Frederick Douglass: The Meaning of July Fourth

July 4, 2015 • Joe • slavery

On this Independence day it is well to remember yet again a probing and candid speech, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” given by the formerly enslaved and probably greatest 19th century American, Frederick Douglass, at Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, at the peak of North America slavery (indeed, about 230 years into that era).

Frederick Douglass The Meaning of July Fourth.odt by Thavam Ratna

Murder complaints filed over capsized Philippine ferry

Police and rescuers comfort a crying passenger after he was brought ashore from a capsized passenger ferry Thursday, July 2, 2015, in Ormoc city, central Philippines. Coast Guard officials say the boat capsized minutes as it left a central Philippine port in choppy waters, leaving dozens dead and many missing.(AP Photo/John Pilapil)The Associated Press

By OLIVER TEVES-July 04. 2015

MANILA, Philippines (AP) "” Police in a central Philippine city said Saturday that they have filed murder complaints against the owner and the crew of a ferry that capsized shortly after pulling out of port, leaving more than 50 people dead.

The complaints were filed with the local prosecutor late Friday as the 36-ton M/B Kim Nirvana was lifted from the water, said Senior Inspector Rio Tan of the Ormoc City police. The local prosecutor will review the complaints to determine whether there is enough evidence to file charges.

At least 59 people died and 145 survived Thursday's disaster, including all 18 crew members, said regional coast guard commander Capt. Pedro Tinampay.

Tinampay said a maritime casualty investigation that has begun will determine how many people actually were aboard the vessel. The 204 so far known to have been on board are more than the 189 initially reported, Tinampay said, adding that authorities will reconcile different figures for survivors and casualties.

The ferry overturned minutes after pulling out of the port on its voyage to one of the Camotes Islands, about 30 kilometers (19 miles) to the south.

Murder complaints were filed against ferry owner Joge Bung Zarco, boat captain Warren Oliverio and 17 other crew members, Tan said.

Some passengers reported that the boat suddenly swerved to the right, possibly causing its cargo, including 80 sacks of cement, to shift to one side of the ferry, Tinampay said.

"It capsized and its right outrigger broke," he said. "The captain suddenly turned the boat to the right, and we have people saying that."

Oliverio denied he made a sudden turn, blaming the strong waves for flipping his boat. "It was the waves," he told ABS-CBN television. He said that he could not have made any sudden turn because there was another vessel close to the ferry.

Lawrence Drake, a retired American firefighter who was among the survivors, disagreed with the complaints, saying that the crew members, especially the captain, did all they could to save the passengers.

"It's wrong. It's wrong. I feel bad," he said by phone from Ormoc.

Drake said Oliverio stripped down to his underpants, jumped into the water to grab people drifting away, and then put them on one of the outriggers to cling to while waiting for rescue boats.

Drake also disputed accounts that the captain abruptly turned the boat, causing it to capsize.

"That is 100 percent incorrect. I was 10 feet from the captain," he said, recounting that he was in the front seat of the boat at the time.

Drake said the water was rough, with waves "flying over my head" as he revived a woman with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, one of two people the former upstate New York firefighter said he helped save that day.

Drake was heading with his Filipino wife and her mother, who both survived, to Camotes, where he lives.

Tinampay said eight bodies were recovered from the boat after it was hoisted out of the water. City rescue group head Ciriaco Tolibao said three more bodies were recovered from the sea early Saturday.

The boat remains belly up on the Ormoc wharf and will be turned upright to allow investigators to get a closer look, Tinampay said.

Even if Obama Wins an Iran Nuclear Deal in Vienna, Can He Sell It at Home?

The White House is already waging an all-out PR war as it prepares to bring a potential nuclear deal back to Washington.

 

BY DAN DE LUCE-JULY 5, 2015

It might be too much to say that President Barack Obama’s administration went nuclear last month on a New York Times story suggesting that Iran was reneging on a tentative deal to freeze its uranium enrichment program. But the June 3 report was, at the least, roundly blasted by the State Department’s top spokeswoman on the Iran negotiations, Marie Harf.

Even if Obama Wins an Iran Nuclear Deal in Vienna, Can He Sell It at Home by Thavam Ratna

Greeks reject bailout terms in landslide referendum

Polls showed the country of 11 million nearly evenly split on a question about Europe’s now-expired bailout offer.

