Never Be Silent

From the Amnesty International blog, in its entirety:

About a year ago, my first entry was posted to this site, about the murder of the Sri Lankan editor Lasantha Wickramatunga on Jan. 8, 2009. Mr. Wickramatunga had been an outspoken critic of the Sri Lankan government and his paper, the Sunday Leader, and its staff had previously come under attack before his killing. President Rajapaksa ordered a police investigation into his murder. As a recent report by the International Federation of Journalists makes clear, however, to date there’s been little progress in bringing his killers to justice. At least 14 journalists and other media workers have been killed in Sri Lanka since 2006. Will we see anyone punished for any of these crimes? Or will impunity continue?

From the Amnesty International blog, in its entirety:

I heard some very disturbing news last night.  Dileesha Abeysundera, a Sri Lankan journalist and media rights activist, is in danger.  Several unidentified people traveling in white vans tried to break into her compound in Colombo (Sri Lanka’s capital city) at 11:45 P.M. on Sept. 28.  While they didn’t succeed and Dileesha wasn’t harmed, I’m very worried for her.   The use of white vans was particularly chilling; they’ve been used in many abductions and enforced disappearances in Sri Lanka since 2006.

Dileesha had organized a meeting on Sept. 28 calling for the abolition of the Press Council Act, a law which restricts freedom of expression in Sri Lanka by prohibiting publication of materials relating to economic policy, government documents and other topics.  The Sri Lankan government has repeatedly defended the Act.  It’s thought that she was threatened that evening because of her work in organizing the meeting that day.

Over 14 media workers have been killed since 2006 with no one brought to justice in any of these cases.  For more information on how freedom of expression has been under attack in Sri Lanka, please see our report, “Sri Lanka:  Silencing dissent.”

Please write to President Mahinda Rajapaksa in Sri Lanka and ask him to ensure Dileesha’s safety and to investigate the attempted intimidation of her.  Please also ask him to investigate the attacks, including killings, of other Sri Lankan journalists and media workers.  His address is:  Presidential Secretariat, Colombo 1, Sri Lanka; email:  prsec@presidentsoffice.lk.  Thanks for your consideration.

From the Guardian, excerpt:

The young mother was standing by the side of the road, clutching her baby. The baby was dead.

Damilvany Gnanakumar watched as she tried to make a decision. Around them, thousands of people were picking their way between bodies strewn across the road, desperate to escape the fighting all around them.

“The mother couldn’t bring the dead body and she doesn’t want to leave it as well. She was standing … holding the baby. She didn’t know what to do … At the end, because of the shell bombing and people rushing – there were thousands and thousands of people, they were rushing in and pushing everyone – she just had to leave the baby at the side of the road, she had to leave the body there and come, she had no choice. And I was thinking in my mind ‘What have the people done wrong? Why are they going through this, why is the international government not speaking up for them? I’m still asking.”

Four months later and Gnanakumar is sitting on a cream leather sofa in the living room of the family home in Chingford, Essex, reliving the final days of Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war.

For most of those four months, the 25-year-old British graduate was imprisoned behind razor wire inside the country’s grim internment camps, home to nearly 300,000 people. She was released last week, partly as a result of pressure from this newspaper, and flew back into London on Sunday.

The last time she publicly spoke about the conflict was from the hospital where she was working inside the ever-shrinking war zone in Sri Lanka’s north-east. Then, the national army had surrounded the small sliver of land where the remnants of the Tamil Tiger guerrillas held out and where hundreds of thousands of civilians had taken refuge. She had been in despair: a shell had just struck the hospital and dozens were dead. “At the moment, it is like hell,” she said then.

Gnanakumar was one of a small group of medics treating the wounded and providing a running commentary to the outside world from behind the lines. For months she had managed to stay alive while around her thousands died. At night, she lived in bunkers dug in the sand. During the day, she helped in the makeshift hospitals, dodging the shells and the bullets, tending the wounded and the dying, as the doctors tried to operate with butchers’ knives and watered-down anaesthetic.

Now her damning account provides a powerful rebuke to the claims of the Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, that the defeat of the Tamil Tigers was achieved without the spilling of a drop of civilian blood.

More about Sri Lanka’s civil war in my previous posts.

From IRIN news, excerpt:

BANGKOK, 10 September 2009 (IRIN) - Internally displaced persons (IDPs) in camps in Sri Lanka’s north will be released to their relatives, and the government expects the majority to be resettled by early next year, says a minister.

