Italy arrests Algerian suspect wanted by Belgium in blast probe Deadly attacks in Belgium mourned in days following blasts at airport, subway (AFP) Sunday 27 March 2016 Digital images seized include three men who helped plan Paris attacks, suicide bomber in Brussels -
An Algerian national wanted by Belgium in connection with fake ID documents used by the Paris and Brussels attackers was arrested in Italy on Saturday, local media reported, citing police.
Djamal Eddine Ouali, 40, was detained under a European arrest warrant in the southern region of Salerno in a joint operation between anti-terrorist forces and Rome's special operations police, reports said.
He is suspected of being part of a network that produced fake documents for illegal immigration, the AGI news agency reported. Hundreds of digital photographs were then seized from a counterfeiter's workshop, including images of three of those who planned the deadly attacks in Paris in November.
Another photograph was of Najim Laachraoui, a suicide bomber at Brussels airport, reports cited police as saying. The alleged accomplice of the attackers will be extradited to Belgium in coming days, the reports said.
Nine people have been arrested in Belgium and two in Germany as the investigation continues into the Brussels bombings, which killed at least 31 people, according to The Independent.
Suspicions were raised after local immigration officials checked Ouali's residency permit. Police had been searching for a man with the same name and belonging to the same organisation since 6 January.
Investigations are ongoing as to how Ouali came to be in Italy and into the networks of which he may have been a part.
FILE-In this file photo taken from video released by Nigeria’s Boko Haram terrorist network, Monday May 12, 2014, shows missing girls abducted from the northeastern town of Chibok. A teenage who surrendered before carrying out a suicide bombing attack in northern Cameroon has told authorities she was one of the 276 girls abducted from a Nigerian boarding school by Islamic extremists nearly two years ago, authorities said Saturday, March 26, 2016. (Associated Press)
By Edwin Kinzeka Moki | AP-March 26
YAOUNDE, Cameroon — A teenager who surrendered before carrying out a suicide bombing attack in northern Cameroon has told authorities she was one of the 276 girls abducted from a Nigerian boarding school by Islamic extremists nearly two years ago, authorities said Saturday.
If confirmed the development would mark the first news of the missing Chibok girls in many months. It has long been feared that some are being used by their Boko Haram abductors to carry out such attacks given the growing number of young female suicide bombers.
The girl is about 15 years old and turned herself in before detonating her explosives, said Idrissou Yacoubou, the leader of a self-defense group in Limani, Cameroon.
“The girl looked tired, malnourished and psychologically tortured and could not give us more details about her stay in the forest and how her other mates were treated,” he said.
Cameroon has ordered investigations to determine the authenticity of the 15-year-old’s declarations, said Midjiyawa Bakari, governor of the Far North region. Cameroonian authorities declined to identify her by name because she is a minor.
The office of Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari and Nigeria’s military did not immediately respond to questions sent on a public holiday.
Authorities said Saturday along with the 15-year-old two other young women came with explosive belts — one was arrested and the other managed to flee back across the border into Nigeria.
In Chibok, a community leader said by telephone that the girl’s age could correspond to that of a 14-year-old who was the youngest among 276 girls abducted in the early hours of April 15 from a government boarding school. Dozens of the girls managed to escape on their own within hours, but 219 remain missing.
The plight of the abducted girls drew international attention and prompted the #BringBackOurGirls campaign on social media.
Dozens of them were last seen in a Boko Haram video with extremist leader Abubakar Shekau who boasted they had converted to Islam and threatening to sell them off or marry them to his fighters.
There have long been suspicions that Nigeria’s home-grown Islamic extremist group is using captives as suicide bombers. It is not known how many thousands of other girls, boys and young men and women have been abducted by the group.
In recent months Nigeria’s military has reported freeing at least 3,000 people held captive by the insurgents. Most recently, the military said it rescued 829 hostages in raids Tuesday on several Boko Haram-held villages in the northeast. At the same time, there are reports of Boko Haram continuing to take dozens of new captives.
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Associated Press writer Haruna Umar in Abuja, Nigeria contributed this report.
Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif (R) shakes hands with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at the Prime Minister's house in Islamabad, Pakistan, in this March 25, 2016 handout photo. REUTERS/Press Information Department(PID)/Handout via Reuters
A police vehicle patrols near the portraits of (L-R) Pakistan's President Mamnoon Hussain, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, displayed along a road during Rouhani's visit to Islamabad, Pakistan, March 25, 2016.
BY MEHREEN ZAHRA-MALIK-Sat Mar 26, 2016
Pakistan and Iran aim to increase annual trade volumes between the two countries to $5 billion by 2021, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said on Saturday.
Sharif spoke at a business conference with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who arrived in Islamabad on Friday for two-day talks focused on increasing Pakistan's electricity imports from Iran, boosting trade relations and reviving plans for a gas pipeline between the two countries.
"In the five years strategic action plan signed yesterday we have aimed at boosting our bilateral trade to the level of US Dollars five billion by 2021," Sharif said.
"More land routes for trade on our border, trade exhibitions, industrial and agricultural cooperation and mutual recognition of standards will boost trade."
Trade between Pakistan and Iran fell to $432 million in 2010-11 from $1.32 billion in 2008-09, according to the Trade Development Authority of Pakistan, after western powers imposed sanctions on Tehran aimed at halting a nuclear programme they suspected was aimed at developing a nuclear bomb.
Most of the sanctions were lifted in January in return for Iran complying with a deal to curb its nuclear ambitions.
"Iran has the capability to help the development of the economic infrastructure of Pakistan including roads, railways dams and others area," Rouhani said in his speech at the Pakistan-Iran Business Forum.
Iran currently exports around 100 megawatts (MW) of electricity to the areas of Pakistan that border Iran. Pakistan is in the final stages of negotiating a deal that will increase that to 1,000 MW, the ministry of water and power has said previously.
Energy-starved Pakistan suffers about 12 hours of power cuts per day and is keen to import Iranian oil, gas, iron and steel.
Iran is interested in Pakistani textiles, surgical goods, sports goods and agricultural products.
Pakistan also plans to set up industrial sites in the impoverished border area, especially petrochemical storage, and link the infrastructure to a $46 billion project with China dubbed the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
(Writing by Mehreen Zahra-Malik; Editing by Mark Potter)
President Barack Obama and Argentina’s President Mauricio Marci throw flowers into the River Plate to honor victims of the Dirty War.
President Barack Obama and Argentina’s President Mauricio Marci throw flowers into the River Plate to honor victims of the Dirty War.
03/24/2016
BUENOS AIRES, March 24 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama said the United States was too slow to condemn human rights atrocities during Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship as he honored victims of the “Dirty War” on Thursday, but he stopped short of apologizing for Washington’s early support for the military junta.
Obama’s state visit to Argentina coincided with the 40th anniversary of the coup that began a seven-year crackdown on Marxist rebels, labor unions and leftist opponents, during which security forces killed 30,000 people.
“There has been controversy about the policies of the United States early in those dark days,” Obama said while visiting a memorial park in Buenos Aires dedicated to victims of the dictatorship.
“Democracies have to have the courage to acknowledge when we don’t live up to the ideals that we stand for. And we’ve been slow to speak out for human rights and that was the case here,” he said.
Obama’s trip, winding up later on Thursday, is part of a wider effort to deepen ties and bolster U.S. influence with Latin America after years of frosty relations with left-leaning governments in the region.
With South America’s leftist block now in disarray amid graft scandals and economic recession, Argentina’s new center-right leader, Mauricio Macri, offers Obama a new ally in one of the Americas’ biggest economies.
Obama traveled to Argentina from Cuba, where he became the first sitting U.S. president to visit in 88 years and opened a new chapter in engagement with the Communist-ruled island after decades of hostilities.
That policy shift has boosted Washington’s standing in a region long wary of being treated as the U.S. “backyard,” although U.S. foreign policy under Obama has still been dominated by the Middle East.
DEATH FLIGHTS
At the memorial on the banks of the La Plata River, Obama and Macri walked along a stark wall that is known as the Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism and is inscribed with 20,000 names.
In bright sunshine, they walked down to a pier that overlooks the river, dropping white roses into the water to commemorate the dead. Obama bowed his head and stood with Macri in silence.
