ABC can foul. See Niromi! Hear Niromi! Without a Knox …. No Demidenko

Michael Roberts, courtesy of Groundviews where a different title was used, namely, “ABC, Gordon Weiss and authoress Niromi de Soyza”

Like many people I used to think that such agencies as the BBC and ABC provided balanced reviews and were relatively unbiased. No more. Further confirmation: a recent panel presentation by ABC in March 2013 that was anchored by Jane Hutcheon,** exposed in blatant nudity the lop-sided perspectives within Aunty ABC. The presentation was timed to coincide with the UNHCR sessions in Geneva where the USA was sponsoring a resolution censuring Sri Lanka. No problem with that. But this was a serious ABC review dependent on two questionable “experts,” namely, Gordon Weiss and authoress Niromi de Soyza aka Subhodini Mariatta Anandarajah – known as Subha among her pals. When Australia has a bevy of possible commentators, from Ameer Ali to Rohan Bastin, Serge de Silva-Ranasinghe, Shanaka Jayasekera, Laksiri Jayasuirya, Noel Nadesan and Suri Ratnapala to choose from, their selections on this occasion indicated partisanship.

Niromi De Soyza’s Message to the Australians at Adelaide Writers’ Week

 Presented on 20 March 2013 — SEE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9uWKa5YfKQ

Thuppahi was led to this presentation of self by”Niromi” by a blog comment inserted in its ‘leaves.’ This was in the SECTION on “BOOK REVIEWS” rather than the initial review of Tamil Tigress by myself on 21 August 2011. I was on holiday when the Writers’ Week event took place, but those present at one of Subothini Mariatta Anandarajah, alias Niromi’s, presentations said that she shed tears on stage. Those present at two other events in Sydney and Melbourne also indicated that she burst into tears. The implications of this fact remain open to differing interpretations; but must enter everyone’s reading. As significantly, DBS Jeyaraj one of her erstwhile defenders, did not produce his fifth article as promised. In any event, apart from the different versions of the book the world is being presented with (see Bala’s comments) Subothini Anandarajah has shifted her stance and told her [silent] interviewer at Adelaide that she was confronted with the “enemy” when she functioned as  a female Tigress guerilla. But the first book’s back cover blurb speaks of her encounter with “government troops” during that first awful (because her bosom pal died) skirmish in December 1987 . Elsewhere in the book and in interviews she refers to encounters with both Indian and government troops. Again, one has to compare her initial 2009 newspaper account with the stories later. Unfortunately I was only led to the 2009 story AFTER I had written my initial essays.  The discrepancies are quite outstanding. Alas, readers seem to be guided by whether one is a good Tamil-for-the -Tamil-cause or a bad Tamil or a bad non-Tamil. Brand someone a government apologist and thereafter whatever  s/he says becomes unacceptable. Even women indulge in this tactic of playing the man not the ball.  Cheap tactics, simpleton minds! BALA  is a refreshing change [assuming he is truly a Bala].

Spare a moment’s reflection,too, for the Australian journalists and publishers who lap all this up without asking searching questions! Nikki Barraclough in Sydney reacted immediately when I first contacted her and sent the initial questioning of the book. She was on a flying visit abroad and said she would get back to me. Well, nothing followed. Likewise one of the book distributors in Melbourne who was organising a forum and inquired if I was available.When I said I would be severely critical and would not be a good choice, there was surprise expressed and I was not contacted again –no surprise that.         

Misreading and Distorting the Sri Lankan War, 2009-2012

Michael Roberts 25 May 2012

The recent UNHRC resolution sponsored by USA and directed at the government of Sri Lanka was the culmination of a campaign that began during the last stages of Eelam War IV. Since 2010 articulate circles in the West have been convinced that there had been “40,000 civilian deaths” during this phase. In contrast Rohan Gunaratna asserted that there were 1400 civilian deaths, of which 200 were inflicted by the LTTE. Both calculations are erroneous. Estimates provided by three moderate Tamils who have had regular access to the Tamil personnel who were on the ground indicate that the death toll, inclusive of Tamil Tiger personnel, was in the range 10,000 to 16,000, in circumstances where it was impossible to differentiate in all cases between those Tiger, those recently conscripted as auxiliaries and those truly civilian.