Sri Lanka’s Minister of Resettlement and Disaster Relief Services, Rishad Bathiudeen, told IRIN on 10 September that President Mahinda Rajapaksa had made the decision to allow the IDPs to live with their relatives, with effect from this week.

Bathiudeen said the government could not say how many people would be released, but that it would consider all applications from relatives outside the camps.

“If the application comes, we will attend to it,” said Bathiudeen.

The minister said authorities, including the police, would confirm the identities of people seeking the release of their relatives, according to an announcement posted on the government’s website on 9 September.

Proof of consent from the IDPs to live with their relatives was needed for release, he said.

Nearly 300,000 people who fled fighting in the final months of the 26-year civil war between the government and the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are confined to the government-run camps.

The Sri Lankan government has said it is aiming to resettle about 80 percent of the refugees by year-end, and Bathiudeen said most people would be out of the camps by end-January.

Neil Buhne, the UN resident coordinator in Sri Lanka welcomed Wednesday’s government announcement

“By the 31st of January … we will have more people resettled – the majority of people will be resettled,” he said.

From Amnesty International, excerpt:

On Wednesday 1 September, the Sri Lanka Team at Amnesty International’s International Secretariat organised a vigil outside Parliament Square in London. We gathered to protest against the sentencing of Jayaprakash Sittampalam Tissainayagam, known as Tissa to his friends and family, to 20 years ‘vigorous imprisonment’ by the Government of Sri Lanka.

Tissa has been named a Prisoner of Conscience by Amnesty International. We believe that he has been imprisoned simply for publishing articles critical of the Government of Sri Lanka.

Tissa’s case was noted by President Barack Obama on world press freedom day as an “emblematic example” of media repression; a symbol of what has become the fate of many journalists and media workers in Sri Lanka held under sweeping anti terrorist legislation.

The aggressive stifling of independent media in Sri Lanka has meant that a true picture of what is happening to civilians caught up in the conflict has not been allowed to emerge, and a dangerous culture of silence and self censorship has developed among members of the international community and local civil society.  Approximately 280,000 civilians remain displaced by the recent war, and are living in de facto detention camps without adequate food, sanitation or shelter.

Many passers by reacted with messages of solidarity and support for Tissa’s case, illustrating the need for groups like Amnesty International to speak out on behalf of those who have been silenced.

Find out how you can help Tissa.

From the Amnesty International blog, in its entirety:

I was shocked this morning when I heard the news that J.S. Tissainayagam, the detained Sri Lankan journalist, was sentenced to 20 years rigorous imprisonment by the Sri Lankan High Court.  Tissainayagam has been detained for the last 18 months and was tried under Sri Lanka’s draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act for writing two magazine articles in 2006 critical of the government’s conduct of the war against the opposition Tamil Tigers.  Amnesty International considers Tissainayagam to be a prisoner of conscience, detained and prosecuted solely for his legitimate work as a journalist, and has been calling for his immediate, unconditional release.

Tissainayagam was one of the journalists singled out for praise by President Obama this past May in his statement in honor of World Press Freedom Day.

Organizations working in defense of press freedom reacted strongly to today’s sentence.  The International Federation of Journalists condemned the sentence, calling it “brutal and inhumane.”  The Committee to Protect Journalists announced today that it will honor Tissainayagam with a 2009 International Press Freedom Award.  The group Reporters Without Borders said it was “appalled” by the “shameful” sentence; the group also announced today that Tissainayagam had been selected as the first winner of the newly created Peter Mackler Award for Courageous and Ethical Journalism.

Please write to Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa and ask that J.S. Tissainayagam be released immediately and unconditionally.  President Rajapaksa’s address is:  Presidential Secretariat, Colombo 1, Sri Lanka; fax:  00-94-11-244-6657; email:  prsec@presidentsoffice.lk.  Thanks for any help you can give.

From Amnesty International’s blog, in its entirety:

Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa said last Tuesday that no one should be above the law, including members of the police or armed forces.  This follows a widely publicized incident last week in Sri Lanka:  two youths were arrested by the police on August 12 and their bullet-ridden bodies were discovered the next day.  The killings sparked public anger and riots against the police.  Several police officers have since been arrested in connection with the murders.

