With few options, Iran and Europe try to save nuclear deal

Parisa Hafezi, John Irish, Robin Emmott-MAY 15, 2018 

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Europe tried on Tuesday to find a way to save the Iran nuclear deal without the United States, saying a quick solution was needed for it to survive the reimposition of U.S. sanctions ordered by President Donald Trump.

British, French and German foreign ministers, along with the EU’s top diplomat, discussed the next steps with their Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif, a week after Trump abandoned an agreement he branded a “horrible, one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made”.

Seeking to uphold what the European Union had considered its biggest diplomatic achievement in decades, the 2015 accord rests on allowing business with Iran in exchange for Tehran shutting down any capacity to build an atomic bomb.

“We are on the right track ... a lot will depend on what we can do in next few weeks,” Zarif said after the 90-minute meeting with the foreign ministers and EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini.
But Britain’s Foreign Minister Boris Johnson was blunt about the chances of avoiding U.S. sanctions that also seek to prohibit foreign companies from doing business with Iran.

“We have to be realistic about the electrified rail, the live wire of American extraterritoriality and how (it) can serve as a deterrent to business,” Johnson told reporters.

 

Highlighting just how difficult it will be, the U.S. Treasury announced on Tuesday more sanctions, including on Iran’s central bank governor, just minutes before the Brussels meeting was due to begin.
“We are working on finding a practical solution,” Mogherini told a news conference. “We are talking about solutions to keep the deal alive,” she said, adding that measures would seek to allow Iran to keep exporting oil and for European banks to operate with the country.

European commissioners would also discuss sanctions-blocking measures on Wednesday, she added.
Zarif earlier said European powers must give Iran guarantees that it will get the economic benefits of the deal, warning there was not much time for them to deliver those assurances.

The deal between Iran and six world powers lifted most international sanctions in 2016 in return for Tehran curbing its nuclear programme, under strict surveillance by the United Nations, to stockpile enriched uranium for an atomic bomb.

Trump denounced the accord, completed under his predecessor Barack Obama, because it did not cover Iran’s ballistic missile programme, its role in Middle East conflicts or what happens after the deal begins to expire in 2025.

The deal’s proponents say it is crucial to forestalling a nuclear Iran and preventing wider war in the Middle East. Britain, France and Germany say they are willing to address Trump’s concerns but that the nuclear deal is the best way to prevent Tehran from obtaining an atomic weapon.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian also warned of the dangers of ditching the deal, adding that the Middle East was explosive and could be on the cusp of war.

NO REGIME CHANGE

EU diplomats said they needed some time to understand the U.S. position.

Britain's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas and French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian take part in meeting with Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in Brussels, Belgium, May 15, 2018. REUTERS/Yves Herman/Pool

“One of the questions that we need to ask the Americans is whether their final objective is to make the Iranians yield on its nuclear programme or to get rid of the regime,” said a senior French official, acknowledging that Paris was concerned by the ideological shift in Washington since John Bolton was appointed U.S. National Security Advisor.

Before arriving in Brussels, Johnson told Britain’s parliament that regime change in Iran was not a policy Britain should pursue.

Annulment of the accord could tip the balance of power in favour of hardliners looking to constrain pragmatist President Hassan Rouhani’s ability to open up to the West. If it falls apart, he could become politically vulnerable for promoting the accord. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, not Rouhani, has the last say on all state matters.

European diplomats acknowledged that the EU support, however sincere, risked looking hollow after Trump reimposed an array of wide sanctions last week on Iran that will hit European companies investing there.

“Let’s not fool ourselves that there are dozens of things we can do,” said a senior European diplomat. “We don’t have much to threaten the Americans. Optimism doesn’t abound.”

Iran’s nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi was quoted by Fars news agency as saying he was not optimistic on the prospects of the talks with the Europeans.

 

Slideshow (5 Images)

 

The U.S. Treasury announced on Tuesday more sanctions on officials of the Iranian central bank, including Governor Valiollah Seif, for allegedly moving millions of dollars on behalf of the country’s Revolutionary Guards Corps to Lebanon’s Shi’ite Hezbollah group.

The EU, which with Germany, France, Britain, Russia, China and the United States signed the nuclear accord, does have some steps it can take to shield European business in Iran.

They include retaliatory sanctions, allowing the European Investment Bank to invest directly in Iran and coordinating euro-denominated credit lines from European governments. But the reach of the U.S. financial system, the dominance of the dollar and the presence of European companies’ operations in the United States all weaken any potential EU measures.

Revealed: Ecuador spent millions on spy operation for Julian Assange

Exclusive: Files show at least $5m went on activities including spying on guests at London embassy
Julian Assange addresses the media from the balcony of Ecuador’s embassy in central London. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

Dan Collyns, Stephanie Kirchgaessnerand Luke Harding-Tue 15 May 2018

Ecuador bankrolled a multimillion-dollar spy operation to protect and support Julian Assange in its central London embassy, employing an international security company and undercover agents to monitor his visitors, embassy staff and even the British police, according to documents seen by the Guardian.

