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  • Diaspora prepares to send relief to forsaken civilians in Vanni

    Mar 17
    The Tamil Diaspora in Britain is organising a direct 'mercy mission' taking food and medicine to the civilians of Vanni, forsaken by the conscience of the International Community, said Dr. V. Arudkumar from London, on Tuesday, 10 March.
     
    Prominent humanitarian personalities are expected to participate in this mission, he said, which will be supported by Diaspora Tamil professionals in the medical field.
     
    Politicians and legal experts are already engaged in deliberations in materialising the mission, Dr. Arudkumar said.
     
    The move by the Tamil Diaspora in Britain comes as heavy rains and min-cyclone destroyed the tents of the displaced people causing more than 20,000 families stranded without shelters.
     
    Indiscriminate shelling by the Sri Lanka Army, using internationally banned cluster munitions and fire-bombs continued to target civilian settlements inside the 'safe zone'.
     
    An ICRC worker was killed inside the civilian zone early in March. Another humanitarian worker was wounded on March 10.
     
    Relief initiatives and offers of voluntary services were also reported from the Diaspora medical professionals of Australia and Norway.
     
    The Tamil Diaspora is seriously considering a 'mercy mission' as Sri Lanka is yet to provide safe passage to the requests extended by the charity organisations in Australia and Norway where doctors had urged their foreign ministries, United Nations Secretary General and the ICRC to secure urgent permission from Sri Lankan authorities to facilitate safe passage of their convoy of doctors and medical supplies to Vanni.
     
    Dr. Panchakulasingam Kandiah, Senior Consultant Radiologist of Haukeland University Hospital in Bergen, Norway, said on 27 February that the medical team of the Norwegian Tamils Health Organisation (NTHO) was prepared to work inside the 'safe zone' without any safety assurances from the Government of Sri Lanka.
     
    "However, the NTHO requires necessary guarantees for our safe passage through Colombo and government's permission to reach the conflict zone with ICRC escort," he had said in a press conference to the Norwegian media in Oslo.
     
    The latest British move is a pure humanitarian effort, Dr. Arudkumar said. "We will send an open appeal to all concerned, but are prepared to proceed with our mission as we need to act fast."
     
    All necessary judicial and humanitarian precautions would be taken care of, he said adding that a team of experts were dealing with the preparatory measures.
  • Civilian situation dire with no food, water
    The humanitarian situation in the Vanni is said to be dire, as a lack of food and clean water lead to illness and death by starvation.
     
    Dr. T. Sathiyamoorthy, the Regional Director of Health Services (RDHS) of Kilinochchi district, said that only 109.71MT of food had been received for the month of February 2009 through the ships with the help of the ICRC.
     
    The real requirement per month, according to the RDHS is 4950 MT.
     
    "Consequently people are threatened with starvation unless the food condition is urgently rectified," the doctor said in his situation report adding: "Particularly children, women, elders and those who are seriously ill become vulnerable to the onslaught of starvation."
     
    "Only a few people could be satisfied with this amount of food received. Even to receive this, people wait in winding queues in the scorching son."
     
    "In fact, 13 people have died of starvation in the latter part of February alone."
     
    The water facilities in the 'safety zone' have been naturally limited because of the landscape. The sudden increase in the population had made the situation worse. The available open wells and the water provided by the bowsers are not enough at all to provide sufficient water to the people, the report said. People wait in long queues for a long time even to collect a few pots of water provided at 10 places.
     
    Due to the non availability of materials to construct toilets, open defecation has become common among the majority of the people, reports said.
     
    The report by the Kilinochchi RDHS, citing the Government Agent's statement on 28 February 2009, said around 330,000 persons from about 81,000 families were living in and around the 'safety zone' and more than 90 percent of the people are living under substandard tarpaulin shelters.
     
    The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) organised the eighth sea evacuation of sick and wounded civilians and their dependents from combat areas on 4 March, but officials warned the situation was dire.
     
    Since the first evacuation on 10 February from Putumattalan in Mullaithivu District, more than 2,700 sick and wounded civilians have been moved by ferry to safer areas for medical care, Sarasi Wijeratne, ICRC spokesperson, told IRIN.
     
    "Concerning the civilian population trapped by the continuing fighting in the Vanni region, it is definitely one of the most disastrous situations I have come across," Jacques de Maio, ICRC's head of operations for South Asia, said in a statement on 4 March.
     
    "They are exposed to shelling and exchanges of gunfire. People are dying. There is no functioning hospital or other medical facility in the area," De Maio said.
     
    "The facilities that did exist have been shelled and are mostly destroyed."
     
    Wijeratne said one of the ICRC's local staff had been killed inside the combat zone on 4 March.
     
    The ICRC established the ferry service in February when evacuation overland was halted because of security fears.
     
    The ferry service has also been used by World Food Programme (WFP) to transport food into the combat areas.
     
    Heavy fighting between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the Vanni in the Mullaithivu District in northern Sri Lanka has forced tens of thousands to flee.
     
    The ICRC estimates that up to 150,000 persons are still in the Vanni.
     
    "Civilians are literally trapped in the combat zone. In the ongoing military confrontation, civilians and other non-combatants are dying in the line of fire and cannot receive life-saving assistance," De Maio said.
     
    Morven Murchison, the ICRC health coordinator, said more and more people were moving into Putumattalan to escape the fighting.
     
    "Because there is not enough drinking water in the Putumattalan area, they end up moving back inland in search of water," she said in a web post on 26 February.
     