Survivors of the crackdown say one of the military rulers’ tactics was so-called “death flights,” where political opponents were tossed into aircraft, stripped and then thrown alive into the river and the Atlantic Ocean to drown.
Washington’s early support for the military rulers reflected Cold War thinking, which sometimes put the United States on the side of brutal right-wing governments in Latin America. In a gesture toward Argentines still angry over that legacy, Obama has promised to declassify U.S. military and intelligence records related to the dictatorship-era.
But the U.S. leader was criticized by some rights activists. One group of victims’ relatives said the timing of his visit was a provocation.
“We will not allow the power that orchestrated dictatorships in Latin America and oppresses people across the world to cleanse itself and use the memory of our 30,000 murdered compatriots to strengthen its imperialist agenda,” the Buenos Aires-based Center for Human Rights Advocates said in a statement.
Some Argentines welcomed Obama’s gestures. “Obama is not going to say outright ‘forgive us’, but he’s saying it through his actions,” said Daniel Slutzky, a 75-year-old college professor.
Obama said on Wednesday it was “gratifying to see Argentina champion our shared commitment to human rights.” Yet Macri’s opponents balk at the suggestion the socially conservative leader is a rights defender.
“It takes courage for a society to address uncomfortable truths about the darker parts of its past. Confronting crimes committed by your own leaders, by your own people - that can be divisive and frustrating, but it is essential to moving forward,” Obama said.
Speaking after Obama, Macri said: “We have to reaffirm our commitment to the defense of democracy and human rights. Every day, somewhere in the world they are jeopardized.”
Obama’s visit to Argentina is a show of support for Macri’s sharp turn away from the nationalist policies of his predecessor, Cristina Fernandez, who frequently railed against the United States and Wall Street. Obama praised Macri on Wednesday for his rapid economic reforms.
During his trip to Cuba, the U.S. president challenged President Raul Castro on human rights and political freedoms even as the two men sought to move on from more than half a century of animosity that began soon after Cuba’s 1959 revolution.
Obama has been traveling with his family and later on Thursday they were to switch briefly into vacation mode, traveling to the lakeside town of Bariloche in Patagonia for the afternoon before returning to Washington. (Writing by Richard Lough and Hugh Bronstein; Editing by W Simon and Frances Kerry)
America is engaged in another of its sprawling and costly national election campaigns. A few of the events, such as the New Hampshire primary or the Iowa Caucus, I’m sure have participants seeing themselves as Thomas Jefferson’s sturdy yeomen doing their civic duty. But such humble and misty-eyed tableaux can be deceiving for the big picture is quite disturbing, including, as it does, billions of dollars spent and a lot of noise generated about things which will not change in any outcome.
America is, despite all the noise and expense of its election campaigns, not a democracy, and, as the world’s greatest imperial power, it is not a place which genuinely honors human rights, either at home or abroad although its politicians never stop talking about them. It is a country controlled by wealth whose purpose is the acquisition of still more wealth, equipped with a military that in scores of wars and interventions has fought precisely once for the country’s defense.
It marked a fateful time in the modern era when America, under Harry Truman, decided to partner with the emerging state of Israel, a very fateful time indeed. Today much of the Middle East is in ruins, whole states and societies have been destroyed, at least a million have died, and some of the world’s great archeological and historical treasures have been destroyed as though by a gang of gleeful wanton young men.
“Most likely is that Myanmar will become an example of the “new normal politics” in Southeast Asia — a hybrid regime, with an elected executive, powerful military, and deeply entrenched elites dominant in much of politics and, particularly, the economy.” – Ashley South, Nikkei Asian Review – March 19, 2016.
( March 25, 2016, New Delhi, Sri Lanka Guardian) The fact that Myanmar is moving towards a full-fledged democracy is evident from, the free and fair elections conducted in November 2015, the military’s nod for a civilian government and the election of Htin Kyaw, a civilian, as president on 15 March 2016 after over five decades of military and quasi-military rule. However, the Tatmadaw (armed forces) continues to have a firm grip over the administration, with an ex-general as a vice-president, with 25% of the seats in both houses of parliament for the military men in uniform and with three ministers for the Home Affairs, Defence and Border affairs nominated by the Commander-in-Chief from among the military personnel.