Over more than five years, Ecuador put at least $5m (£3.7m) into a secret intelligence budget that protected the WikiLeaks founder while he had visits from Nigel Farage, members of European nationalist groups and individuals linked to the Kremlin.

Other guests included hackers, activists, lawyers and journalists.

In the lead-up to the US presidential election in 2016, his whistleblowing website WikiLeaks released several batches of emails connected to the Democratic party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Last month, the Democratic National Committee filed a lawsuit against the Russian government, Donald Trump’s campaign and WikiLeaks, alleging a conspiracy to help swing the election for Trump.

Documents show the intelligence programme, called “Operation Guest”, which later became known as “Operation Hotel” – coupled with parallel covert actions – ran up an average cost of at least $66,000 a month for security, intelligence gathering and counter-intelligence to “protect” one of the world’s most high-profile fugitives.

An investigation by the Guardian and Focus Ecuador reveals the operation had the approval of the then Ecuadorian president, Rafael Correa, and the then foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, according to sources.

The then Ecuadorian foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, with Assange at the embassy in August 2014. Photograph: John Stillwell/WPA/Getty Images

Correa has defended the decision to give Assange political asylum and described the UK’s behaviour towards Ecuador as “intolerable”. Neither he nor the Ecuadorian government had any immediate comment.

From June 2012 to the end of August 2013, Operation Hotel cost Ecuador $972,889, according to documents belonging to the country’s intelligence agency, known as Senain.

The agency used a “special expenses” budget to pay for CCTV cameras to be installed in the embassy weeks after Assange moved in.

At the same time, documents show an international security company was contracted to secretly film and monitor all activity in the embassy. The company installed a team who provided 24/7 security, with two people on shift at a time, based at a £2,800-a-month flat in an Edwardian mansion building round the corner from the Knightsbridge embassy.

Even the then Ecuadorian ambassador to the UK, Juan Falconí Puig, seems to have been unaware of the operation until a council tax bill for the flat was posted to the embassy in May 2015. The arrangement had to be explained to the ambassador in a conference call with Patiño, according to a source.

The security personnel recorded in minute detail Assange’s daily activities, and his interactions with embassy staff, his legal team and other visitors. They also documented his changing moods.

The interior of the apartment in Basil Street, which cost £2,800 a month to rent and is round the corner from the embassy. Photograph: Chestertons

The team consulted Assange about each person seeking to visit him. Guests would pass through a security zone, leaving their passports with staff there, according to sources, and documents seen by the Guardian.

The passports were used to create a profile that described the visit and gave background details of all his visitors.

Worried that British authorities could use force to enter the embassy and seize Assange, Ecuadorian officials came up with plans to help him escape.

They included smuggling Assange out in a diplomatic vehicle or appointing him as Ecuador’s United Nations representative so he could have diplomatic immunity in order to attend UN meetings, according to documents seen by the Guardian dated August 2012.

In addition to giving Assange asylum, Correa’s government was apparently prepared to spend money on improving his image. A lawyer was asked to devise a “media strategy” to mark the “second anniversary of his diplomatic asylum”, in a leaked 2014 email exchange seen by the Guardian.
This included a joint press conference with him and Patiño in London, and the publication of an opinion piece for the Guardian. The fee including other costs would be $180,960 for a year’s media consultancy.

Assange supporters gather outside the embassy in Knightsbridge in June 2017. Photograph: Matt Dunham/AP

In an extraordinary breach of diplomatic protocol, Assange managed to compromise the communications system within the embassy and had his own satellite internet access, according to documents and a source who wished to remain anonymous. By penetrating the embassy’s firewall, Assange was able to access and intercept the official and personal communications of staff, the source claimed.

In tweets on Tuesday WikiLeaks denied that Assange had compromised the embassy’s network. “That’s an anonymous libel aligned with the current UK-US government onslaught against Mr Assange,” WikiLeaks wrote, adding that its editor-in-chief was not in a position to respond.

In 2014, the company hired to film Assange’s visitors was warning the Ecuadorian government that he was “intercepting and gathering information from the embassy and the people who worked there”.

The escalating cost of the Operation Hotel surveillance operation was also an issue for Ecuador’s financial controller’s office.

Assange talks with his then legal adviser, Baltasar Garzón, second right, inside the embassy in August 2012. Photograph: Sean Dempsey/PA

Carlos Pólit, the then comptroller general, wrote to the then intelligence chief, Pablo Romero, in March 2013, asking how $411,793 could have been spent on special expenses in five months without a single receipt.

