After decades (if not colonial centuries) of labelling Iran-Persia as barbaric, evil and un-civilised by successive US leaders, last week the world suddenly heard the current “leader of the free world” actually refer to Iran as a civilisation. The brutal irony in that now infamous (and incriminating) X message by US president Donald Trump is that the US has belatedly acknowledged Iran’s cultural credentials in the very act of threatening its deliberate genocidal erasure.

The world now holds its breath as Iran and the US yesterday seemingly suspended their highest level talks in decades in Islamabad. US delegation leader Vice President J.D. Vance and Iranian delegation head Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqher Ghalibaf have both returned to their capitals but the host Pakistani government insists that the negotiation process is not over.

However, President Trump himself seems to be creating an atmosphere to sustain the current pause in hostilities when he commented to media on Friday that it did not matter to him if a deal with Iran is reached or not. “We win, regardless,” he said. “We’ve defeated them militarily.”

After suddenly pausing their bombardment of Iran, will the US-Israel combine now resume attacks? Can they put up with more Iranian retaliation, however small scale?

After resisting some of the worst military aggression humanity has ever seen and forcing the US-led Western power bloc to negotiate, can “civilised” Iran’s military and economy sustain this ancient nation’s spirited defiance of the West’s revived imperialism? Will this last belligerent wave of a receding European colonial empire be blunted, at least for now?

The answer to that world-historic question partly lies in another cultural acknowledgment by the current imperialist hegemon: Iran is not only one of humanity’s oldest civilisations but it is also one of the world’s longest lasting empires. Indeed, Persia was a set of kingdoms and an empire beginning with Bronze Age Elam, a millennium before Macedonia’s short-lived empire of King Alexander briefly conquered that vast, prosperous region.

Persia-Iran prevailed over all Western invaders in the following millennia.

And now, probably the world’s most foul-mouthed national leader is mouthing victory as he seemingly persists with negotiations with his intended genocidal-imperialist victim.

Last week the world had to face up to bizarre brinkmanship when the US president officially threatened to wipe out a whole civilisation, referring to Iran, which his forces have been ferociously attacking for the past month. The guns are now suddenly silent and the US and Iran are at talks in Islamabad at the invitation of the Pakistani government, one of America’s oldest client regimes.

While the world’s billions of poor are hoping for an easing of food and livelihood insecurity caused by the US-Israeli war on Iran, aside from the current pause in Western military strikes, there is much doubt whether the talks will actually be  sustained beyond the fortnight of suspended attacks conceded by Washington and Tel Aviv.

In his explicit threat on his official social media account to physically eliminate the entire Iranian nation, President Trump, notorious for his usually vague bombast, sounded far more definitive in carrying out that threat than Washington’s current commitment to pursuing talks.

Demanding that Iran immediately re-open the Strait of Hormuz (the “f….g Strait”, the US president called it), he wrote on his Truth Social account on April 7 that, “A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

That, the US is eminently capable of doing as the whole world knows since it wiped out the large Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in just seconds using a single atom bomb per city at the end of World War 2. Indeed, that same full scale annihilation of cities or swathes of countryside has also been perpetrated using purely conventional explosives during World War 2 and in subsequent wars in Vietnam and Iraq.

Both the Gaza Strip and Afghanistan have already experienced the mind-boggling destructive effects of giant sized US conventional bombs and Iran is currently experiencing the same. These are munitions of calibre ranging from one tonne to over a terrifying 10 tonne impact.

With Iran’s small, ageing, air force already knocked out of the skies by the overwhelmingly superior US and Israeli air forces and its air defence batteries also similarly degraded, the US alone boasts of over 11,000 strike missions on Iran in these past four weeks of attacks. Israel boasts of only a slightly smaller number of missions.

With such air superiority, the two attacking countries now claim the destruction of over a dozen key railway bridges (including Iran’s biggest) as well as many road bridges. President Trump had also been threatening fully focused targeting of Iran’s entire road and rail infrastructure in other messaging last week.

In fact, the two attacking allies – utilising various services of many of America’s 32 NATO allied member states as well as eight Persian Gulf region monarchies – have also severely damaged Iran’s once strong economy and social infrastructure. They proudly claim destruction of two major Iranian steel plants, pharmaceutical plants, universities, libraries, mosques and cultural centres. It is possible to argue that the destruction of Iranian civilisation is already partially achieved.

Indeed, the US president’s blood-curdling threat of a whole civilisation dying made last week should be seen as cruel, crafty hyperbole that actually hides harsh reality. In distracting world attention away from ongoing operations with such an announcement of all-encompassing implications, this message is actually covering up the partial achievement of precisely that genocidal project.