The elections were held on 08 November 2015 in a free and fair manner with observers from both international and domestic organisations to monitor the elections. The main opposition party, National League for Democracy (NLD), under the leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi had a land slide victory by securing over 75% of the elected seats in both houses of parliament. It had also dominated the seven (Bamar majority) regional parliaments and five of the seven ethnic predominant states.
Myanmar is perhaps the only country where there is a long gap (over 4 months) between the elections and the date when the new government takes over. The new parliament was convened on 01 February 2016 and the new government takes over on 01 April 2016.
Keeping in mind the events in 1990 when the election results were annulled by the military, Aung San Suu Kyi, on achieving a resounding victory in the 2015 elections, repeatedly said that she is looking for a ‘national reconciliation’ government and her party will not be seeking revenge for all that the party had suffered at the hands of the military junta since 1990. With this aim in view she had meetings with President Thein Sein, C-in-C Sr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the powerful erstwhile military ruler Sr. Gen. Than Shwe and the lower house speaker Thura Shwe Mann during the period of over two months (since the election results were announced) for a smooth transfer of power.
A truck carries a dismantled statue of Lenin in Zaporizhia, Ukraine. Photograph: Prylepa Oleksandr/AFP/Getty Images
Friday 25 March 2016
The statue of Lenin in Zaporizhia is the last major edifice of the Bolshevik leader left standing in the centre of a major Ukrainian city. Or rather,it was.
The statue had it all: the gigantic scale (20m tall), the heroic scowl and the red granite plinth featuring a crowd of smaller workers crowding around the feet of the giant leader. Lenin made the “look here, see what we have wrought” gesture common to many of the tens of thousands of mass-produced Lenins, although this specific one is not one of the standardised Lenins churned out in factories during the Soviet era.
But the real communist significance came in the inscription – and the direction in which he was pointing. On the now decapitated plinth was, in Ukrainian, the famous slogan “Communism = Soviet Power plus Electrification of the Whole Country”, while his gargantuan hand gestured to the nearby Dnieper dam, one of the largest ever constructed.
In the 1930s under Joseph Stalin, images of the dam were ubiquitous in Ukraineand beyond, featuring on countless reliefs (on the side of a block of flats in Dnipropetrovsk, in Metro stations in Moscow and Kiev), on stamps, on badges. After it was opened, it generated more power than the entire infrastructure of the pre-1917 Russian empire.
Despite removing the Lenin statue, the planning of the city, its whole construction, will still be around the dam, that most Soviet of symbols. In fact, in Zaporizhia it becomes clear that the only way to “de-communise” a city such as this would be to raze it to the ground.
Soviet architecture
Zaporizhia is organised around a typical Stalinist boulevard, an example of Soviet imperial baroque at its most stupefying – a long, wide road which begins near the railway station and then after several miles terminates at the former Lenin statue.
This avenue is no longer called Prospekt Lenina on Google Maps (where it has reverted to its original name, Prospekt Sobornyi), but it is on all of the street signs, many of which are built onto the buildings, and decorated with golden swags.
On Lenin Prospekt, a small monument of molten steel being poured stands in one corner of the square, with the legend “Glory to Work” on one side and a sheaf of wheat on the other. An immense Soviet era steelworks stands just outside the city centre.
Much unlike nearby Dnipropetrovsk, the money made in this industrial city hasn’t been invested to any obvious effect in Zaporizhia. However, left over from the Stalinist era there are plenty of amenities, cinemas, theatres, concert halls, mostly neoclassical – the Dovzhenko Cinema features a lovely metal bust of the film director and relief sculptures of workers and peasants.
But what is most interesting in Zaporizhia is the casual, slightly mocking approach that citizens have taken to its apparently overpowering history. “Citizens of the USSR have the right to work”, reads the pompous Russian inscription opposite the Kirov Palace of Culture. Appropriately, then, someone has put a baton in the hand of the statue of the early Bolshevik leader Sergei Kirov that stands in front of this neoclassical temple, so that he looks either like a conductor or a magician.
This sort of gentle mockery seems a much more genuinely democratic and “anti-totalitarian” approach than pulling down monumental statues to build new ones.
