Sri Lanka

on the crisis in Sri Lanka

2009-05-04T20:09:00.005+01:00

Sri Lanka is very much in the news these days. This blog does not want to repeat what's been said. Quick googling should allow anyone to find more about the crisis in Sri Lanka. The gist is that Sri Lankan armed forces are gaining more ground against the LTTE.

Recently literally hundreds of thousands of people have fleed LTTE-controlled areas and are now in IDP camps in various places in the North. Estimates of how many still trapped between the fighting in the No Fire Zone is contested. Estimates range from 20,000 (SL Govt estimate) to more than 50,000 (UN Agencies).

According to our sources, most Aid-agencies have access to the camps. These include international aid agencies such as Care, Oxfam, UNHCR, UNICEF, Worldvision and local NGOs like Sarvodaya have access to the camps. There are also citizen-led initiatives. More information on how to help is available on sites such as savevanni.org

For more on the background, Reuters has a very useful Q+A on the situation. A must-read for anyone who wants the gist.

The debates on whether the entire military offensive is worth it is raging in the Sri Lankan blogosphere. Much notable writing keeps getting published all-over mainstream media on Sri Lanka. Keep Tabs on these things.

and if you can, help.

Conflict Watch, Sri Lanka

2009-04-18T05:56:00.004+01:00

The Sri Lankan armed forces continues to record impressive military victories. With the latest victory in Anandapuram (See David's Blacker's excellent analysis here) , LTTE is trapped along an estimated 100,000 civilians are trapped in a small area of land in the NorthEast of Sri Lanka.

There are increasing calls from the international community for the LTTE to lay down their arms, but the Tigers continue to hold civilians as human shields. There government has decided to pause the hostilities in view of the recent Sinhala/Tamil New Year in Sri Lanka, and some, most notably India has requested the government to extend the temporary halt on hostilities. The latter's interest in the Sri Lanka is amplified due to the elections in that country, and the need to appease the very large ethnic Tamils in India, who according to recent polls put the Sri Lankan issue among the top most election considerations.

A few important reports have also come out during the past few weeks. Most notably from UTHR (Jaffna), and International Crisis Group. Gruesome reality of civilians caught between the crossfire is being caught on camera and distributed by various sources. Human Rights Watch has an audio slide-show with some horrific images.

International media too take note of the situation, if only sparingly. The economist had a related piece recently and so did the New York Times and the Times in the UK.

With a few exceptions, most people in Sri Lanka seems to be adjusting to the reality of a post-LTTE Sri Lanka. Intellectuals are having their say, there seems to be a general consensus that there should be some form of devolution to address the larger dissatisfaction of the Tamil community in Sri Lanka. Whether or not this form of devolution will sufficiently address the root causes of the conflict remains to be seen.

The Sri Lankan blogs and websites continue to be good sources for updated information. Apart from the usual suspects, Federal Idea is a good source for anyone interested in conflict-related video content. The channel features content from Young Asia Television, which in itself is a good source for quality video content.

On the question of a ceasefire et al

2009-04-15T16:22:00.003+01:00

See post by Rohini Hensman here on Kafila. My response to Rohini, and Nirmala Rajasingham's response to my comment, mine and Niran Anketell's response to Nirmala are compiled on my blog here.

Also see this post on Lines and this post by Ahilan Kadirgamar where in a response I seek to debate a position that people like Ahilan Kadirgamar, Nirmala Rajasingham take that the option of an armed struggle to the Tamil people's problem was pre-mature ill/poorly-conceived. I make reference to this and respond in my response to Nirmala on Rohini Hensman's article on Kafila. I will post something more detailed on this on my blog in the near future.

April, in Sri Lanka

2009-04-02T20:30:00.005+01:00

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.

Unforgetting the Forgotten Conflict

2009-03-16T08:38:00.005Z

There's a humanitarian crisis of devestating proportion currently unfloding in Sri Lanka.

After nearly three decades of conflict, the Sri Lankan Army have the upperhand in the military conflict. The LTTE, the seperatist (by all accounts a ruthless terrorist) group (supposedly) fighting for an independent Tamil homeland in the Northeast of Sri Lanka is now reduced to a mere 35 square kilmoters, down from controlling almost 1/3 of the country several months ago.

As the fighting became heavier, stories of heavy civillian casualties are seeping through the iron gate Sri Lankan government has put down in information. According to best estimates more than 2,000 people have died in the last couple of months alone, many more thousands wounded. The number loss of combatants, including Sri Lankan soldiers are unknown.