By Griff Witte and Michael Birnbaum-July 5

ATHENS — Greek voters on Sunday delivered a desperately needed victory for their government in its showdown with European creditors, as official results from a Sunday referendum showed the country rejecting a bailout offer that officials here had scorned.

Greeks Reject Bailout Terms in Landslide Referendum by Thavam Ratna

China rolls out emergency measures to prevent stock market crash

Investors look at computer screens showing stock information at a brokerage house in Wuhan, Hubei province, China, July 3, 2015.

BEIJING/SHANGHAI | BY PETE SWEENEY AND SAMUEL SHEN-Sun Jul 5, 2015

China's stock markets face a make-or-break week after officials rolled out an unprecedented series of steps at the weekend to prevent a full-blown stock market crash that would threaten the world's second-largest economy.

The government is anxiously awaiting the market opening on Monday to see if the new measures will halt a 30 percent plunge in the last three weeks, or if panicky investors who borrowed heavily to speculate on stocks will continue to sell.

In an extraordinary weekend of policy moves, brokerages and fund managers vowed to buy massive amounts of stocks, helped by China's state-backed margin finance company which in turn would be aided by a direct line of liquidity from the central bank.

China has also orchestrated a halt to new share issues, with dozens of firms scrapping their IPO plans in separate but similarly worded statements over the weekend, in a tactic authorities have used before to support markets.

"After the 28 companies suspended their IPOs, there will be no new IPOs in the near term," the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) said in a statement on Sunday night.

An online survey by fund distributor eastmoney.com over the weekend, which polled over 100,000 individuals, said investors believed stock indexes would rise more than 5 percent on Monday. But many of those polled didn't think the bounce will last long.

"You're going to need the central bank to open the floodgates to take us back to 4,500 points in Shanghai," said an investment manager in Shanghai.

The Shanghai Composite Index was last at 4,500 on June 25, and is now trading 22 percent lower. [.SS]

China stocks had more than doubled in just 12 months even as the economy cooled and company earnings weakened, resulting in a market that even China's inherently bullish securities regulators eventually admitted had become too frothy.

But the slide that began in mid-June, which the CSRC initially tried to downplay as a "healthy" correction after the fast run-up, has quickly shown signs of getting out of hand.

A surprise interest-rate cut by the central bank last week, relaxations in margin trading and other "stability measures" did little to calm investors, who sent shares down another 12 percent in the last week alone.

China's top leaders, who are already struggling to avert a sharper economic slowdown, seem to be losing patience.

FLURRY OF STEPS

Earlier, in a series of initial announcements on Saturday, China's top brokerages pledged to collectively buy at least 120 billion yuan ($19.3 billion) of shares to help steady the market, and would not sell holdings as long as the Shanghai Composite Index remained below 4,500.

The China Mutual Fund Association said 25 fund companies also pledged on Saturday to buy shares. Another 69 fund firms said on Sunday they would do the same.

In addition, 28 companies that had been approved to launch IPOs all announced they had suspended their plans.

The u-turn is consistent with past IPO freezes in China when share markets were falling sharply, though they are usually spun as spontaneous company decisions, not as government directives.

Respondents to the eastmoney.com survey thought news of an IPO slowdown or freeze would be the most welcomed on Monday.

On Sunday, China state-owned investment company Central Huijin said it had recently been buying exchange-traded funds and would continue to do so.

The combined effect of the policies is to signal to China's army of retail investors, who conduct around 85 percent of share transactions, that the government is now standing behind the stock market. But it is unclear whether even this will be enough to put a floor under prices or revive the rally.

Li Feng, a trader at Fortune Securities, said the amount of money that brokerages and fund managers vowed to put into the stock market was tiny compared with the size of leveraged positions still waiting to be unwound.

Some analysts suggest total margin lending, both formal and informal, could add up to around 4 trillion yuan.

Samuel Chien, partner of Shanghai-based hedge fund BoomTrend Investment Management Co, said he was ready to pile into blue-chip stocks, betting the new steps would trigger a rebound.

"Main indexes will rise. For the Shanghai Composite, the area below 4,500 is relatively safe now," Chien said. "I have ample cash at hand, and surely will buy stocks this week."

