Day: 14 February 2016

Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena on Saturday claimed that his victory in the elections saved his predecessor Mahinda Rajapaksa from being hauled before an international war crimes court. “He (Mr Rajapaksa) was publicly lamenting that he was to be taken before a war crimes court and executed on an electric chair. The people who voted me against him have prevented that,” Mr Sirisena said, responding to Mr Rajapaksa’s statement on the UN human rights chief’s visit to the country. Mr Sirisena said his victory in elections in January 2015 over…

Flexibility in implementing UNHRC resolution is acceptable by Zacki Jabbar The Sri Lankan government was looking at various options within the limits of what they have defined as their preference in the manner in which war crimes accusations against the previous Rajapaksa regime and the LTTE  should be investigated. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein revealed in Colombo last week that with regard to the call by his office for a Hybrid Court to inquire into alleged war crimes, the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government had indicated that it did not want…

By Tisaranee Gunasekara – “Cultural purity is an oxymoron.” – Kwame Anthony Appiah (Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers) The Independence Day celebrations commenced with the national anthem sung in Sinhala and concluded with the national anthem sung in Tamil. It was a first and a good first, a gesture of enormous symbolic significance, an unmistakable indication of the new government’s commitment to an inclusive, pluralist project of nation-building. Gotabaya Rajapaksa once derided the singing of the national anthem in Tamil as “a ridiculous and unpractical idea.”[i] But for those…

Who is funding MR’s new party? The tug-of-war between President Maithripala Sirisena and former President Mahinda Rajapaksa to get the reins of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) has reached its penultimate stage with the latter opening a new political operations office with the alleged support of the majority of Provincial Councillors and Local Government members. Several senior and young members of the party seemed to have paid no heed to the indirect threat of having to face disciplinary action and were on the verge of being expelled from the…

Final stage of the war by Rajan Philips Even for those of us who are not (western) classists, it would makes sense to know that the resolution of a dilemma in logic and rhetoric involves either taking the left horn, the right horn, or going in between the two, not to mention (rhetorically) distracting the proverbial bull. Transcending from the ‘precocious’ world of ancient Greece to the pernicious world of contemporary Sri Lankan politics (where good things can still happen from time to time – as Professor Carlo Fonseka realized…

Now President Maithiri says ”I saved Mahinda from the electric chair” Today the 14th of February 2016 President Maithripala Sirisena said that he is the one who saved former President Mahinda Rajapaksa from being sent to the electric chair. He said that former President Rajapaksa claimed that if he (Maithripala) became the President of the country, he (Mahinda) would be send to the electric chair over alleged war crimes. “But my government was able to save him from being sent to the electric chair,” President Sirisena said addressing an event…