    "The lack of clean water is a major humanitarian concern," she told IRIN.
     
    "The population at the coast has increased tremendously over recent weeks and the wells in Putumattalan cannot provide enough water for everyone to drink, wash and cook."
     
    "The risk of an outbreak [of disease] is very high given most people's living conditions, the lack of water and the lack of proper sanitation," she said.
     
    "There are no proper latrines or pits in the area where most displaced people are. There are reports of an increase in the number of cases of communicable diseases, including diarrhoea and respiratory infections," Murchison said. "We are very concerned about the possibility of a serious outbreak of disease."
     
    De Maio said the ICRC had been unable to transport sufficient medical supplies into the combat areas.
  • Different Certainties
    This week Tamil expatriates in Canada and Europe demonstrated vociferously, yet peacefully, on the streets of Toronto and in front of the European Union's headquarters in Brussels and the United Nations in Geneva. The demonstrators placed a cluster of demands before the international community, including recognition that the Tamils are suffering ongoing genocide in Sinhala-dominated Sri Lanka, that they are struggling for their inalienable freedoms and that the bans on the LTTE be lifted. As the repeated mass actions in the Diaspora and the Indian state of Tamil Nadu underline, these sentiments are shared by the no longer silent majority of Tamils.
     
    The proximate cause for the mass demonstrations is the ongoing massacres of the quarter of a million Tamils in the Mullaitvu district by Sri Lankan military bombardment. Well over two thousand people, including at least seven hundred children, have been killed since January. Though well aware of the bloodletting, the international community has stood by, less concerned with the lives of Tamils than the military destruction of the LTTE. Moreover, as we pointed out recently, the suffering being heaped on our people by the Sinhala military - with the tacit support of the international community - is for one purpose: to make us give up our demand for self-determination and submit to Sinhala hegemony.
     
    However, the resolve of the Tamil people - and the LTTE - to resist Sri Lanka's genocidal onslaught is hardening, not weakening. An extraordinary wind of solidarity and outrage is blowing through the global Tamil community. An obvious paradox seems to escape many international observers of the island's protracted conflict: the closer the Sinhala state says it is to destroying the LTTE, the more widespread, open and active Tamil popular support for the Tigers is becoming.
     
    International approaches to Sri Lanka in the past few years have centred on defeating the LTTE. In a utopian belief that a harmonious multi-ethnic Sri Lanka is waiting to emerge beneath the bloodsoaked surface, the international community has supported the Sri Lankan state's indiscriminate onslaught into the Tamil-speaking Northeast. In doing so, it has fuelled and the virulent Sinhala supremacy that has infected and shaped the state since independence.
     
    In other words, international support for the slaughter in the Northeast turns on the conviction that Tamils and Sinhalese will harmoniously co-exist once the LTTE is defeated. This fiction feeds itself; it is argued, for example, that many Tamils live amongst Sinhalese in the south. What is ignored is that almost a million Tamils have fled the island, and hundreds of thousands of others live in fear in the South, accepting the potentiality of state or communal violence over the certainty of summary killings, 'disappearances', torture and rape in the Northeast.
     
    Even amidst the Sinhala military's casual slaughter of starving Tamil civilians in Mullaitivu, this simplistic logic equates the unleashing of a thousand projectiles each day at Tamil civilians with the LTTE's insistence the Tamils do not want to be removed from their home soil and interned in state-run concentration camps - the fate of almost a million other Tamils since the conflict began. 'Both sides', in this logic, are to blame.
     
    It seems implausible to many Tamils that amidst the undisguised popularity of President Mahinda Rajapakse's Sinhala supremacist regime and the preparedness of the Sinhala state to openly slaughter Tamils that the international community can still believe a harmonious Sri Lanka is possible. This belief turns on both the international community's naïve faith in the malleability of Third World people's sentiments and an arrogant belief in its own abilities to discipline states like Sri Lanka into being liberal. There is a reason why the views of peoples in 'developing' parts of the world are not taken as seriously as those of people in 'advanced industrial' societies and why the former are accorded less rights than the latter.
     
    It is this combination that has convinced the international community that the Tamils' demand for an independent Tamil Eelam is an unnecessary and 'extreme' demand to a problem of 'poverty'. The point therefore is that the Tamils as a whole have to continue to make clear in their lobbying, demonstrations and other political activities why, exactly, they are unable to live with dignity in a Sinhala-dominated Sri Lanka: Tamil Eelam is not some whimsical pick from a menu of possible 'solutions' but a recognition that outright independence is the only way to escape genocide and secure the future security and well being of our people. And that is why we cannot and will not compromise.
  • Nadesan urges UN to investigate Colombo's War Crimes
    B. Nadesan, the political head of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) Sunday, March 15 said the Tigers had "plenty of evidences" to document that the Sri Lankan government of Mahinda Rajapakse was "intentionally directing attacks against civilians," committing war crimes and crimes against humanity when asked to comment on the recent statement issued by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). The UN High Commissioner had warned that the actions by the warring parties could amount to war crimes.
    "There are thousands of evidences among the civilians, officials and local aid workers. The ICRC has witnessed the Sri Lankan attacks on the civilians," he said. An ICRC worker was recently killed and another wounded in the Sri Lankan artillery fire inside the 'safe zone,' announced by the Sri Lankan government.

    The ICRC is also a witness to the plight of the wounded civilians and the hospital which is struggling to operate as the Sri Lankan government is continuing to block medicines, he further said.

    "Civilians are forcibly uprooted, separated and jailed inside barbed wire internment camps. Hundreds of civilians have gone missing in SLA controlled territories and in the South," he added.

