Aboriginal Reverse Racism? Dhanushka Uswatte assaulted in Adelaide

I: Letter from Eshantha Ariyadasa to Roberts, 21 May 2013

Dear Sir,

I am Eshantha Ariyadasa, presently a research higher degree student at Flinders University in South Australia. This is to inform you of a very tragic incident that happened to a Sri Lankan student Dhanushka Uswatte who is presently at the Flinders University reading for his honours degree.

According to Dhanushka, last Friday (10^th May 2013), he was waiting for a bus at a bus stop with one of his Australian university friends. Suddenly an Australian (an Aboriginal) has appeared swearing at both of them, and has demanded that Dhanushka go back to his country. Dhanushka politely requested that he leave them alone, as they have done nothing wrong other than waiting to catch a bus. However unfortunately his request was ignored and Dhanushka was brutally attacked by this person. He suffered severe facial injury and had to undergo an immediate surgery at the Flinders Medical Centre in Adelaide. According to Dhanushka, two plates have been used during his operation underneath his left eye and just above his mouth to fix the fracture caused by this attack. He says, part of his face’s left side is still numb as some nerves too have been damaged. This incident has been reported to the police as well as to the officials of the university.

Pragmatic Action & Enchanted Worlds: A Black Tiger Rite of Commemoration

Michael Roberts,   … a reprint of an article in Social Analysis,  Volume 50, Issue 1, Spring 2006, 73–102. **

The de facto LTTE state in Sri Lanka has established a number of calendrical rituals to honour and remember its fallen heroes and heroines, the māvīrar. These are the personnel who have died in battle or fallen as part of the LTTE goal of political independence, namely, Thamilīlam or Eelam as the latter is more widely labelled. The most significant of these moments is Heroes Day on 27 November when their ­talaivar, or “Leader,” Velupillai Prabhākaran (more properly Pirapakaran) also delivers a peroration for 25 minutes immediately prior to the lighting of the flame of sacrifice at 6.06 p.m. at the designated tuyilam illam (resting places) for the māvīrar.[1] As Chritiana Natali discovered (2005) the Tamil people do not see these sites as “cemeteries.” Rather they are “portrayed as temples.” Binded, like the people she talked to, a demi-official LTTE site described the locations as “holy places.”[2]

Language and National Identity: The Sinhalese and Others over the Centuries

Michael Roberts, reprinting an article published in 2003 in Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Summer 2003, 9: 75-102.**

 ABSTRACT: The collective identity of Sinhala-speakers over four centuries dating from the 1590s is analyzed with due attention to the structural form of (a) the Kingdom of Kandy and (b) the British colonial regime that took control of the whole island by 1815/18. The analysis dwells on the modes of oral, visual-iconic and written forms of cultural transmission that pre-dated print technology, while drawing attention to the relative uniformity of the Sinhala language in both geographical and temporal scale. A semantic pattern of political alliances based on the opposition of inside to outside which works contextually like a nestling Chinese-box is one dimension of this linguistic order. This supported the tendency of Sinhalese representations to adopt an associational logic which merged past enemies (the wicked Tamils) with contemporary enemies (the Portuguese, the English) during the liberation struggles of the Kandyan state and its militia in the pre-1818 period. Such tendencies and the continuation of disparaging epithets coined during the period of Portuguese imperial intrusion into the vocabulary of the twentieth century must inform any theoretical efforts to distinguish the collective consciousness of the Sinhalese after the substantial transformations initiated under the British from that which is expressed so powerfully in the war poems of the pre-British period.

A Story of Southern Sinhala Recalcitrance: How the Devolution Gestures of 1981-83 moved NOWHERE

S. Sivathasan in the Sunday Leader,13 May 2013

When the Jaffna Development Council started functioning a Minister who made frequent official visits to Jaffna was Hon. Gamini Dissanayake. His known closeness to the President lent some significance to the discussions he had with Mr. Nadarajah the Chairman of the Council. A warm rapport developed between the two. To the Chairman it opened a two-way communication connecting the District with the Centre. The Minister perhaps was not unaware of the political fall-out for the government, if things turned out well.

Quite a few meetings with the Minister were held in Colombo. The Chairman, the Government Agent Dr. Nesiah and the writer participated in these meetings. What were emphasized from the Council’s side were substantially larger funding and more devolved powers to utilize the finances effectively. The proposition struck a sensitive chord with the Minister and he took the initiative in arranging for a meeting with President J.R. Jayawardene one evening at his residence. It was in the latter part of 1982. The five of us took part in the discussions for over an hour. Development priorities with central funding were outlined by us. The Jaffna Lagoon Scheme and bridging the Mahadeva Causeway were among them. There was responsive interaction.

A People Without a Story: the Lankan Tamils

Aatish Taseer, courtesy of SUNDAY, where the title is “a People without a Story”

 celebrations in the south–May 2009

FOUR years ago this week, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam announced that their struggle for an independent homeland in northern Sri Lanka had “reached its bitter end.” The group had been fighting on behalf of the Tamil people for more than a quarter-century, and its defeat was absolute.  Today, great sections of Tamil country are still a scene of devastation. The houses are either destroyed or brand-new; the land is uncultivated and overgrown; there are forests of decapitated Palmyra palms, damaged by heavy shelling. And then there are the relics of war — graveyards of L.T.T.E. vehicles rotting in the open air; the remains of a ship, its superstructure blown to pieces and in whose rusting starboard a gaping hole gives on to blue sea.

