Situation Analysis

Secretary, Ministry of Public Administration. Independence Square. Colombo 07. 03 June, 2019. Public Administration Circular No.13/2019 dated 29105/2019 entitled ‘Ensuring Security in the Office Premises of the Government’. The above Circular has come to the attention of the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka. The Commission has also received complaints from members of the public that the […]

ECONOMYNEXT – Sri Lanka’s police chief Pujith Jayasundera, now on compulsory leave, following Easter Sunday bomb attacks, has petitioned the Supreme Court alleging he was kept out of national security council meetings after October 2018, and he was offered a diplomatic post if he resigned. A Deputy Inspector General who was head of State Intelligence […]

In the face of the damage to life and property caused by the terrorist attacks on 21st April 2019, it is the duty of the state to support the victims with rebuilding and restoring their lives to normalcy. While their loss and pain cannot be erased, every effort must be made to ensure that these […]

Image: Channa Jayasumana, a known extreme Sinhala nationalist is a  prominent speaker at Gotabhaya Rajapaksa’s political platform “Viyath Maga” . To read the interview by Kelum Bandara with the Rajarata Medical Faculty teacher Dr. Channa Jayasumana that appeared in the DM of 16 February (2017) captioned “Sinhalese Culture and Theravada Buddhism have inseparable links” was disappointing […]

Image: Displaced Pakistani refugees in Sri Lanka. Statement by the Jaffna People’s Forum for Co-existence. As residents of Jaffna and people belonging to different faiths, we are deeply saddened and ashamed that a refugee family was forced to leave Jaffna due to concerns raised about possible threats to their safety by the police. The incident […]

Image: Sri Lankan protesters hold placards at a demonstration in Colombo on May 21, 2019. ISHARA S. KODIKARA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES. On May 8, when the 47-year-old Nazia Naseer (a pseudonym) went to her 5-year-old daughter’s school in Colombo to attend a parent-teacher meeting, she was stopped at the gate by other parents and teachers because of the way […]

Image: The central market in Minuwangoda in western Sri Lanka following the riots on May 13 [Rukshana Rizwie/Al Jazeera] Muslims live in fear after wave of attacks is blamed on Buddhist hardliners in the wake of Easter Sunday bombings. by Lisa Fuller & Rukshana Rizwie Kottaramulla, Sri Lanka – The stench of turpentine overpowered Jiffriya Ameer as […]

The reinstatement of an army intelligence official implicated in attacks on journalists has given rise to serious concerns for the safety of media personnel and witnesses who testified against the officer and his platoon. Army Intelligence Major Prabath Bulathwatte has been back in the spotlight after Army Commander Mahesh Senanayake stunned civil society in a […]

At the last stages of the war thousands of civilians who lived in the Vanni Region of Northern Sri-Lanka were killed, injured and disappeared. Surrenders of war and persons among detainees were gone disappeared. When war intensified in late 2008 people of Vanni region started to move towards Mullaitivu district from other parts of Vanni. […]

(New York) – Ten years since the end of Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war, the government has failed to provide justice for the conflict’s many victims, Human Rights Watch said today. The conflict ended on May 18, 2009, with the total defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The Sri Lankan government pledged to provide […]

  Sri Lanka has encountered a second security failure by allowing the unruly violent mobs to attack Muslim mosques and ordinary Muslim citizens particularly in the North Western Province and Gampaha District. This should have been an ‘anticipated backlash’ to the Easter Carnage inflicted by the IS terrorists three weeks before. However neither the law […]

There is much good sense in the assertion by Sri Lanka’s Catholic Church this Friday that despicable communal violence by organised mobs against Muslims in the North Western Province and Minuwangoda a few days earlier was not only politically instigated but also a deliberate attempt to turn public focus away from the shock and horror […]

On the tenth anniversary of the end of Sri Lanka’s three decade-long internal armed conflict, Amnesty International calls on the government of Sri Lanka to end impunity and put accountability for crimes under international law and human rights violations and abuses at the heart of its transitional justice process. The horrific Easter Sunday attacks on […]

Image: Relatives of people who went missing during Sri Lanka’s civil war taking part in a candle light vigil. File   | Photo Credit: Getty images. Meera Srinivasan. Some of the lands of survivors are yet to be released, relatives are still missing and reconciliation is afar. Given a choice between living in a camp for displaced […]

by Melani Manel Perera. Television operators invade the homes and privacy of survivors, they “must be educated in communications ethics”. A comment posted on Facebook sparks new violence against Muslims in Chilaw. Survivors must be supported in the long run by specialist groups. Taking care of even the first responders, priests and nuns included. Colombo […]

