The UN could have prevented the deterioration in human rights security in Sri Lanka this year. But it had another political priority.

What are international guarantees worth now?

Milk and clear honey, wild rice and lentil

Sri Lanka’s state is embarking on a slow pogrom

Even as an unofficial war between the Liberation Tigers and the Sri Lanka government claimed hundreds of lives (see pages 1-5), low-intensity violence continued to claim the lives of civilians and combatants alike in the island’s Northeast.

US authorities this week charged eight men with providing material support to the Tamil Tigers the US Justice Department said. The LTTE has said the individuals, all expatriate Tamils, have nothing to do with it.

Amongst the charges are conspiring to buy surface to air missiles for the Tamil Tigers and bribing US officials to have the LTTE removed from a list of terrorist organizations and to obtain classified intelligence, a statement said.

A Tamil newspaper editor and former member of parliament was killed outside his home on the besieged Jaffna Peninsula late Sunday, international and local media reported.

Sinnathamby Sivamaharajah, managing director of the Tamil-language Namathu Eelanadu newspaper was shot dead in Vellippalai. Police are investigating the murder, according to news reports. The motive for the killing is unclear.

Kethesh Logananathan, Deputy Secretary General of Sri Lanka Government’s Peace Secretariat and a former member of the militant group, EPRLF, was shot dead by unknown gunmen on August 12.

The Sri Lankan government blamed the Liberation Tigers for the killing, which came amid heavy fighting in the Jaffna peninsula (see pages 1-5).

Pandemonium erupted at a peace rally organized by the National Anti-War Front (NAWF) held on August 17 Thursday at Viharamahadevi Park when a group of monks of the Sinhala ultra-nationalist National Bhikku Front (NBF) arrived at the site.

NBF activists thereafter climbed the stage and started shouting at the organizers of the peace rally.

A doctor, his wife, two nurses and the driver of an ambulance belonging to Nedunkerni hospital, were killed on the night of August 8 when a Sri Lanka Army (SLA) Deep Penetration Unit (DPU) attacked the ambulance with claymore fragmentation mines.

The next day a civilian bus with 75 passengers narrowly escaped another claymore attack 10 kilometres from the Nedunkerni ambush site. A medical vehicle that was following the bus was hit, but no one was wounded.

Complaints were made to Eravur Police that at least 20 Tamil youngsters playing with their friends near Vishnu Temple surroundings were abducted by unidentified persons in a white van on August 15.

About fifteen unidentified armed men in a van took the boys away at gunpoint. The boys come from several villages including Santhiveli, Murakoddanchenai, Sithandy, Mawadivembu, Vantharumoolai and Kaluwankerni in the Eravur police division in Batticaloa district.

Seven people, including four commandos of Special Diplomatic Security Unit, were killed when the convoy of Pakistan’s High Commissioner in Sri Lanka was hit by a Claymore fragmentation mine

The outgoing High Commissioner, Col (retd) Bashir Wali Mohammed was unhurt in the blast on Flower Road in Kolpity, which Sri Lanka blamed on the Liberation Tigers.

The Tamil project has come this far in the face of open and consistent international hostility and contempt.

The Norwegian government, which is responsible for monitoring of Sri Lanka’s ceasefire said this week that its staff were withdrawing from the embattled Northeastern districts to the capitol, Colombo.

The Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM), comprising staff from Nordic countries, is to lose many of its members at the end of the month: the LTTE has refused to accept monitors from countries that have proscribed the group.