    The civilians, officials and the humanitarian workers would be able to provide detailed accounts if independent international monitors visit the civilians in Mullaitheevu, the LTTE political head said.

    More than 2,800 civilians have been killed and more than 7,000 wounded in the attacks on civilian targets by the Sri Lankan forces since late January, Nadesan said pointing to the data referred by the OHCHR. But, the real casualty figure of the civilians who perished in the Sri Lankan attacks would be higher than the figures cited by the UN statement, he said.

    "The Sri Lankan government is carrying out genocidal massacres by deliberately targeting civilians, their humanitarian supplies and the hospitals," he said adding that shells have been fired by the Sri Lanka Army in the close vicinity of Puthumaaththalan hospital.

    Air strikes using cluster bombs, artillery and Multi-Barrel Rocket Launcher attacks deploying cluster munitions and fire-bombs were systematically targeting civilians earlier in Chuthanthirapuram and now in Maaththalan, Pokkanai, Valaignarmadam, Mu'l'livaaykkaal, Iraddaivaaykkaal and the adjoining areas where civilians were residing.

    Artillery, MBRL attacks and SLAF airstrikes have been used to herd the people from Tharmapuram to Chunthanthirapuram and later to the coast stretch north of Mullaitheevu by the Sri Lankan forces.

    "The SLA shelling has also targeted World Food Program's (WFP) storage for humanitarian supplies in Chuthanthirapuram. Now, the SLA attack has again targeted the humanitarian supplies being stored before distribution in Maaththalan," Nadesan charged.

    "This is why we are continuously urging the international community to send its diplomats to visit the people here in Mullaiththeevu and listen to them," he said.
  • UN call for civilian evacuation lopsided – TNA MP
    Calling for the evacuation of civilians and making them to end up in the hands of their killers, is taking side with one of the parties to the conflict and amounts to another one of the war crimes, perhaps the most serious one of them when comes from a world body of human rights, said Jaffna MP, Kajendran, responding to a statement from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, on Friday, March 13.
    The High Commissioner, Ms. Navi Pillai called on both the Sri Lankan Government and the LTTE to immediately suspend hostilities in order to allow the evacuation of the entire civilian population by land or sea, a press release from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said.
    She didn’t say anything on where should they be evacuated or on who would be responsible for them thereafter.

    By a subtle twist of realities ultimately in favour of genocidal Colombo, the OHCHR is trying to justify evacuation and not protection of civilians where they are, by equating Colombo government and the LTTE in war crimes, the MP noted.

    "This is not a balanced judgment."
    "It neither serves humanitarian cause nor the affected civilians, but favours only the oppressors."

    "What the OHCHR is envisaging is ‘enforced surrender’, even if people are not willing to surrender themselves into the hands of a genocidal government," the MP said.

    Ultimately the civilians will end up in the barbed wire camps of the government after losing a part of them in the screening process.

    "Where was the OHCHR when this was happening to the thousands who got into the hands of the government in the last couple of months, and what it was able to do on the conditions of the internment camps," asked the MP.

    "It is not a natural catastrophe justifying evacuation. It is a situation deliberately created by a chauvinistic government and by the greed of certain world powers."

    "The UN, especially its human rights arm, needs to stand upright in indicting the real culprits and in stopping their war of atrocities.

    "The talk of evacuation comes from the failure, incompetence and unwillingness in rendering protection.

    "Whether those who are now calling for evacuation are prepared to take full responsibility to the safety, wellbeing, rehabilitation and freedom of all the civilians, and what mandate and power they have is assuring them are crucial questions."

    "The UN which is not prepared to take full responsibility of the situation in the island, which has withdrawn its agencies from the war zone and which is not able to assert itself with the Sri Lankan government in protecting the civilians has no moral grounds to take side only on the evacuation issue."

    Meanwhile the already artful OHCHR press release, quoting Ms Navi Pillai, was twisted and painted further by some international news agencies to discredit the LTTE and to the benefit of Colombo. They didn’t fail to bring in the South African, minority Tamil profile of Ms. Navi Pillai.
  • Gothabaya on yet another visit to Beijing
    Sri Lankan Defence Secretary Gothabaya Rajapakse travelled to on a day six day long visit China to discuss military cooperation including training of security personnel.
     
    "Secretary Defence Gotabhaya Rajapaksa made an official visit to the People’s Republic of China from 28th February to 6 March 2009," a Sri Lankan Defence Ministry statement said.
     
    Gothabaya Rajapakse, the younger brother of President Mahinda Rajapakse, held discussions with the Chief of the General Staff and Vice Minister of the Ministry of National Defence, Lt General Mia Xio Tian, Vice Minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information, Chen Qui Fa, and Vice Minister of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs He Yifei during his visit.
     
    Rajapakse, extended his gratitude towards People’s Republic of China and its people for the steadfast support given over the years to Sri Lanka to strengthen the war against terrorism, the statement further added.
     
    In the past few years China has become a major supplier of arms to Sri Lanka. As the ethnic conflict intensified, Sri Lanka has purchased JY-11 3D air surveillance radars, armoured personnel carriers, T-56 assault rifles, machine guns, anti-aircraft guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, missiles, bombs and the like from China.
    In addition to supplying weapons, China is also increasing its influence over the island, located 22 kilometres south of India, through large scale development projects.
    China is upgrading the Hambantota harbour in southern tip of the island and is building or expanding three major roads in Sri Lanka — an expressway from the Katunayake Airport to Colombo, a 200-odd-km road from Ambapasa to Trincomalee and about 100km of road from Hambantota to another airport east of it.
  • Aceh tense as elections near
    The road where Abu Karim died is as pretty as a picture - a place where flowering branches hang over the dusty road and neighbours gather to while away the afternoon.

