In a classified memo written by US’s Sri Lanka Ambassador Robert Blake in October 2006 to Washington, ten months after the extra-judicial execution of five students at a Trincomalee beach, Basil Rajapakse, advisor to Sri Lanka’s President and brother Rajapakse, had told Ambassador Blake that Special Task Force (STF) was responsible for the killings, according a Wikileaks document. Father of Ragihar, one of the student killed, is one of the three plaintiffs who have filed a civil case against Sri [...]

The US has started to enforce its sanctions on Iran. That’s likely to have knock-on effects on many countries that depend on Iran for oil.

One of the most vulnerable in this regard is Sri Lanka, as the BBC’s Charles Haviland explains from its capital, Colombo.

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"The Eezham people have a very direct obligation of fighting for their own sovereignty against a state that presumes to have a unitary power over them," stressed veteran Filipino left ideologue, Prof. Jose Maria Sison. In an exclusive interview to TamilNet on Sunday, Prof. Sison spoke on the questions of sovereignty of the Eezham Tamil nation, the protracted nature of genocide that Sri Lanka imposes on Tamils in their homelands, the principled position of leftists on the national question, and [...]

Sri Lanka’s Ambassador to the US, Jaliya Wickramasuriya, recently responded to the Crisis Group Report’s assertion that assault on women in Sri Lanka is on the rise. On the one hand, the Ambassador denies the very existence of rape or violence against women in Sri Lanka – “Rapes, this and that not taking any place in Sri Lanka”. On the other hand, he admits that is does exist, by saying that “Like any other country, we have, like couple [...]

Two Tamil organizations in the U.S. jointly issued a commemorative stamp to mark the 6th anniversary of the extra-judicial execution by Sri Lanka security forces of five Trincomalee high school students on the 2nd January 2006, when the highly accomplished students were spending an afternoon at a seafront in Trincomalee. The stamp, the issuing organizations said, is a mark of respect to the families that are fighting for justice, and to celebrate the indomitable spirit of Dr Manoharan, the father [...]

The Tamil hit song ‘Kolaveri di’ has become a hit in India and Sri Lanka thanks to its catchy beat and words.

Now a Sri Lankan born British singer Arjun Coomaraswamy has released an English remix of the track in London and it has reached almost 2 million hits on YouTube.

The English version of ‘Kolaveri di’ has been named ‘How Could you do this to me’ and it has become one of the most viewed songs by an independent South [...]

As Sri Lanka’s civil war came to a bloody end in May 2009, the BBC’s Priyath Liyanage was struck by video footage of a boy walking through the war zone holding a violin. Two years on, can this boy be traced and why did he make such a perilous journey with only a musical instrument?

In the last months of Sri Lanka’s civil war, nearly 300,000 Tamil civilians – driven out of their homes with the retreating Tamil rebels – [...]

A report commissioned by the Sri Lankan government has concluded civilians caught up in Sri Lanka’s civil war were not deliberately targeted by the country’s military.

The UN has called for an independent international investigation.

The civil war was one of the world’s bloodiest and longest-running, leaving parts of the island devastated and hundreds of thousands of people displaced.

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Despite ongoing concerns over risks of torture in Sri Lanka, including to Tamils returning to Sri Lanka, the UK government continues to remove refused Sri Lankan asylum seekers, with a charter flight planned for 15 December, a UK-based activist group, Freedom from Torture (FfT) said. The group has recently launched a public action calling on the UK government to take urgent steps to ensure that they are not returning anyone to a serious risk of torture in Sri Lanka following [...]

The Tamil Sovereignty Cognition declaration released this year on Heroes Day would serve as a ‘conceptual reference point’ in ensuring that Tamil sovereignty is never compromised, writes RM Karthick, research scholar at a British university, in an article published in Countercurrents, an Indian on-line journal. “It is naivety to expect anything democratic from a unitary state of Sri Lanka,” he argues drawing parallels between the observations by the military analyst and senior editor late Mr. Sivaram Dharmeratnam with the Declaration [...]

The York Federation of Students, the students’ union at York University representing over 50,000 students, unanimously adopted a resolution last week recognizing the ongoing structural genocide of the Eezham Tamil nation and the need to stand in solidarity with the Tamil people in their global struggle for self-determination. The success of enacting such resolutions has been credited to campaigns by Tamil students in educating and explaining the narrative of the Tamil struggle to their peers and allies, student activists said. [...]

Sri Lanka is still a country struggling to put decades of civil war behind it.

The final stages – in 2009 – were of particular concern to human rights groups as reports suggested thousands of civilians had been killed.

The Sri Lankan government rejected calls for an independent international inquiry but it did appoint its own commission, and that panel is due to submit its report in a few days. But will it move the reconciliation process forward?

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With a final report on the civil war due, we ask if Sri Lanka’s ethnic communities are more divided than ever.

Since Sri Lanka ended a long-running civil war in May 2009, the country has attracted new tourists and trade. But critics say Sri Lanka’s ethnic communities appear more divided than ever with the risk of further conflict.

Former Tamil Tiger combatants returning home from military-run rehabilitation camps are finding the military still have a pervasive presence in [...]

Sri Lanka’s civil war ended with "credible" evidence that war crimes were committed. Now Channel 4 News can reveal mounting evidence that the government is still torturing Tamil prisoners.

The UN has already found that evidence of the killing of up to 40,000 civilians amid allegations of serious human rights abuses amounted to "credible allegations" that war crimes had been committed during the last days of the civil war in 2009.

Now ahead of a United Nations meeting tomorrow, human rights [...]

After Sri Lanka’s special envoy Mahinda Samarasinghe met Wednesday morning with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Inner City Press asked him how the meeting had gone. Video here and below.

"Constructive," he called it, saying that the government’s Lessons Learnt & Reconciliation Commission report, due November 15, will be presented nearly a year later in October 2012 to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Inner City Press asked Sri Lanka had again complained about the transmission to Geneva of the UN [...]