More than half that amount – $224,699 – was spent on three undercover agents for Operation Hotel: a captain in the Ecuadorian navy, a colonel and a counter-intelligence operator. They were typically given monthly cash payments of about $10,000, according to official accounts, for services classified as “intelligence and counter-intelligence operations”.

Romero said documentation relating to “the security of our guest” needed to be kept to a minimum given the “high sensitivity of the case”
.
But the Operation Hotel outgoings were a fraction of the intelligence agency’s special expenses. In Assange’s first two months in the embassy, Senain spent $22.5m on 38 other operations with codenames including “undercover agents”, “counter-intelligence” and “Venezuela”, according to official documents.

Documents seen by the Guardian show Senain made multimillion-dollar payments to internet surveillance companies for spying software. One was Hacking Team, a cybersecurity company based in Italy.

Hacking Team did not respond to a request for comment. Documents show it was contracted directly or subcontracted through other companies by Senain between 2012 and 2015.

 Lenín Moreno, the Ecuadorian president, is keen for Assange to leave the embassy in order to improve ties with the US. Photograph: Juan Ruiz/AFP/Getty Images

It is unclear how the Ecuadorian government used the surveillance tools. But investigative journalists working in Ecuador say they have often been forced to move their websites abroad to avoid cyber-attacks and hacking attempts. Others have been prosecuted through the courts. Facing fines and criminal charges, some were forced into exile.

Ecuador’s president, Lenín Moreno, shut down Senain in March in response to what he called the “ethical outcry of citizens”.

He said the move was intended to “guarantee the security needs of the country”, in what appeared to be a pointed reference to the resources the agency had dedicated to protecting a person who had very little to do with Ecuador’s security.

Ecuador’s comptroller is investigating how Senain spent $284.7m between 2012 and 2017, the majority of it on special expenses such as activities connected to Assange. About 80% of the overall budget went on such expenses last year, according to a statement on the comptroller’s website.

This article was written in collaboration with Fernando Villavicencio and Cristina Solórzano from Focus Ecuador

India: 240,000 girls die annually due to gender discrimination

image: https://cdn.asiancorrespondent.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/shutterstock_565903441-940x580.jpg

Almost a quarter of a million girls in India die each year due to gender discrimination. Source: Travel Stock/Shutterstock

 15th May 2018

INDIAN society’s systemic preference for sons and gender discrimination is killing almost a quarter of a million girls under the age of five each year, a new study has found.

The almost 240,000 young girls found to fall victim to this discrimination did not include those aborted simply for being female, researchers wrote in The Lancet medical journal.

“Gender-based discrimination towards girls doesn’t simply prevent them from being born, it may also precipitate the death of those who are born,” said study co-author Christophe Guilmoto of the Paris Descartes University.

“Gender equity is not only about rights to education, employment or political representation, it is also about care, vaccination, and nutrition of girls, and ultimately survival.”

SEE ALSO: A culture of impunity lies behind India’s rape epidemic

Guilmoto and a team used population data from 46 countries to calculate how many infant girls would have died in a society where there was no discrimination impact, and how many died in reality.

The difference, about 19 deaths out of every 1,000 girls born between 2000 and 2005, was ascribed to the effects of gender bias.

This amounted to about 239,000 deaths per year, or 2.4 million over a decade.

A woman shouts slogans during a protest against the rape of a ten-year-old girl, in the outskirts of Delhi, India April 25, 2018. Source: Reuters/Adnan Abidi

“Around 22 percent of the overall mortality burden of females under five (in India) is therefore due to gender bias,” the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) a research institute based in Austria, said in a statement.

The problem was most pronounced in northern India, the researchers found, with states Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh, accounting for two-thirds of the excess deaths.

Hardest hit were poor, rural, farming regions with low education levels, high population densities, and high birth rates.

SEE ALSO: India has 63 million fewer women than it should have

“As the regional estimates of excess deaths of girls demonstrate, any intervention to reduce the discrimination against girls in food and healthcare allocation should, therefore, target in priority regions… where poverty, low social development, and patriarchal institutions persist and investments (in) girls are limited,” said co-author Nandita Saikia of IIASA.

The abuse of girls in India has come to the fore recently after a spate of brutal rape cases that have prompted widespread protests calling for an end to the culture of impunity that exists.

India registered about 40,000 rape cases in 2016, up from 25,000 in 2012, government data show. Rights activists say thousands more go unreported.

Reporting by AFP. 

The Rohingya Have Fled One Crisis for Another

As the monsoon season looms, hundreds of thousands of refugees are living in overcrowded Bangladeshi refugee camps at risk of an imminent cholera outbreak.

Rohingya refugees in Balukhali camp on January 13, 2018 in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. (ALLISON JOYCE/GETTY IMAGES)

BY SOPHIE COUSINS

| MAY 15, 2018, 7:01 AM
KUTUPALONG-BALUKHALI REFUGEE CAMP, Bangladesh — Lukia fled Myanmar with nothing but a swollen belly. For a grueling three days and nights, she walked with her elderly mother and a nephew — her only surviving family members — across the border to Bangladesh about five months ago. “During the violence, everything was burned,” she says. “My husband, brother, and father were burned. That’s why we came here.”