     

    There's a small mosque on the corner, and a tiny coffee stall sits tucked between the small, neat houses. It's very quiet.

    The forecourt outside Abu Karim's house is blackened with patches of rubber, where the wheels of his car spun and burned as he sat dying at the wheel.

    He had been shot twice in the head by unknown gunmen, just a few weeks before parliamentary elections.

    The police have been up and down this little street several times. No one, it seems, saw anything that might help catch his killers.

    His neighbour, Sooratnawati, helped take him to hospital the night he was shot. She told me she thinks it strange the police have not found the people who killed him.

    "Maybe it's because there were no witnesses," she said. "And I think it's weird that there were no witnesses but what can I say? Everyone said they didn't see anything."

    Inside the house Abu Karim's wife, Cut Dede, watches nervously over her four-year-old son. Like many people here she is in no doubt this was a political killing.

    Aceh Party

    Abu Karim was a former guerilla in Aceh's independence struggle. That struggle came to an end with a peace deal, signed in the aftermath of the devastating 2004 tsunami.

    The deal saw the rebel Free Aceh Movement (Gam) give up their claim to independence in return for far-reaching autonomy and the chance to form a political party.

    Aceh is now gearing up for parliamentary elections in April. For the first time ever, local parties will be able to contest the polls in this province. That includes the former rebels in the new Aceh Party who are predicted to do very well.

    Abu Karim's death is one of several recent attacks against the former rebels and their new political party. Three men have died, and one has been injured in the shootings.

    Grenades have landed in Aceh Party offices, and campaigning has been interrupted on several occasions.

    But Aceh's police spokesman, Farid Ahmad, is adamant: the killings have nothing to do with politics.

    Instead, he says, the motive was most likely in-fighting between the former guerillas, many of whom have failed to reintegrate properly.

    "The people that did this," he tells me, "maybe they're hungry, or don't have a job and so they use their weapons to find food. It's not political."

    Army security

    Whoever killed Abu Karim, his death is feeding tensions in Aceh ahead of the elections.

    Rumours pointing towards the involvement of groups linked to the Indonesian army are unsubstantiated, but potent nonetheless.

    And they come at a time when the army is quietly repositioning itself back in Acehnese villages.

    Down a rugged track in one sleepy village we found nine young soldiers holed up in an abandoned house. They told me they had lived there for three and a half months, patrolling the nearby villages in case of any problems.

    "Elections in other places sometimes end in violence," they told me, "so particularly in this area, where there was conflict in the past, there's a need to make sure things will be secure here".

    But according to the peace deal, this kind of security is not what the army's for. At Aceh's tiny airport, we found the former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari - the architect of that peace deal, known as the Memorandum of Understanding, or MoU.

    I asked him what he thought of the army going back into the villages. "That's totally against the MoU," he said.

    "The MoU is very clear - the army had to remove itself from the villages and focus on external defence. We have to be careful that we don't create similar sorts of situations that existed during the conflict years, otherwise there's a risk of intimidation."

    The Aceh Party has vetoed any mention of independence on the campaign trail.

    But some in the army are reported to be worried that that is the new party's true agenda. With polling day less than a month away, there's a nervousness in the air.

    As one young politician here put it: people think these elections are the end of Aceh's peace process. Actually, they're the beginning.

  • Sri Lankan economic woes deepen as buyers stay away
    Sri Lanka’s economy is going through a severe crisis as key exports including garment and tea significantly drop with buyers staying away.

    According to a recent survey in the past four years, many large international garment buyers moved their business out of Sri Lanka and into cheaper manufacturing destinations.
     
    75 factories, in seven provinces have closed down in this period and out of this around 24 factories closed down over the past six months alone, according to the survey.
     
    These factories were mainly located in the free trade zones in Katunayake, Biyagama, Koggala and Seethawaka Pura. Some factories were registered under the Board of Investment and some under the Textile Division of the Ministry of Industrial Development.
     
    In addition to job losses and foreign exchange losses these garment factory closures have also hit other connected industries.

    “Out of around 50 main international garment buyers registered with the Sri Lanka Garment Buying Offices Association, 12 shut down their offices in Sri Lanka within the last three years. These buying offices were shifted mainly to Singapore, India and Pakistan. Production was shifted mainly to India, Bangladesh and Vietnam,” Yarns and Fibres Exchange reported quoting Mr Dawson, a private consultant who conducted the survey.

    The survey blamed the unstable security situation along with comparatively higher cost of production in Sri Lanka as reasons for foreign buyers leaving Sri Lanka.
     
    Elaborating on the security concerns the survey stated buyers felt it was difficult to send technical staff to local factories for periodic factory inspections, because of security worries.

    Island’s other big earner, tea, is also not faring well according to the Sri Lanka Tea Board, which announced a 30% drop in overseas sales in January.
     
    Sales from tea shipments fell to 6.9 billion rupees (61.37 million dollars) in January, compared to 9.8 billion rupees in the same period a year earlier.
    Volumes of tea exports also fell 25 percent to 17.76 million kilograms in January, over the same month in 2008, the board said.
     
    "We are reeling from twin effects of lower rainfall and a deliberate effort to curtail our own production. This has hit our exports in terms of volumes and earnings," according to Tea Board chairman Lalith Hettiarachchi.
     
