Sri Lanka’s immediate future: Visvalingam speaks out — in temperate and wise words

Dr. A. C. Visvalingam,* in the Island, 28 January  2012, with different title: “Minorities should consider adopting an inclusive approach”

The Citizens’ Movement for Good Governance (CIMOGG) has generally refrained from proposing any specific solutions to the ethnic conflict because successive governments have invariably gone against the advice given by moderate individuals and groups in this regard. It would have been counterproductive for CIMOGG to have tendered yet more unsolicited advice that was bound to be ignored. Even the interim recommendations made months ago by the Lessons Learnt & Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), within the circumscribed Terms of Reference given to it, have been largely ignored by the government. What will eventually happen to the recommendations contained in the Commission’s Final Report and the several earlier reports on solving the National Question is anybody’s guess.  

Gananath Obeyesekere reviews John Holt’s new Reader

Gananath Obeyesekere, Courtesy of the Economic and Political Weekly, January 28, 2012 vol xlvii no 4

This massive, ambitious project by a distinguished historian of religion contains a series of essays that span a long time period from Sri Lanka’s mythic origins to the terrifying 25-year insurrec­tion of the Tamil Tigers – the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) – and its final eradication by the Sri Lankan army. It is difficult to review a comprehensive collec­tion of this magnitude without bringing to bear the reviewer’s own prejudices.

My criticism of this work is that it plans to do too much and therefore achieves too little. It is “all you wanted to know about Sri Lanka” within the frame of a single vol­ume which to me is an impossible task. The work is sprawling and lacks an organising principle and “history, culture, politics” is too broad to be manageable. The editor brings together disparate essays by social scientists, colonial historians, poets and novelists along with journalistic articles in newspapers, but they lack an overall analytical or interpretative framework that will benefit students and scholars alike.

Poor Governance in Indian Cricket and Indian Politics

Ramesh Thakur, in The Australian, 16 January 2012, with title “Cricket Debacle mirrors India’s Poor Governance“

 Pics from Reuters

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vijitha Yapa speaks out against self-righteous sermonizing

From The Island, 23 January 2012

Senior Sri Lankan Journalist, Vijitha Yapa with Vice President of the Republic of South Sudan Dr Rick Machar Teny. They were at an international conference held in mid January titled ‘making democracy real’ where Mr Yapa presented a paper on the future of Sri Lanka’s democracy. Mr Yapa said that it was not a question of asking who was right after a bitter war but what was left. “It is from there we need to pick up the pieces and work towards reconciliation.” He said that more than preaching to Sri Lanka, countries need to assist Sri Lanka in ensuring democratic rights and a future for all her people.

Dr Rick Machar was interested to hear of Sri Lanka’s initiatives for reconciliation with the minorities after the 30 year war. Speaking on South Sudan’s challenge on national reconciliation and good governance, he said that 30 years of war and 2.5 million dead had left his country traumatized.

Shehan Karunatilaka snaffles a bag of ‘wickets’

Courtesy of The Island and

NEW DELHI, January 22: Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka has won the US$ 50,000 (LKR 5.68 million) DSC prize for South Asian Literature for Chinaman at the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF). The prize and a unique trophy were presented to the 36-six-year-old Singapore-based Sri Lankan by Bhutan’s Queen Mother Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuk in Jaipur on Saturday night.  The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature celebrates the richness and diversity of South Asian writing. It was instituted last year by DS Constructions Ltd, an Indian infrastructure and construction company.It is a literary prize, awarded annually to writers of any ethnicity or nationality writing about South Asia themes such as culture, politics, history or people for an original full-length novel, written in English, or translated into English.

“Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew” is the story of a retired Sri Lankan sports journalist’s hunt for a long-forgotten, and a fictional, Sri Lankan cricket player, Pradeep Mathew.

Kathy Klugman gains key post and is promptly depicted as “controversial diplomat” by Aussie media

Courtesy of WA Today– http://www.watoday.com.au/national/controversial-diplomat-snares-gillard-role-20120118-1q6kl.html … SEE Addendum at end**

A TOP Australian diplomat heavily criticised for her role in ”rehabilitation” ceremonies for alleged Tamil rebels in Sri Lanka has been rewarded with a job in Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s department. Kathy Klugman will become head of the international division in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, a key foreign policy job.

Ms Klugman, who was high commissioner in Colombo until this month, was condemned by rights groups in October for handing out certificates to Tamils after they were held for two years in a detention camp by the Sri Lankan government.

She was earlier criticised for publicly praising Sri Lanka’s security forces after they intercepted a boat carrying 44 asylum seekers, including two children, bound for Australia. The Australian branch of the International Commission of Jurists and the Greens complained at the time that Australia had ignored obligations under refugee conventions. Six of the asylum seekers were later detained under anti-terrorism laws in Sri Lanka as alleged former fighters with the Tamil Tigers. Up to 10,000 Tamils were later rounded up and kept in camps.

