[BBC]

In a report on Tuesday, the Independent quoted a Bell Pottinger company spokesman as saying it wrote a speech the president gave to the UN in 2010.

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[Journal of Foreign Relations]

After three decades of war, Sri Lanka is still a mess. President Mahinda Rajapaksa could not care less about national reconciliation. Here is a president who did not hesitate to assert his authority at the end of the war. Yet now, he is afraid to be a strong and thoughtful leader, reluctant to take a stand.

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[Amnesty International]

The Commonwealth risks becoming ‘irrelevant’ if its leaders allow Sri Lanka to become its next host, Amnesty International said today ahead of the organization’s biennial summit.

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[Global Post]

Social networkers and good old fashioned newspapers may have the unique opportunity to serve Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa a summons to answer for his alleged role in extrajudicial killings during the civil war between government forces and Tamil insurgents.

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[Huffington Post]

Sri Lanka’s postwar policies are a hindrance to reconciliation between the country’s embittered ethnic communities, two years after the end of a civil war, an international think tank has said.

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[Time]

On June 14, the British television network Channel 4 broadcast a stunning hour-long documentary presenting footage of horrific abuses allegedly committed by Sri Lankan troops during the last months of the country’s war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The images are graphic and profoundly disturbing. They include the execution of naked, bound prisoners; soldiers laughing and making macabre sexual jokes about women who appear to have been raped before they were executed; and images of bodies in field hospitals and refugee camps, which eyewitnesses said had been deliberately shelled by the Army in violation of international norms. It also describes the utter failure of the United Nations to do anything about it; the UN’s decision to leave the war zone made it possible for the Sri Lankan Army to finish off the LTTE without any independent witnesses. Journalists, too, were banned from the area.

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[Globe and Mail]

As the President’s motorcade passed slowly through Colombo Monday, 20-year-old university student Chaturi Waidyasekera pressed her head to the ground, then rose and chanted, “Praise our king” Dozens of others did the same, beneath billboards that pictured Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa in the white robes of a Buddhist deity. Ms. Waidyasekera explained, calmly, that she believes the elected leader of Sri Lanka should remain in office for life because last week he ended a 26-year civil war with the violent defeat of the Tamil Tigers.

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[BBC]

Tamil rebels trapped in a tiny enclave of northern Sri Lanka have declared a ceasefire, a rebel spokesman says. The Tamil Tigers (LTTE) had given up their fight against a major government offensive and “decided to silence our guns”, he said on a pro-Tamil website. “This battle has reached its bitter end,” said Selvarasa Pathmanathan, the Tigers’ chief of international relations, in a statement on Tamilnet. President Mahinda Rajapaksa has already claimed victory in the 26-year war. A later statement on the Tamilnet website appeared to modify the rebel position.

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[HRW]

President Mahinda Rajapakse should order prosecutors to drop all charges against journalists held on politically motivated charges, Human Rights Watch said in a letter to the president today. J.S. Tissainayagam, a journalist, and N. Jashiharan, a publisher, and his wife, V. Valamathy, have been in detention since March 2008. The letter identified serious violations of due process and the right to a fair trial by the authorities in Tissainayagam’s case. “Tissainayagam’s arrest was politically motivated and his detention has involved a litany of due process violations,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch.

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[Reuters]

Sri Lanka’s media is paying a heavy price after getting entangled in a political struggle between President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s ruling coalition and an opposition with few means to challenge his leadership. Events in Sri Lanka have grabbed more world headlines than usual so far this year. First, for a string of military victories over the Tamil Tiger separatists that have raised the prospect of an end to the island’s 25-year war and brought Rajapaksa a popularity windfall.

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