    Russia and former Soviet republics are the largest markets for Sri Lankan tea, accounting for nearly a fifth of total exports, followed by the Middle East and North Africa.
     
    With the onset of the global economic meltdown, prices have collapsed to an average of 2.65 dollars a kilo (1.20 dollars a pound) from record highs of 4.26 dollars a kilo between January and September last year.
     
    The drop in export earnings combined with the spiralling cost of imports, especially due to increased military purchases to sustain the war, is impacting the dwindling foreign reserves, forcing the government to seek bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
     
    Adding to the country’s financial woes, in February, Fitch Ratings downgraded Sri Lanka long-term foreign and local currency Issuer Default Ratings (IDRs), making it harder for Sri Lanka to borrow in the global markets.
     
    Fitch cited ‘the increased vulnerability of sovereign creditworthiness to adverse shocks associated with rising inflation, persistently large fiscal deficits and worsened terms of trade due to soaring oil prices in the context of greater government recourse to commercial and market-based financing’ for the downgrade.
     
    However, Sri Lanka’s Central Bank, which is now in discussion with the IMGF for a bailout, said the Fitch assessment was based on 'pessimistic views on the security situation, inflation and foreign currency borrowings’.
  • Sri Lanka dusts off the begging bowl
    Sri Lanka is going on bended knees to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - an institution it chased away two years ago - for a bailout package worth US$1.9 billion as the country's authorities scrape the barrel for foreign exchange.

    Sri Lanka's economic crisis is two-fold: sagging export income and the Central Bank using the few dollars it has to intervene in local money markets to defend the rupee from depreciating against the US dollar.

    At the same time, the government's access to cheap commercial borrowing from foreign sources to fund the costly war against separatist Tamil rebels and other state expenses has dried up with the global financial meltdown.

    Last week, the government took the plunge and announced it was in negotiations with the IMF for a $1.9 billion standby arrangement.

    Central Bank governor Ajith Nivard Cabraal - who has been criticized by economists and opposition legislators for misleading the country on the state of its finances - was quoted as saying: ''The offer was made for a facility without conditions. We didn't think we needed it but then this happened to be a good opportunity.''

    The country had $1.7 billion in gross official reserves at the end of December, sufficient just for 1.5 months of imports, compared with more than $3.5 billion a year earlier.

    Senior economist Sirimal Abeyratne from the University of Colombo told Inter Press Service (IPS) that the financial crisis is so acute that Sri Lanka had few choices. ''Otherwise, why ask for money if we have money, particularly from an institution [IMF] that the government didn't want,'' he said.

    Dushni Weerakoon, senior economist at the Institute of Policy Studies, said Sri Lanka's main problem has been the ''outflow of foreign exchange last year following the global economic crisis and using whatever resources we have to defend the Sri Lanka rupee in local money markets''.

    She told IPS that in addition to an outflow of $600 million after foreigners withdrew money in central bank bonds in the second half of 2008, the bank has been pumping some $200 million a month (in the last three months of the year) in an unsustainable exchange rate policy to prop up the rupee.

    Sri Lanka last year kept its exchange rate at about 108 rupees to the US dollar until October 2008 as the government sought to slow inflation. The rupee has since dropped to about 114.30.

    The move to return to the IMF for emergency cash comes after the government virtually threw the organization out of the country in January 2007, with the IMF closing its Colombo office, saying it had no program left.

    The opposition and economists at that time said the government had come under pressure from hardline partners like the JVP (People's Liberation Front) and the JHU, formed mainly by Buddhist monks, who frowned on Western-led multilateral agencies like the IMF or World Bank and their tough, conditional lending.

    Loans from the IMF, generally seen as a lender of last resort, generally come with conditions such as demands for a reduced budget deficit, cuts in government spending, tighter monetary policy and a flexible exchange rate policy, which would allow the rupee to float freely against major currencies.

    Economists said much of the Sri Lanka's spending, particularly on the military, came from domestic borrowings and when that dried up, it came from foreign borrowings from commercial sources, and China and Iran.

    Sri Lanka has been relying on China for political and economic support after turning away from the once-favoured West, which has been repeatedly critical of the government in Colombo over human-rights violations.

    Early last year, before the global crisis, the government was so gung-ho about the access to cheap credit from commercial sources that one powerful Finance Ministry official told a senior World Bank staffer: ''We don't need your conditional money. We have access to cheap credit without conditions.''

    With foreign reserves fast dwindling, the central bank, whose governor is a political appointee and former advisor to President Mahinda Rajapaksa, in February, announced two measures to shore up reserves: raising $500 million from Sri Lanka's diaspora and currency swaps with other central banks in the region. However neither has worked as expected.

    Economist Abeyratne said Sri Lanka was in a debt trap, where one had to borrow to pay off debts. ''We are down to our lowest levels. Diaspora funds have not come as expected. Last year, the government paid close to half a million dollars in debt payments and this year it will be higher. So we are borrowing to pay off our debt - which is where part of the $1.9 billion IMF facility will go.''

    Weerakoon said the debt payments will increase this year once some central bank bonds expire and payments are made. There was also payment to be made to Iran for an oil credit line, she said. ''There is quite a list of payments.''
     
    [Edited for Brevity]
  • Sri Lanka escapes Commonwealth censure despite demand from MPs
    The political watchdog of the Commonwealth refrained from discussing the civil war in Sri Lanka despite a last-minute plea by a group of British MPs to place it on the agenda of its meeting in London on Wednesday, March 4.
     
