Photographs of Tamils with ‘dog-tag’ imprisoned at undisclosed torture camps in Sri Lanka
September 10,2009 – War Without Witness
Photographs of Tamils with ‘dog-tag’ imprisoned at undisclosed torture camps in Sri Lanka
Media has much reported on the fate of more than 300,000 tamil IDPs currently held in internment camps funded by UN and International agencies and their lack of freedom of movement. These rare images emerging from Sri Lanka shows the forgotten storey of Tamils who are “dog-tag”ed and arrested by Sri Lankan Military Officers for interrogations as possible suspects of Tamil Tigers. Sri Lankan government has claimed that they have arrested more than 10,000 suspects but ICRC has only access 2,000 of them. None of this suspects were produced in courts and don’t have access to any legal support & effectively in illegal imprisonment.
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The case of Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma and J.S. Tissainayagam of Sri Lanka – Asian Human Rights Commission
September 02, 2009 – Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC)
The recent case against Aung San Suu Kyi by the Burmese junta is internationally well known. The case and the verdict were condemned all over the world as one more demonstration of a completely fake trial merely orchestrated to silence Burma’s opposition leader. She has already been under house arrest for two decades. Aung San Suu Kyi was charged with violating the rules relating to detention. The court sentenced her to five years of rigorous imprisonment. Within hours the Burmese junta, which was aware of the tremendous adverse impact of their decision throughout the world, reduced the sentence to 18 months of detention in her own home. The sole exercise of the trial was to give a semblance of legality and legitimacy for further imprisonment of this lady in a way so that she could not participate in any events relating to proposed elections in the country.
J.S. Tissainayagam’s case from Sri Lanka, though not as well known as Aung San Suu Kyi case, is also quite well known internationally. The arrest, detention and the trial against this man, a well known journalist and a human rights activist, received the attention of many governments. The American president, Barrack Obama himself mentioned this case as an example of the repression of journalists throughout the world. All leading media organizations worldwide condemned the arrest, detention and trial and repeatedly called on the government for Tissainayagam’s unconditional release.
Like the case of Aung San Suu Kyi, the case of Tissainayagam too, had no real grounds on which to base a criminal charge. In both cases the charges were fabricated. The charges were based on special regulations and not on the normal laws of the country. These regulations themselves were made in order to give enormous powers of harassment over dissidents and anyone who holds any form of opinion that is opposed to that of the regime in power.
Where the charges themselves are not valid there cannot be a fair trial. The issue before the court in both cases was to decide on the legality and the validity of the charges in the first instant. Both courts proceeded on the basis of these bloated charges and found the two persons guilty.
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CPJ award goes to jailed Sri Lankan journalist
August 31, 2009 – Committee to Project Journalists (CPJ)
The Committee to Protect Journalists announced today that it will honor imprisoned Sri Lankan journalist J.S. Tissainayagam with a 2009 International Press Freedom Award. Tissainayagam, left, sentenced today to 20 years in prison on specious charges of violating anti-terror laws, is one of five journalists who will be honored by CPJ at a ceremony in November. The full slate of awardees, selected by CPJ’s Board of Directors this summer, will be formally announced in September.
A Colombo High Court sentenced Tissainayagam to 20 years of hard labor in the first conviction of a journalist under the country’s harsh anti-terror laws. Tissainayagam, known as Tissa, suffers from poor health and said his confession to the charge was extracted under threat of torture, according to his lawyers.
“We are announcing this award today to highlight the depth of outrage at this unjust sentence,” said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. “Its harshness and the retroactive nature of the charges reflect vindictiveness and intolerance. We are calling today for Tissainayagam’s release–an appeal we plan to repeat at our awards ceremony, when the world’s leading journalists gather to demand press freedom for all of our colleagues.”
U.S. President Barack Obama highlighted Tissainayagam’s case during his World Press Freedom Day address in May.
Hundreds of prominent journalists will gather in New York on November 24 to recognize Tissainayagam and the other honorees. Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international correspondent, will be the host; Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of Dow Jones and managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, is chairman of the event.
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Sri Lanka’s anti-Tamil crimes continue
September 1, 2009 – Socialist Workers Online UK
Though the civil war in Sri Lanka has officially ended, two recent events show that the danger for the country’s Tamil minority remains.
First, a video has emerged of Sri Lankan troops summarily executing naked prisoners during the campaign against rebel Tamil Tigers in the spring. The government put enormous effort into keeping journalists out of the warzone.
This allowed it to deny rumours of atrocities, even as evidence mounted. The government implausibly claims that the new footage is fake.
This effectively sanctions the government’s brutal assault on Tamil areas that led to 20,000 deaths this year alone and forsakes hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians still held in detention camps.
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J.S. Tisssainayagam sentenced to 20 years and justice is dead in Sri Lanka – Asian Human Rights Commission
August 31, 2009 – Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC)
The Asian Human Rights Commission is saddened, disappointed and shocked but not surprised at the judgment of the High Court of Colombo in sentencing J.S. Tisssainayagam to 20 years of rigorous imprisonment for a simple piece of writing which he had done and which was interpreted as aiding and abetting terrorism. The AHRC is not surprised by this judgment because at the very inception of this case the AHRC pointed out that this is purely a political case, the first of its kind in which the accused, Mr. Tisssainayagam’s guilt or innocence was not an issue but an opportunity to send a message to society on the changed circumstances of the country where freedom of expression does not matter at all. That was the real aim of this case. It is the sort of prosecution that could have happened under the regime of Joseph Stalin through the prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky.
In Vyshinsky’s trials the outcome was predetermined. The trials of the 1930s were known worldwide as show trials. Those actually accused were not really the targets of the proceedings. The accused were mere exhibits to be advertised before the rest of Russia in order to pass a message to the people about the fundamental beliefs that Stalin wanted to impose on society. Vyshinsky’s biographer Arkady Vaksberg writes that the “purpose of the trial had not been to disgrace or, indeed, to annihilate some of the accused but to create a precedent and pave the way for a psychological attack on the population.”
The greatest loser in this case is not J.S. Tisssainayagam it is the justice system and the judiciary in Sri Lanka that has suffered the greatest loss which would be hard for it to overcome. Even this is not a huge surprise for most people in Sri Lanka. They know that justice has been dead for a long time in their country.
Justice and media freedom in Sri Lanka is like the phantom limb; a dream of an amputee who still believes that his limbs are intact. The reminder of the Tisssainayagam case should always be associated with the image of the phantom limb.
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