April, in Sri Lanka

Dear Diary,

It's April already. In Sri Lanka this means a lot of holidays. After celebrating the official new year on the first of January like the rest of the boring earthlings, we Sri Lankans celebrate one more New Year in April. This time around, the "New Year Holidays" will be accompanied by a weekend and a few more holidays one for "Good Friday" and another for something else. One tend to loose track of these things. Anyway, all this is another excuse to go somewhere cool and get drunk in this island of hours, it's said that Sri Lanka has one of the highest consumption of alcohol and the highest number of holidays, most Sri Lankans enjoy both, except for the poor souls trapped in the North.

Ah yes, that little affair... Mainstream media in the west, seem to have all but forgotten the issue. According to media reports, the Sri Lankan Army have the LTTE encircled along with the civillian population in a very close area. Calls for a ceasefire from some quarters have been rejected by the president, who's determined to "finish it off". The government have however agreed for periodic "pauses" in the fighting so as to let the civilians flee into government controlled areas, and live the next few years of their life in detention camps welfare camps set up by the government.

As said before to you diary, the Sri Lankan media continue to harp the official government line and the only space for dissent continues to be on the web. During the past month, new sites have come up dissenting the official story sold by the warring parties.

One interesting site is JustDissent, which brings alternative view points about the conflict which does not find space in the mainstream media. Another site is warwithoutwitness and contains gruesome pictures and videos of what is (supposedly) happening in Vanni. Viewer discretion of the latter is highly advised.

Quite apart from all this dissenting, we are also seeing beginnings of citizens-led collectives to bring aid/medicine to the people affected. Trusts such as ActLanka have set up a website which enables people to get involved in the relief effort. First, they are focusing on the Vauvniya Hospital. One way people can help the situation is by donating their time and their money to causes such as this.