    "There was a brief mention of pressure being put by some MPs, but there was no discussion," a Sri Lankan diplomat told IANS on condition of anonymity.
     
    "In any case, even if they took it up we would have objected because this is not the forum to discuss it," the diplomat told IANS after the meeting of the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group (CMAG), the body that is charged with enforcing adherence to human rights and democratic values.
     
    According to reports, a group of 10 British members of parliament issued an appeal on the morning of the meeting criticising the Sri Lankan government and urging the Commonwealth to suspend the South Asian country for alleged human rights violations against Tamils.
     
    "Last year, Sri Lanka lost its seat on the UN human rights council over its poor human rights record. It is likewise incumbent upon the Commonwealth to exercise leadership on human rights," the MPs said in their joint statement.
     
    They said Sri Lanka, which has never featured on the CMAG's agenda, should be "put under permanent scrutiny and its government suspended from the Commonwealth" unless it met four conditions.
     
    These were: establishing a ceasefire with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE); granting UN monitors unfettered access; allowing international aid agencies access to the troubled Vanni region; and resuming peace negotiations with the LTTE.
     
    The Sri Lankan diplomat, however, said the statement, which was published as a letter in The Guardian newspaper, had not been delivered to the Sri Lankan Embassy in London.
     
    "In any case, while we are happy to state our case, we would never have discussed the situation under the terms spelt out in the letter," the diplomat added.
     
    The appeal was signed by the ruling Labour Party's Joan Ryan, Siobhain McDonagh, Virendra Sharma, Andrew Dismore, Stephen Pound, Phyllis Starkey, Eric Joyce and Neil Gerrard, the Conservative Party's Lee Scott, Andrew George of the Liberal Democrats and Andrew Pelling, an independent MP.
  • EU Parliament calls for halt in violence
    The EU Parliament passed a resolution, with a large majority, calling for immediate ceasefire between the Sri Lanka Army and Liberation Tigers of Tamileelam in order to allow the civilian population to leave the combat zone.
     
    Condemning all acts of violence against civilians in the safe zone and expressing serious concern for the plight of the people in the refugee camps run by the Sri Lankan government, the EU Parliament demanded full and unhindered access to international and national humanitarian organisations, as well as journalists to the combat zone and to the refugee camps.
     
    Thursday, March 12 resolution called for immediate ceasefire without any conditions and expressing concern not only for the plight of civilians in the safe zone, but also for the inmates of the internment camps run by Colombo are viewed as significant stances by political observers.

    The resolution was passed by 358 votes to 232, on average, according to Robert Evans MEP.

    Full text of the resolution follows:

    P6_TA-PROV(2009)0129

    Sri Lanka

    European Parliament resolution of 12 March 2009 on the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Sri Lanka

    The European Parliament,

    – having regard to Rules 91 and 90(4) of its Rules of Procedure,

    A. whereas an estimated 170 000 civilians find themselves in an emergency situation, trapped in the battle zone between the Sri Lankan army and the forces of the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam (LTTE) without access to the most basic aid,

    B. whereas UN agencies have documented more than 2300 civilian deaths and at least 6500 injuries since late January 2009,

    1. Calls for an immediate ceasefire by the Sri Lankan army and the LTTE in order to allow the civilian population to leave the combat zone; condemns all acts of violence and intimidation which are preventing civilians from leaving the conflict area;

    2. Condemns the attacks on civilians as documented by the International Crisis Group;

    3. Calls on both sides to respect international humanitarian law and to protect and assist the civilian population in the combat zone, as well as in the safe zone;

    4. Is concerned about reports of serious overcrowding and poor conditions in the refugee camps established by the Sri Lankan Government;

    5. Demands that international and national humanitarian organisations, as well as journalists, be granted full and unhindered access to the combat zone and to the refugee camps;

    6. Calls on the Sri Lankan Government to cooperate with countries and aid organisations that are willing and able to evacuate civilians;

    7. Instructs its President to forward this resolution to the Council, to the Government of Sri Lanka, to the Secretary-General of the United Nations and, for information, to the Commission.
  • British Conservatives back Sri Lanka
    Despite the horrific human rights violations the Sri Lankan government is committing against the Tamil civilians in its war to wipe out the LTTE, a visiting British Member of Parliament belonging to the British Conservative party claimed that President Mahinda Rajapakse’s regime needs support not criticism.
     
    The Sri Lankan government needs help not condemnation as it grapples with the current military conflict, Liam Fox, told reporters and added that a special fund with the help of international partners must be set up to help the Sri Lankan government in handling the reconstruction and rehabilitation of the war ravaged areas in the Northern and Eastern provinces.
     
    In 1997 as a minister of the then British government, Fox brokered a bi-partisan agreement with Sri Lanka's main political parties as means to end the Tamil minority conflict in the island. Fox's remarks came after his meeting with Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse on Friday, March 13.
     
    Tamil political analysts said that the pro-government stance taken by Fox, was disappointing when Sri Lankan government has unleashed a genocidal war on the Tamils, instead offering a political solution to the long dragging ethnic conflict.
     
    Conservative Members of European Parliament (MEPs) also took a very pro-Sri Lanka stance during the EU parliament debate on Sri Lanka last week.
     
    British Conservative MEP and Chairman of the 'Friends of Sri Lanka Group' Geoffrey van Orden told the European parliament that "the LTTE is now in a desperate end game and, typically in such situations, is turning to international apologists to get it off the hook.
     
