EDITOR'S NOTE: In celebration of SAJA's 15th anniversary, we talked to senior journalists who have been with the organization since its early days. In these profiles, they share a bit of themselves and their association with SAJA.
Thalif Deen, the former U.N. Bureau Chief and Regional Directorof Inter Press Service News Agency, says as a Sri Lankan journalist he is now an “endangered species.”
Over the years, Deen says that SAJA has kept South Asian reporters in North America abreast of news from the other side of the world, including the struggles of journalists in other parts of the world.
“I have always appreciated the services provided by SAJA,” he said. He specifically mentioned Sree Sreenivasan, one of the group's founders, and his role in keeping the member community alerted to breaking news from the South Asian region.
Deen was among the first members of SAJA 15 years ago. He also served on SAJA's executive committee, and was one of the first Sri Lankan journalists to join the organization.
WEBCAST: SRI LANKA BRIEFING #4 Discussing the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) Special Report: on A Marred Victory and a Defeat Pregnant With Foreboding
SAJA presents the fourth in a series of webcasts about Sri Lanka (recordings of previous sessions below).
SAJA features a rare interview with a member of University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), Dr. K. Sritharan. UTHR(J) has just issued a special report focusing on the last two months of the war in Sri Lanka—and in particular, its ramifications for civilians.
SPEAKER: Kopalasingham Sritharan, former Mathematics Lecturer at the University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, is a co-founder of University of Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna). The group formed in 1988 at the University of Jaffna, and documented human rights violations and abuses by all sides in the nation's conflict, including various armed groups. After the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) assassinated Dr. Rajani Thiranagama, another prominent founding member of UTHR(J), in September 1989, Sritharan and fellow UTHR(J) member Rajan Hoole were forced to leave the university. For the past 20 years, in hiding and on the move, they have systematically documented human rights violations, provided political critiques and recorded voices of ordinary people from all communities. UTHR(J) was awarded the prestigious Martin Ennals Award for human rights in 2007. K. Sritharan is also a co-author of The Broken Palmyra.
Official report summary: This report covers key issues arising from the recently concluded war. It begins by examining current political prospects, and then moves on to a sketch of the last two months of the war primarily from the standpoint of civilians. While being frank about the LTTE’s cynical use of civilians, the report raises questions about the Sri Lankan government’s relentless move to crush the LTTE leadership while placing the civilians it held hostage at unacceptable risk. It examines humanitarian and human rights issues, the detention of the doctors who served with courage in the No-Fire Zone, questions about the fate of the injured left behind and moral questions arising from the action against the LTTE leadership and the fate of Prabhakaran’s family. The report closes with a warning, noting the danger posed by the present government behaving increasingly like a replica of the LTTE, and makes some recommendations that UTHR(J) believes would be profitable at this juncture. The report and its recommendations emphasize two aspects in particular: the need for urgent measures to address the concerns of the recently displaced living in camps and to secure accountability of the state to ensure the due rights of its citizens.
Featuring: K. Sritharan, University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna). Moderator: V.V. Ganeshananthan, current SAJA board member, former SAJA vice president and author of "Love Marriage," a novel set in Sri Lanka and the diaspora.
Friday, June 12, 2009 10:30 am-11:00 am NY time 8 pm-8:30 pm Colombo time
Listen live or to a recording:http://www.blogtalkradio.com/saja/2009/06/12/Sri-Lanka-Briefing-4-The-Human-Rights-Situation (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.
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
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.
The Sri Lankan government has made headlines across the world after
ending the 25-year Tamil Tiger rebellion, a victory that The Washington
Post's editorial board called a rare and "reversal of fortunes."
But what does it tell us about other struggles? While the United States
grapples with two wars abroad against fierce insurgents, one school of
thought is
that Sri Lanka has proved something.
But did Sri Lanka really set an example?
Yes, according to this editorial in the Wall Street Journal.
Four years ago, the newly elected government under Mahinda Rajapaksa
decided to launch a fullscale military offensive against the Tamil
Tigers, investing massive amount of resources in military and
counterinsurgency resources. That very determination, according to the
Journal, gave Sri Lanka an edge against one of the most skillful
insurgents ultimately defeating them.
No, writes
Bobby Ghosh of Time. While Sri Lanka might have set a great
standard militarily, Ghosh thinks that other countries fighting
insurgency should not attempt to follow its lead because the costs at
which Sri Lanka won the war amount to thousands of lives. "Rajapaksa's
triumph has come at a high cost in civilian lives and a
sharp decline in democratic values — and he is no closer to resolving
the ethnic resentments that underpinned the insurgency for decades," he
writes.
Of course, it's hard to rain on the Sri Lankan government's parade right now. Still, a shunned group
will only stay dormant for so long. If a democratically elected
insurgent group can come back to threaten a country, it's even more likely for a violently repressed group like the Tamils.
We are still collecting information on this breaking news. Please post any links in the comments section below. From VOA's Steve Herman, who has been on the ground in Sri Lanka for several weeks now.
LTTE Leader Killed, Sri Lanka Claims Total Control of Island Nation By Steve Herman Colombo 18 May 2009 The quarter-century civil war in Sri Lanka has come to a dramatic end. The army says it has wiped out the entire leadership of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, including the founder-leader of the rebel group. And for the first time in 26 years, the government says all territory of the island nation is back under its control.
Sri Lanka's state-controlled broadcasters switched to patriotic programming and special reports to announce a total victory and that the military had vanquished the entire leadership of the rebel organization that had terrorized the island nation for decades.
"It has been revealed that the LTTE supremo, Velupillai Prabhakaran, has been killed owing to the attacks of the advancing troops today, in the morning," the announcement said.
