http://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/presidents-wife-can-be-a-better-guide-in-empathy-for-post-war-reconciliation/

Jehan Perera

The highlight of last week’s visit to Sri Lanka by Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee of Liberia was the presentation of a Sri Lankan Women’s Agenda on Peace, Security and Development to the government.  The many co-sponsors of this Women’s Agenda would have wished to make this presentation directly to President Mahinda Rajapaksahimself.  However, they had to be content with handing over the document to senior minister Tissa Vitaranawhose commitment to minority rights and inter-ethnic reconciliation has made him a popular and trusted figure to civic activists.  At the event organized in Kandy by Visaka Dharmadasa whose soldier son went missing in the war and now heads the Association of War Affected Women, it was Professor Vitarana who took to the floor on behalf of the government. Continue reading →

http://www.dailynews.lk/2012/08/17/news13.asp

Nipuni WIMALAPALA

Sri Lankan Women’s Agenda on Peace, Security and Development will be presented to the government at Earl’s Regency Hotel in Kandy at 10 am today with the participation of Nobel Peace Prize Winner of 2011 Leymah Gbowee as the Guest of Honour. This was revealed at a press conference at Galle Face Hotel yesterday.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa is expected to be the Chief Guest.

The Agenda has been formed by the Association of War Affected Women in collaboration with most of the woman political representatives from political parties and women’s movements in Sri Lanka. Continue reading →

http://dailymirror.lk/opinion/172-opinion/21108-women-in-aftermath-of-war.html

Peace activist Lillian Wald once said that women, more than men, have the ability to strip war of its glamour – its outdated heroisms, patriotisms and perceive it for what it really is; a demon of destruction and hideous wrong.

Sitting on the rough, mud thatched door ledge of her little shelter, Nadaraja Letchchami’ (31) has her eyes fixed on the horizon, as if in a trance. Her trail of thought shatters as her son hugs her. Cuddling up to her warmth, his tiny arms around her neck he asks, “Amma, ende appa engey? (Mummy, where is daddy?)”. After almost three years of whipping-up stories of his father’s whereabouts, Letchchami has now run out of answers. Continue reading →

http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/08/03/sri-lanka-massacre-aid-idINDEE8720BP20120803

NEW DELHI (AlertNet) – It was a massacre that shocked the world’s aid community.

Seventeen aid workers murdered outside their office in Sri Lanka’s northeast. They had been executed at point-blank range with automatic weapons in the worst attack on humanitarian workers since the 2003 bombing of the United Nations compound in Baghdad.

Six years on, justice for the families of the local aid workers employed by the group Action Contre La Faim (ACF) remains elusive, rights activists say, calling on the United Nations to independently investigate the killings. Continue reading →

http://groundviews.org/2012/08/02/the-rise-and-fall-of-sri-lankan-undocumented-migration-to-italy/

2 Aug, 2012 by Bernardo Brown

More than ten years ago the smuggling of people out of Sri Lanka by boat was thriving. While Australia is currently the preferred destination of these smuggled migrants, Italy was one of the major destinations in the past. While the points of departure of these boats also seem to be different today, there are some useful lessons to be learned from incidents of human smuggling in recent Sri Lankan history.

Allow me to briefly sketch out the origins of Sri Lankan mass illegal migration to Italy. Towards the late-1990s, people from across the island and of all ethnic backgrounds considered Italy as a potential destination for labor migration. However, this transnational migratory flow to Italy had initially been almost monopolized by Catholic youth from the western seaboard. Virtually all of these young men who sought to relocate to Italian cities as an alternative to working with their families in the fishing industry came from smaller towns like Negombo, Wennappuwa and Chilaw, all located to the north of Colombo. Continue reading →