Norway’s deafening silence on Sri Lanka is wrong: Aftenposten

[TamilNet, Thursday, 07 July 2011, 00:24 GMT]
Sri Lanka is in the middle of a power-game played by India, China and the USA. Norway’s interests in Sri Lanka are insignificantly few. There is no reason why Norway should maintain a deafening silence over the need for an international tribunal on the war crimes that took place in the island. The silence is due to a line of thinking in the Norwegian foreign ministry and especially in Mr Erik Solheim, that it would ‘normalise’ Norway’s relationship with Colombo. Rather than being in the driver’s seat in demonstrating how concerned Norway is about human rights, it is wrong on the part of Norway’s government to stand along the roadside with a mouth full of dust, says Kristoffer Rønneberg, a foreign affairs journalist of the prominent newspaper Aftenposten, in a commentary column published on Tuesday.      Full Story>>>
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Thursday, July 7, 2011

Rajiva: UN expert panel copied from Weiss’s book, Channel 4 documentary

[TamilNet, Thursday, 07 July 2011, 09:33 GMT]
Speaking on BBC’s HardTalk program Tuesday, Prof. Rajiva Wijesinghe, advisor to the Sri Lankan President on reconciliation, claimed the UN panel of experts’ report on Sri Lanka’s war crimes had “taken stuff, some of it verbatim” from former UN spokesperson Gordon Weiss’s recently published book, and from Channel 4’s recent documentary. When asked why the Sri Lankan government wasn’t agreeing to demands by the British government, US government and the EU for a thorough, independent, investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, Prof. Wijesinghe said: “Because we are not here to keep your electorate happy.”

Speaking about the UN expert panel’s report Prof. Wijesinghe asserted:

“If you go through the [UN] report, a lot of it is based on two sources, one is the Channel 4 material - because a lot of what they [UN experts] say, without saying where it came from, is precisely what was on the Channel 4 stuff; the second is a lot of stuff is taken, some of it verbatim from a book by a man called Gordon Weiss who worked for the UN in a rather junior capacity in Sri Lanka, and who tends to corroborate what they say.”          Full Story>>>
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Thursday, July 7, 2011

War and aftermath raise questions over Tamil strategy of engagement with powers

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 05 July 2011, 05:41 GMT]
LTTE and Tamil nationalism were perceived by some powers as getting into the way of their geo-strategic interests. Therefore ‘peace and stability’ means stabilising the Sinhalese regime by crushing LTTE’s military challenge – that was done – and bringing Tamil nationalism to heel, which process is ongoing both in Sri Lanka and among the Tamil diaspora, writes Dr. S. Sathananthan in an article he sent to TamilNet. The power-abetted genocidal war and the aftermath facilitations given to Colombo to complete the genocide into a structural one, raise serious questions among Tamils over the nature of their strategic engagement with some powers.

Dr. Sathananthan’s article is presented here as an example of a shade of opinion among Tamil academia in this regard. The views are that of the writer:

MULLIVAAIKKAAL: TRAPPING THE LTTE
By: Dr S Sathananthan

The issue most debated by intelligent Tamils last May, the 2nd Anniversary of Mullivaaikkaal, was the following: why did the leadership of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), possessing more than three decades of military experience and expertise, stay in their last and shrinking base in Mullaiteevu until it was too late to escape into the Vanni jungle?    Full Story>>>

Posted by Thavam