More than 5,000 protesters took to the streets of Sydney Saturday, 28 March, demanding action against the Sri Lankan government and the atrocities being committed against Tamil civilians caught up in the war in the Vanni.

Sri Lanka’s largest Tamil political party called on the government to declare a ceasefire to protect civilians in the north and demanded that humanitarian agencies are permitted access to the conflict zone before discussing a political solution to decades long ethnic conflict.

Sri Lanka’s war on the Tamil people has reached an extremely brutal level. Many neutral observers and human rights activists have called it ‘genocide’. While brutal attacks against Tamils have reached a new height, lies spread by the government have also reached a new height.

Nimal Sripala de Silva, a cabinet minister in Sri Lanka parliament, said that India’s great assistance helped SLA to defeat the Liberation Tigers and that the people of Sri Lanka should be grateful to India

Paataali makkal Katchi (PMK), an ally of ruling Congress government has announced that it is forging a new regional alliance in a blow to the ruling Congress party's attempts to secure a national coalition weeks before the general election.

The LTTE is not a movement believing that war is the only means to achieve the aspirations of the people it represents. But, political solution needs an environment conducive to it.

Despite hundreds of Tamils dying in Vanni daily, Indian premier Manmohan Singh wants to ‘wait and see’ for the Rajapakse regime to put forward a devolution package, something it has not managed to do for over three years.

The top United Nations relief official Thursday repeated the world body’s concerns over the safety of civilians – numbering as high as 190,000 – trapped by fighting in northern Sri Lanka between Government forces and the LTTE.

The United States has accused Sri Lanka of breaking promises to stop shelling a no-fire zone where thousands of civilians are trapped by fighting between separatists and government forces.

The UN Security Council's second session in a month on the conflict in Sri Lanka was a "friendly censure" of the government, according to Jorge Urbina, the Ambassador of Costa Rica, a member of the Council.

Tamils Against Genocide (TAG), a US-based activist group, filed a complaint against Secretary of the US Treasury, Timothy Geithner, and the US Executive Director at the IMF, Meg Lundsager, in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia to obtain a "declaratory judgment that a failure of the United States to oppose Sri Lanka’s pending $1.9 billion IMF loan application would constitute a violation of 22 U.S.C. 262d,"

Veteran American civil rights campaigner Reverend Jesse Jackson, who addressed the Tamil Diaspora conference in London on Thursday said that "we [the global community] have a moral obligation to stop the killings" in Sri Lanka.

ON May Day in 1993, Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa was in the back streets of Colombo, greeting supporters as they streamed into the capital for the day's festivities, when he was killed by a suicide bomb. Had the conventions of diplomacy permitted it, I would probably have been at his side.

The humanitarian situation in the Vanni is said to be dire, as a lack of food and clean water lead to illness and death by starvation.