But people like Shao Qinglong, a public service worker who has already lost over a quarter of his capital investing in stocks, told Reuters all he is waiting for is for the market to recover enough for him to break even.

"I didn't sell at the peak because people all say the market will rise beyond 6,000 points," Shao said. "I'm now waiting for the market to rebound so that I can get out."

(Additional Reporting by Adam Rose; Editing by Kazunori Takada)

Egypt journalists face jail for reporting non-government terrorism statistics

New law awaiting presidential approval outlaws the publication of ‘false news or data about any terrorist operations that contradicts official statements’

 The government of Egypt’s president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, has cracked down on journalists who question its direction. Photograph: APAImages/REX Shutterstock

Patrick Kingsley and Manu Abdo in Cairo-Sunday 5 July 2015

Egypt was accused of making a savage assault on free speech on Sunday, after its cabinet drafted a law that criminalises the reporting of terrorism statistics that differ from those the government provides.

Under an article in the new terrorism law presented to the president for his final approval, journalists face at least two years in jail if they publish figures that contradict those that state institutions such as the army release.

The article concerned outlaws the intentional publication of “false news or data about any terrorist operations that contradicts the official statements released by the relevant authorities”.

The move follows the recent deadly attack by Islamic State’s Egyptian affiliate, in which the group narrowly failed to capture a town in a remote part of the Sinai desert, and killed a number of Egyptian soldiers. The army denied it had lost more than 17 men, and criticised foreign media outlets for reporting higher death tolls.

Officials built on that criticism with Sunday’s draft law, a lengthy text that also extends punishments for other terrorism-related charges.

Gamal Eid, the executive director of the Arab Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI), a Cairo-based NGO, condemned the proposal, comparing it with the actions of the Nazis.

“We are faced with an article that pushes the media towards Goebbels’ media – the media of one opinion and one narrative,” he said. “It is against the freedom of press, especially press that is critical and professional.”

Egypt’s justice minister, Ahmed el-Zind, told Agence France-Presse: “There was no choice but to impose some standards. The government has the duty to defend citizens from wrong information … I hope no one interprets this as a restriction on media freedoms. It’s just about numbers.”

The law is the latest clash between the country’s increasingly authoritarian government and what remains of independent civil society. Since the army ousted the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi from the presidency two years ago, the government has used the pretext of combatting a wave of militancy that has left hundreds of policemen and soldiers dead to unleash a wave of legislation that legal experts say is the most restrictive since the 1950s.

Police have also arrested thousands of mainly Islamist opposition members,killed more than 1,000 protesters and curbed the activities of NGOs and political parties. After the assassination of Egypt’s chief prosecutor last week, President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi promised to limit prisoners’ right to an appeal, a pledge billed as an honest attempt to speed up the punishment of terrorists, but condemned by rights campaigners as a backdoor attempt to curb basic legal rights.

As a widespread wave of nationalism has taken hold, large swaths of Egypt’s state and private media have backed the government, but journalists who have questioned its direction have been targeted in the crackdown.

There are currently at least 18 journalists in Egyptian jails, a figure the Committee to Protect Journalists said last week represented an all-time high. Three al-Jazeera journalists accused of terrorism have been released on bail, but remain on trial. Last month the Cairo correspondent for El País, the leading Spanish broadsheet, fled the country after Spanish diplomats warned that he faced arrest.

Since Sisi’s government took power, officials have regularly criticised foreign journalists for reporting narratives that conflict with its own. In the latest example, the foreign ministry criticised the terminology that correspondents use to describe Isis, and instead suggested that the group be described with epithets such as “slaughterers, executioners, assassins, slayers, destroyers and eradicators”.

Troubling, The U.S. Declaration of Independence

• by Qadri Ismail 
• - on 07/04/2015

Modern, recent, European, the concept of the human being as a rights bearing subject dates only from around the seventeenth century. This in itself isn’t troubling. (Europe has given us good things: cricket, paan and kokis from the countries that colonized us alone.) But the celebrated texts of its earliest articulations, like John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government(1689), produce the human not uniformly, homogeneously, but in heterogeneous, dissymmetrical categories. The U.S. Declaration of Independence (DOI, 1776) resonates with Locke; despite famously asserting that “all men are created equal,” it qualifies that statement, distinguishes between those gifted rights, subject, and the unequal, those without, other.