There seems to be a deliberate desire by the government to keep the costs of this conflict unknown to the Sri Lankan public.

There is deep censorship in the media, through a campaign of fear and intimidation. Journalists are abducted, killed, publicly proclaimed as terrorists, which has resulted in number of senior journalists fleeing the country. The ones who stay practice self-censorship, a sign that that the campaign of fear has worked.

Only pro-government journalists (from the state media) are allowed in the conflict zones, and there's an open and a systematic clamp-down on journalists who dissents the government line, which according to government officials amounts to treason.

Ironically, in Sri Lanka only foreign journalists and media networks has the luxury of a degree of openness. Foreign journalists too are not permitted to enter the conflict zones, except for guided tours by the government, which presents a rosy picture of the situation. The only two independent actors with access to the ground -- United Nations and ICRC -- are not allowed to speak on record because of the politics involved.

With no independent journalists on the ground, one can rely only on government comminques as well as reporting from pro-LTTE websites and pro-LTTE organizations such as the TRO for information, none of which can be relied upon for accuracy. The internet is perhaps the only place where some local voices find a space to disseminate information, even then in a climate of fear.

What follows are links to reports and websites that provides for a better understanding of the conflict unfolding in Sri Lanka.

Two recent feature reports, one by Australia's SBS and Al-Jazera's Dining with Terrorists program provided a good synopsis of the situation in the country. For much more detailed accounts see the two reports by the International Crisis Group and Human Rights Watch.

For updating content, Groundviews and Transcurrents are two good sites for following elite opinion on the conflict. Sri Lankan blogoshere at Kottu.org is somehwat activist in nature, and occasionally feature analysis of politics related to the conflict. Our own site, InMutiny is dedicated to bringing perspectives of the conflict generally not seen by Sri Lankan audiences.

-- The Mutiny Crew

Any Tamils? He asked in Sinhalese..

2009-03-10T19:11:00.004Z

David Blacker, a Sri Lankan writer and blogger, relates an encounter he had with the Sri Lankan security personnel recently. From his blog,

I’d just finished a 19-hour film shoot and was pretty exhausted by the time we wrapped. It was past 3am as we piled into the van that was taking us back to the agency — one of my writers, this client servicing bugger, and myself. It hadn’t been the most stressfree shoot, and tired as I was, my body was tense and I was turning over the next day’s takes in my head — takes that were scheduled to begin at 9am.

The van’s abrupt deceleration snapped me out of my thoughts, and I groaned inwardly as I saw the armed soldier waving us down. Army VCP. I was sitting by the rear door and slid it open before the van had stopped. A soldier peers into the dark interior of the vehicle.

“Any Tamils?” he asks in Sinhalese.

This is the first time I’ve heard this asked at a checkpoint, and the client servicing bugger — Tamil — hands over his ID. The troop looks it over, asks him where he’s from — Ratnapura — and hands the ID back. They’re more interested in my ID, which looks like it’s been through the digestive tract of an elephant thanks to my having gone swimming with it in my pocket, years ago. With a stern instruction to get a new ID, we’re waved off.

A couple of minutes later, the van slows down again — police VCP. Out we get again.

“Any Tamils here?” we’re asked again, in a much more nasty tone. Something tells me trouble’s on the way.

Read the rest of the story here.

Dining with Terrorists (Sri Lanka)

2009-02-24T06:34:00.002Z

The recent Al Jazeera Dining with Terrorists program on Sri Lanka is one of the more accurate portrayals of the conflict and the current situation in Sri Lanka. The program is now available on youtube and posted below.

Part 1:

Part 2:

On Distrust, Suspicion and Personal Friendships: Understanding the Effects of a Socially Protracted Conflict

2008-06-24T06:07:00.000+01:00

Suspecting generally Tamils who belong to the younger age bracket as possible terrorists has a history of more than 30 years since the time Tamil youth took up arms to give effect to the Tamil Nationalist project of creating a separate state in Sri Lanka.

There are various ramifications of what this ‘feeling’ of suspicion can do to people. This post is a small note from my personal experiences. This is an issue, a theorem difficult to explain, but let me try. The central question that I pose in this post is whether one can separate his take on the ethnic politics of this country from affecting his friendship. My equation is this” politics has fuelled distrust and suspicion. Trust and confidence in each other are central ideals to any notion of friendship. Hence there has to be a connection.

