“Any mention of my island home (no matter what British political scandal it may involve), is most welcome. For here is a chance for the world to stop its hurried turning, pause a moment, and remember that savage kingdom in the Indian Ocean. To read once more of the 100,000 Tamils thought to have died in a few balmy days last May.

“Memory, that dignified defender of all human life, will not simply disappear. It is the archaeological remains of our collective existence. Those who bear witness can never forget until closure is achieved.”

Roma Tearne, a scholar with Brookes University, discusses then British Foreign Secretary's David Miliband’s decision last year to focus on Tamils’ humanitarian plight in Sri Lanka.

“Japan's studied refusal to add to the international pressure on the Sri Lankan government, while it continues to pour money into infrastructure development, could be construed as not simply more ineffectual checkbook diplomacy, but in fact a cynical investment in the regime.

“The failure of Sri Lanka's most significant development assistance partner to lend weight to the widespread international pressure upon the Sri Lankan government to address the many significant humanitarian and human rights issues, and respond meaningfully to Tamil grievances, provides the Sri Lankan government with the necessary space to withstand the pressure."

Dr. Craig Martin, a law scholar with both University of Baltimore and Osaka University,  discusses the contrast between Japan’s role in Sri Lanka and Tokyo’s declared ambitions to be a world “power for peace”.

In October 2009, Japan’s stubborn support for Sri Lanka drew direct criticism from Human Rights Watch and other human rights groups, who protested:

"To date, while other major donors and friends of Sri Lanka have expressed their concerns in public, Japan has not spoken out against the illegal detention of a quarter of a million [Tamil] civilians, nor has Japan called for accountability for serious violations of international humanitarian law by the government and the LTTE.

"It is the time for Japan ... to break the silence and to make use of its unique relationship with Sri Lanka to uphold the basic rights of all Sri Lankans."

“Most of [Sri Lanka’s] deficit reduction plans hinge on turning around loss-making state ventures hampered by subsidy schemes, mismanagement and an infamously intractable corps of bureaucrats.”

Public sector resistance to the government’s proposed economic reforms, and poor government follow-through, “could put the [proposed] changes at risk, and leave potential foreign investors still wary of Sri Lanka as a destination," Reuters reports.

Sri Lanka's 1.3 million public employees are not pleased with what they see as an insufficient wage hike, which President Rajapaksa has been promising since he won office in 2005, the agency said.

Sri Lanka's has a population of 21 million.

See Reuters’ summary of ‘Key political risks to watch in Sri Lanka’

Last week, reviewing Sri Lanka’s new budget, the Wall Street Journal also expressed scepticism. Noting President Rajapakse’s proclivity for a state-managed economy, the paper warned:

"Given its recent track record Colombo should expect investors to sit on the sidelines until the government shows it's serious about reform"

See also the analysis by Joseph Sternberg, the WSJ's Business Asia editor, here.

It isn’t surprising that the only British politician who will be meeting Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapakse during his controversial visit to the UK this week is Defence Secretary

Amid a storm of outrage and calls this week by Amnesty International for Britain to pursue war crimes prosecutions against Sri Lankan leaders, the Defence Secretary is going to meet President Rajapakse “in a private capacity”.

"This reflects Dr Fox's longstanding interest in Sri Lanka and his interest in, and commitment to peace and reconciliation there," a spokesman for Fox told The Guardian newspaper.

A closer look at Dr. Fox's long-standing engagement with Sri Lanka suggests otherwise.

Indeed, Dr. Fox has long been a defender of the Sri Lankan regime, despite the mounting evidence of Colombo’s war crimes and atrocities, and despite his leader, Prime Minister David Cameron also backing an international investigation into these.

Sri Lanka funded

Dr. Fox is so close to the Sri Lankan government, he visited the South Asian island three times last year – at Sri Lanka’s expense – even as international outrage mounted over the alleged war crimes, and the internment of hundreds of thousands of Tamils in militarised camps.

Of these and two other recent trips to Sri Lanka, three were paid for fully by the Sri Lankan government.

The other two are registered as paid for by an organisation calling itself the 'Sri Lankan Development Trust'. A search on Google Tuesday produced no links at all to this entity.

And Dr. Fox's visits were not 'peace' initiatives.

His November 2009 visit, for example, was to attend the National Convention of Rajapakse’s Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP).

