If structural changes are what the West aims in the island of Sri Lanka through IMF and GSP+ loans, those cannot be achieved without first emotionally rehabilitating the Eelam Tamils.
“Tamils should be vigilant of Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapakse’s intentions. He says that there is no minority race in the country but only a majority race. It is clear that his intention is to assimilate the Tamil race into the Majority Sinhala race in Sri Lanka,” Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam, Tamil National Alliance (TNA) Jaffna district parliamentarian, told TamilNet Saturday, in an interview in Jaffna.
Police authorities in northern Sri Lanka have rejected accusations by opposition parties that the government is terrorising the region in the run up to Vavuniya Urban Council elections.
Despite the end of hostilities, children in Sri Lanka continue to be at risk of forced recruitment, arbitrary detention and other human rights abuses, the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers (Coalition) said on Tuesday, 28 July.
Throughout the years of the island’s ethnic conflict, successive governments of Sri Lanka maintained that the war was against the LTTE and not the Tamil people.
The head of an all party panel set up by Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse to seek an ever elusive southern consensus on the Tamil national question and buy time to conduct war has said the panel has come up with a home grown solution with no absolute devolution.
Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse has appointed more military top brass to a number of top and strategic positions in the government and promoted more officers including three Brigadiers to the rank of Major Generals and 46 Colonels as Brigadiers.
Sri Lanka's President and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, Mahinda Rajapaksa, on the occasion of Esala Perahera, the Sri Lankan Buddhist festival that commemorates the scared tooth of Buddha, has granted an special amnesty for 1,933 SLA deserters including SLA officers released from several prisons, Sri Lankan police authorities said on Tuesday, July 28 .
The New York-based group Human Rights Watch on Tuesday pressed for an international probe into the killings in Sri Lanka of 17 local employees of a French charity three years ago.
The Sri Lankan government is putting pressure on the families of murdered aid workers to seek compensation from the charity that had employed the 17 individuals at the time of their murder.
Sri Lanka will not allow reporters into Vavuniya and Jaffna to cover the local government elections to be held there on Saturday, the Associated Press reported.
"When it comes to regional issues, Clinton should make the case that the expanding US-Indian relationship gives Indian leaders more strategic flexibility.
They can stop trying to match their Chinese counterparts in backing regimes, such as those in Burma and Sri Lanka, that have committed gross human-rights abuses against their own people. If a shared respect for democratic values forms the foundation for the burgeoning US-India partnership, Indian leaders should be able to heed any such counsel from Clinton," the Saturday July 18, editorial in Boston Globe said.
Sri Lanka has asked aid agencies to scale down operations on the island. The government claims that now it has claimed victory over the LTTE, there is no longer a need for agencies like the Red Cross.
Hundreds of thousands of Tamils remain locked in camps almost entirely off-limits to journalists, human-rights investigators and political leaders. The Sri Lankan government says the civilians are a security risk because Tamil Tiger fighters are hiding among them.