 Tamils streaming across Nandikadal Lagoon probably late April–Pic by AFP

It is towards the clarification of these specific circumstances and a criticism of the claims presented by a variety of human rights agencies, moral crusaders and media engines that this essay is directed. The campaign has been sustained by a mixture of lies and half-truths amidst truths, compounded further by a wilful blindness to the manner in which the LTTE utilised the Tamil populace in its domain as labour pool, protective shield and bargaining chip meant to induce a ”humanitarian intervention.” The massaging of death toll figures, therefore, is just one facet of a massive propaganda heist.

An Angry Sinhalese: Mahinda Gunasekera’s Protest to the Canadian Houses of Parliament

Mahinda Gunasekera, 11 January 2012**

Submission to the House of Commons Sub-Committee on Human Rights re Sri Lanka

84 Tambrook Drive, Agincourt, Ontario,  M1W 3L9, Tel. (416)4980783

Mr. Scott Reid, MP for Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Assington, Chair of the House of Commons Sub-Committee on Human Rights of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International  Development,and the other members of the Sub-Committee on Human Rights

Honourable Members of the House of Commons Sub-Committee on Human Rights,

Submission on the Human Rights situation in Sri Lanka: Further to my letters e-mailed to Ms. Miriam Burke, Clerk to the Sub-Committee on Human Rights with copy to Mr. Scott Reid, MP, Chair of the House of Commons Sub-Committee on Human Rights on November 24, 2011, December 1, 2011 and December 12, 2011, seeking an opportunity to appear before the Sub-Committee especially due to the fact that I was proceeding on a six week holiday to Sri Lanka from January 12, 2012.  I am now submitting my views pertaining to the period of the conflict in Sri Lanka which was decisively ended by the military defeat of the fighting forces of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), an organization designated as an international terrorist movement banned by 32 countries including Canada, by the armed forces of the duly elected Government of Sri Lanka on May 18, 2009.

I am the President of the Sri Lanka United National Association of Canada, which is a Non-Profit Community Association which has functioned since 1983 bringing an alternative viewpoint on Sri Lankan affairs to the elected parliamentarians, media and general public of Canada.  Our association represents Canadians of Sri Lankan origin from all ethnic, religious and other backgrounds with the majority of the members coming from the Sinhalese community, who have made Canada their adopted homeland.

Visual Evidence I: Vitality, Value and Pitfall – Borella Junction, 24/25 July 1983

Michael Roberts, 29 October 2011

 Pic by Chandragupta Amarasinghe 

The anti-Tamil pogrom of July 1983 in the southern reaches of Sri Lanka stirred me to the bone: generating anger and depression in alternate moods as  I ruminated from a distance in  Australia in the mid-1980s. Much later, when on study leave in Lanka in 1991, I picked up testimonies and tales about specific incidents of killing and threat during those dark days in Colombo, including one relating to the killing of Arumanaiyagam, a former young colleague.

    When I flew from Katunayake to Charlottesville inVirginia for the second stage of my leave on a semester fellowship, it was in a particular mood that I sat in the planes and reflected upon that horrible occasion. The relative isolation of my quarters in Charlottesville suited that mood. It was there that I penned “The agony and the ecstasy of a pogrom: southern Lanka, July 1983” – a literary essay rather than a social science document, one that amounted to a personal statement of protest and anguish.   

 This essay eventually appeared in an anthology of my essays, namely, “The agony and the ecstasy of a pogrom: southern Lanka, July 1983,” in Roberts, Exploring Confrontation. Sri Lanka. Politics, Culture and History, Reading: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994, pp. 317-27. An invaluable facet of this presentation was the inclusion of two photographs from the Tamil Times of November 1983 depicting mob scenes at Borella Junction on the night of 24/25^th July 1983. Extracted from the poor reproductions in the Tamil Times, these photographs would have made a fastidious cameraperson squirm because they lacked sharp definition. But the definition was good enough to reveal striking content – content of the sort that would make viewers squirm because of the inhumanity of man-upon-man they revealed to all and sundry. Better versions of these pictures that are now reproduced within this post would already have bought this point home to readers.