His Conservative party was not in government. Neither did he meet any elected Tamil representatives during his visits.

During a BBC investigation in March this year into British MPs accepting junkets paid for by foreign governments, Dr. Fox's trips were highlighted as breaches of Parliamentary rules relating to MPs declaring overseas trips paid for by foreign governments when speaking on those countries.

For example, soon after returning from his November 2009 trip, Dr. Fox spoke in the House of Commons debate on foreign and defence affairs

Defending Sri Lanka

Even as a demands for actions against Sri Lanka’s war crimes and ongoing repression were growing stronger in the international community, Dr. Fox defended the Rajapakse regime.

“As members of the European Union, we have to be careful not to lecture too much or give too few incentives in a country that is beginning to move very much in the right direction,” he told Parliament.

During that debate Dr. Fox neither declared he was at the Sri Lankan president's party's convention just the previous week, nor disclosed the source of funding for his trip.

This was not the first time Dr. Fox had discussed Sri Lanka in parliament without making clear his material interest: the BBC said he had also done so on 30 April 2008.

Responding to the BBC's report, he was contrite, but unrepentant, saying at the time "[I] recognise that when asking one question in 2008, I should have noted an interest and will be writing to the registrar to make this clear."

During the debate in 2009, Dr. Fox cited a vague “long involvement in Sri Lanka” and again decided not declare his interests.

That obfuscation echoes his dissembling this week with regards to meeting President Rajapaksa.

Sri Lanka is not the only conflict of interest Dr. Fox failed to declare.

According to The Times newspaper, whist he was Shadow Secretary of State for Defence, Dr. Fox accepted £50,000 from a defence firm donor.

Britain's Channel 4 News has obtained an extended video of war crimes, including sexual abuse, by Sri Lankan soldiers committed in the last days of the war.

Since then, one of the murdered women seen naked and bound in the video has been identified: a journalist well known on to Tamil television viewers during the war.

Amnesty International has called on Britain to examine the gathering evidence of war crimes to see if Sri Lankan officials, including President Mahinda Rajapakse, can be indicted on universal jurisdiction laws.

See the shorter version of the video, first broadcast last year by Channel 4 News, here.

“There are no examples we know of a regime undertaking wholesale investigations of its own troops or senior officials for war crimes while that regime or government remained in power. In Sri Lanka this is further complicated by the fact that responsibility for many of the alleged crimes rests with the country's senior civilian and military leadership, including President Rajapaksa and his brothers and opposition candidate General Fonseka.”

See the full text of a US Embassy cable of January 2010, released by Wikileaks to The Guardian newspaper here.

The US cable also says Tamil political leaders in Sri Lanka fear for their lives if they demand accountability for war crimes, even though they want this eventually: TNA leader R. Sampanthan is quoted welcoming the international community - and especially the Diaspora's - efforts on the issue.

Also, see related article by The Guardian here.

“The Oxford Union has in the past faced criticism for inviting other controversial speakers also known for their racist views. However, President Rajapakse is in a different position from [far right leader] Nick Griffin or [Holocaust denier] David Irving.

“These previous speakers live in countries with a free and independent media and the rule of law. They could not therefore use the Oxford Union as a means of propagating unchallenged, noxious views or indeed as a platform for a campaign of concealment.

“However, President Rajapakse has crushed free speech in his own country and done his best to conceal from international attention the grave crimes committed in the Tamil speaking areas.”

Sixteen Tamil university societies wrote earlier this month, via the Tamil Youth Organisation (TYO), to the Oxford Union over its controversial invitation to Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse. They did not get a response.

The university Tamil societies are those of Cambridge, Nottingham, King’s College London, Kingston, Cardiff, St. Georges, Westminister, Hertfordshire, Southampton, Queen Mary, Middlesex, Brunel, Greenwich, Imperial College, Central London, and City.

A reader's query to the the University of Oxford, meanwhile, produced this response:

"The Oxford Union is an independent debating society. Although most of its members are current or former Oxford students, it is not part of the University of Oxford. It has its own funding sources and premises, and the University does not have jurisdiction over its events."

“Would Sri Lanka be better off wagering on the intelligence of President Rajapakse and his relatively small circle, or on the creativity and hard work of a broader entrepreneurial class? The fact that foreign direct investment, and domestic long-term investment money, is sitting on its hands a year and a half after the war is a sign of which side of that bet the market is taking.”

