Why has devolution of any form not happened already, almost sixty years since independence and thirty years since Sri Lanka’s war began?
In Sri Lanka a white van without a number plate is a symbol of terror and the disappearances that occurred in all parts of the country. Commissions on Disappearances in the South during the last few years of the 1980s have documented at some length how armed men, travelling in white vans without number plates abducted thousands of people who were never seen again. These reports are available at www.disappearances.org. Now such vans have reappeared and do so frequently in the Jaffna peninsular. A report from one family states "the fear of the white van in the day and specially in the night is...
This is the statement issued by Co-Chairs of the Tokyo Donor Conference - Norway, the European Union, the USA and Japan – following their meeting in Brussels on September 12, 2006.
The arrests in the United States and Canada last month of a handful of Tamil expatriates in connection with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) shocked the Tamil Diaspora communities there and elsewhere. Those arrested were charged with a number of crimes, including attempting to buy missiles and rifles for the LTTE and, incredibly, with attempting to bribe US officials to lift the ban on the LTTE. The strength of the cases against the individuals concerned will, quite rightly, no doubt be tested in court in the fullness of time. But one side effect of the shock has been to make some...
The UN could have prevented the deterioration in human rights security in Sri Lanka this year. But it had another political priority.
The Tamil project has come this far in the face of open and consistent international hostility and contempt.