How the Media Manipulates the World into War

SEE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_erbpUSki4&feature=youtu.be

As the US and Iranian governments escalate tensions in the already volatile Straits of Hormuz, and China and Russia begin openly questioning Washington’s interference in their internal politics, the world remains on a knife-edge of military tension. Far from being a dispassionate observer of these developments, however, the media has in fact been central to increasing those tensions and preparing the public to expect a military confrontation. But as the online media rises to displace the traditional forms by which the public forms its understanding of the world, many are now beginning to see first hand how the media lies the public into war.

“When Suffering becomes infotainment–just another commodity” — Susan Moeller

Two Reviews of  Susan Moeller’s Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War, and Death (Routledge, 1999) 392 pp

ONE by Carl Sessions Stepp  in American Journalism Review

Here’s one of the perverse conundrums of journalism: If you fail to cover a story, you do wrong; but if you cover it, you can go wrong, too. That is an exaggerated and unfair rendering of Susan Moeller’s point in “Compassion Fatigue,” but it gets at the nature of the problem. Moeller argues that the volume and character of disaster coverage can lull audiences into a “compassion-fatigue stupor” and damage prospects for remedy and recovery.

A former journalist who teaches at Brandeis, Moeller examines coverage of a range of calamities, from Ebola in Zaire and famine in the Sudan, to assassination in Israel and war in Iraq. Almost always, she concludes, news coverage is formulaic and sensationalized. Stories “all sound alike”; causes and solutions are oversimplified; and characters must “fit into the parts of victim, rescuer and villain.” As one crisis bleeds into the next, “it takes more and more dramatic coverage to elicit the same level of sympathy as the last catastrophe.”

Subhas Chandra Bose: A Pact with the Devil – Between Gandhi and Hitler

SEE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyhmI6a2qsA …..where in this revealing material we also see Prof Anita Pfaff, Bose’s daughter, as well as information about the Indian National Army. It was sent to me by MANGO with the note “Some kind soul has uploaded it to Youtube and translated it into English. A superb effort.” Web Editor

ALSO SEE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGCEDRB-MoI&feature=related … FOR Hitlers Secret Science: In the crucible of World War II, Germany’s most brilliant scientists race to create terrifying new weapons of mass destruction. Before the war is over, Germany will produce many technological firsts that remain the basis for many air and spacecraft today.
Did they have outside help?

Besides this revealing material we see Prof Anita Pfaff, Bose’s daughter, as well as informaion about the Indian National Army. It was sent to me by MANGO with the note “Some kind soul has uploaded it to Youtube and translated it into English. A superb effort.” Web Editor

The Torture Scene in “Killing Fields” and Gordon Weiss

Michael Roberts, courtesy of Colombo Telegraph where it appeared a few days earlier.. with a different title. The version here has minor embellishments.

 Frontispiece images in the Gordon Weiss web-site — http://www.gordonweissauthor.com/press.html#

                                                 ONE

In the course of my researches into the emergence of Ceylonese nationalism in the British period, I delved in considerable detail into an event that was referred to then as “the 1915 riots” – the term “riots” in South Asia being a mechanical reproduction of the terminology of the British legal lexicon to describe affrays of all sorts. In 1915 this shorthand phrase referred to the assaults on the Mohammedan Moors (as they were called then) in the south-western quadrant by elements of the Sinhalese population (Roberts 1981). Amidst the complex processes that promoted this outbreak let me isolate a particular factor: a critical force inspiring the attacks was the incitement by those whom I have referred to as “stirrers” (Kannangara 1984; Roberts 1981; 1994a).

The outbreak of the July 1983 pogrom against Tamils living in the south-western and central regions of Lanka encouraged scholars to redefine such events as “pogroms.” On this occasion too, anecdotal testimony from friends and the article by Valli Kanapathypillai (1990) indicate that incitement by a diverse body of chauvinist stirrers was one factor behind a campaign that legitimised the terror wrought by depicting these activities as acts that would “teach Tamils a lesson.”

Dwelling on some anecdotal tales I was motivated in the 1990s to pen a literary essay of protest against the horrendous acts of July 1983: “The Agony and Ecstasy of a Pogrom: Southern Lanka, July 1983.” This article was written during a lonely sojourn in Charlottesville, Virginia, where my isolation promoted reflexivity. Central to this intervention was the deployment of two horrifying photographs extracted from the Tamil Times. In subsequent years I discovered that these images had been captured by a brave cameraman, Chandragupta Amarasinghe, who supplied me with better copies and clarified details about the mayhem around Borella Junction that 24^th/25^th night in July (Roberts 1994b, 2003).