Recent Works on Sri Lanka’s Ethnic Conflict

Asoka Bandarage, The separatist conflict in Sri Lanka, terrorism, ethnicity, political economy, London & New York, Routledge, 2009, ISBN 0-415-77678-3 (hbk) & 10-203-88631-3 (ebk) 279 pp

N. Manoharan, Democratic dilemma. Ethnic violence and human rights in Sri Lanka, New Delhi, Samskriti,  2008, 279 pp, (pbk) ISBN978-81-87374-50-3

MR Narayan Swamy, The Tiger vanquished. LTTE’s story, Sage Publications, India, 2010 189 pp, ISBN 978-81-321-0459-9 (pbk)

 Ana Pararajasingham (ed.)  Sri Lanka: 60 years of independence and beyond, AMM Screens, Chennai, for Centre for Just Peace and Democracy, 2009, 621 pp, with articles by Lionel Bopage, Neil de Votta, Bruce Kapferer, John Gooneratne, Dagmar Helmann-Rajanayagam, David Rampton, Peter Schalk, Kristian Stokke, Jayampathy Wickramaratne among others.

Michael Roberts, Fire and Storm. Essays in Sri Lankan Politics,Colombo: Vijitha Yapa Publications, 2010 … ISBN 978-955-665-134-8… 336 pp, 33 illustrations

Michael Roberts, Potency, Power and People in Groups, Colombo, Marga Institute, 2011, 128 pp and 78 pp illustrations, incl. of rare images (pbk), ISBN 978-955-582-129-2

Anton Sebastian, A Complete Illustrated History of Sri Lanka, 696 pp, 444 illustrations

Gordon Weiss, The Cage, Pan Macmillan Australia, 2011 … 352 pp, 24 illustrations

                                             SOME ARTICLES

Kumar Reupesinghe, “Ethnic conflicts in South Asia: the case of Sri Lanka and the Indian Peace-keeping force (IPKF),” in Subrata Mitra (ed.) Politics of South Asia,  volume V,  London, Routledge, 2009, pp.  315-35.

Daya Somasundaram, “Collective trauma in the Vanni — a qualitative inquiry into the mental health of the internally displaced due to the civil war in Sri Lanka,” International Journal of Mental Health Systems, 2010 ….This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited].

Daya Somasundaram, “Parallel Governments: Living Between Terror and Counter Terror in Northern Lanka (1982-2009),” Journal of Asian and African Studies, 2010, 45: 568-583, doi:10.1177/0021909610373899; http://jas.sagepub.com/content/45/5/568.abstract

 Symbolic burning of DC bill, late 1960s

ALL IMAGES are reproduced from the book Potency listed above. The signature image is a depcition of the Kotahena Riots, 1883.

Forbidden Fruits? Niromi de Soyza under Scrutiny

Michael Roberts, courtesy of www.groundviews.org, where the article appeared earlier  under a slightly different title

The literary world is now poised on the brink wondering if the Tamil Tigress (Allen & Unwin, 2011) is going to join Forbidden Love (Random House, 2003) and The Hand that signed the Paper (Allen and Unwin, 2000) in the house of literary infamy. Has the Tamil lady who uses the nom de plume Niromi de Soyza[1] woven an autobiographical tale of lies that match those coined by Norma Toliopoulos and Helen Darville who wrote their memoirs as Norma Kouri and Helen Demidenko?

When Kouri’s book was challenged by the Jordanian National Commission for Women on the ground that it contained 70 exaggerations and errors, Random House Australia indicated that “they were satisfied with the veracity of the story, [though] names and places had been changed to protect the identities of those involved.”[2] Their defense did not hold up for long as Malcolm Knox spearheaded the media questioning in Australia. Random House pulled the book from the shelf [3] – but that was after the first run of this memoir had sold over 200,000 copies in Australia alone and after “enthusiastic Australians voted it among their favorite 100 books of all time.”[4]

