Day: 1 March 2015

Govt Statements on Army Camps Triggered Genocide Resolution

Karu

COLOMBO: Northern Province Chief Minister C.V.Wignewaran has attributed the Northern Provincial Council’s  resolution on an “on-going genocide against Tamils in Sri Lanka” to Central government ministers’ saying that not a single army camp will be removed from the province. Addressing a meeting on the cooperative movement attended by Central Ministers Gamini Jayawickrema Perera and D.M.Swaminathan in Jaffna on Saturday, Wigneswaran said that recent public pronouncements that not even a single army camp will be withdrawn from the province could have been avoided. These statements had resulted in the NPC passing…

Read More

We Feel Very Strongly Against The Continued Stay Of Armed Forces

Karu

By C.V. Wigneswaran – Guru Brahma … Hon’ Governor, Hon’ Minister Gamini Jayawickrama Perera, Hon’ Minister D.M.Swaminathan, Hon’ Deputy Minister Mrs.Vijekala Maheswaran, Hon’ Ministers of the Provincial Council, officers of the Northern Provincial Council, other officers, my dear brothers and sisters, The change in Government is showing favourably in the number of visits by VIPs from Colombo last few days. We welcome all of them. Earlier the point of contact of the Ministers from the Central Government was a Minister who ran his Establishment from a Theater close by a…

Read More

SLFP-UNP cohabitation in the south, and TNA power struggle in the north

Karu

by Rajan Philips The north and south are different again. The SLFP and the UNP are uneasily cohabiting in the current parliament. The minority UNP is running the government and the majority SLFP is constrained to go along with it. The situation is unprecedented and unusual, but not undemocratic or unconstitutional. The constraint on the SLFP is a democratic extensionof the January 8 presidential election in which the incumbent president and then leader of the SLFP, Mahinda Rajapaksa, was defeated by the common opposition candidate, Maithripala Sirisena, who is now…

Read More

WikiLeaks: By Improving SL Navy’s Ability, US Will Help To Bring Terrorist LTTE To Heel: Embassy Colombo

Karu

“As extensive embassy reporting has discussed, the political, economic, military and security environment in Sri Lanka has undergone dramatic changes since the 5 december 2001 parliamentary elections which brought a new government to power. The GSL and Tamil Tigers (LTTE) have signed a ceasefire Memorandum of Understanding as a prelude to talks (o/a may 27) aimed at ending nearly two decades of brutal civil war. Feelings of optimism and hope have swept over this troubled island. The fighting has stopped, and the many and onerous security procedures that affected every…

Read More

Northern PC: Spoiling for another fight

Karu

The Northern Province Chief Minister has written to the Prime Minister saying, inter-alia, that “the Sinhalese polity is a decent community. Only the politicians mislead them in the wrong path”. Might we echo the Biblical quote; ‘first cast out the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye’. The Chief Minister was responding to the Prime Minister’s earlier missive that the recent NPC resolution he had moved calling for an investigation into “genocide against the Tamils…

Read More

TNA top rung rebuffs diaspora

Karu

by P. Krishnaswamy TNA parliamentarian for Batticaloa S. Yogeswaran roundly condemned sections of the Tamil diaspora community who burnt party leader R. Sampanthan’s effigy in London. He said that the TNA leadership cannot act according to the dictates of the diaspora community on every issue relating to Sri Lankan Tamils. Sections of the diaspora community burnt the effigy of R. Sampanthan together with that of party frontliner M.A. Sumanthiran opposite the US embassy in London as a protest against the deferment of the UNHRC report on Sri Lanka’s purported war…

Read More

Four bowlers in two overs

Karu

Plays of the day from the Group A match between England and Sri Lanka in Wellington The beamer Bowling at the death in limited-overs cricket is a thankless business. With Jos Buttler hitting even the good deliveries to the boundary, Lakmal found himself struggling for answers. The first delivery of the final over – perhaps an attempted yorker – was a high full toss that was called as a no-ball due to its height and pulled to the boundary. Later in the over, after a perfectly respectable full ball had…

Read More

British involved – Rise of Sri Lanka’s luxury tourist resorts ‘fuels round of human rights abuses’

Karu

British-based travel agencies among those named in report as hotel complexes hit traditional way of life British-based travel agencies are among the European holiday firms criticised in a report that alleges tourism development in Sri Lanka is prompting new human rights abuses. Large-scale tourism developments since the end of the civil war six years ago have had disastrous effects on local communities, including cases of fishermen losing their access to the sea and allegations of land grabbing by the military, says the report. Among the travel agencies criticised is Swiss-based…

Read More

85 Sri Lankan Immigrants Detained in Medan

Karu

Medan, N Sumatra (Antara News) – As many as 85 Sri Lankan nationals are being detained in an Immigrant Detention House of Medan, Belawan, North Sumatra, for trespassing Indonesian territory without any legal documents and passports. “The detained foreign nationals are considered to violate the Immigration Law and some of them are asylum seekers to some countries such as Australia,” Head of Medans Immigrant Detention House Purbanus Sinaga said here Saturday. The Sri Lankans are detained along with other 310 illegal immigrants at Medans Detention House. The immigrants entered the…

Read More

INTERVIEW: General Daya Ratnayake: “We have never abused our power”

Karu

Looking at the Sri Lankan army, it is basically a reflection of our entire society. We have a fair number of Muslims, and now a fair number of Tamils. But, by nature, the Tamils and Muslims do not tend to be involved in the military, due to their way of life. The majority of the Sri Lankan Army is Sinhalese. That is normal. It is in the interest of people from different political parties to point out such thing but the military is a reflection of society and all our…

Read More