Troubling, The U.S. Declaration of Independence by Thavam Ratna

With 59.5 million war displaced- 70% of them Muslims

Will world ever be safe for generations to come

By Latheef Farook-04/04/2015

In a startling disclosure  that humanity is  subjected to threat  by America ,the UNHCR's annual “Global Trends Report: World at War”, ,said that the number of people forcibly displaced at the end of 2014 had risen to a staggering 59.5 million .The overwhelming majority of oppressed people in the world are Muslims.

With 59.5 million war displaced- 70% of them Muslims.odt by Thavam Ratna

Researchers Detect Eye Diseases Using Smartphone

By Eurasia Review-July 4, 2015

Researchers at the Medical and Surgical Center for Retina developed software that detects eye diseases such as diabetic macular edema using a smartphone. The system is aimed at general physicians who could detect the condition and refer the patient to a specialist.

The software was developed in collaboration with biomedical engineers from the ITESM and uses the camera of the phone to detect any abnormality in the thickness of the retina.

“The idea is to detect and prevent diseases in general practice. We are not replacing the specialist, we want to know which patients have a disease and make an early detection,” said Dr. Juan Carlos Altamirano Vallejo, medical director of the Medical and Surgical Center for Retina.

He added that the technology is designed for general physicians, “who support the health system in Mexico and, even without in-depth knowledge of ophthalmology, can, with this tool, detect certain abnormalities and send the patient to the specialist.”

Using the software will reduce costs and streamline the Mexican health system. With just having the app on the cell phone and focusing the camera on the eye, immediate results will be obtained. “We start off the fact that it is much cheaper to prevent than to cure blindness.”

The app also has utility in rural communities, where expertise areas such as ophthalmology have not arrive yet because equipment to detect these diseases are expensive and so far only the visiting specialist can do this kind of diagnosis.

“It will help those that when they go to the eye doctor are already blind, we needed to go a step back, to know who is at risk and needs to go to a specialist. Not wait for a doctor,” said Altamirano Vallejo.

Software development has been satisfactory and is expected to soon be marketed and incorporated the basic health system.

Altamirano Vallejo said that the Medical and Surgical Center for Retina is a small company with just ten employees dedicated to ophthalmology and retina special medical care. It it also dedicated to biomedical and pharmaceutical research, to develop diagnostics and equipment, applicable to society. “We want to give back to our community everything it gives to us, trying to pay the mortgage we all have with Mexico.”

Source: Agencia ID

International community ‘must maintain fullest scrutiny of Sri Lanka’ say NGOs

03 July 2015 A coalition of international non-governmental organisations has called on ambassadors of UN Human Rights Council Member States to maintain scrutiny of Sri Lanka on issues of justice and accountability. In a letter written to ambassadors on Friday, the organisations said that despite a delay in releasing the report of a UN investigation into mass atrocities committed during the final phase of Sri Lanka’s armed conflict, there is “serious concern that there has been no visible progress in these areas till date”. “In the last few months, the government has expressed its categorical unwillingness to allow international investigations within Sri Lanka, and has thus far not publicly demonstrated real cooperation with the UN High Commissioner by providing access to information relevant for the report,” said the letter. Signatories of the letter included Forum Asia, the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, Conectas Direitos Humanos, Human Rights Law Centre, International Commission of Jurists, International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism, International Service for Human Rights and the Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice. It went on to state that “recent actions by the government raise serious concerns about its intentions towards genuine justice and accountability,” citing the promotion of accused war criminal Major General Jagath Dias to Chief of Staff of Sri Lanka's army. “Moreover, members of both the Rajapaksa and Sirisena Presidencies, as well as leading members of the major political parties currently contesting Parliamentary elections, were in positions of authority during significant periods of the armed conflict and may have personal vested interests in deflecting accountability concerns,” the letter added. Sri Lanka faces key tests ahead of September 2015, said the NGOs, noting that it must ensure that any investigative process is international, ensure it resolves outstanding issues such as militarisation in the North and East and allow full access to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to investigate massacres that took place. “Until these three tests are satisfactorily met, the international community and the UN Human Rights Council must maintain the fullest scrutiny of Sri Lanka on questions of justice and accountability,” said the NGOs, noting that “many challenges still remain unaddressed”. “In the hurry to acknowledge changes, member states of the UN Human Rights Council and the UN as a whole should not let go of the many fundamental challenges that remain,” they concluded. “To do so would amount to losing sight of the forest for the trees.” See the full text of the letter here.

