Watchdog quits over human rights abuses | World news | The Guard. Sri Lanka was accused yesterday of widespread abductions in its counter-insurgency operations against the Tamil Tigers, making the country one of the worst in the world for "disappearances". The reputation of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, a former human rights lawyer, was dealt another blow when an international advisory panel on human rights resigned, accusing the government of carrying out perfunctory investigations into alleged atrocities. The panel had been created by the government. As scrutiny of Sri Lanka's record intensified, Human Rights Watch published a report into 99 cases of abductions and "disappearances" of ethnic Tamils, human rights activists and journalists who were taken into custody.
The security forces subsequently denied holding them. Yesterday's Human Rights Watch report said the vast number of abductions and disappearances investigated were carried out by the army, navy or police, particularly by members of the police criminal investigation department. Tamils aren't voting for change | Suren Surendiran | Comment is. The Tamil National Alliance's current manifesto prefers a federal structure in Sri Lanka to a separate state. It claims shared sovereignty, and that the north and east provinces are the historical habitations of Tamil-speaking people. It further states that the Tamil people are a distinct nationality and are entitled to the right of self-determination. Power-sharing arrangements must be established in a unit of merged Northern and Eastern provinces based on a federal structure, in a manner also acceptable to the Tamil-speaking Muslim people.
Devolution of power should be in the areas of land, law and order, socioeconomic development including health and education, resources and fiscal powers. The above should be considered in the following context: "[Tamils] have no appetite for an election at a time when they haven't even begun to rebuild their own lives and livelihood destroyed during many years of war that only ended just seven months ago. Rumours of war | News. Tamil Tiger rebels escort the body of Tamil MP Joseph Pararajasingham, who was shot dead by unidentified gunmen as he attended Christmas mass. Photograph: AP Whatever political goodwill that followed the tsunami a year ago has long vanished from Sri Lanka. Unlike in Indonesia, where the disaster led to a reconciliation between the government and rebels in the breakaway province of Aceh, the government in Colombo and the Tamil Tiger rebels are once again at daggers drawn, and the 2002 truce brokered by Norway is giving way to the renewed threat of civil war.
The Tamil Tigers have fought tenaciously for two decades for a separate state in the Tamil-dominated north-east of Sri Lanka, and nearly 65,000 people have died in the conflict. In the latest upsurge of violence, 45 government soldiers have died this month in attacks Colombo has blamed on the rebels.
It is a depressing turn of events and international monitors of the 2002 truce fear the worst. The situation is not entirely hopeless. Jonathan Steele: The struggle between Tamils and Sinhalese | Wor. A new tsunami is gathering force in Sri Lanka. A country which lost over 35,000 people in last year's catastrophe is facing a disaster which could dwarf that death toll.
Yet the looming threat has hardly been noticed by the outside world. Among decision-makers in Sri Lanka's Sinhalese and Tamil communities a wave of war preparations is rising up. Assassinations of politicians and civic leaders happen with increasing frequency. Every day brings new violations of a four-year-old ceasefire. Attacks on government troops have been mounting with lethal intensity. Forty-four have died in three separate incidents this month. Although the peace negotiations which followed the ceasefire stalled in April 2003, by and large the truce held until a few weeks ago. In Indonesia's tsunami-stricken province of Aceh, last year's calamity pushed pro-independence rebels and the government into peace. Donor governments saw a chance to use the disaster to revive the peace process. What can be done? Tamil independence is only option, says rebel leader | World new. Velupillai Prabhakaran, leader of the Tamil Tigers.
Photograph: Dexter Cruez/AP The Tamil Tigers' reclusive leader today effectively ended the rebel group's support for the 2002 ceasefire with Sri Lanka's government, saying that it was "defunct". In his annual address to the island's Tamil population, Velupillai Prabhakaran put the government on notice war was the only option left for his guerrilla forces in their pursuit of an independent state. "It is now crystal clear that the [Sri Lankan] leaders will never put forward a just resolution to the Tamil national question. Therefore, we are not prepared to place our trust in the impossible and walk along the same old futile path," he said. The Tigers' leader made his "heroes' day" speech, which commemorates the 18,700 rebels who have died in two decades of conflict, from a secret location.
It was then broadcast by the rebels' TV and radio network. A round of peace talks took place a month ago but quickly broke down amid bitter arguments. Ceasefire over as Tamil Tigers' leader calls for independence | The Tamil Tigers' reclusive leader last night effectively ended the rebels' support for the 2002 ceasefire with the government of Sri Lanka, saying that it was "defunct". In his annual address to the island nation's Tamil population, Velupillai Prabhakaran put the government on notice that war was the only option left for his guerrilla forces.