As Zaporizhia was in the 18th century the administrative and military centre for the Cossacks, the replacement for Lenin will, apparently, be a military Cossack “hetman”.
Communist history is remembered with a certain critical distance here, but it isn’t stripped away. In a city so totally Soviet as this, how could it be?
There is evidence that the crucifixion of Christ may be the only day on which a Blood moon, noonday darkness & global or multi-tectonic earthquake coincided.
But what about the bloody moon? – Crucifixion April 3rd AD 33
Blood moon is when sometimes in a total lunar eclipse, the earth which comes between sun & moon casts a red shadow on the moon.
The earthquake during crucifixion was global in scope (affecting every tectonic boundary) as Tertullian & Africanus document.
The answer to that question fixes the date of the crucifixion with precision. Beyond reasonable doubt, in fact, because a “blood moon” has a specific meaning. In ancient literature, not only the Bible, it means a lunar eclipse. Why bloody? Because when the moon is in eclipse it is in the Earth’s shadow. It receives no direct light from the sun, but is lit only by the dim light refracted and red-shifted by the Earth’s atmosphere. The moon in eclipse does glow a dull red, as you know if you have seen it.
This matters, because with Kepler’s equations we can determine exactly when historical eclipses occurred. Perhaps it will not surprise you to learn that only one Passover lunar eclipse was visible from Jerusalem while Pilate was in office It occurred on April 3, 33 AD, the Day of the Cross.
That day followed a night of horrors predicted by the prophet Isaiah. In place of sleep for Jesus there were torch-lit hours of interrogation and mockery, spittle in the face and beatings, barbed lashes tearing flesh from his back and thorns pressed into his scalp. Isaiah wrote that the messiah would be beaten until “marred beyond human likeness” And so, Jesus was brutalized during multiple “trials” and retrials before priests Annas and Caiaphas), King Herod and Roman prefect Pontius Pilate. In the end, his fate was decided by a mob. He was marched to Golgotha, the “place of the skull,” and crucified. He would die within six hours.
My mother bought her first GPS in the 1990s. A few months later, she came home angry because it had directed her to the wrong side of the city, making her an hour late. “That’s too bad,” I said, and we went on with our lives. We both understood that commercial GPS was a new technology and wasn’t infallible, but one wasted hour was a small price to pay for the 99 percent of driving trips on which it worked correctly. We knew that with further testing and user feedback, GPS technology would continue to improve.
Things would have been different if that technology with a 1 percent failure rate was a pacemaker or artificial valve implanted in my mom’s heart and designed to keep her alive.
But how can we expect technology to improve if a person’s health is at stake? It is unethical to test new medical devices on patients without ample evidence they will work; extensive animal testing, clinical trials and a complicated FDA approval process are necessary before such devices go to market. This means potentially lifesaving treatments can take years to reach patients.
Now, scientists are turning to new tools, including computer simulation and 3D printing, to develop faster, safer ways to test medical devices without installing them in live humans or animals. My lab is working on applying these techniques to heart and vascular diseases. This work has the potential to improve outcomes from the invasive procedures common in treatment today.
Taking measurements inside the body
Vascular disease, my research area, is a very common affliction in the U.S. There are hundreds of techniques for fixing circulatory system problems, including stents (wire cylinders hold blood vessels open), balloon angioplasty (blocked arteries are reopened by pushing obstructions out of the way) and even heart valve replacement.
Before a cardiovascular device or procedure is deemed safe and effective, it must be verified to successfully restore healthy blood flow in the body. It has beenshown that the details of blood flow, such as flow speed, direction and pressure, can affect the health of the cells lining the heart and blood vessels. Knowing what the blood flow looks like before being fixed, and what may happen after a procedure or device installation, can help predict the technique’s success.
Properties such as flow speed, direction and pressure are hard to measure in a live human or animal because most measurement techniques require puncturing blood vessels. The few noninvasive methods either give unreliable results or are too slow and expensive to use on every patient. Furthermore, most flow measurements from live animals and humans are not sufficiently detailed to determine whether a procedure will ultimately lead to disease of the walls of the affected blood vessels.