Lukia, who thinks she’s in her early 20s, along with nearly 700,000 other Rohingya — mostly women and children — have fled here since last August to escape a military crackdown in Myanmar’s western coastal state of Rakhine. Hundreds of Rohingya villages were razed to the ground in addition to widespread murder and rape, which the United Nations has since described as bearing the “hallmarks of genocide.”

Most now live in refugee camps, under flimsy tarpaulin and bamboo tents in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district, a small area in the southeast corner of the country, perched on steep slopes that were once forested hills. Lukia has since had her baby, who was delivered in her family’s tent by her mother. She was at a health post when I met her inside the sprawling refugee camp because her 3-month-old had diarrhea — an indication of things to come.

The monsoon season, which begins in earnest in a few weeks’ time, is predicted to bring with it disease, landslides, flash flooding, and death.

The refugee camps are located in one of the most frequently flooded regions of one of the most flood- and cyclone-prone countries in the world. In 1970, Cyclone Bhola killed at least 300,000 people; in 2007, Cyclone Sidr killed 10,000. Despite their efforts, aid agencies fear that they will be unable to protect the Rohingya from yet another crisis, one that could end in utter catastrophe, further terrorizing refugees who have endured unimaginable atrocities.

“What is the worst-case scenario? I have no idea,” says Didier Boissavi, a U.N. employee who monitors water, sanitation, and hygiene in the camps. Cholera and acute watery diarrhea are endemic in Bangladesh — and it gets worse during the rainy season. While two cholera vaccination campaigns have been completed in the refugee camps and host communities, there are concerns that an outbreak of the disease is inevitable because of poor sanitation and water quality, coupled with close living conditions and predicted latrine flooding.

“Why are we putting so much emphasis on a vaccine?” asks Khairul Islam, a doctor and the country director for WaterAid Bangladesh. “Maintaining water quality hasn’t been addressed with enthusiasm,” he adds. According to the joint response plan for the Rohingya crisis — a plan that brings together more than 130 partners, including dozens of international aid organizations, and outlines funding and response requirements — because of the current density of the population, “any outbreak has the potential to kill thousands.”

“This pathogen is the fastest contagious disease known to mankind,” Boissavi says, referring to the cholera bacterium Vibrio cholerae.At a Médecins Sans Frontières health post inside Kutupalong-Balukhali refugee camp, Ibrahim Barrie, a medical team leader, shows me how they’re preparing for an outbreak: by setting up oral rehydration points and emergency treatment centers, including isolation areas equipped with beds and chairs with a distinct hole in the middle. “The highest death toll will be the elderly,” he says, due to the extreme heat, their frailty, and dehydration from diarrhea. “Most of them are just waiting to die.”

On a sweltering afternoon, refugees collect sandbags, plastic, and bamboo, grabbing anything that could be used to fortify and protect their tents — and families — from being swept away. They carry the goods up steep slopes, dodging thick piles of red mud and water holes from a recent intense downpour. While work is being done to clear land to create stable ground for the thousands who are most vulnerable to monsoon damage, more than 200,000 refugees live in areas that are likely to flood or collapse.

Agencies including the International Organization for Migration (IOM) are training refugees in search and rescue and first aid, along with creating safe access routes and new drainage channels to try to limit flooding. But there’s only so much that can be done, and there’s only so much battering tents can withstand. “With the monsoon coming, we’re looking at possible multiple disasters. It’s not a one-day or one-week weather event. It’s four or five or maybe six months,” says Caroline Gluck, a spokeswoman for UNHCR.

While Bangladesh has a good early warning system for cyclones, there are no plans to evacuate refugees. Moving to higher ground is out of the question — there’s too many people and too little land — and so is doing more to make the shelters sturdier, because the authorities won’t allow it.
Building stronger or permanent structures would suggest that the refugees are here to stay, and, in an election year, that is not a signal Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina wants to send

 to voters, especially when public sentiment toward the Rohingya refugee population is starting to harden. Building concrete homes for refugees would be, in the Bangladeshi government’s view, a political liability. And they are already being branded a threat rather than fellow Muslims in need of compassion. Hasina has told local media that the longer the Rohingya stay, the likelier it is that they will create security issues because “when people remain frustrated and have no work, they could easily indulge in militancy.”

“I think Bangladesh misjudged the immediacy of [the Rohingyas’] return. It’s only now that Bangladesh realizes that these people aren’t going back anytime soon,” says Meenakshi Ganguly, the South Asia director at Human Rights Watch. This year, Bangladesh and Myanmar agreed to complete a voluntary repatriation of the refugees in two years. Not a single refugee has willingly returned home. (A few weeks ago, a few Rohingya did return to Myanmar, but it was reportedly staged.) The U.N. high commissioner for refugees recently said conditions in Myanmar are not yet “conducive for the voluntary, safe, dignified and sustainable return of refugees” and that responsibility remains on the government to rectify this.