Pirapāharan, Ambassador Dixit and Major-General Harkirat Singh, Commander of the IPKF in a relaxed mood after a conference on 26 Sept. 1987 and before a split developed and the LTTE went to war with the IPKF — Pic from Sachi Sri Kantha, “Prabhakaran and the LTTE”

 When Demidenko’s manuscript was submitted to the Universityof Queensland Pressin 1993, they had rejected it,[5] but The Hand That Signed the Paper appeared in print under the masthead of Allen and Unwin in 1994. It is said that the Allen & Unwin editorial staff believed that it was essentially autobiographical, though they persuaded the author to alter the family’s name in the book to “Kovalenko.”[6] The book won the Vogel Award for a first novel in 1994, which was followed in 1995 by the most prestigious literary prize inAustralia, the Miles Franklin Award, as well as the Gold Medal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. When it was subsequently discovered that Demidenko had no Ukrainian background, a literary storm erupted. This furore was further exacerbated by Darville’s continued evasions as well as her manifest anti-Semitic prejudices.

    The issue facing us today, therefore, is whether Tamil Tigress is going to join such ‘august shelves’ in some attic that contains Forbidden Love and The Hand that signed the Paper. The latter books are placed within the context of serious issues, honour killing in

James Jupp answers Michael Roberts in measured and amiable tones

James Jupp, by email dated early September [emphasis by Web Editor]

Dear Michael Roberts,

Nice to hear from you even if some of the remarks you make about my book review were out of place and need not have been made.  Your remarks connecting me with “Trotskyism” are quire misplaced.  My life-long friendship with Anil and Jeanne Moonesinghe began atLondonUniversity and the Labour League of Youth (official Labour Party) in 1949.  I was not then, or ever, a Trotskiyist — later on atYorkUniversity I was even an active campaigner against the local Socialist Workers Party- the quasi Trotskyist followers of Tony Cliff (Anil’s earlier faction).

 Anil and Jeanne are now deceased but my friendship remains with their children Vinod (inSri Lanka) and Janaki (inUSA). Vinod keeps me swamped with information (they call me “uncle”).

To say that I have not “kept in touch with Sri Lankan research is a bit over the top — how do you know?  It is not my main interest as I am quite disgusted with the lies, rumours, mass murders and chaos that have characterised this once peaceful country – as my review should show.  However I have been a member of a small diaspora group of mainly Sinhalese in Canberra and have taken a regular role in their meetings. I also read the English-language press regularly on the internet.  My small home library includes more books on Sri Lanka than most public libraries in Canberra — including your own classic collections on colonial politics and early nationalism.  For many years I also received the Tamil Times from England but it ceased in the face of the militant Tigers in the diaspora.

Tekwani reviews Channel 4′s ‘documentary’ and THE CAGE in the midst of an ongoing propaganda war

Shyam Tekwani, courtesy of Tehelka, where the title was “The long afterlife of war in teardrop isle”

 

Tamil civilians pass checkpoint

IT IS the first truth of war, however deplorable, that civilians die. The first casualty in war is the civilian. The real victims of war are the civilians. Particularly in civil wars, which are  about national survival. In a war zone, they are everywhere, fleeing on foot, on bicycles or handcarts or on somebody’s back, through drenching rain or blazing sun. Wandering around in circles, with no destination, to escape the hail of gunfire and rockets, all with just one question to ask: when would this madness end?

Dogged efforts by an assorted cast of actors to unearth evidence and implicate Colombo of war crimes steadily increased the pressure on the Mahinda Rajapaksa government and peaked around the second anniversary of the military victory. First, the United Nations released its controversial report of the secretary-general’s panel of experts on accountability in Sri Lanka citing evidence ‘sufficiently credible to warrant further investigations’ into the charges of violations of international humanitarian and human rights law committed during the last phase of military operations. The report was followed by The Cage: The fight for Sri Lanka & the last days of the Tamil Tigers, a book by Gordon Weiss, who was the spokesperson and communications adviser attached to the UN team in Colombo during the years that included the end of the war. Then came the sensational British television Channel 4’s documentary Killing Fields (not to be mistaken for the brilliant 1980s film on Pol Pot’s Cambodia). All three claimed to have ample evidence to charge the government of Sri Lanka for crimes against humanity.