“To stay quiet is as political an act as speaking out.”
Arundhati Roy, Author and Activist
The plight of the silenced can only be alleviated when enough are listening. Those suffering in Sri Lanka are stifled from speaking. Please lend them your voice.
This section contains addresses of key policy makers and news agencies along with sample letters and useful guides.
This section contains a timeline depicting the historical background of the Sri Lankan conflict. Spanning from the pre-colonial era to present day events, the timeline allows the user to gain valuable insight into the causes of this conflict. (Launch Flash Timeline...)
Short documentary on Black July and links to other related videos. (view feature video...)
| Related Videos: |
| Tamil Abductions: An SBS Dateline production on the recent abductions of Tamils in Sri Lanka. |
| Sivaram: Violence against Journalists (Part 2, Part 3): Film about the silencing of free speech through death and intimidation. |
| Shadow War: The emergence of 'paramilitaries' and their impact on the cease fire. |
| Still Photographs |
Articles on the recent acts of persecution against the Tamil minority. (complete list of articles...)
| Related Links: |
| Touched by Tragedy: An Australian medical doctor teaching in the North East puts forth his first-hand view of the situation. pdf |
| I am not a Terrorist: The high price Tamils are forced to pay for basic human rights. |
| No Middle Way for Militant Monks: The role played by the Buddhist clergy in this conflict. |
A flash animation containing a series of observations depicting the events of July 1983 and its implications. Many of the quotes in this section are sourced from independent journalists and international witnesses.
There are several accounts of Tamils attributing their escape from death, to their Sinhalese and Muslim neighbours. We are grateful to those who risked their own lives to allow Tamils to hide in their homes.
The 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom produced an exodus of Tamils who fled to all parts of the world. Our appreciation extends to countries, such as Australia, for welcoming us, and providing a safe home to live in.
We appreciate your thoughts, suggestions and queries. Please send us your feedback.
Stories from witnesses and victims from around the Globe (TBA).
Did you or someone you know get affected by Black July or any other incident? Tell us your story.
We are grateful for our sources - a rare breed of unbiased reporters and journalists.
Kosovo: The Global Significance of Independence
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The Real News Network
24 Feb 2008
Bruce Fein is the founder of the American Freedom Agenda, that works to restore constitutional checks and balances. He served in the US Justice Department under President Reagan and has been an adjunct scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, a resident scholar at the Heritage Foundation, a lecturer at the Brookings Institute, and an adjunct professor at George Washington University. "In the long run, separate statehood creates greater stability." - Bruce Fein
Sri Lankan Security Accused of Aid Massacre
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Radio Austrlia, Australian Broadcasting Corporation
01 Apr 2008
The Sri Lankan Government has been accused of a high level cover-up over the 2006 murder of 17 aid workers by local security forces. A local human rights group says local police shot the 17, most of whom were Tamils, with the complicity of senior officers.
Human Rights in Sri Lanka
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Worldview, Chicago Public Radio
28 Dec 2007
Chicago Public Radio airs an interview with Human Rights Watch's Sunila Abeysekera and Fred Abrahams. Sunila directs the Sri Lankan human rights group INFORM. She's spent the past 20 years documenting human rights abuses in Sri Lanka. Sunila has worked with Human Rights Watch for many of those years. She's currently helping them lobby for a UN monitoring mission in Sri Lanka. Fred is a Senior Researcher for Human Rights Watch's Emergencies program. Worldview Producer Andrea Wenzel spoke with Sunila and Fred when they were in Chicago. Fred explained what he thinks are the most critical human rights concerns in Sri Lanka today.
Sri Lanka: Killing for Peace
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Unreported World, Channel 4
9 Nov 2007
Reporter Sandra Jordan and director Siobhan Sinnerton travel to northern Sri Lanka and uncover the government's heavy-handed tactics in the latest stage of the country's 30-year civil war. As the first foreign journalists to visit the city of Jaffna , Jordan and Sinnerton discover that the government has abandoned the ceasefire signed in 2002 in favour of a military campaign against the rebel Tamil Tigers - with many innocent civilians paying the price.
The Sri Lankan Civil War is an ongoing conflict on the island-nation of Sri Lanka . Since the year 1983, there has been on-and-off civil war, predominantly between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE, also known as the Tamil Tigers), a separatist militant organization who fight to create an independent state named Tamil Eelam in the North and East of the island.
The origins of the Sri Lankan civil war lie in sharp disagreements over language, access to universities, and riots between Sri Lanka's majority Sinhalese, mostly Buddhist, and minority Tamil, mostly Hindu, community. These gradually but continuously escalated from the 1920s until the outbreak of civil war in 1983.
Sri Lanka's Dirty War
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Journeyman Pictures
July 2007
In the past 18 months, over 2,000 Sri Lankans have been kidnapped or murdered, allegedly by government death squads. Now Human Rights Watch is calling for aid to Sri Lanka to be withheld.