While Myanmar’s state counselor, Aung San Suu Kyi, recently announced that she will allow U.N. human rights and development organizations to enter Myanmar to prepare the ground for the mass return of the Rohingya, Ganguly stresses that repatriation needs to go far beyond just building infrastructure. The refugees say they need assurances about their legal status, citizenship rights, and protection — and to bring the killers of their families to justice.

“What we’re arguing for — we don’t see that happening right now — and that is to hold everyone who committed these horrific crimes to account. Is that going to happen before the rains? No,” Ganguly says. “Literally the monsoon season is now.” Instead, she says, it’s time for Bangladesh to allow the Rohingya out of camps to seek safe shelter and employment opportunities. While they are safe from persecution here in Bangladesh, they do not enjoy free movement or the right to seek formal work; they are essentially trapped in a detention camp, minus the barbed wire.

Checkpoints around the camps and along the road to Cox’s Bazar, some 20 miles away, ensure that refugees do not leave the camps’ perimeters.

“Bangladesh has to agree to let these people move out of these areas and let them scatter where they can also have livelihoods,” Ganguly argues.

But Bangladesh is adamant it has its own solution. The government plans to move 100,000 refugees to Bhasan Char, a low-lying uninhabited island in the Bay of Bengal. The United Nations and aid agencies fear any refugees who are relocated to Bhasan Char — which is technically a sandbank that emerged not long ago — would be isolated from the mainland, leaving people at the mercy of severe weather events. H.T. Imam, one of Hasina’s advisors, told the media that the island wouldn’t be a “concentration camp, but there may be some restrictions.”

With the imminent monsoon season, the refugees’ future in both Bangladesh and Myanmar is uncertain. What is clear though is the devastating toll it will have on the population. “The Rohingya are running away to be safe, and now another thing is threatening their lives. That sense of protection they had [here] will be totally lost,” says Olga Rebolledo, an IOM mental health worker.

And the monsoon season could get worse if aid agencies don’t secure more funding soon. In March, aid organizations launched the joint response plan, seeking more than $950 million in 2018.
However, as of now, the response has been only 16 percent funded. The consequences are quite clear. “If we don’t get funding, people will die,” says Fiona MacGregor, a spokeswoman for the IOM in Cox’s Bazar.

For Human Rights Watch’s Ganguly, this points to the apathy of the international community. “Everyone goes and sees the horrible situation and expresses sympathy, but nothing conclusive is happening,” she says. “The international community has to stop engaging in disaster tourism and start doing something about it.”

Drug target for curing the common cold

By Michelle RobertsHealth editor, BBC News online-14 May 2018

UK scientists believe they may have found a way to combat the common cold.

Rather than attacking the virus itself, which comes in hundreds of versions, the treatment targets the human host.

It blocks a key protein in the body's cells that cold viruses normally hijack to self-replicate and spread.

This should stop any cold virus in its tracks if given early enough, lab studies suggest. Safety trials in people could start within two years.

The Imperial College London researchers are working on making a form of the drug that can be inhaled, to reduce the chance of side-effects.

• What to do if you have a cold or flu
• Sneezing myths and facts

In the lab, it worked within minutes of being applied to human lung cells, targeting a human protein called NMT, Nature Chemistry journal reports.

All strains of cold virus need this human protein to make new copies of themselves.

Researcher Prof Ed Tate said: "The idea is that we could give it to someone when they first become infected and it would stop the virus being able to replicate and spread.

"Even if the cold has taken hold, it still might help lessen the symptoms.

"This could be really helpful for people with health conditions like asthma, who can get quite ill when they catch a cold."

He said targeting the host rather than the infection was "a bit radical" but made sense because the viral target was such a tricky one.

Cold viruses are not only plentiful and diverse, they also evolve rapidly, meaning they can quickly develop resistance to drugs.

The test drug completely blocked several strains of cold virus without appearing to harm the human cells in the lab. Further studies are needed to make sure it is not toxic in the body though.

Dr Peter Barlow of the British Society for Immunology said: "While this study was conducted entirely in vitro - using cells to model Rhinovirus infection in the laboratory - it shows great promise in terms of eventually developing a drug treatment to combat the effects of this virus in patients."

Fighting a cold

Colds spread very easily from person to person. And the viruses that cause the infections can live on hands and surfaces for 24 hours.

Painkillers and cold remedies might help ease the symptoms. But currently there is nothing that will halt the infection.