Joseph Sternberg, editor of the Wall Street Journal’s Business Asia column, examines Sri Lanka’s economic prospects. (See also).

This is what India’s External Affairs minister S. M. Krishna said Saturday in his speech at the opening of the Indian consulate in Jaffna:

“Over centuries, Jaffna has always stood at the crossroads of history, culture and religion, kings and kingdoms, trade and commerce, and arts, dance and literature. Jaffna port was on the main sea route of its times. … It is, therefore, natural that when India decided to establish a Consulate General, Jaffna was a logical, almost inevitable, place for such a presence.

“There must be several in this audience who would have seen the days when there was a direct flight from Palaly to Trichy and a ferry service from Talaimannar to Rameswaram. It is possible that some among you may even have gone off to Chennai – Madras as it was called – only to catch a movie. It’s time to revive those links.”

This is what Tamil Guardian argued in our editorial of 02 June, 2010:

“Before Sinhala domination began in the late 1940s, the Tamil homeland had been connected in myriad ways to global flows for millennia. Quite apart from the time of South India-based imperial networks, even during Western colonial rule the Northeast was well connected to the rest of the subcontinent and other parts of the world.

“Since the island’s independence from Britain, however, the Sinhala-dominated state has sought not only to concentrate power in the South, but also to isolate the Northeast, making Colombo the sole gateway between the world and the Tamil homeland.

“Unless the Sinhala stranglehold on the Northeast is first broken, the Tamils will continue to be largely – and deliberately - excluded from global economic flows.”

Out of the 55 Secretaries, the senior-most civil servants of Sri Lanka’s ministries, appointed this week, one was a Tamil, another a Muslim; the rest were Sinhalese.

Recruitment of young Tamils or Muslims into the civil service has been negligible over the past several years; this year there were none.

This is what Tamils mean by 'the Sinhala state'.

The full list of newly appointed Secretaries - and what qualified the lone Tamil for the job - is available here.

On a related note, it’s worth recalling how – and when – Sri Lanka’s armed forces became mono-ethnic.

Prof. Brian Blodgett, Director of the History and Military Studies Programs for the American Public University, published a study of Sri Lanka’s military in 2004. In it he notes how,

“in 1962, a policy of recruiting only from the Sinhalese Buddhist community was instituted. This was the beginning of an ethnically pure army.”

Prof. Stanley Tambiah of Harvard University published a book length comment, ‘Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy’, just two years after Sri Lanka’s conflict began. In it he noted,

“[Today, in 1986] the armed forces are filled with Sinhalese and the Tamils are excluded from serving in them. … There has been virtually no recruitment of Tamils into the armed forces, and very little into the police force, for nearly thirty years.”

“At first the UK government applauded the establishment of [Sri Lanka’s] LLRC, even though the deficiencies in the scope of its mandate and in its processes were evident from the outset. … The EU, unlike the UK, was quicker to see through this farce. … Fortunately the UK's position is now shifting. [However] words should translate into further action … leading to an independent international inquiry.”

“The UK is uniquely placed to take the lead on refusing to settle for the whitewash that the Sri Lankan government is putting forward, and to demand more.”

Elaine Pearson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Asia division, discusses Britain’s responsibility in accountability for Sri Lanka’s war crimes.

The economic statistics that Sri Lanka publishes can’t be trusted.

For example, in 2009 Sri Lanka claimed the construction industry ‘grew’ – despite falling cement volumes and a plunging housing market.

Sri Lanka’s claimed drop in inflation, meanwhile, came after a telling change in the index being tracked, LBO reports.

Inflation reduced?

The government changed the Colombo Consumer Price Index when inflation hit 29.9 percent. At the time a country-wide index was also completely suppressed.

However, the new price index is missing a standard international (COICOP -classification of individual consumption by purpose) expenditure category - it ignores alcohol and tobacco, which is frequently taxed by the government.

By frequently changing the consumption basket of an inflation index, a state can deceive citizens by showing stable 'inflation', despite steeply falling living standards.

US economists have labeled the phenomenon as 'moving from beef to dogfood'.

In Sri Lanka, the share of food in total consumption is 40%.

Food prices have soared, amid autarkic agriculture and tax policies. The government is waging war on (imported) wheat.