Around 800 Tamil families have been displaced by the building of Sampur power plant and continue to live in misery, reported The Hindu.

According to the paper, the Sampur power plant, a joint project by Sri Lanka’s Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) and India’s National Thermal Power Corporation’s (NTPC), will take up more land than needed for the plant.

The land was taken from Tamils who vacated the area during the conflict.

After a successful Breaking The Silence genocide awareness campaign,  Barts Tamil Society held a screening of the Channel 4 Documentary, 'No Fire Zone', followed by a question and answer session with director Callum Macrae.

The documentary left a fully packed lecture hall stunned into silence for minutes after the end of the film.

Responding to questions on what the outcome may have been for Tamils in the North-East if the LTTE had retained control of Vaani, Macrae said,

"The peace process of 2002 was relatively successful, and the Tigers themselves were successful in improving in a number of human rights issues for their people, including eradicating caste, improving women's rights etc. However it is questionable if peace talks could have been successful considering the impact of 9/11. The event swayed the balance of support and the military campaign against the Tamils was seen as a 'war on terror; which allowed Rajapaksa along with complicit members of the international community to go on, with this rhetoric enabling what was seen as the final solution."

The Sri Lankan government has announced that it will be appropriating houses and lands in the Northern Province found to be owned by Tamils now living abroad, reported the Jaffna based newspaper, the Uthayan.

The government will be using the data collated by the census to identify those properties belong to Tamils who have fled the island, the paper added.

This development comes after a series of measures by the government since the end of the armed conflict in 2009 that have made it increasingly difficult for Tamils living abroad to own land and property in their Northeast homeland.

The Sri Lankan Army has opened a new pre-school in Vellamullivaikal, with the assistance of a Dutch non-governmental organisation, reported the Sri Lankan Army's website.

The army proposed the project to Netherlands-based Caridas Cutex, who then provided sponsorship for the school and were subsequently invited to the opening in the presence of the 68 Division of the Sri Lankan Army.

The Voice of the Nation

The Ministry of Defence and Urban Development, teaming up with the Bank of Ceylon, awarded educational scholarships to 76 school children of military personnel on Friday.

Japan’s special envoy to Sri Lanka Yasushi Akashi has criticised Sri Lanka’s repetitive appointment of commissions and failure to act on them, in a press conference held at the Japanese Embassy in Colombo yesterday. 

Speaking after a 6-day visit to the island, Akashi stated,

“There is a certain amount of impatience and frustration on these matters and there is a notion that the Sri Lankan Government has taken too much time appointing commissions and then shelving their reports without taking any action.”

“I hope the government of Sri Lanka is reflecting upon these past repetitions."

"I think time has come for action and I hope that kind action is needed, the implementation of the LLRC report is a good testing case of real action, it’s the people in Sri Lanka not those in other countries are anxiously waiting for action and not just sound and fury”.

The Sri Lankan Army has distributed free school accessories to 500 Tamil school children at a ceremony in Mullaitheevu.

Sinhalese priests, Father Roshan Wikremasinghe and Father Gamini Perera, from the 'Pragna Pradhana' programme, along with several military officials, took part in the ceremony.

See our editorial on militarisation here.

The European Union Parliament has passed a resolution stating that the United Nations should initiate an international investigation into allegations of violations of international humanitarian law, if Sri Lanka fails to start one itself, before March 2014.

Passed on Thursday, the resolution called for,

"an independent and credible investigation into alleged violations by March 2014, and considers that otherwise the UN should initiate an international investigation".

In a report released today, the Agence France Presse (AFP) outlined extensive threat of rape and abuse that Tamil widows faced in the North-East.

The South Asia expert for the London based Minority Rights Group international (MRG), Farah Mihlar, outlined that Tamil women in the North-East felt threatened from other ethnic groups, many of whom are from the Sinhalese majority that were flooding into the North-East.