But in addition to Iran’s civilisational resilience, what other factors are operative in the current pause by the US offensives?

Analysts also point out that the attrition resulting from Iran’s resistance and, if piecemeal, retaliation have made both the Washington and Tel Aviv regimes seriously unpopular. Israelis are beginning to panic over actual war conditions and casualties and the anti-war campaigns are strengthening.

In the US, the worsening market volatility, rising living costs and the clear failure of the Trump government to quickly defeat Iran as promised is making Trump personally unpopular and his backing Republican Party uneasy about their electoral prospects. The Western alliance, while quietly facilitating the US-Israeli operations without direct military participation, which fools no one, is known to be pressing for an end to the actual war in order to ease worsening pressures on their own economies.

Europe is far more vulnerable to the current energy crisis and shipping and trade disruption. In the Global South, there has never been any support for the war, even if most nations are silent due to their heavy dependence on actors on both sides of the conflict.

The war may resume since both the Israeli and US regimes are well known for their wanton belligerence and unrealistic arrogance over their military superiority. But given all the factors listed above, war is unlikely to resume immediately.

Shipping remains at a standstill in the Strait of Hormuz despite the ceasefire, dampening hopes for a resolution to one of the worst global energy disruptions in history. Only a handful of vessels have transited the critical strait since Washington and Tehran announced a two week pause in fighting, according to ship tracking data. Usually there is a daily transit of about 150 vessels.

More than 600 vessels including 325 tankers are still stranded in the Gulf due to the blockage of the strait, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence.

The waterway usually carries about one-fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas supplies.

The US negotiating team heading to Islamabad includes familiar faces: Jared Kushner, special envoy Steve Witkoff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CENTCOM Commander Admiral Brad Cooper, several of whom took part in earlier indirect negotiations with Iran.

Vice President Vance was reportedly added to the team at the last minute. With both the Iranian Speaker and Foreign Minister in their delegation, this made the weekend talks in Islamabad the highest level meeting between the two countries since the nuclear pact on Iran’s nuclearisation decades ago.

There is much speculation that Vice President Vance wanted to lead because he has hopes of a Republican presidential candidacy in the future. The White House has denied that domestic political pressure played any role in the president’s decision to negotiate.

But the Republican Party is losing popularity parallel to President Trump’s own unpopularity and the mid- term full congressional elections loom in November. The whole House of Representatives and half of Senate seats must be contested and elected. With narrow majorities in both chambers, the Republicans worry over defeat.

Thus, domestic interests as usual decide geopolitics. There is no doubt that Tehran had also anticipated Washington’s concerns. Iran is the mature civilisation after all.

Thus, do civilisations clash and geopolitics proceed. Trump should have read the Babur Nama or at least the even more sophisticated Arthashastra.

The post Iran-US talks: Has a Resurgent Civilisation Blunted Western Neo-imperialism? first appeared on Groundviews.

The targeting of medical infrastructure has become a documented feature of multiple modern conflicts. It is not a coincidence but a strategy.

In Syria, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) documented repeated strikes on health facilities by both the Assad government and the coalition forces. Civilian populations developed a fear of seeking medical treatment near hospitals. That fear itself was a strategic outcome. A population unable to access healthcare becomes easier to displace, demoralise and control.

In Iraq, during the 2003 invasion and subsequent urban operations, similar patterns emerged. Western observers reported that coalition forces struck health facilities in urban areas. PHR documented the consequences. Each incident was attributed to military necessity. The compounded effect was the systematic degradation of civilian survival infrastructure.

The pattern across Syria, Iraq, Gaza and Sri Lanka is consistent. Hospitals are struck after their coordinates are submitted to military commands. Medical workers are killed. Journalists who document the strikes are intimidated, abducted or murdered. Each element of this pattern is documented and none of it is accidental.

Information warfare: concealing the deliberate

Language is not the only tool of concealment. Modern warfare is accompanied by sophisticated information operations designed to prevent accountability.

Psychological operations have become central pillars of contemporary military strategy. In the digital age, they are classified as cognitive warfare or information warfare. Their purpose is to fragment reality; to flood the information space with competing narratives until the truth becomes inaccessible.

Specific techniques used have been documented. Atrocity propaganda fabricates reports of enemy brutality to justify strikes and demonise opponents. Deep fake technology produces convincing false footage of military events. False flag operations stage attacks or incidents to appear as if conducted by adversaries.

