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WEBCAST: Sri Lanka Briefing #3 - The End of the Tigers: What's Next in Post-War Sri Lanka

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WEBCAST: SRI LANKA BRIEFING #3
The End Of The Tigers: What's Next in Post-War Sri Lanka

SAJA presents the third in a series of webcasts about Sri Lanka (recordings of previous sessions below).

The war in Sri Lanka has drawn to a close in terms of military operations—but serious humanitarian and political questions remain. Will there be a return to armed conflict, or is it really over?  How will the issues of hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people be addressed? How will the human rights situation be addressed? As the international community and Sri Lankan government officials talk about a political solution, what process is likely to take hold? How far will that solution go? What will be the relationship between rehabilitation, reconstruction, development and the political process? What are the possibilities of a transitional process to provide democratic space? How can demilitarization and democracy move forward in Sri Lanka? What role will the powerful Tamil diaspora play?

Featuring: Ahilan Kadirgamar, spokesperson for the Sri Lanka Democracy Forum; Alan Keenan, senior analyst of the International Crisis Group; Jayampathy Wickramaratne, constitutional lawyer.
Moderator: V.V. Ganeshananthan, former SAJA vice president and author of "Love Marriage," a novel set in Sri Lanka and the diaspora.

Thursday, May 21, 2009
11:30 am-12:30 pm NY time
9 pm-10 pm Colombo time
See local time around the world: http://snurl.com/ihcnp 

Listen live or to a recording: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/saja/2009/05/21/SAJA-Sri-Lanka-Briefing-3
(you can go and set an e-mail reminder for yourself)
or listen live via your phone by dialing this NYC number +1-347-324-5991

Please post your questions in the comments section below or e-mail saja[at]columbia.edu (subject=webcast). You can also call into the show live.

SPEAKERS:

Ahilan Kadirgamar is a spokesperson of the Sri Lanka Democracy Forum, an international network of Sri Lankan activists formed in 2002, and is committed to democratization, human rights and a political solution in Sri Lanka. He is also a contributing editor of Himal Southasian magazine.

Alan Keenan is the International Crisis Group's Senior Analyst based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He coordinates all aspects of Crisis Group research and publications on Sri Lanka, the dynamics of its conflict, and the possibilities of its peaceful resolution. He is also responsible for the Crisis Group's advocacy work on Sri Lanka, which involves consultation with government officials, diplomats, international NGOs, academia, the media, and policy think-tanks in Sri Lanka, as well as briefing foreign ministries, UN agencies and concerned civil society organisations in Europe and the U.S.

Jayampathy Wickramaratne, constitutional lawyer; former senior advisor, Ministry of Constitutional Affairs; member of the team that drafted the 2000 Constitution Bill; member of the panel of experts to assist the All Party Representative Committee and signatory to the "majority report" that proposed a strong power-sharing arrangement with extensive devolution and power-sharing at the center.

You can listen to previous webcasts here and here:
BRIEFING #1: http://www.sajaforum.org/2008/12/webcast-sri-lanka-the-.html
BRIEFING #2: http://www.sajaforum.org/2009/01/webcast-sri-lanka-briefing-2.html

Kadirgamar and Keenan also appeared in this discussion, co-sponsored by the Asia Society:
http://www.asiasociety.org/resources/090415_sri_lanka.html

Post your comments or questions below.

BHOPAL: Marking the 25th year of a chemical disaster

Where were you when Bhopal happened? I was at school in Madras, and we heard about this crazy chemical spill up north, at the Union Carbide plant. It was a small school, but two of the kids - also NRIs - happened to be in Bhopal. So everyone waited and waited, wondering if our friends were among the thousands who died in those first few days, consumed by that poison cloud. They were not, but it was a formative experience, and just a few weeks after Indira Gandhi's assassination (on Halloween - I remember that clearly, too) and the massacres that followed.

The spill happened in early December, 1984, but in New York they're marking the 25th anniversary starting this weekend. The events are taking place at the Brecht Forum, a lefty haunt on the Manhattan waterfront. The organizers are hoping to maintain their remarkably long vigil against Dow Chemical (maker of Napalm and Agent Orange), and will be presenting photos by Raghu Rai. Survivors of the Bhopal disaster will also be on hand.

Read on.

YOUTH LEADERS FROM BHOPAL MARK 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF CHEMICAL PLANT DISASTER WITH A US/CANADA SOLIDARITY TOUR.
 
JOIN THEM IN NEW YORK AT THE BRECHT FORUM, SUNDAY, MAY 10, FROM 1:30 TO 3:30 P.M. FOR A PANEL DISCUSSION AND FUNDRAISER

The Brecht Forum is located in the West Village in Manhattan at 451 West Street (between Bank & Bethune Streets). Phone: (212) 242-4201.