I dearly hope justice is done in this case and the killers held accountable.  But there remain thousands of cases of human rights violations by the Sri Lankan security forces, including the police, where no one has been prosecuted or convicted.  The recent Amnesty International report on presidential commissions of inquiry in Sri Lanka details the government’s failure to deliver justice for serious human rights violations for decades.  I hope President Rajapaksa’s recent statement will lead to a serious, sustained effort by the Sri Lankan government to bring perpetrators of human rights violations to justice at last.  The ongoing impunity enjoyed by the security forces for past violations must end.

Read more about Sri Lanka in my previous posts.

From Amnesty International:

Amnesty International today issued an urgent action appeal on the five Sri Lankan doctors currently being held by the government under emergency regulations.  We are concerned that they are at risk of torture or other ill-treatment.  The doctors had provided medical services to civilians trapped in the war zone, during the last stages of the war earlier this year between the government and the opposition Tamil Tigers.  Before they were detained by the government on May 15, the doctors had provided eyewitness accounts to the media of the suffering experienced by the trapped civilians.  On July 8, while still under detention, the doctors appeared at a press conference organized by the government and retracted their earlier reports.  AI is concerned about how genuine their later statments were.  The doctors remain in detention without charge.

Amnesty is calling on the Sri Lankan government to release the doctors immediately, unless they are to be promptly charged with a recognizable criminal offense.  Please join our appeal and write the government on their behalf.  Write to:  President Mahinda Rajapaksa, Presidential Secretariat, Colombo 1, Sri Lanka; email:  prsec@presidentsoffice.lk.

Send an e-mail via Amnesty International, it only takes a minute:

On May 15, three government-employed doctors (Drs. T. Sathiyamoorthy, Varatharajah and Shanmugarajah) who had been working in the war zone in northeastern Sri Lanka were detained by the Sri Lankan security forces. They had left the war zone with 5,000 other civilians and were last seen at the Omanthai checking point. Dr. Varatharajah had been seriously injured and is reported to have been airlifted by the Sri Lankan Air Force to an unknown location. Drs. Sathiyamoorthy and Shanmugarajah are thought to be in the custody of the Terrorist Investigation Division, a police unit, in the capital, Colombo. On July 8, while still under detention, they appeared at a press conference in Colombo and retracted prior reports made by them of civilian casualties during the last stages of the war; given the circumstances, the credibility of their statements during the press conference is open to question. They remain in detention and have not been charged with any crime. Call on the Sri Lankan government to release them immediately unless they are promptly charged with a crime.

From the Associated Press, excerpt:

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka – In just six months, one of the world’s largest camps for war refugees has been carved out of the jungles of northern Sri Lanka, complete with banks, post offices, schools and a supermarket. But no one is allowed out, and hardly anyone is allowed in.

Aid workers and foreign diplomats increasingly fear that Manik Farm, a facility they helped build, is actually a military-run internment camp where 210,000 ethnic Tamil civilians displaced by the civil war are being held indefinitely. Government memos and U.N. documents obtained by The Associated Press, as well as interviews with more than two dozen aid workers, U.N. officials, diplomats and rights advocates, detail how the international community poured tens of millions of dollars into these camps, despite their concerns.

“At best, it is at the edge of all kinds of international principles,” said one Western diplomat based in Colombo, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from the government. “But more likely, it is illegal.”

The documents and interviews also reveal what appear to be worsening conditions at the camp, which houses civilians displaced in the final, bloody battles of the quarter-century civil war that ended two months ago.

In June, chicken pox was rampant and cases of typhoid, tuberculosis, skin and respiratory infections, hepatitis A, scabies and diarrhea have begun cropping up, according to U.N. reports. More than 35 percent of children under 5 are suffering from wasting, or acute malnutrition, according to a July 3 government presentation leaked to the AP.

Tents meant for five are packed with up to 15 people, water is scarce and the seasonal rains expected in the coming weeks could create a health nightmare, several foreign aid workers said. Relatives are not allowed to visit, although many gather at the barbed wire fence hoping to get messages to their loved ones. Opposition lawmakers are barred as well, and independent journalists are only allowed in on rare, military-guided tours.

Signs of unrest are growing. Several weeks ago, inmates held a protest demanding they be reunited with family members in other fenced-off sections of the camp, aid workers said. Military troops shot in the air to disperse the angry residents…