The Tamil homeland of Northern Sri Lanka is once again a war zone. The government is convinced it can crush the rebels within three years. "They only have this area left", states Brig Prasad. As well as targeting Tamil rebels, the government is accused of thousands of; "extrajudicial killings, abductions, disappearances". Most of the disappeared are ethnic Tamils. MP Mano Ganesan believes the abductions are; "a means of crushing the Tamil national struggle". The capital, Colombo, teams with police and soldiers but none of the abductors have been caught.
Western Media Ignores Sri Lankan State Terror - Australian Doctor
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ABC Conversation Hour
August 2007
Dr John Whitehall is a pediatrician, who works as the Director of Townsville Hospital's Neonatal Unit. John has also saved the lives of children all around the world, doing humanitarian work in often violent and dangerous places. Last year, John was a finalist for Senior Australian of the Year for his work raising relief funds for victims of the Asian tsunami.
John says his faith has helped steer him towards much of his humanitarian work. "I'm a Christian," he says, "and ideally speaking, what I have done was informed by that earlier belief. Having said that, I don't mind a bit of adventure on the side and one thing led to another!"
In Sri Lanka in 2004, John worked training a young group of medical students. "There were 32 of them," he remembers. "After a week or so, I began to realise there was something a little different about this group. I gradually found out they were the medical wing of the Tamil Tigers... These students had been selected in this extraordinary medical experiment because until 1992 the casualties were taken across to India... so they decided to form their own medical wing. I just happened when they were looking around for a pediatrician to teach them pediatrics."
John in no way supports terrorism but he came to understand the Tigers' fight. "I have said in articles I've written that the Tigers have well exceeded the bounds of conventional warfare and the Geneva convention... They have inflicted terror... What I have come to be aware [is] you can't understand the situation in Colombo if you only focus on the terror which is coming from one side, and you don't mention the state terror...It doesn't come out in the media here - bombing of schools... forced refugee status... at least 5,000 Tamils have disappeared in the last six months."
NB: The last 30 mins of the interview is focused on Dr Whitehall's work in Sri Lanka.
Tamil Abductions
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SBS Dateline
July 11 2007
Since 2005, there have been almost 20 cases of Tamils, either Australian citizens or relatives back in Sri Lanka, being kidnapped and held for huge ransoms. Some Tamils in Australia have pleaded with the Howard government for help, only to be disappointed by a lack of action.
While most are too afraid to come forward publicly, Dateline speaks exclusively to the families of those who were kidnapped.
Most Australians would probably be blissfully unaware that tens of thousands of Sri Lankan born Tamils living peacefully in this country thousands of kilometres from the violence that's been plaguing their homeland for decades. In recent months however the terror and anguish experienced by families in Sri Lanka has been visited on their relatives here in Australia. Dateline's been told of 18 separate case of Tamils, Australian citizens, permanent residents or their relatives who have been kidnapped back in Sri Lanka and held for ransom. Some have been released but the lives of others still hang in the balance. Nick Lazaredes has investigated three Sydney families caught up in this epidemic of abductions. Understandably they were prepared to talk so long as we didn't reveal their identities.
Sivaram: How Violence Against Journalists Cripples Democracy
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
The Reclaim Initiative
2006
Journalists and artists in Sri Lanka are being threatened, attacked, and killed. The most notable recent case is the abduction and murder of Dharmeratnam Sivaram, the renowned editor of the online news publication TamilNet. While his killers are still unknown, we do know that threats of violence like this inhibit the flow of accurate information and objective critique.
In this film, we take the story of Sivaram’s life and unsolved murder as the axis around which we explore these questions. With versions in English, Sinhala, and Tamil, we hope to air the piece on Sri Lankan television before offering it to outside audiences.
The film is a collaboration with one of Sri Lanka’s finest filmmakers (who wishes to remain anonymous until production is complete), and includes interviews with prominent Sri Lankan journalists, filmmakers and scholars—many of whom themselves have been threatened.
Sri Lanka's Shadow War
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SBS Dateline
April 19 2006
Another beautiful but troubled island nation, Sri Lanka, devastated by the tsunami but already hugely damaged by the stop-go civil war between the government and the rebel Tamil Tigers, a brutal conflict that's left more than 60,000 dead. In recent years, a fragile cease-fire put a clamp on what had been open hostility. But now, in what was already a complex conflict, a new, third force has emerged. Dubbed the 'paramilitaries', they're accused of attacking the Tamil Tigers as a proxy force for the government. The government denies this, countering that the so-called paramilitaries are a fiction concocted by Tiger propagandists. So what's the real story? Here's Dateline's Aaron Lewis. And a warning that some sequences in Aaron's report could upset some out there.
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