The Union Carbide Chemical Disaster in Bhopal, India has killed more than 23,000 people due to a catastrophic gas leak and ongoing water contamination in this central Indian city. This year marks the 25th Anniversary of the horrific night in 1984 when a toxic cloud of methyl isocyanate enveloped the sleeping city. The Anniversary is a celebration by Bhopal survivor groups and their allies of 25 years of courage in the face of corporate crime. Two 16 year-old youth organizers from Bhopal, and senior activists Rachna Dingra and Satinath Sarangi, will be touring the US and Canada in this April and May.

DESI SPOTTING: Amrit Singh, torture documenter

A note from SAJA Board member John Laxmi:

In the swirling controversy surrounding the legal memos relating to the use of various forms of torture, Ms. Amrit Singh is getting attention for the work she did in documenting the practices at various detention centers and related policies.  Ms. Singh is a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The following link to ACLU's site has information about "Administration of Torture," a book co-authored by Ms. Singh: http://www.aclu.org/about/staff/administrationoftorture.html

More on Singh, who happens to be the daughter of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, below.

HUMAN RIGHTS: Immigrant detainees die, then disappear

The New York Times has an important piece on its front page today, about immigrants who die while awaiting deportation, and how hard it is for outside groups to learn what happened--even the basic fact of the detainee's death. In one case, a Pakistani man named Ahmad Tanveer died in September of 2005, apparently because his chest pains went ignored. But his death was only discovered in the last few weeks. From "Immigrant Detainee Dies, and a Life is Buried, Too":

Even now, most questions about Mr. Tanveer are unanswered, including just who he was and why he had been detained. The rescue of his death from oblivion took a rare mix of chance, vigilance by a few citizen activists, litigation by the civil liberties union and several months of inquiry by The Times. Even as the newspaper confirmed Mr. Tanveer’s death with jail officials, and tracked his body’s path from a Freehold morgue to the cargo hold of an airplane at Kennedy Airport, immigration authorities maintained that they could find no documents showing such a person was ever detained, or died in their custody.

Not until March 20, in response to a new request by The Times under the Freedom of Information Act, did the agency release an internal e-mail message acknowledging that the death had been overlooked. It issued a corrected list that now includes him — his first and last names transposed — among 90 people who died in immigration custody between Oct. 7, 2003, and Feb. 7, 2009.

The article quotes an official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), who claims that all detainee deaths have been made public. But that's promptly contradicted by the reporter, who lists other deaths that ICE hasn't. 

For more on this issue, visit Breakthrough's website.

PRESS FREEDOM: CPJ on South Asian reporters at risk

A guest post by Rumee Singh...

Journalists in South Asia are at 'severe risk' according to a new report released by the Committee of Protected Journalists. CPJ, a New York-based media watchdog compiles and analyzes deaths of journalists.  Its recent report lists 14 countries with unresolved cases of murders of journalists. Iraq, Sierra Leone and Somalia topped the impunity index list, but six out of the 14 are South Asian nations: Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India. [see last year's report]
 
Sri Lanka falls fourth on the list with 9 unsolved cases, while Pakistan ranks tenth with 10 unsolved cases. Rankings are based on the CPJ impunity index, which is calculated as a percentage of a country's population and covers the years 1999 through 2008. [more on their methodology]
 
From the CPJ report: Getting Away With Murder

South Asian journalists face particularly severe risks. The already murderous conditions for the press in Sri Lanka and Pakistan deteriorated further in the past year. “We’re distressed to see justice worsen in places such as Sri Lanka and Pakistan. Our findings indicate that the failure to solve journalist murders perpetuates further violence against the press,” said Joel Simon, CPJ executive director. “Countries can get off this list of shame only by committing themselves to seeking justice.”

Here's a quick breakdown by countries:

Sri Lanka: Rank 4 
The CPJ reported nine unsolved cases and an increase in attacks against reporters including the fatal killing of Lasantha Wickramatunga, editor of a newspaper strongly critical of the government and its military campaign against the Tamil Tigers. See our earlier coverage of his death. 

HUMAN RIGHTS: UN Official Alleges War Crimes in Sri Lanka's Escalating Civil War

The civil war in Sri Lanka has attracted greater international scrutiny within the past week, with UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay suggesting that both the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) may have committed war crimes:

Warning that the loss of life may reach "catastrophic levels," [Pillay] urged the government and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebels to halt hostilities to allow the evacuation of civilians trapped on the northeastern coast.