You can catch a cold by:

• inhaling tiny droplets of fluid that contain the cold virus - these are launched into the air when an infected person coughs or sneezes
• touching an object or surface contaminated by infected droplets and then touching your mouth, nose or eyes
• touching the skin of someone who has the infected droplets on their skin and then touching your mouth, nose or eyes

Symptoms - a runny or blocked nose, sneezing and sore throat - usually come on quickly and peak after a couple of days. Most people will feel better after a week or so. But a mild cough can persist for a few weeks.

9 years today – Last hospital stops functioning, shelling continues

Photographs: Tamil civilians wade across Nandiakadal lagoon over to Sri Lankan army territory on May 14th 2009.

Marking 9 years since the Sri Lankan military onslaught that massacred tens of thousands of Tamils, we revisit the final days leading up to the 18th of May 2009 – a date remembered around the world as ‘Tamil Genocide Day’.  The total number of Tamil civilians killed during the final months is widely contested. After providing an initial death toll of 40,000, the UN found evidence suggesting that 70,000 were killed. Local census records indicate that at least 146,679 people are unaccounted for and presumed to have been killed during the Sri Lankan military offensive.

14th May 2009

Last hospital stops functioning

14May 2018

The last remaining makeshift hospital in the conflict zone, set up inside a school, ceases to function from this day as Sri Lankan military shelling becomes heavier.

The OISL reports,

“After 14 May 2009, the doctors could no longer go to the hospital due to the intensity of the shelling, and it had to be closed. Dozens of patients who could not be moved were left behind.”

“Medical personnel were seen putting up a white flag and moved some patients to shelter, then, with the patients who were able to, they started to walk towards the Vadduvakal bridge to the south. Some 150 patients were left behind, as their injuries were too serious for them to be moved and they could not be evacuated by ship.”

Photograph: Sri Lankan soldeirs march into the final conflict zone backed by artillery fire on May 14th 2009.

It adds that the LTTE gave orders on this day to ensure civilians fleeing the conflict zone would not be stopped.

“From 14 May, tens of thousands civilians heeded the calls of SLA soldiers with megaphones and slowly walked along the A35 road lined with SLA positions towards the Vadduvakal bridge, which was one of the main crossing points. Most surviving LTTE fighters had discarded their uniforms, laid down weapons and other military equipment and donned civilian dress. Along with other LTTE political cadres, they walked amongst the crowds with their families.”

The UN Petrie report stated that as “several thousand civilians continued to flee the NFZ, mostly south along the lagoon, some walking, some on small boats or clinging to inflated tyres… Artillery fire reportedly continued from Government forces”.

Photographs: Above and right. Tamil civilians cross over into Sri Lankan military territory, many by wading across Nandikadal laggon amidst heavy artillery fire. May 14th 2009.

No respite from the shelling

The LTTE Peace Secretariat reported that the Sri Lankan military had continued shelling, killing thousands of civilians. Extracts reproduced below.

“The local aid workers in Vanni Region estimated 1700 civilians have been killed and over 3000 injured in the last 48 hours due to the persistent use of heavy artillery and mortars by the Sri Lankan armed forces.”

“We call upon the international community to protect the civilians from this ongoing carnage by taking whatever measure required. The LTTE is ready to engage with the International Community in its actions to bring an end to the humanitarian crisis.”

See the full statement here.

Read More

Unofficial truth commission shows way for government

Kandy Truth Commission

BY Jehan Perera-May 14, 2018, 9:29 pm 

On Sunday a meeting of a truth commission took place in Kandy in which I was an observer. This was not the truth commission promised by the government to the international community in Geneva in October 2015. Rather, it was an unofficial body, a citizens’ truth commission, set up by the District Inter Religious Committee of Kandy. The District Inter Religious Committee (DIRC) had previously been involved in mitigating the violent situation that had arisen inKandy in early March 2018 and which lasted for a week in defiance of police curfews declared in the district. The DIRC members influenced the government officials, relevant religious leaders and academic persons in the area to take necessary action to solve the problem. In the midst of the troubled period, the DIRC also held a media conference to request all communities to be peaceful and to avoid escalating the problem.

 After the riots had ended the DIRC decided to appoint a Citizens’ Truth Commission (an unofficial Truth Seeking mechanism) to find root causes of the incident that had taken place in Kandy. The members appointed as commissioners were Justice W.M.P.B. Waravewa, Retired Judge, Professor S.A Kulasooriya, Professor Milton Rajaratne, Attorney-at-law Chrismal Warnasooriya, Professor Amarakeerthi Liyanage, A.M.L.B. Polgolla, Retired GA, Kandy, Dr. M.B. Adikaram, Retired Director General, Mahaweli Authority, Dr. Kanchana Kohombange , Attorney-at-law M.K.M Shahin Hasan, S.L. Weerasena, Retired Director General, Agriculture Department and university lecturer R. Ramesh.  The commissioners assigned two expert committees to collect the evidence from the victims as well as from the other people in the areas where the most serious incidents had taken place. 

