Photo credit Asianews.it On 30th August – International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances – hundreds of families of disappeared persons in Sri Lanka, most of them Tamils and from the war affected North and East, will travel to Colombo to meet with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ms. Navatheenam Pillay, at the tail end of ...
Photo courtesy Transcurrents / by Tony Ashby, AFP Bandula Jayasekara (@bundeljayse) is currently one of Sri Lanka’s highest-ranking diplomats, as Consul General in New South Wales and Queensland, Australia and former Consul General to Toronto, in Canada. His Twitter account has consistently featured bitter invective and all-manner of unsubstantiated allegations against civil society and human rights activists in Sri ...
Photo courtesy @dumindaxsb Almost all major mainstream media outlets in Sri Lanka are now owned, or partially owned by individuals representing both business and political interests. This ownership simply treats media as a wing of a business conglomerate, and uses ‘objectivity’ merely as an essential product feature without which the market for their news would erode. Strategies of media control, ...
Image courtesy Tamil Diplomat When I heard that the Northern Provincial Council had passed a resolution on Genocide, I put my “head in my hands” again- something I did often during the previous regime. I asked myself, have we gone back to the beginning after all this violence and heartbreak? Tamil politics led by lawyers ( I am a ...
[Editors note: Dr. Rajini Thiranagama (née Rajasingham), was a Tamil human rights activist and feminist murdered in 1989 by the LTTE. She was one of the founding members of the University Teachers for Human Rights, Jaffna, which during the war, published some of the most hard hitting critiques and exposes of Government as well as LTTE atrocities and human rights violations. Since ...
Do you know what it means? Most pejoratives have origins in completely acceptable descriptive words. ‘Negro’ comes from the Latin ‘Niger‘ which means black, ‘Paki’ is shortened from ‘Pakistani’. Terms like Chinaman, Coolie are also derived from relatively innocent descriptive origins. They get their pejorative connotations after being repeatedly used in an insulting manner. Other names originate directly from a desire to put down ...
The end of war in Sri Lanka, captured for posterity by Google Earth published last week by Groundviews was the first look at the end of the war in Sri Lanka through historical satellite imagery freely accessible via Google Earth. The article was an open invitation for those using Google Earth to scan for and alert others over areas ...
People are meeting up on Reid Avenue (across from the Arts Faculty) to protest the recent cutting of trees in that area. Reid Avenue (AKA Philip Gunawardena) and Thurstan Road (AKA Cumaratunga Munidasa) have beautiful old trees, some ancient, giving shade and pleasure to Colombars for generations. Recently some of these trees have been cut and some citizens are gathering ...
“The fighting’s started in Jaffna again,” said the woman at the shop. I knew the incident she was speaking of: a hartal, a protest of sorts; police tear-gassing the crowd; a hundred and thirty people arrested; a lot of top brass in Jaffna being transferred away. The woman went on to discuss the Jaffna problem at length with her customer. ...
Google Corporation is now moving towards to create futuristic technical tools apart from its general internet service providing. There are two popular tools such as a vehicle which drive without a driver and a pair of spectacles which operates using artificial intelligence.On 4th of April, the Google Corporation had launched details regarding this glasses/spectacles with a video which displaying how ...
When Etisalat dreams of a Sri Lanka where everyone is connected, it’s clearly thinking only of the Sinhalese. Why else would the company’s website feature, so prominently, a Lion to depict ‘everyone’ in Sri Lanka? In popular media, corporate marketing and government output, there are numerous other examples of a racism so deeply internalised and ingrained in Sri Lanka ...
Image courtesy Dushiyanthini Kanagasabapathipillai. More photos on her Twitter feed as well as from Marisa de Silva. Families of the disappeared from the Northern Province, gathered in Colombo on 4th August 2014, at 2.30pm, at the Centre for Society&Religion (CSR), which is a Church (Oblates of Mary Immaculate – OMI) run institution situated in the premises of a Catholic Church. ...
Photo courtesy Today I’ve heard of home invasions but this is the first time I’ve watched a Ministry invasion. The country watched while the BBS swarmed into Rishad Bathiudeen’s Ministry in search of missing monk, to wit, Ven Watarekke Vijitha thero. Was the latter a suspect in a case of murder, rape, child molestation or even theft? Nope. His ...
Groundviews strongly endorsed a rally held in Colombo on Sunday to reaffirm the fact that Sri Lanka is not only a Sinhala-Buddhist country. As the movement’s Facebook event page noted, this non-partisan, non-violent awareness raising rally aims to empower the silent majority of moderate Sri Lankans to stand up for an inclusive Sri Lanka. At its peak, Groundviews was ...
We Sri Lankans have a complex relationship with Sri Lanka. Like all humans, we hate certain things. The dust. The public transport. The electricity bill. The mid-year heat and the politicians with their promises and that random uncle who always gets drunk at the wedding. But we love our country. If the US takes a go at us, we curse Obama and ...
When Asfan Thajudeen ghosted languidly over for the try that gave St. Thomas’ Preparatory School the lead that that would not be assailed by S. Thomas’ College Mt. Lavinia, there was something poetic about it. Both brothers, Wasim and Asfan, share physical characteristics. Tall, handsome and long of limb, one wiry full back could easily have been mistaken for the ...
Photo courtesy Manchester Evening News When the journalist Peter Savodnik asked me to collaborate with him on making The Brothers Shaikh, I said no. I was scared. This was my home. I knew that if I crossed some invisible line, there would be repercussions. But then I changed my mind. What convinced me was that The Brothers Shaikh was ...
Photo credit: Vikalpa It is very likely readers of Sinhala mainstream print media have no clue who Ganesan Nimalaruban was, or exactly how he died. A simple Google news or general web search suffices to highlight how poor even English mainstream media coverage has been over the controversy surrounding his death. Vikalpa was present at the funeral of Nimalaruban. ...
It was with deep sadness that I learnt Shanthi Sachithanandan had passed away yesterday. In emails and face to face conversations spanning many years, I remember an individual who was, at her core, deeply committed to the work around empowering those at the margins to become their own agents of change, even in conditions of great austerity. Groundviews has featured Shanthi’s ...