Pillay said the government had repeatedly shelled the designated "no-fire" zones for civilians and also cited reports the separatist guerrillas were holding civilians as human shields and had shot some as they tried to flee.

"Certain actions being undertaken by the Sri Lankan military and by the LTTE may constitute violations of international human rights and humanitarian law," Pillay said in a statement.

"The world today is ever sensitive about such acts that could amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity," added the former U.N. war crimes judge, who is a member of the Tamil ethnic group and grew up in South Africa.

Pillay called on Sri Lanka's government to grant full access to U.N. and other aid agencies to monitor human rights and humanitarian conditions amid reports of "severe malnutrition" among those trapped. [link]

Pillay stated that as many as 2,800 civilians have been killed and over 7,000 injured since January, and that as many as 180,000 civilians may be trapped in the conflict zone.

Others in the international community have raised similar concerns. According to the International Committee for the Red Cross, the humanitarian situation faced by civilians in the conflict zone is "deteriorating by the day." Former special advisor to the UN Secretary General Lakhdar Brahimi says that the humanitarian crisis places Sri Lanka "on the brink of catastrophe." In a phone call to to Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapaksa, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed "deep concern" about escalating civilian deaths and urged the Sri Lankan Army "not [to] fire into the civilian areas of the conflict zone." The European Union has also called for a cease fire to permit trapped civilians to escape the fighting.

Sri Lanka disputes the UN's figures — the LTTE, the government asserts, has "infiltrated certain personalities into these agencies" — and has rejected calls for a cease fire. More details are available in two stories from the BBC World Service's Evening Report, linked above (and here and here). However, according to the Christian Science Monitor:

[T]he sensitive data aired by Ms. Pillay were based on firsthand daily reporting by UN national staff and aid workers trapped in the no-fire zone. A copy of a recent UN briefing paper that was obtained by the Monitor listed similar casualty figures and described mounting casualties in the squalid, densely packed coastal strip. "Daily incoming artillery and mortar fire has caused large number of casualties with a noted increase since 26 Feb," it said.

The briefing paper said several weeks of food and medicine shortages had led to deaths from malnutrition and from preventable diseases. [link]

Meanwhile, SAJAer Angilee Shah has published a feature article in the Far Eastern Economic Review (which was reported from Colombo, Singapore, and Los Angeles with the support of a SAJA Reporting Fellowship) critically examining the consequences of the Rajapaksa government's aggressive approach to prosecuting the civil war:

UK: BBC Journalists to Strike Over Proposed "Offshoring" of South Asia Services

Journalists from across all services of the BBC have resolved to hold two one-day strikes next month, prompted in large part by plans to "offshore" operations for the BBC World Service's Hindi, Nepali, and Urdu programming to Delhi, Kathmandu, and Islamabad. From the Guardian:

TV, radio and online news will be disrupted on Friday 3 April and Thursday 9 April after nearly 800 members of the National Union of Journalists chapel at the BBC today voted in favour of industrial action in a national ballot.

More than 1,100 of the union's nearly 4,000 members at the corporation took part in the vote, 77% of whom voted in favour of a strike.

The most urgent threat of compulsory cuts is at the World Service's South Asian section, where up to 20 members are at risk, the union has said. Staff in Scotland are also understood to be under threat.

The NUJ general secretary, Jeremy Dear, said: "Journalists at the South Asian services have been fighting a heroic struggle against the outsourcing of their jobs ... now they have the weight of thousands of NUJ members at the BBC behind them." [link]

In late February, journalists within the South Asia services held their own one-day strike to protest the proposed restructuring. In addition to worrying about lost jobs in London, the journalists fear that shifting operations to the subcontinent would compromise the quality and independence of the BBC's coverage:

Staff are concerned that moving production of these BBC language services abroad will result in poorer output and a loss of independence which is integral to the BBC World Service.

One member commented: “If the BBC’s succeeds in imposing change, the tendency will be for the output to become more and more India-centric, in the case of the India service, as they try to compete with local FM broadcasters.

“This moves away from the World Service’s USP: impartial news with a global perspective. Why should the British taxpayer end up paying for a local Indian radio station?” [link]

The International Federation of Journalists has echoed these concerns, asserting that "the BBC management's off-shoring plans will put at risk seventy years of first-class journalism and expose their journalists to political and commercial pressures beyond their control." On the eve of last month's one-day strike, John McDonnell, a Labour MP for west London, elaborated upon these concerns even further:

BREAKING NEWS: Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry Reportedly to Be Restored as Chief Justice of Pakistan

UPDATE (10:58pm ET): Text (in Urdu and English) and video of PM Gilani's speech now available online. Gilani announced that Chief Justice Chaudhry would be restored to his position following the retirement of Abdul Hameed Dogar on March 21, and that provincial governments have been asked to lift the emergency measures imposed earlier this week under Section 144. Gilani also announced that the government would request the Supreme Court to review the decision holding Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz Sharif ineligible for public office.