In Sri Lanka, this technique has domestic precedents, for example, the violent attack on the US embassy in Colombo on March 10, 1971 by the members of the Maoist Youth Front and the anti-Tamil pogrom of July 1983. Both were covertly orchestrated by state and regime leaders to frame the JVP as responsible for both. How many further false flag operations have been created and launched by the state across the country’s many conflicts remains unclear and has yet to be fully revealed.

Allegations surrounding the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks suggest they may have been a false flag operation with political objectives. While government investigations have linked the attacks to local radicals inspired by ISIS, a 2023 documentary revealed that senior intelligence officers met with the attackers in advance to create a security crisis, thereby reinforcing a national security agenda to influence upcoming elections.

Ordinary social media users, amplifying unverified war footage, inadvertently extend official disinformation campaigns. The net effect is the deliberate production of a fog of war in the information domain. Within that fog, distinguishing genuine collateral damage from intentional targeting becomes technically difficult for external observers and strategically desirable for perpetrating states.

Psychological operations were deployed within Sri Lanka long before the final stage of the civil war in 2009. During the April 1971 uprising, coalition politicians and state broadcasters disseminated fake reports that insurgents were killing children under five and adults over 55 and that an insurgent government would uproot the island’s plantation economy to plant cassava. The broadcasts were calibrated to exploit existing social divisions. Their purpose was not to inform but to widen the gap between the generation of young fighters and the parental generation whose support they depended upon. Fear, rather than force, was the instrument used to isolate combatants from their communities.

Neutralising local media is a key component of the military strategy. Since October 7, 2023 in Gaza alone 262 journalists have been killed. In Sri Lanka, Amnesty International documented high levels of intimidation, abduction and murder of journalists, particularly those covering Tamil civilian casualties and government corruption. Without journalists, there are no witnesses. Without witnesses, there are no victims – only damage.

Scale of what is hidden

Statistics, even when incomplete, are clarifying. Since 2001, between 363,000 and 387,000 civilians have been killed in military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan. In Iraq alone, more than 12,000 civilians were killed in the first nine months of the 2003 invasion. These figures account only for direct killing; they exclude the indirect casualties produced by the destruction of water, food, medical and electrical infrastructure.

One analysis estimated that when indirect deaths are included, the true toll is four to five times the number recorded in direct casualty counts. Civilian fatalities now considerably exceed combatant deaths in modern armed conflict. The collateral damage rule was designed to limit civilian harm. The empirical record demonstrates that it has failed to do so.

The question that follows is uncomfortable. When a rule consistently fails to protect those it was designed to protect while reliably serving the rhetorical interests of those causing harm, it has ceased to function as law. Instead, it only functions as a linguistic instrument, not as a legal instrument for the management of accountability.

Naming what is happening

The term collateral damage is not a neutral descriptor but a political instrument. It transfers moral responsibility from a deliberate act to an impersonal process. It converts the killing of people into a technical problem of targeting geometry. It allows those who ordered the strikes to express regret without admitting intent.

George Orwell wrote that the purpose of political language is to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. Collateral damage is a precise example of the phenomenon he identified. It makes mass killing sound like the unfortunate margin of error in an otherwise legitimate operation.

The conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq and Sri Lanka share a structural similarity. In each case, the pattern of destruction – the repeated targeting of hospitals, the deliberate degradation of water and food infrastructure, the killing of journalists and the mass displacement of civilian populations – exceeds any plausible definition of incidental harm. In each case, the language of collateral damage has been deployed to prevent that conclusion from being drawn.

Accountability begins with language. It begins with the refusal to accept that the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in predictable, documented, repeated circumstances are merely unfortunate consequences of legitimate operations. It requires calling the act by its name.

Deliberate targeting of civilians is a war crime. The language used to disguise it is not a semantic issue but a moral one. And the cost of accepting that language, uncritically, is borne by those buried beneath the rubble; people who will never be counted as victims because the vocabulary has already declared them damage.

^{Sources: UN Human Rights Council reports; Amnesty International; Physicians for Human Rights; Oxford Journal of Conflict and Security Law; Global Policy Journal; West Point Lieber Institute; Wikipedia (Collateral Damage).}

Read Part 1 here: https://groundviews.org/2026/04/07/collateral-damage-how-an-euphemism-launders-mass-killing-part-1/

The post Collateral Damage: How an Euphemism Launders Mass Killing – Part 2 first appeared on Groundviews.