"It is now crystal clear that the [Sri Lankan] leaders will never put forward a just resolution to the Tamil national question. Therefore, we are not prepared to place our trust in the impossible and walk along the same old futile path," he said. The Tigers' leader made his "heroes' day" speech, which commemorates 18,700 killed rebel fighters, from a secret location. It was then broadcast by the rebels' TV and radio network.
Roads and buildings in rebel-held territory were decked out in flags and bunting. Although the two sides in the conflict are supposed to be observing a truce, the reality is that a bloody war is taking place on the ground. Sri Lankan president's brother escapes suicide attack | World ne. Sri Lanka's defence secretary, the brother of the country's president, narrowly escaped with his life today after a suicide bomber targeted a military convoy in which he was traveling through the heart of the island's capital. The audacious strike, by a suspected Tamil Tiger bomber, left at least two people dead and 15 wounded. Moments after the explosion police sprayed the site with bullets. It appears the bomber drove a rickshaw alongside the five-car convoy, carrying the defence secretary, Gotabhaya Rajapakse, and detonated the device. "[Mr Rajapakse] is safe, no harm has come to him," a military spokesman said.
The government blamed an "LTTE suicide bomber", using the acronym of the rebels' official name, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Anticipating the public reaction to the bombing, the government also released photographs of president Mahinda Rajapakse hugging his younger brother. The defence secretary is a key target for the Tamil Tigers. Army accused of collusion in Sri Lanka child abductions | World. The Sri Lankan army has been colluding in the abduction of hundreds of children to train and fight against Tamil Tiger guerrillas in the country's intensifying war, according to the independent monitoring group Human Rights Watch.
Based on interviews with escaped children and their parents, the HRW report builds on allegations made recently by Unicef. The allegations are a severe embarrassment to the Sri Lankan government, which is struggling to find a response before the UN security council discusses the issue next month. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which is fighting for Tamil autonomy, has been using child soldiers for many years, some as young as 11. Unicef has received the names of almost 6,000. The Sri Lankan government always denounced this as a sign of the Tigers' cruelty. Up to 600 children have been seized in the Batticaloa district since June last year, the report says. In other cases parents say the police refuse to register complaints of abductions. Jonathan Steele: Sri Lanka's president seems as mindless as any. The roadblock was unexpected. Driving to Colombo along Sri Lanka's south-west coast, we were forced on to a sidestreet by police in Hikkaduwa, one of the island's main tourist centres.
There must have been a multiple crash, we assumed, as the detour along narrow village lanes took us past rice paddies shimmering in the afternoon sun. Back on the coast road, fleets of ambulances racing south seemed to confirm our suspicions. Later we discovered the problem was a bomb. Like terrorist attacks on civilians anywhere in the world, this one was "mindless", to use the epithet that politicians and editorial writers always employ on these occasions. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) have been fighting for a separate homeland for decades.
Sri Lanka has long been a test case for the complexity of dealing with political movements that turn to terrorist methods, almost always as a last resort. Sri Lanka's Sinhalese elite seemed to know this. It is equally absurd to use war to disarm them. Letters: The ongoing trouble in paradise | From the Guardian | T. Letter: Sri Lanka is committed to peaceful negotiations | From t.
Jonathan Steele's assessment of the situation in Sri Lanka in your Comment column (February 9) contained grave factual inaccuracies and general bias. His attempts to rationalise the LTTE's attacks on civilian buses by suggesting that "this was their answer to an escalating military campaign" seems a justification of the methods used by a terrorist organisation banned in the UK and European Union.
His claim that the LTTE had a local not global agenda ignores the fact that international institutions and thinktanks have researched its commercial links with the al-Qaida movement. Furthermore, there is an open warrant from the Indian supreme court for the arrest of the LTTE's leader in connection with the assassination of the late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. It is well known that the LTTE gets its arms and ammunition as well as its financing from overseas, with a large amount of funds being collected in the UK, much through extortion and intimidation.
Ambassadors hurt in Tamil Tiger attack | World news | guardian.c. The Italian ambassador to Sri Lanka, Pio Mariani, wears a dressing on his head after being injured when Tamil rebels fired rockets at a helicopter in which he had been travelling. Photograph: Lakruwan Wanniarachchi/AFP/Getty The US and Italian ambassadors to Sri Lanka were injured when their helicopter came under attack from mortars fired by Tamil rebels today, officials said.