No details were given about the "constitutional package" that reportedly was to accompany Chaudhry's restoration. Some links to early coverage:

• Daily Times
• Dawn
• Guardian
• The News
  
• New York Times

In consultation with Nawaz Sharif, Aitzaz Ahsan and other leaders in the lawyers' movement have reportedly postponed the Long March for the time being. However, another leader in the lawyers' movement, the Chief Justice's spokesperson Athar Minallah, responded cautiously, stating that the Long March would end only when the Chief Justice "takes his place in courtroom number one" in the Supreme Court building and warning the government against curtailing Chaudhry's constitutional term of office, which is not scheduled to end until 2013.

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UPDATE (8:50pm ET): PM Gilani's speech now beginning. Live streams below, and live discussion at Chapati Mystery.

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UPDATE (7:56pm ET): Join a live discussion on Gilani's speech at Chapati Mystery at 8pm ET.

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Via Reuters (and Sadia Abbas), some breaking news from Pakistan:

The Pakistan government agreed on Monday to reinstate Iftikhar Chaudhry as Supreme Court chief justice to end a political crisis that has gripped the Muslim nation, a government official said.

The official added that a constitutional package would also be presented.

President Asif Ali Zardari had hitherto stonewalled calls from the opposition led by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and a lawyers' movement to restore the judge.

Chaudhry was dismissed in late 2007 by then-president and army chief Pervez Musharraf, but Zardari regarded the judge as too politicized and feared he could pose a threat to his own presidency if restored. [link]

No solid confirmation as yet, but Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani is scheduled to address the nation shortly.

Watch a live stream from Samaa TV here:

PAKISTAN: Geo TV Blocked, Sherry Rehman Resigns

Everything old appears to be new again in Pakistan. The latest: government bans on independent television news coverage.

On the heels of an emergency crackdown earlier this week, in which the government of President Asif Ali Zardari responded to the "Long March" organized by the lawyers movement by banning public gatherings and reportedly detained hundreds of opposition lawyers and political workers, Zardari has also moved to block transmission of Geo TV throughout the country:

On the direct order of President Asif Ali Zardari, the transmission of the Geo News was blocked by cable operators in various parts of the country on Friday, which drew flak from across the country.

The transmission was blocked in some parts of Karachi, Hyderabad, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore, Quetta, Multan, Rawalakot, Muzaffarabad, Deepalpur, Sargodha, Nawabshah, Faisalabad, Gujranwala and Dera Murad Jamali. [link]

Geo and other TV news channels were previously blocked -- for much the same reasons as the present ban by Zardari -- by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, first as the lawyers' movement was gaining momentum in the spring of 2007 and later after Musharraf declared a state of "emergency" in November 2007.

HUMAN RIGHTS: Quantifying India's Encounter Deaths and Disappearances

In recent weeks, human rights violations in India have slowly been seeping into the mainstream Western consciousness — and not just because of Sergeant Srinivas. A flurry of media stories and human rights reports draws attention not only to particular extrajudicial killings, disappearances, and incidents involving torture at the hands of Indian police and security forces, but also to the prospect that such incidents may be part of more systematic patterns of abuse than is typically assumed.

Both the New York Times and Time have published stories within the past month discussing the prevalence of so-called "encounter killings" in India:

Numbering in the thousands every year, "encounters" or "encounter killings" are shootouts between the Indian police or army and any criminal element, from terrorists to petty thieves. Many Indians believe that at least some are stage-managed — with, say, a police officer placing a gun in the hands of a dead person — leading to the popular phrase, "fake encounter killing."...

In almost all, India’s limited forensics capabilities make investigating the claims of either side hard to verify. But the national news media often accept the police’s version,which puts them in harmony with many in their middle-class audience who fear rising crime and terrorism. Meanwhile, Bollywood and Indian media lionize “encounter specialists” — soldiers or policemen who, like Dirty Harry, specialize in shootouts. [NYT]

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Human rights activists have for years protested the growing incidence of encounters, some of them allegedly staged. "Encounters have become the norm," says Vrinda Grover, lawyer and human rights activist. "They have become the police's preferred method to deal with not just terrorists, but criminals of all kinds." Legends of "encounter specialist" cops abound, and one of them was even the subject of the Bollywood film Ab Tak Chhappan ("So far 56", implying the number of people he had killed).