    He further rejected claims that Sri Lanka was killing innocent Tamil civilians stating: "We cannot support amendments to the resolution before us based on unattributable and often nonsensical allegations or selective quotation from one NGO report. And we have no good reason to dispute the Government's firm assertion that its troops have not fired on no-fire zones and nor will they".
     
    "The greatest service all in this House can do is call on the LTTE to lay down its arms and to release the civil population from its grip.” Geoffrey van Orden added.
     
    Another British Conservative MEP Charles Tannock, who is the Conservative Foreign Affairs Spokesman, told the European parliament: "we should be resolute in our support for President Rajapaksa and his efforts to end an insurgency that has brought untold human misery to Sri Lanka and severely retarded economic development on that beautiful island.”
     
    Tannock further said that he wanted to see ‘the comprehensive defeat of the LTTE and a peaceful, just and multi-ethnic Sri Lanka established in its place’.
  • US congress members point out Sri Lanka's
    A group of 38 United States members of Congress sent a joint letter on Thursday March 12, to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and to the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Dr. Susan Rice, highlighting the humanitarian crisis faced by Tamil civilians in Sri Lanka, and expressing concern over conditions in the internment camps, calling for bringing the issue to the UN Security Council, and encouraging active U.S. leadership to bring about a long-delayed political settlement.
    The diverse, bipartisan group of 38 Members of Congress was led by Congressman Jim Moran and included chair of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, Congressman McGovern, leading Republican in the House on all human rights issues, Congressman Wolf, and ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia Congressman, Dan Burton.

    “We write with great concern regarding the grave humanitarian crisis in northern Sri Lanka. Human rights groups report that up to 200,000 civilians are trapped in the Vanni region, amid fighting between Sri Lankan Government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Most have been cut off from outside food and medical supplies for weeks, and their lives are threatened by the war and their resulting humanitarian needs. Human Rights Watch reports that 2,000 Tamil civilians have been killed since January, and 7,000 civilians have been wounded,” the Congressional letter said.
    Pointing out that Sri Lanka is currently on “Red Alert” for genocide the letter stated, “While some would dispute the legal definitions of genocide at this time, there can be no doubt that ethnic-based violence is widespread in Sri Lanka, and Tamil noncombatants are deliberately victimized by Sri Lankan Government policies.
    “Your active leadership at this critical time can help save thousands of lives and make progress toward a sustainable political solution to end the horrific cycle of violence in the country. We urge you to continue to condemn all attacks against civilians by the Sri Lankan Government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Both sides need to establish humanitarian corridors to allow noncombatants to travel freely and to receive humanitarian assistance. All UN agencies and aid workers, as well as journalists and human rights monitors, need to be granted access to the region, and we hope this can be arranged soon.”