Using computers to model blood flow
To circumvent this problem, scientists can test cardiovascular devices and procedures using simulations and synthetic models. These studies allow far more controlled and extensive flow data collection than would be possible on a live patient. Several research groups, including my own, are currently doing this sort of work, which includes modeling fluid velocity and pressure in blood vessels with computers. This process is called computational fluid dynamics (CFD).
Because every patient’s vascular network is a slightly different shape, there has been a movement to perform patient-specific simulations. That means scanning an individual patient’s blood vessels from medical images and modeling them virtually. By varying the model to simulate a procedure or device implantation, doctors can predict how the patient’s blood flow will change and choose the best possible outcome in advance. For example, CFD has been used to model coronary aneurysms in children and suggest techniques for treating them.
There are many advantages to using this method to predict cardiovascular procedure and device success. First, CFD produces detailed data on blood flow near vessel walls, which are difficult to measure experimentally and yet are critical in determining future vessel health. Also, because CFD can simulate variations in blood vessel shape, physicians can use it to optimize surgery plans without experimenting on the patient. For example, CFD has been used to plan surgery to repair the hearts of babies born with only one working ventricle.
Flow velocity simulation contours in cross-sections of three different vessel geometries after a Fontan procedure, which compensates for a weak heart ventricle in babies. This type of work allows surgeons to plan surgeries. W. Yang, JA Feinstein, AL Marsden, et al., Author provided
However, CFD also has its challenges. Cardiovascular devices are more difficult than surgery to model in a simulation. Also, fluid models often must be coupled to models of arterial wall mechanics and biological factors such as cell responses to hormones to obtain a complete simulation of a device or procedure’s impact.
Using experiments to model blood flow
Some researchers, including my group, have taken modeling beyond computers and have fabricated physical models to study how cardiovascular devices affect blood flow. Now 3D printing technology is advanced enough to build realistic models of human blood vessels, and pulsatile-flow pumps can drive flow through these vessels to mimic the heart’s pumping. Since the vessel models are synthetic, there are no ethical issues associated with puncturing them to take flow measurements.
These real-world models also have the advantage that it is possible to install real cardiovascular devices and use real blood, neither of which can be accomplished with a simulation. For example, a recent study found previously unidentified vortices in blood flow through a curved artery downstream of a stent. However, experiments are slower than CFD, more expensive and generally produce lower-resolution data.
There are still many challenges in using fluid mechanics simulations and experiments to predict the success of cardiovascular procedures and devices. The effect of flow on blood vessel health is closely coupled with the elasticity of blood vessel walls and cell responses to blood chemistry; it is difficult to model all of these factors together. It is also hard to validate model data against real human blood flow since it is so difficult to take measurements in a live patient.
However, simulated blood flow models are already being used in the clinic. For example, the FDA recently approved HeartFlow FFR-CT, a flow simulation software package, to help health care professionals evaluate the severity of coronary artery blockages. As blood flow modeling techniques continue to develop, it is our hope that we can acquire more data on the human circulatory system and the effectiveness of devices with minimal human or animal experimentation.
The Sri Lankan military declared the project will be completed next week.
25/03/2016
“This is a true reconciliation village with both Sinhalese and Tamils. There are six families of Tamil female soldiers currently in military service,” Mr. Withana said.
Sri Lanka’s Tamil National Alliance (TNA) has expressed opposition to a housing project in the Tamil-majority north which has been dubbed the “reconciliation village”.
On Thursday during the northern provincial council sessions TNA councillor T Sarveswaran said the housing scheme was a forcible settlement of the majority Sinhalese in lands belonging to the Tamils.
The village at Kokeliya in Vavuniya district is to be opened by President Maithripala Sirisena early next month.
Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Defence Sarath Chandrasiri Withana however denied the TNA accusation.
“This is a state land not a private property,” Mr. Withana said. He said 51 people were allotted pieces of land out of 81 lots of land.
“This is a true reconciliation village with both Sinhalese and Tamils. There are six families of Tamil female soldiers currently in military service,” Mr. Withana said as he denied any racial discrimination in awarding lands.
Tamils are demanding the release of their lands held for military purposes throughout the 35-year civil war which ended in 2009.
Since 2015 the government has released such lands periodically as its moves to achieve national reconciliation.