Julie Bishop pulverizes ABC’s prejudiced misinformation

SEE http://www.juliebishop.com.au/transcripts/1277-abc-24-the-world-with-jane-hutcheon.html : “ABC 24 The World with Jane Hutcheon” .. with the Sri Lankan segment placed first in this re-presentation

JANE HUTCHEON    To discuss Syria and the state of the world the Deputy Opposition Leader and Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop joins us in the studio. Julie Bishop welcome to ‘The World’, many thanks for coming in.
 JULIE BISHOP    Good evening.

          SEGMENT TWO : ……….. 
 JANE HUTCHEON    Let’s go to Sri Lanka now , and I wonder, do you support the return of Sri Lankan asylum seekers to their country of origin? 
 JULIE BISHOP    Yes, I do. Based on what I saw and have learned from a visit to Sri Lanka in January of this year, I’m convinced that the Sinhalese in particular have no reason to fear persecution in Sri Lanka. 
 JANE HUTCHEON    What about the Tamils? 
 JULIE BISHOP    Indeed the Tamils likewise are receiving much better treatment under the Sri Lankan government and if they were to fear persecution in any form, then paying a people smuggler and getting on a rickety boat and travelling thousands of kilometres across the sea is not the right thing to do. 
 If they do want to claim asylum, if they do claim a fear of persecution, which I would dispute, then they can go 30km into India, where they would be welcome and provided with health and medical support. 

The BBS That My Mother Likes = An Emblem for the Sri Lankan Equivalent of Middle America

Darshanie Ratnawalli  courtesy of the Nation and the Colombo Telegraph, with the latter drawing a volatile discussion which readers may wish to view … SEE note below pertinent to that discussion

I am the legitimate issue of a woman who unabashedly claims to admire the Bodu Bala Sena. This affords me a critical perspective into the issue, without which everyone is floundering like headless chickens. There may be other people, whose mothers etc. harbor soft spots for the BBS. But because they are not me, they would either try to keep these mothers in the closet or, in contradistinction, empathize with these soft spots; whereas I…Well you shall see.

My mother represents the Sri Lankan equivalent of Middle America and, as such, the demographic bloc that makes or breaks any movement dependent on mass support for its success. In Middle America (SL), one becomes a Buddhist by being a stakeholder of the Buddha Sāsana (deliberately called henceforth, the Buddhist Church of Lanka) and by emotionally aligning oneself with the age-old mission of fostering this Sāsana on this soil for the allocated five thousand years.  Once one has fulfilled this basic requirement adherence to Buddhism proper becomes peripheral and is largely left to personal discretion.

Introducing “Numbers Game” – A Detailed Study of the Last Stages of Eelam War IV

Michael Roberts …. See http://www.scribd.com/doc/132499266/The-Numbers-Game-Politics-of-Retributive-Justice  OR http://www.margasrilanka.org/ [right panel at top—then click]

   Pic from Tamilnet, 1 May 2009  from Tamilnet, 5 May 2009, in Third NFZ  in the extreme south of the final pocket of LTTEresistance

I. PREAMBLE

Presented here is an “Introduction” and pointer to a significant visual and textual study entitled “Numbers Game: The Politics of Retributive Justice,” which scrutinizes both the data and other studies of what happened during the last five months of Eelam War IV. This was the period when a large body of people, almost exclusively Tamil in lineage, was corralled into an increasingly shrinking area by virtue of a strategic/tactical decision by the LTTE leadership. The Tamil Tigers who were now facing imminent defeat, were hoping to use the human mass to engineer a humanitarian catastrophe, thus forcing the international community to act by halting the conflict. This comprehensive survey has been assembled by a collective, the “Independent Diaspora Analysis Group.” The key hand is a person who wishes to remain anonymous and can be called “Citizen Silva.” Born to Sinhalese parents, raised and educated in the West, he has spent the entirety of his life outside the island. This foreign setting has enabled him to build close personal links with the island’s other ethnic diaspora groups, thus shielding him from the communalistic shadows that overwhelm many of his compatriots back home. As the analysis of the satellite imagery reveals, his engineering background allows him to bring to the examination a range of technical skills not usually associated with the average empirical scientist.

An Australian Editor’s Advice: “Keep Sri Lanka in the Fold”

Editorial in The Australian, 29 April 2013

FORMER prime minister Malcolm Fraser and Greens senator Lee Rhiannon are singing from the same song sheet as Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, but they are misguided in calling for a boycott of the next Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Sri Lanka in November. Making that nation an international pariah is no answer to the human rights issues that have arisen since the Colombo government’s 2009 victory over the ethnic insurgency led by the barbarous Tamil Tigers, described by the American FBI as “the world’s deadliest terrorist group, worse (even) than Hamas”.

The dark charisma of Adolf Hitler

SEE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AG4YMNg_viw

 Pic from the Library of C0ngress

Adolf Hitler seemed an unlikely leader – fuelled by anger, incapable of forming normal human relationships and unwilling to debate political issues. Such was the depth of his hatred that he would become a war criminal arguably without precedent in history. Yet this strange character was once loved by millions. How was this possible, and what role did Hitler’s alleged ‘charisma’ play in his success?