Joint Open Letter on Sri Lanka 2 July 2015 by Thavam Ratna

Colombo enacts farcical show in Mirusuvil massacre case

Staff sergeant Sunil Ratnayake was sentenced to death by the Colombo High Court on 25 June 2015. He was part of an elite LRRP squad. The victims, including two teenagers and a 5-year-old child, were tortured and slain on 19 December 2000 at Mirusuvil. The postmortem report established that the throats of the victims were cut with sharp knives and their arms and legs had been chopped off. The massacre was definitely not the work of a soldier who had gone mad, Tamil legal sources who took part in the initial investigations in Jaffna told TamilNet. [Photo courtesy: Wasitha Patabendege, Daily News]

[TamilNet, Saturday, 04 July 2015, 17:21 GMT]
As part of a concerted showdown in its campaign to transform the Geneva-based OISL investigation discourse into a domestic investigation, the Sri Lankan legal system was recently deployed to ‘demonstrate’ its ‘capacity‘ to 'investigate' what would be described by the human rights defenders as a ‘mass atrocity’ crime. The case, in which one non-commissioned officer of the Sri Lankan Army, Staff Sergeant Sunil Rathnayake, was sentenced to capital punishment, was in fact a genocidal crime in which several Sinhala soldiers, including a captain rank officer having command responsibility, took part. The main surviving witness in the case, who narrowly escaped the brutal massacre, had identified in 2001 the culprits, who belonged to the notorious ‘Deep Penetration Unit’, which was trained by Colombo to commit genocidal acts. 

• [Tamil] Initial eyewitness report from 2001 by the sole survivor of the massacre Ponnuthurai Maheswa

Colombo Enacts Farcical Show in Mirusuvil Massacre Case by Thavam Ratna

maheswaran_statment_2001.pdf by Thavam Ratna

Colombo Port City: White Elephant? Affront to human rights?

Jul 3, 2015

Just five months after taking office, President Sirisena’s government may backtrack on one of its key pre-election promises – to scrap the controversial $1.5 Billion Colombo Port City Project (CPC). The project, which was officially inaugurated in September 2014 by former president Mahinda Rajapaksa and Chinese President Xi Jinping, was set to be the ‘single biggest private sector project in Sri Lanka’s history’. The project has since been suspended over allegations of corruption, serious environmental hazards, and concerns about its human rights impact.

Background: Colombo Port City

The Port City was designed to make Colombo a global hub of business and tourism, by creating a luxury commercial development with world-class facilities on 223 hectares of reclaimed land. However, the lack of any significant human and environmental impact studies for such a large-scale development has raised serious issues for the new government who, critics say, have remained mostly preoccupied by the perceived geopolitical rewards associated with the project.

The design of the Port City

The CPC, like many development projects in post-war Sri Lanka, is to be financed through Chinese investment. However, in a significant departure from the $4 billion of infrastructural projects awarded to Chinese investors, mostly in the form of loans, between 2009 and 2013, the CPC project provides for 48% of the reclaimed land to be leased and owned by a sole investor – in this instance, the China Communications Construction Company Limited (CCCC) whose majority stakeholder is the Chinese government.

Human Rights and Environmental Risks

The economic case for the project, and its purported human and environmental costs, have also come under serious scrutiny from across the country. Just two days prior to the formal suspension of the project, a broad umbrella movement of clergy, human rights and environmental activists, fisherman, and Buddhist leaders, gathered under the banner of the ‘People’s Movement against the Port City’ (PMPC) to voice their concerns. In particular, the group cautioned against the potentially enormous environmental and health costs associated with the building process itself.

Building the port city has raised environmental concerns

First, environmentalists point out the huge impact associated with the project’s demand for locally extracted materials. Equivalent to the size of Monaco, the project will require roughly 5 million cubic meters of granite, 60-70 million cubic meters of sand and 4 million cubic meters of rubble. As many have pointed out, the quarries used to source granite are already the cause of serious damage to the local community – depleting water sources, damaging housing and destroying the rich biodiversity of animals and plant species in the area.

