Let’s applaud local-foreign collaboration in Libya

‘The Cage:’ Optimism in post Gaddafi world


 Gordon Weiss was United Nations Spokesman in Lanka for two years during the civil war; his recent book The Cage (The Bodley Head, London, 2011) was on the shelves for some weeks before the government had it taken off; so much for the fraud called lifting Emergency Regulations! The book is scathing in its expose of the Rajapaksas and military but also merciless in denouncing the Tigers. Weiss is not pro-Eelam; “I went to Sri Lanka as a supporter of the state’s essential right to protect its sovereign territory, and I left with much the same view” he says. The government had every right to fight the war to victory but “the tactical choices the Sri Lanka Army was directed to make and which contributed to the deaths of so many civilians warrant a credible judicial investigation of the kind that the Sri Lankan state . . . is no longer capable of mounting”. (Emphasis added).

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Is Govt. stalling on detainees, disappearances?

Sunday 11 September 2011

y Ranga Jayasuriya

Vijitha, (30) surrendered to the army at Vattuval on May 16, 2009, a day before the long-running ethnic conflict reached its bloody conclusion. He was amongst the exodus of Tamils who headed to the government controlled area, after troops breached the final defence line of the Tigers. At Vattuval, military officials told incoming crowds that persons, who were even briefly involved with the Tigers, need to identify themselves. They were asked to form a separate queue and were assured that they would not be harmed. The military announcement sounded so reassuring to the beleaguered crowds that many parents handed their children over to the army. Vijitha, who served as a clerical worker at an LTTE office gave himself up at the check point, persuaded by his ageing mother. 
That was the last time his mother saw him. Since then, she had visited military camps and detention centres island wide, searching for him, but all in vain. 
His mother says she could even recognize the officer who took her son into custody. 
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