Within an entrenched climate of distrust between the different ethnic communities in Sri Lanka it is my hunch that no amount of personal relationship and friendship can totally alleviate this feeling of suspicion. For a Sinhala speaking person I doubt whether it can be ever possible, how much ever long standing and close the friendship is, to be sure that his or her Tamil friend might not be a ‘LTTE type of Tamil’ ( I know its difficult to define this. I am not going to attempt to define it myself). Now this is not entirely problematic but what follows is: I will go a step further and say that it might not even possible for a Sinhala friend (when the suspicion is evoked externally) to easily dismiss the fact (in its entirety) that his Tamil friend might not be a member of the LTTE. Let me deal with two personal examples. One of my friends was once caught up in a mess where a member of an organisation that he used to head started spreading stories that he was either close or part of the LTTE. Now this sent ripples all round and some of his friends started to feel that they shouldn’t get ‘involved’ in ‘this’. They were ‘not sure’. Now I must quickly add that there were many friends of my friend’s – a whole host of them - whom he would flinch at the thought of even labelling them ‘Sinhala’ friends who stood by him. But my friend did feel that he was shocked by the response by quite a few (actually many) who were ‘not sure’.

The other situation was when this same friend of mine was arrested for all the wrong reasons or probably as some told him because he was stupid. Some of his friends worked very closely to get him out but they warned their other friends not to come to the police station to meet him. The reason: police would get suspicious, unnecessary questions would follow etc etc. Now this was very unfortunate. Being not to be with your friend during time of distress is as worse it can get.

These are difficult questions. Sometime back we organised a forum theatre looking at how the ethnic conflict has affected young peoples personal relationships with people in other communities. The plot revolved around two friends one Sinhalese and the other Tamil who were arrested for ‘loitering’ around (yes it is sort of a crime in this country). The parents of the Sinhala boy get him out without problem and the boy protests that he wont leave the police station unless his Tamil friend is also released. The parents drag the boy away from the police station. The police are shown in this theatre piece to advice the parents not to allow their son to have friendship with Tamils.

Last month I was in New York and I met up with my uncle who moved to the US after being forced to leave his country having been affected personally because of riots that took place in Colombo in 1983. Now both my aunt and uncle said that though a lot of their Sinhala friends had been helpful back in Colombo during those difficult times and continued to be good friends, it was impossible to shred away the thought which they believed was true that most of the ‘Sinhalese’ friends except for a handful of few friends were to use the popular term of their generation ‘communal minded’ when it came to politics and discussions that centred around how to resolve the conflict in Sri Lanka – that they never understood the problems of the Tamils. Now this is what academics who research on peace building and conflict resolution call a ‘protracted social conflict’- a type of conflict very very difficult to remedy.

The other side of the problem is this. For some Sinhalese there is no ethnic conflict because they all enjoy within their friendships many a Tamil. We all drink together have fun etc etc. For all those who think we don’t have an ethnic conflict because of your friendships my answer is: the test of friendships whether they are effected by politics or not is when the worst of your ‘suspicions’, unconsciously situated in you, are threatened. The foregoing paragraph where I narrate a conversation with my uncle and aunt is a dedication to them.

For me I wonder what would take to alleviate this distrust that has been built over centuries of reading history, passing down oral history and personal experiences. It will take a sea changing turn in our history (now what do these academics call it? ..hmmm..yes .. paradigm shift..!!) for us to push back our distrust of each other. There seems to be no indication of this happening in the near future.

On Introducing Myself

2008-06-20T13:19:00.012+01:00

You meander through this site and stumble on this name. Earendil... A name that doesn't make sense, a name that shouldn't make sense.

Earendil - another forgotten character, a man who was shaped by the conflict of his world that rose from the depths of Tolkien's imagination. And you think to yourself that perhaps, things could not get more cryptic than this.

But what do you know about this writer?
You know that somewhere in a corner of the world that is caught in the selective headlights of global amnesia, someone is hunched over a keyboard sending out these missives to you- writing about his life, his world, his country and his place. His place- why the word - place? That word - something... something not quite right with that - "place".

You know that he exists somewhere in Colombo, Sri Lanka... doing a degree, working with youth organizations and dealing with his place in a fractured society, in a fractured land.

You know that for the next few months he is going to be talking to you, telling you parts of his life, parts of his story and painting parts of his world as vividly as he can. And maybe, just maybe then by the end of it all you will look back and say that the you have found something to remember about this forgotten corner of the world.