Second, they highlight the potential damage caused by the process of dredging, which will be used to reclaim the 541 acres of land on which the Port City will sit. As environmentalist Sajeewa Chamikara points out,

“When one attempts to reclaim seas to create artificial islands, there is significant damage to aquatic ecosystems even when proper procedures are followed.”

Neither the Initial Technical Study nor the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) conducted by Moratuwa University (under the instruction of the previous regime), seem to have adequately tackled the complexity of these issues – one of their reports even boldly proclaiming that, “there were no major environmental impacts” associated with the reclaiming of land. However, the evidence suggests that the impacts are already being felt by coastal environments and communities. After just a few months of dredging, fish breeding grounds off the coast of Negombo already appear to have been disrupted – a trend which could seriously harm the sustainability of certain species in the region. And elsewhere, recent data has indicated changes in wave and sea patterns believed to be responsible for increases in coastal erosion as far South as Panadura.

The group’s President, Fr. Sarath Iddamalgoda made a statement cautioning against the potentially grave environmental and human impacts of the project, highlighting it’s place in a string of “white elephant” projects inaugurated by the former regime whose benefits continue to line the pockets of government officials at the expense of local communities.

Sadly, this would not be the first time the Government of Sri Lanka has embarked upon an exorbitantly overpriced public project with the Colombo – Katunayake expressway reportedly costing up to $57 million per km according to some estimates – as we mentioned in an earlier blog to pave the same distance with gold would have cost 19 times less. Such white elephants: Hambantota, Matale, the OCH, were the hallmark of the previous regime.

The opening of Colombo Port City, with Mahinda and the army much in evidence, gave some unsubtle clues as to the political value of the project

Effect on Livelihoods

The long-term environmental costs aside, many of the immediate effects of the CPC redevelopment have already been felt by local fishermen who, as a result of declining fish stocks, have reported major financial losses in “Negombo, Wennappuwa, Uswetakeiyawa, Hendala, Panadura, Wellawatte, Mount Lavinia, and Moratuwa”. In one of the worst hit areas, Thamba Gala – where the Port City will be built – Fishermen have reported losses of $30,000 since work began. With theaverage fisherman earning just 46,000 rupees (US $340) per month it would take years to recover these losses.

Economic justification

Proponents of the Port City have continued to argue that it has the potential to transform Colombo into a global business hub on the scale of Dubai, Singapore or Hong Kong. Although work has been suspended as of 5th March 2015, pending a full EIA and investigation by a special committee chaired by Prime Minister Ranil Wickramasinghe, 25% of the project has already been completed. With Parliament now suspended the status of this investigation is unclear.

Supporters of the Port City have argued that the completed works will make it very difficult for the Sri Lankan Government to back out of the billion dollar commercial deal. The threat of potential legal action has also been mounting against the government as the CCCC has reported daily losses of $380,000 for every day the project is suspended – this could leave Sri Lanka with a hefty compensation bill in excess of $41 million. 

The CCCC have argued that once completed the project would attract $13 billion in Foreign Direct Investment and lead to greater economic prosperity for the entire Island. Yet these claims have been marred by allegations of corruption and fraud. In 2011 the World Bank debarred the CCCC from any involvement in its development projects.

The Colombo Port City represents a perfect opportunity for a new Sri Lanka to tackle head-on the long-standing issues of human rights violations, corruption and wasteful expenditure. President Sirisena’s government was elected to tackle the string of serious violations against democracy, free speech and human rights that the previous administration had left behind.

Whilst the negative implications are clear, the Port City does also present Sri Lanka with an opportunity for some much needed socio-economic development. The question is whether the potential benefits of the Port City and consequences of not completing the project, outweigh the negative effects on the country.

Those who stand to lose the most from the Port City are not the billion dollar Chinese investors but some of the most vulnerable communities; fishermen, rural villagers and local business owners. The people of Sri Lanka deserve to have their natural environment, livelihoods and rights protected by their government.

Only one thing is clear, in order for Sri Lanka to truly learn from its past mistakes the discussion about the Port City must be refocused to centre on the protection of its own people over and above the interests of foreign investors and greedy politicians.

This blog post was contributed by Rushika Paulas and edited by the SLC