The helicopter carrying Robert Blake, the US ambassador, and his Italian counterpart, Pio Mariani, had just touched down in Batticaloa district when several mortars landed nearby, the Sri Lankan minister Mahinda Samarasinghe said. Mr Samarasinghe, the disaster management and human rights minister, was with the ambassadors at the time of the attack. He said both were "fine" but had suffered slight injuries. A small piece of shrapnel was removed from Mr Mariani's head, and he was later discharged from Batticaloa's government hospital. There were no reports of injuries to officials travelling in a second helicopter. Public caught in Sri Lanka's three-way battle | News | guardian. Commander Karuna. Photo: SenaVidanagama/AFP/Getty ImagesAs Sri Lanka's air force bombed Tamil Tiger rebels for a third day in a row, Amnesty International today released a report drawing attention to the plight of civilians caught up in the long-running civil war.
The increased number of people fleeing their homes has pushed the number of displaced people to well over 120,000, according to humanitarian groups. And if things are not bad enough, armed groups - some in the uniforms of a breakaway Tamil Tiger rebel faction - are abducting refugees from increasingly crowded camps. As the Intercontinental Cry blog notes: "It is the civilian population - especially the poor and the vulnerable, women and children, who find themselves sheltering under trees, in open spaces or in churches and in schools as "internal refugees" struggling for food and clothing without any proper social welfare services.
The worrying pattern is that... they have no protection from either side. " Tamil Tigers target military airfield in their first air raid | Tamil Tiger rebels mounted aerial bombing raids on a military airbase next to Sri Lanka's main international airport this morning, and warned further attacks would follow. Light aircraft dropped explosives on the base 23 miles north of the capital, Colombo, before dawn.
Early reports said the attacks had killed two airmen and wounded 17. Witnesses living nearby reported explosions, flashes, and gunfire from inside the fortified base. Rebel military spokesman Rasiah Ilanthiraiyan said: "A couple of aircraft of Tamil Eelam Air Force have launched an attack on a Sri Lankan military airfield and hangars of military aircraft. It is a measure to protect Tamil civilians from the genocidal aerial bombardments by Sri Lankan armed forces. The government said the attack, the first such aerial bombing by the Tigers, who claim to have built up an air force, was aimed at the military base and did not damage the civilian airport.
Between troops and Tigers: refugees caught in Sri Lanka's bloody. Sitting beneath a palm tree, Loganathan points to his new "house": a brown tent with blankets for a floor just outside Batticaloa, a town on Sri Lanka's east coast straddling a blue lagoon. The 34-year-old Tamil labourer says his family have been sheltering under the tarpaulin since November when a mortar shell landed in his garden, which was about 62 miles away from the refugee camp he now calls home.
His nine-year-old daughter lost her arm in the blast and his five-year-old son's back was scarred by the shrapnel. "The army was shelling the town and we innocent people were caught in the firing. Now we are stuck here. These tents are too hot, there's too much sickness and no medicine and no jobs for us. " The father of two is typical of Batticaloa's newest residents.
Displaced by an increasingly bloody civil war between Tamil Tiger guerrillas and the Sri Lankan army, more than 150,000 live under plastic tents or in hastily converted schools and warehouses. Batticaloa is no island of calm. Sri Lankan forces claim Tiger sea base destroyed | World news | The Tamil Tigers' leader, Vellupillai Prabhakaran. Sir Lanka's air force said today it had destroyed the main sea operations base of the Tamil Tigers separatist group.
The air raid on the base, near the town of Mullaitivu in northern Sri Lanka, destroyed fuel stocks and started a major fire, an air force spokesman said. "We now understand that the base was the headquarters of the Sea Tigers [the group's marine operation] and had a fuel storage tank beside other facilities," said Group Captain Ajantha Silva. However, the Tamil Tigers said the raid had instead hit the offices of White Pigeon, a local charity that makes prosthetic limbs for landmine victims. "It's not a headquarters. It's a White Pigeon office that is damaged," a spokeswoman told the Reuters news agency. "There is no Sea Tiger building in the area where the attack took place. The Sea Tigers are renowned for launching suicide attacks against the Sri Lankan navy by ramming explosives-laden boats into ships. Tamil Tiger attacks end Sri Lanka peace deal, at least 23 killed.
Tamil Tigers attack airforce base | World news. Sri Lankan government accused of torture | World news | guardian. Sri Lankan minister killed by bomb | World news. Death toll escalates in Sri Lanka clashes | World news | guardia. Tamil Tigers warn of return to civil war in Sri Lanka | World ne. Tamil Tigers kill 28 with bus bomb | World news. Sri Lanka fighting kills 90, military claims | World news | guar.
Sri Lanka bus blast kills 24 | World news. Sri Lankan rebel planes bomb Colombo | World news | guardian.co. Sri Lankan troops 'to capture' Tamil Tiger headquarters | World.