    While calling for the “internment centers masquerading as ‘welfare villages” to be brought under the administration of the United Nations agencies, the letter further said: “We urge continued efforts to press other UN Security Council members to bring Sri Lanka’s crisis to the agenda of the Security Council.”     
  • China fuels Sri Lankan war
    Sri Lanka, the once self-trumpeted "island of paradise," turned into the island of bloodshed more than a quarter-century ago. But even by its long, gory record, the bloodletting since last year is unprecedented. The United Nations estimates that some 1,200 noncombatants are getting killed each month in a civil war that continues to evoke a muted international response even as hundreds of thousands of minority Tamils have fled their homes or remain trapped behind the front line.
    With the world preoccupied by pressing challenges, President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brother, Defense Minister Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, a naturalized U.S. citizen, press on with their brutal military campaign with impunity. The offensive bears a distinct family imprint, with another brother the president's top adviser.
     Chinese military and financial support — as in Sudan, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Uzbekistan, North Korea, Burma and elsewhere — has directly aided government excesses and human rights abuses in Sri Lanka. But with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton publicly emphasizing that the global financial, climate and security crises are more pressing priorities for U.S. policy than China's human rights record, which by her own department's recent admission has "remained poor and worsened in some areas," Beijing has little reason to stop facilitating overseas what it practices at home — repression.
    Still, the more China insists that it doesn't mix business with politics in its foreign relations, the more evidence it provides of cynically contributing to violence and repression in internally torn states. Sri Lanka is just the latest case demonstrating Beijing's blindness to the consequences of its aggressive pursuit of strategic interests.
    No sooner had the United States ended direct military aid to Sri Lanka last year over its deteriorating human rights record than China blithely stepped in to fill the breach — a breach widened by India's hands-off approach toward Sri Lanka since a disastrous 1987-90 peacekeeping operation in that island-nation.
    Beijing began selling larger quantities of arms, and dramatically boosted its aid fivefold in the past year to almost $1 billion to emerge as Sri Lanka's largest donor. Chinese Jian-7 fighter jets, antiaircraft guns, JY-11 3D air surveillance radars and other supplied weapons have played a central role in the Sri Lankan military successes against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (or "Tamil Tigers"), seeking to carve out an independent homeland for the ethnic Tamils in the island's north and east.
    Beijing even got its ally Pakistan actively involved in Sri Lanka. With Chinese encouragement, Pakistan — despite its own faltering economy and rising Islamist challenge — has boosted its annual military assistance loans to Sri Lanka to nearly $100 million while supplying Chinese-origin small arms and training Sri Lankan air force personnel in precision guided attacks.
    China has become an enabler of repression in a number of developing nations as it seeks to gain access to oil and mineral resources, to market its goods and to step up investment. Still officially a communist state, its support for brutal regimes is driven by capitalist considerations. But while exploiting commercial opportunities, it also tries to make strategic inroads. Little surprise thus that China's best friends are pariah or other states that abuse human rights.
    Indeed, with its ability to provide political protection through its U.N. Security Council veto power, Beijing has signed tens of billions of dollars worth of energy and arms contracts in recent years with such problem states — from Burma and Iran to Sudan and Venezuela.
    In the case of Sri Lanka, China has been particularly attracted by that country's vantage location in the center of the Indian Ocean — a crucial international passageway for trade and oil. Hambantota — the billion-dollar port Chinese engineers are now building on Sri Lanka's southeast — is the latest "pearl" in China's strategy to control vital sea-lanes of communication between the Indian and Pacific Oceans by assembling a "string of pearls" in the form of listening posts, special naval arrangements and access to ports.
    China indeed has aggressively moved in recent years to build ports in the Indian Ocean rim, including in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma. Besides eyeing Pakistan's Chinese-built port-cum-naval base of Gwadar as a possible anchor for its navy, Beijing has sought naval and commercial links with the Maldives, Seychelles, Mauritius and Madagascar. However, none of the port-building projects it has bagged in recent years can match the strategic value of Hambantota, which sits astride the great trade arteries.
    China's generous military aid to Sri Lanka has tilted the military balance in favour of government forces, enabling them in recent months to unravel the de facto state the Tamil Tigers had run for years. After losing more than 5,594 square km of territory, the Tigers now are boxed into a 85-square-km sliver of wooded land in the northeast.
    But despite the government's battlefield triumphs, Asia's longest civil war triggered by the bloody 1983 anti-Tamil riots is unlikely to end anytime soon. Not only is the government unable to define peace or outline a political solution to the Tamils' long-standing cultural and political grievances, the Tamil Tigers are gearing up to return to their roots and become guerrilla fighters again after being routed in the conventional war.
    While unable to buy peace, Chinese aid has helped weaken and scar civil society. Emboldened by the unstinted Chinese support, the government has set in motion the militarization of society and employed control of information as an instrument of war, illustrated by the muzzling of the media and murders of several independent-minded journalists. It has been frenetically swelling the ranks of the military by one-fifth a year through large-scale recruitment, even as it establishes village-level civilian militias, especially in conflict-hit areas.
    With an ever-larger, Chinese-aided war machine, the conflict is set to grind on, making civil society the main loser. That is why international diplomatic intervention has become imperative. India, with its geostrategic advantage and trade and investment clout over a war-hemorrhagic Sri Lankan economy that is in search of an international bailout package, must use its leverage deftly to promote political and ethnic reconciliation rooted in federalism and genuine interethnic equality.
    More broadly, the U.S., European Union, Japan and other important players need to exert leverage to stop the Rajapaksa brothers from rebuffing ceasefire calls and press Beijing to moderate its unsettling role.
    Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.
  • UN statement criticised by Government and Tamils.
    A statement by the UN right chief stating that both sides in Sri Lanka's conflict may have committed war crimes and must suspend fighting to let thousands of civilians escape, has been rejected by the Sri Lankan government and Tamils .
     
    Whilst, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay’s accusation of war crimes has irked the Sri Lankan government, her call for all civilians in Vanni to be evacuated has raised concern among Tamils.
     
    Pillay on, Friday March 13, said that certain actions undertaken by the Sri Lankan military and by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) could constitute violations of international human rights and humanitarian law and called on both the Government and the LTTE to immediately halt the fighting to allow all civilians to evacuate the conflict zone.
     
    Sri Lanka’s Human Rights Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe said on Saturday, March 15 rejected Pillay’s accusations that that 2,800 civilians had been killed in Sri Lanka in recent weeks as "unsubstantiated.
    "It is very, very unprofessional of her (Pillay's) office to rely on unsubstantiated figures," minister Samarasinghe told reporters.
     
    "The figures are similar to those on Tiger proxy websites." he added.
     
    The UN statement stated that although there is a Government-designated ‘no-fire’ zone for civilians in the Vanni region, repeated shelling has continued inside these areas.
     
    Samarasinghe, however, denied that government forces were firing into a demarcated "safe zone" for civilians and accused UN human rights chief Navi Pillay of relying on pro-rebel elements to arrive at her assessment.
    "The army is not shelling into the safe zone for civilians." Samarasinghe said.
     
    Tamil political observers questioned the rational behind Pillay’s call for all civilians to be evacuated from Vanni, stating that uprooting of civilians from traditional homeland and handing them over to their oppressors will only help Sri Lanka’s genocidal intentions. 
     
    In her statement, Pillay also urged the Sri Lankan authorities to give UN and other independent agencies full access to the conflict areas and Tamil detention centres in government held territories to accurately assess conditions.
     
    “We need to know more about what is going on, but we know enough to be sure that the situation is absolutely desperate,” she said.
     
    “The world today is ever-sensitive about such acts that could amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
     
    “The current level of civilian casualties is truly shocking, and there are legitimate fears that the loss of life may reach catastrophic levels if the fighting continues this way,” the UN rights chief said, adding that “very little attention is being focused on this bitter conflict.”
     
    Referring to reports of LTTE holding civilians against their will in Vanni and forcibly recruiting them, the High Commissioner said: “The brutal and inhuman treatment of civilians by the LTTE is utterly reprehensible, and should be examined to see if it constitutes war crimes,”.
     
    However, responding to UN rights chief’s accusations, LTTE political wing head, B. Nadesan said: "This is why we are continuously urging the international community to send its diplomats to visit the people here in Mullaiththeevu and listen to them," 
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