Media reports say the rebel leader, along with other top commanders, was killed trying to flee in an ambulance. The Defense Ministry says the bodies are in the process of being identified and that 250 rebels were killed during the final burst of fighting Monday.
OBITUARIES (more to come - please come back soon):
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]
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.
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:
As the civil war in Sri Lanka heads for what seems like an end, all the coverage has focused on the fall of the rebel areas in the north. Today, there is breaking news that the capital, Colombo, is facing attack. Please post updates and news below. Or e-mail saja[at]columbia.edu. If you are a journo on the ground or an expert available to speak to reporters, please post your details below.
[UPDATE: The final numbers - two people dead, 40 injured. See Saturday's NYT story.]
UPDATED: Monday, Feb. 9, 2009: M.I.A. didn't win the Grammy (though tabla maestro Zakir Hussain did), but she did get to perform at the Grammys, fully nine-months-pregnant. A review of her work from Mike Bruno in Entertainment Weekly, "Give that Girl a Solo!":
Like many M.I.A. fans, I couldn't have been happier last summer when her absolutely sublime single "Paper Planes" finally caught the public's attention, more than six months after its release, largely thanks to its use in promos for Pineapple Express. Also, like many M.I.A. fans, I was less impressed with the subsequent string of hip-hop mixtapes that included a quick sample of the song as M.I.A. became the genre's it girl for a minute. I'm sure she's thrilled to be included in hop-hop's cool kids club, and I'm not surprised she was elated to share the stage at the Grammys alongside royalty like Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, T.I., and Kanye West -- and being nine-months pregnant, she probably appreciated the help. But personally, I'm disappointed that M.I.A. isn't getting the spotlight to herself, and I was let down 30 seconds into last night's performance (which, like most of those big-stage, all-star hip-hop performances, resulted in a whole less than the sum of its parts) when it turned out to be the Jay-Z-T.I. song "Swagga Like Us" and not the M.I.A. song used as the hook.
Here's the video of the all-star hip-hop performance, with M.I.A. leading them off (it did air in black & white):
- - - -
ORIGINAL POST, SUNDAY, FEB. 8, 2009: In an hour from now the Grammys get underway, and it will be a landmark day for Sri Lankan-British singer M.I.A. (whose real name is Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam). Not only is her 2008 song, "Paper Planes" nominated for Record of the Year, but it's also her baby's due date. From Ben Sisario's NYT piece:
LAST year the big question at the Grammy Awards was whether Amy Winehouse would perform as advertised. This year it might be whether the golf cart gets M.I.A. to the delivery room on time.
M.I.A.,
the Sri Lankan-British rapper, is up for a Grammy and is scheduled to
perform at the ceremony, which CBS will broadcast live from Los Angeles
on Sunday at 8 p.m. She’s also nine months pregnant. Exactly nine
months: her baby is due on Sunday. (“Either way,” she wrote on MySpace after being nominated, “I figured I’ll win.”)
In
case she goes into labor, a golf cart will be in position to get her
out of the enormous Staples Center complex, where the ceremony is held.
“The
overriding principle of a show like this is unpredictability,” said Ken
Ehrlich, the Grammys’ producer. “We don’t look for births onstage, but
we do look for spontaneity.”
A remix of "Paper Planes," along with the original appears on the "Slumdog Millionaire" soundtrack.
You can watch the Grammys on CBS from 8 pm ET tonight, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2009.
A few days ago, we ran an important item on the assassination of Lasantha Wickramatunga, editor of Sri Lanka's Sunday Leader newspaper and a major critic of the government. Like other things Sri Lankan, Lasantha's death may not resonate far beyond the island: to outsiders, this may seem to be a bit verse in yet another epic ethnic conflict. But even if you read nothing else about Sri Lanka, please read the piece below, printed by his paper after his death.
It was, in a sense, Lasantha's final work, an essay he wrote with the understanding that he would be killed for what he did. If, as a journalist, you've fretted about your pay, or job security, or career prospects, read Lasantha's words and remember this: at its finest, its most tenacious, journalism is heroic.
I have read it twice--once at work, and a second time on the subway--and each time, it broke me.
And Then They Came for Me
By Lasantha Wickramatunga
No other profession calls on its
practitioners to lay down their lives for
their art save the armed forces and, in Sri
Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past
few years, the independent media have
increasingly come under attack. Electronic
and print-media institutions have been
burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless
journalists have been harassed, threatened
and killed. It has been my honour to belong
to all those categories and now especially
the last.
I have been in the business of journalism a
good long time. Indeed, 2009 will be The
Sunday Leader's 15th year. Many things have
changed in Sri Lanka during that time, and
it does not need me to tell you that the
greater part of that change has been for the
worse. We find ourselves in the midst of a
civil war ruthlessly prosecuted by
protagonists whose bloodlust knows no
bounds. Terror, whether perpetrated by
terrorists or the state, has become the
order of the day. Indeed, murder has become
the primary tool whereby the state seeks to
control the organs of liberty. Today it is
the journalists, tomorrow it will be the
judges. For neither group have the risks
ever been higher or the stakes lower.
Why then do we do it? I often wonder that.
After all, I too am a husband, and the
father of three wonderful children. I too
have responsibilities and obligations that
transcend my profession, be it the law or
journalism. Is it worth the risk? Many
people tell me it is not. Friends tell me to
revert to the bar, and goodness knows it
offers a better and safer livelihood.
Others, including political leaders on both
sides, have at various times sought to
induce me to take to politics, going so far
as to offer me ministries of my choice.
Diplomats, recognising the risk journalists
face in Sri Lanka, have offered me safe
passage and the right of residence in their
countries. Whatever else I may have been
stuck for, I have not been stuck for choice.
But there is a calling that is yet above
high office, fame, lucre and security. It is
the call of conscience.
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