupillai Prabhakaran had been killed the previous day. News of his death had to filter through before celebrations could begin. ...
Religious tensions have been exacerbated in post-war Sri Lanka, contrary to claims by the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) that attacks against places of religious worship are isolated incidents. In Mach 2013, the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) published a report highlighting concerns about violence and intolerance against all religious communities in the country. The trends highlighted by CPA ...
Image courtesy Nidahasa The Editor of Vikalpa, Sampath Samarakoon, was mercilessly attacked by Hambantota Urban Council Chairman Eraj Frenando (of the toy pistol infamy) yesterday as he was taking part in a street drama with leading rights activists and artistes. A detailed report by the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence (CMEV) around this incident can be read here. The Police arrested ...
Nurit Peled-Elhanan is a professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, peace educator and activist and co-laureate along with late Prof. Izzat Gazzawi of the 2001 Sakharov Prize for Human Rights and the Freedom of Speech awarded by the European parliament. Peled-Elhanan has translated Albert Memmi‘s Le racisme (1982) and Marguerite Duras‘ Écrire (1993) into ...