Human societies scattered across the world have evolved over time under diverse circumstances, both material/ecological and ideational. Though archaeologists, historians and philosophers have gone far back in time in tracing the above process, modern social and human scientists have observed human societies in more recent times and uncovered certain patterns in the way they have […]

Abbraar Masjid mosque is seen after a mob attack in Kiniyama, Sri Lanka May 13, 2019.   | Photo Credit: Reuters. Meera Srinivasan. Police impose island-wide curfew till Tuesday morning amid fears of escalation in violence. Mobs attacked several mosques, torched dozens of shops and homes of Muslims in Kurunegala District, some 100 km north-west of […]

In the old story of the New Testament, Easter was the end of agony. It marked the glory of resurrection, yet another fable in humankind’s vain attempt to get past death. In Post- Easter Sri Lanka, on the other hand,there is no glory, only agony; endless questions and loads of blame. Who is to blame? […]

The Government last week moved to prohibit security forces from taking news media cameras on search operations around the country in the wake of the Easter Sunday bombings that killed 258 people. For weeks, the news cycle has been dominated by SMS alerts and sustained nightly news bulletins that feature 10 minute segments on the […]

Islamaphobia was a recent addition to the political dictionary. Sri Lankan, it appears has at present been caught up in an Islamist/Muslim phobia which is a sequel to the Easter Sunday terrorist attack. However, it has not turned out to be an uncontrollable political and social force. Politicians, state information managers and publishers, mass media, […]

Wrong To Have Withdrawn Military Training Ambassador Blake regretted that after the Sri Lanka-LTTE war ended in May 2009, the US had stopped its military aid and training programs in the island on the plea that there had been human rights violations by the Lankan military. “In the last years of the war in 2008 […]

Sri Lanka’s battle against Islamic extremism would involve two integral parts: (a) an intelligence driven kinetic approach to flush out, arrest or neutralize violent extremists; and (b) a State facilitated and community- led approach to combat non-violent extremism, reverse the spread of Wahhabism and Arabization of local Muslims and restore the primacy of moderate Sufi […]

Image courtesy of AP/Gamunu A. Every suicide bomber has a dream, a fantasy of how their destruction will consummate cataclysmic change. Sri Lanka stamped out such heinous desires once before. Now we are called upon to do so again. At a May Day rally in 1993, a suicide bomber assassinated my father, President Ranasinghe Premadasa. My father was […]

The Easter Sunday carnage in which more than 250, mostly Christians, were killed is the most violent terrorist act in Sri Lanka since the end of the Eelam war in 2009. A terrorist attack on this scale involving the use of high-explosives in coordinated suicide missions on eight different targets by a relatively unknown entity, […]

Image: Like it or not, we are all going to have to unite, work together to heal the wounds and make the country whole again.(Aithiya.lk) Whilst the security operations continue, it is time for the committee set up by the president and indeed the rest of us, to consider the questions that refuse to go away […]

Image Courtesy of Aithiya.lk. Ahilan Kadirgamar. As reports about those behind the Easter Sunday attacks emerge, many questions remain about the motives of the extremists. The full picture of the formation of this extremist force and the objectives behind their heinous crimes may take time. However, they have succeeded in creating a spectacle of death, […]

Image: In Colombo citizens gather to show solidarity on 04th May 2019. ((c) Aithiya.lk. (May 4, 2019)  We the undersigned Tamil civil society organizations unequivocally condemn the horrific Easter Sunday attacks which took more than two hundred and fifty lives, and also express our wholehearted solidarity and support to our Christian communities, targeted in this cowardly […]

Image: The burial of a victim of the Easter Sunday bomb blasts at Sellakanda Catholic Cemetery in Negombo, Sri Lanka, last month.CreditCreditAdam Dean for The New York Times. By Jeffrey Gettleman, Dharisha Bastians and Hannah Beech. (May 3, 2019)COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — The suicide bombs were packed with ball bearings, iron nails and the explosive TATP, […]

Image: Drawing by nine-year-old child, Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, April, 21st, 2019. Let us review the facts. 1. 253 people are dead. 2. Close to 500 injured. 3. They were all people who went to attend their Church’s service on Easter Sunday or were foreigners or Sri Lankans who went to the elite hotel establishments in Colombo […]

  People who have been relocated to a school building due to an overnight gun battle between troops and suspected Islamist militants (Reuters). An eminent Sri Lankan researcher on radicalization and terrorism, Dr. Rohan Gunaratna, urges the Sri Lankan government, the island’s political and religious leaders, and civil society, to ponder over the ill-effects of […]