The inability of Sinhala rulers to provide a peaceful and democratic government for the Tamil people and their virtual dependency on the military rule to handle the affairs of state in the Tamil North East, is the result of usurpation of the constitution and state of Sri Lanka by the Sinhala Volk. The persistence with which it has opted to subordinate the democratic institutions of Parliament, Judiciary, Public Service, the Armed Services and the Police, and the immense
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by A.R.Arudpragasam Views expressed in this article are author own
PART 1
The Impossible Idea of Unitary State of Sri Lanka
( March 25, 2016, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The achievement of the objective of a unitary polity encompassing the whole island of Sri Lanka has been a prime interest of various monarchs and rulers throughout history. The idea, in spite of its noble nature, has brought more misery and suffering to the people of the island than any actual benefit. The process of achieving a unitary state has always led to the suppression of peaceful life of peoples of the island, leading to perpetual war.
Very often the ambitions of the monarchs to wield power over the whole island brought in foreign powers causing great harm to the sovereign rights of the people of the island.
In latter days, the aspiration of seeing Sri Lanka under one umbrella, was achieved under the British rule. Since the subjugation and annexation of the Kandyan Kingdom to the maritime areas in 1815, the whole island of Ceylon became one colonial outpost under the British Crown. This lasted until February 1948, when Ceylon became an independent nation and ever since has suffered a constitutional crisis unable to stabilise itself as a democratic polity.
Can this problem be resolved through dialogue between the various conflicting interests? Can stability be brought through external mediation? In spite of all earnest efforts, the attempts to find an answer to these questions and reestablish peace and harmony to an island, which gave meaning to the word serendipity, has not seen the light of the day for the last hundred years.
The idea of unitary state with a strong centre, under a supreme Parliament claiming to articulate the will of the entire people of Sri Lanka, though inspire a seeming rationality, has cast a substantial section of the population outside the constitutional and political process and brought the to a state of revolt seeking self-determination and statehood.
The proposition of a unitary Sri Lanka has definitely favoured the fortunes of the more numerous community, the Sinhala Buddhists, said to number about 69% of the whole population, and has facilitated the imposition of their will over the others. In repercussion of this, where the Parliament imposed permanent disabilities on the Tamil people, the Tamil people rejected the idea of unitary state vehemently and demanded a separate political arrangement for the articulation of their free will, so as to fulfil their desire for a democratic and just governance.
Following is UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s message for the International Day for the Right to the Truth Concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and for the Dignity of Victims, observed today:
This annual observance pays tribute to the memory of Monsignor Óscar Arnulfo Romero, who was murdered on 24 March 1980. Monsignor Romero was actively engaged in denouncing violations of the human rights of the most vulnerable individuals in El Salvador.
Across the world, every victim has the right to know the truth about violations that affected her or him. But, the truth also has to be told for the benefit of all people and communities as a vital safeguard against the recurrence of violations. The right to the truth is closely linked to the right to justice.
To advance this effort, the United Nations supports fact-finding missions, commissions of inquiry, mapping exercises and truth commissions, which document human rights violations and make recommendations to ensure accountability, reconciliation and other reforms.
Throughout the world, from Colombia to Tunisia, from Mali to Sri Lanka, from Nepal to South Sudan, the United Nations has advocated for inclusive and genuine consultations with victims and affected groups, especially women, girls and those who are far too often excluded and marginalized. Their meaningful participation must be ensured in all relevant stages of transitional justice processes, and their specific needs must be fully recognized in any reparation measures.
Securing the testimonies of victims and witnesses is also essential to ensuring the rights to know the truth and to justice. Appropriate mechanisms for the protection of victims and witnesses, including their physical and psychological integrity, privacy and dignity, must be put in place.
Moreover, the preservation of archives and other documentation relating to human rights violations is crucial for ensuring undistorted historical record and preservation of memory.
On this day, I urge States to adopt measures to promote truth, justice and reparations for victims, which is so crucial to ensuring that gross human rights violations are not repeated. Let us all do more to protect human rights and human dignity.
Deadly attacks in Belgium mourned in days following blasts at airport, subway (AFP) 
Sunday 27 March 2016
Sunday 27 March 2016
