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[FMM]

Sri Lankan authorities have extended “unofficial” censorship to hospitals and funeral parlours as losses mount after a major battle against Tamil rebels, a media rights group said Friday. The Free Media Movement (FMM) said the authorities had prevented photographers taking pictures of military casualties brought to hospitals following heavy fighting in the northern peninsula of Jaffna on Wednesday. The group said it was urging the government as well as the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to respect the right to information.

[Full Story]

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[AHRC]

The hottest topic in Sri Lanka this week is the press statement given at a meeting by the International Independent Group of Imminent Persons (IIGEP), in which the chairperson, Justice P.N Bhagwati, a former chief justice of India, Sir Nigel Rodley, a reputed international lawyer, and Professor Yozo Yokota, a former member of the UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights (2000-2006), participated. The press statement explained the reasons for the IIGEP’s abandonment of their monitoring role. The abandonment was a result of their disappointment in the face of the absence of political will on the part of the government to find out the truth about the 16 cases of gross abuses of human rights investigated by the Presidential Commission of Inquiry (CoI).

[Full Story]

[Reuters]

In March Sri Lankan police used anti-terror laws to arrest and detain J.S. Tissanayagam, a prominent journalist working for The Sunday Times, a maistream English-language weekly. After two weeks behind bars he was finally served a detention order charging him with engaging in terrorist activities, which today in Sri Lanka can be interpreted as criticising the government. In the last year, with a return to war and a rapidly deteriorating human rights situation, Sri Lanka has very slowly managed to grab a few international headlines…. Sri Lanka is now one of the most dangerous places in the world for human rights defenders - broadly defined to include journalists, aid workers, activists, NGO workers and religious leaders.

[Full Story]

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[BBC Sinhala]

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The Sri Lanka government has extended the self-imposed deadline to defeat the Tamil Tigers in the north. Senior Presidential Advisor, Basil Rajapaksa, MP, pledged to hoist the Sri Lankan flag in rebel-held areas by the end of the current Sinhala and Tamil New Year. Army Commander, Lt. Gen. Satah Fonseka, and the government has earlier vowed to “wipe out” the Tamil Tigers by April, this year. Addressing an election meeting in Kantale, President Rajapaksa’s younger brother said the government’s decision whether to continue with the war would depend upon the outcome of the elections.

[Full Story]

[ UPI ]

The country’s population is deeply aware that Sri Lanka is a burial ground for justice. For whatever the reasons, the country’s intellectuals — who are thoroughly aware of this — do not think it worth a fight. Perhaps they know that the fate of the justice system was part of a bigger transformation within the political system. There is nothing the ordinary folk can do, but they do protest in their own simple ways. There is no one to give expression to their frustrations and the injustice that they routinely suffer.There is also the strongly unifying opinion that justice is a superfluous interest and that in the name of the struggle against terrorism justice is not a serious enough issue to be bothered about.

[Full Story]

[ ICRC ]

The limited number of staff available to care for routine cases alongside war casualties has become a critical issue for several hospitals in northern Sri Lanka. In addition, the lack of regular deliveries of supplies from the country’s health ministry has resulted in clinics and hospitals in the Vanni (the four northern districts of Sri Lanka) running out of basic medicines such as paracetamol, antibiotics and vaccines. By agreement with Sri Lanka’s health ministry, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is providing hospitals in Anuradhapura, Batticaloa, Jaffna, Kilinochchi, Mannar, Mullaitivu and Vavuniya districts with medical equipment and supplies for the treatment of sick and war-wounded people.

[Full Story]

[ AHRC ]

The eleven-member International Independent Group of Eminent Persons (IIGEP) consisted of representatives from India, France, Indonesia, the United States, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, Canada, Cyprus, the United Kingdom, Australia and Japan, abandoned their efforts to assist the Presidential Commission of Inquiry to Investigate and Inquire into Serious Violations of Human Rights. They were convinced, after a year of strenuous effort, that they had been trapped in a futile exercise from the point of view of justice and human rights and that the only purpose they were expected to fulfill was to lend credibility to a sinister plot to deny justice.

[Full Story]

[ AFP ]

Sri Lanka stepped up air attacks against Tamil Tiger rebels Wednesday, deploying jets and helicopter gunships as 12 guerrillas were killed in ground battles, defence officials said. Fighter jets bombed a suspected Tamil Tiger base in the northern town of Oddusudan overnight while Mi-24 helicopter gunships were deployed to attack rebel bunkers further north in the Jaffna peninsula, officials said. Verification of casualty claims is impossible as Colombo bars journalists and aid workers from travelling to embattled areas. Tens of thousands of people have died since 1972 when the Tamil Tigers launched an armed struggle to carve out an independent homeland in the island’s north and east for Tamils.

[Full Story]

[Reuters]

High global food and fuel prices are damaging Sri Lanka’s economic growth more than its ongoing civil war, the central bank governor said on Tuesday, but shrugged off suggestions it could miss a 7 percent target. The Asian Development Bank said earlier this month growth would probably slow to 6 percent this year and next on high interest rates and global economic weakness. But governor Ajith Nivard Cabraal told Reuters rebuilding and new growth in areas of the island’s east recaptured from Tamil Tiger rebels last year would help keep growth at or near the target from 2007 6.8 percent.

[Full text]

[ BBC ]

Having covered everything from the IRA to al-Qaeda in four decades of journalism, few people in Britain have spent as much time as the BBC’s Peter Taylor with the people behind political violence. Here he reflects on some of his experiences. I first became aware of the word “terrorism” in 1970 when the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) blew up two aircraft at a remote airstrip in Jordan to try and secure the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli and other jails. They let the passengers and crew off first. Al-Qaeda would have killed them. At the time I never imagined that I would spend most of the next four decades covering the bloody evolution of the Age of Terror.

[Full Story]