The investigation conducted by the commission was preceded by a public notice in the national newspapers announcing the setting up of the citizens’ truth commission, its terms of reference and the names of its commissioners. The final hearing of the commission, which I observed was to review the information of expert committees and also to give opportunity for those who were interested to submit further evidence. The proceedings of the entire hearing were conducted in public with the news media in attendance. Most of those who attended the final meeting of the truth commission in the heart of Kandy city were those who believed in the values of pluralism and people’s participation in governance and represented a cross section of society, which demonstrated the essentially democratic, pluralistic and human rights respecting nature of the Sri Lankan intelligentsia.

SILENT MAJORITY

The truth commission held in Kandy is evidence of the silent majority who could be won over to the cause of peacebuilding and national reconciliation if there were sufficient political champions of those concepts as opposed to champions of crude ethnic nationalism. This silent majority is too often forced to watch silently and with disapproval even as atrocities are perpetrated in their names by others. As this was a nationally advertised and public event there were also unlike-minded persons also in attendance. There was some concern amongst the organizers that there might be attempts to disrupt the proceedings. But this did not happen. Those who wished to participate constructively in the truth commission were too strong in their presence and in their position for the proceedings to be derailed.

Explaining the rationale for the setting up of the truth commission, the coordinator of the Kandy District Inter Religious Committee, Gamini Jayaweera, said that shortly after the anti-Muslim riots the government had announced that it would set up a commission of inquiry to engage in fact finding to ascertain the truth of what happened, whether it was spontaneous, or organized, and if so who was behind the riots. But the government’s inquiry has yet to happen. The police investigations also appear to be at a standstill. Although several of the ground level perpetrators have been arrested by the police, the master minds behind the scenes still remain at liberty. In this context of continuing impunity for the master minds, last week, an independent state institution, the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka led by its chairperson Professor Deepika Udagama spent three days in Kandy engaging in fact finding. This was commendable as the Human Rights Commission did not wait for information to come to it and instead went out proactively to search for the truth.

The setting up of the Citizens’ Truth Commission can be seen as a civil society response to the failure of the government to find and publicise the truth of what lay behind the anti-Muslim riots. There appears to be a general reluctance on the part of the government to get to the truth of violence that has occurred in the past. The apprehension of the government to probe the truth can also be seen in its reluctance to establish a truth commission to find out what happened during the course of the war. The general public, however, are not averse to such findings. Last year another civil society initiative led by the National Peace Council in partnership with the District Inter Religious Committee took place in Kandy in the form of a Truth Forum, which looked into the human rights violations that had taken place in the past, which was well received by those who participated, which provided the inspiration for the present citizens’ truth commission process.

CIVIC EXAMPLE

Unfortunately, there seems to be a continuing apprehension on the part of the government that a Pandora’s Box of revelations will emerge from truth seeking mechanisms that cannot be put back into the box. As a result the promises made by the government at the landmark session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in October 2015 still remain unfulfilled for the most part. The joint resolution at that session, which was co-sponsored by Sri Lanka stated that the government would set up a truth commission, an office of missing persons, an office of reparations and a special court on accountability to deal with the outstanding issues of the war. Three years later it is only the office of missing persons that has seen the light of day. The problem is that establishing the reconciliation mechanisms, and getting them going, does not appear to be a priority of a government that has many other problems to deal with.

On the positive side, the government has been acting more decisively in recent times to pass new legislation with regard to accountability issues, especially after the defeat of the no-confidence motion against the Prime Minister. Three recent examples are the passage of the judicature act, and presentation of amendments to the bribery commission act and the clearing of hurdles to the national audit bill. All of these changes in the laws will strengthen the systems of accountability. Through these measures the government is giving the law enforcement agencies the necessary tools to act against those who are law breakers. The lacuna to fill is to instill in the law enforcement agencies the confidence that they have the political backing to take action.

The District Inter Religious Committee of Kandy’s decision to conduct a truth commission is as testament to the space that the government has created for constructive actions, but which it is not doing itself. The members of this committee have become champions of reconciliation and shown leadership and initiative which is presently lacking in the government when it comes to dealing with issues of healing the traumas of the past. The success of this civil society initiative and its acceptance by people is an indication that this micro level initiative can become a macro level initiative if taken on by other civil society groups. There could be a plethora of civil society truth commissions where people mobilize themselves to discuss and find answers to those issues that are central to their lives and pressurize the government to give its own answers.

Tamil National Question & Tamil Insurgency In Sri Lanka

By Imtiyaz Razak –MAY 14, 2018

Prof. Imtiyaz Razak

On May 17, 2009 the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) admitted the defeat in the war against the Sinhalese dominated Sri Lanka security forces and vowed to silence guns. In May 18, Sri Lanka security forces announced that the LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran, who led the three decades old violent campaign to build ethnic nation for the Tamils who predominantly live in the Northern and Eastern territories of the island of Sri Lanka, was killed by Sri Lanka’s military in a firefight that signaled the effective end to one of Asia’s longest-running military conflicts. The territory formerly controlled by the LTTE have been brought under the control of the government since the middle of 2009 and then government led by former President Mahinda Rajapakshe is claiming that it is making all efforts to rebuild the war affected Northern region where a large majority of ethnic Tamils and minority Muslims live. This short article would deal with the roots of the Tamil insurgency. It would also attempt to provide brief overview about the growth and demise of the Tamil insurgency led by the LTTE. It would finally suggest some solution to the Tamil national question since no solution is being proposed by the current government, which promised solution during the election campaign. .

The history of Sri Lanka’s Tamil conflict or roots of the Tamil insurgency can be identified from the time of colonial period.Three regional sovereign kingdoms were existed in the country, when the Portuguese, the first of the Western colonialists arrived on the shores of Ceylon in 1505. One of these was the independent Tamil Kingdom located on the northern Jaffna peninsula of the same name. Two were Sinhalese with their capitals at Kotte, and at Kandy in the central hill country. The northern Tamil Kingdom had been in existence since the early thirteenth century. When the Portuguese defeated Tamil kingdom then administered by Cankili II, the last Tamil King, in battle and formally annexed the Jaffna Kingdom in 1619. After the Portuguese influence left from the island, the Dutch replaced the Portuguese occupied places until their departure. The British, who displaced the Dutch in 1831 unified the island and thus brought the Jaffna Kingdom under the single.

administration along with the Sinhala kingdoms. The Jaffna centered Tamil Kingdom neither consulted by the British nor offered an alternative power-sharing with the Sinhalese. Problems arose when the British favored the Tamils and gave some cultural concessions to the Tamil region such as building top English medium schools in the Tamil dominated Jaffna district and allied with elites of the Tamils to help in colonial administration. When independence came in 1948, the Sinhalese, the majority ethnic group, who thought that they were being marginalized and found itself in a precarious position, as the majority group sought to gain economic power. The leaders of the Sinhalese seized power from the British administrators and adopted pro-Sinhala policies in order to redress the grievances of the majority community-Sinhalese.

S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike laid the first foundation for such an ethnicization of politics by introducing the Sinhala-Only language policy in the 1950’s. Repeatedly over the next four decades, Sinhala politicians employed the same ethnic tricks to capture a large share of the Sinhalese votes. Then an educational standardization policy in 1972 allowed Sinhalese students to enter Science and Medicine schools with lower scores than the Tamil students. The Constitution of 1972 conferred a special status on Buddhism in both the state and public sectors. Communal riots in 1958, 1961, 1974, 1977 and 1983 in which Tamils were killed, maimed, robbed and rendered homeless were carefully designed by the Sinhala elites eventually radicalized the Tamils who consider themselves as a distinct nation and subsequently produced Tamil militants, notably the LTTE (in 1976), a secessionist Tamil guerrilla movement which set the stage for violent Tamil retaliation and efforts to secede.

It is the fact the LTTE’s three decades old struggle for an independent Tamil state effectively challenged the state policies over the Tamils. It also attracted reasonable global support from the Tamil Diaspora as well as some quarters of the Western governments and policy makers. However, the global political developments of the post September 11 terrorist attacks had radically contributed to the erosion of global sympathy for the LTTE. Sri Lanka’s Sinhala political class had succeeded in portraying the Tamil struggle as mere terrorist campaign and advantageously employed the global war on terrorism for its own counter insurgency activities and war against the LTTE.

The LTTE was militarily defeated in May 2009. The island of Sri Lanka has entered into a new phase and political condition was made to seek a meaningful reconciliation with the Tamils and other minorities to take the island into a post-conflict period. There were wave of expectations that Sri Lanka’sBuddhist dominated government would seek political compromise and settlements with the Tamil leaders. The questions therefore are; will the current government take any meaningful measures to find a solution through power-sharing democracy? Will the collapse of violent resistant by the LTTE further strengthen the hands of the Sinhala extremists who aspire to build Sinhalese only Sri Lanka? Or will it further alienate the minorities of Sri Lanka?

What Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka suggests is that politicization of ethnic distinctions by major political parties has weakened democracy and its institutions and thus has fueled an ethnic violence and conflict. Democratic institutions in Sri Lanka need to be strengthened. Political autonomy and power-sharing can help the Tamils to increase their level of trust in the state and it institutions. In other words, tensions among groups can be significantly reduced in Sri Lanka if the Sinhala political class genuinely seeks political compromise with the Tamil polity and other minorities through a feasible political solution that would go beyond the current British imposed unitary structure. If there is a resistance to offer power sharing, the other option is partition which can possibly offer social and political security, as well as stability, to the different ethnic groups. social and political security, as well as stability, to the different ethnic groups.

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