On the night of February 11, 2026 Bangladesh experienced a remarkable shift in mood. As the eve of a pivotal general election arrived, what is usually a tense political night began to resemble the long, excited night before Eid. Filling living rooms with debate, laughter and renewed hope for a democratic Bangladesh, where their votes actually matter. In different parts of the country, young women even organised election henna festival gatherings, treating the journey to the polling station with the same joy reserved for major celebrations. This comparison between election eve with the night before Eid matters because it is not a casual metaphor. Across South Asian Muslim communities, it evokes a distinctive anticipation, the last minute rush, the reunions and the sense that tomorrow will be collectively celebrated. In 2026, for many Bangladeshis, that collective celebration belonged not to Eid but to the ballot.

The lost festival of voting

Elections in Bangladesh have long carried a festive spirit, blending civic duty with communal celebration. This tradition stretchesback at least to medieval times when the Pala kings were said to be chosen through public consensus. In contemporary Bangladesh, the last major moment when this festival-like energy was widely remarked upon was the 2008 election, often recalled for its exceptionally high turnout (around 87%) and for being broadly seen at home and abroad as a credible, competitive vote.

However, this vibrancy eroded over the next two decades, as elections turned into contested formalities under Sheikh Hasina’s increasingly authoritarian regime. The 2014 polls, boycotted by the opposition amid demands for a caretaker system, were marred by violence, pre-election arrests and arson attacks, creating an environment of fear that suppressed participation. Turnout plummeted to 51% with many seats uncontested. The EU declined to deploy a full Election Observation Mission (EOM) and a European Parliament resolution condemned the polls as not meeting democratic standards and expressed concerns over the violence and lack of inclusivity.

The downward spiral continued in 2018. Boycotted by opposition parties, the 11th national election was marked by ballot stuffing and voter intimidation, leaving the Sheikh Hasina regime to win with no visible opposition. In that context, the EU declined to deploy any EOM with its spokesperson citing concerns about a non-conducive environment. During the January 2024 election, criticism had explicitly moved beyond Bangladesh’s borders and the vote was widely described as staged with reports of voter suppression, procedural irregularities and manipulated outcomes, and turnout falling to a dismal 41.8%.

Thus Bangladesh’s electoral culture, once associated with public enthusiasm, began to erode amid murders, political violence and the widespread suppression of media and free speech. As an eligible first time voter in 2024, I did not even travel back to my hometown as the effort felt pointless. For many people like me, voting no longer carried excitement or meaning; the whole country felt like an opera staged in advance and we were left as a captive audience.

Post-uprising democratic reset

Against this background, the 13th national election was held on February 12, 2026. It was the first national vote after the 2024 student-led uprising that ended Hasina’s longstanding authoritarian regime. In the aftermath, an interim administration led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus promised a transition back toward competitive politics, facing heavy pressure to deliver an election that would be seen as credible and within a clear timeframe. International critics and media outlets tracked the uprising and the stakes of Bangladesh’s political reset, treating the election as a rare test of whether the country could restore routine democratic legitimacy after years of contested governance.

In response, the interim government did not just announce an election date; it declared two days of holiday and described voting as something to be celebrated. In a televised address, Yunus urged citizens to make election day feel like an Eid festival with families going to polling stations together so that children too could witness the “grandeur” of civic rights. It was democracy sold not as ideology but as lived experience – a return of ownership to ordinary people.

In the final days before the vote, that Eid-like framing began to look less like political messaging and more like social reality. Dhaka, typically dense and loud, appeared unusually calm as voters travelled to their home constituencies, echoing the familiar pre-Eid return that empties the capital’s roads. One voter compared the quiet streets to Eid itself and said she had not seen such an election atmosphere in 15 to 20 years.

Perhaps the most vivid evidence of revived civic emotion came from first time voters and from the way they chose to express their excitement. In parts of the capital and in other districts, henna gatherings were organised, capturing the renewed enthusiasm among new voters. Participants compared 2026 with earlier elections, saying previous polls did not feel like real opportunities to vote while this time felt like an occasion worth remembering. One student described putting henna on her hands like Eid, preparing to go to the polling center with joy and hope. From a distance, it would be easy to dismiss such imagery as youthful theatrics. But in societies where public life has been constrained, symbolic gestures often signal confidence because when people believe their vote counts, they begin weaving voting into the rituals of everyday life.

On February 12, the festival moved from metaphor to street level detail. Reports from across the country described long queues from the early hours and a largely peaceful environment. In districts such as Pabna, local coverage noted the visible excitement of first time voters and long lines of women and men waiting to cast ballots, including older citizens who said they had not been able to vote in previous elections. As one voter put it, “I am very happy today. I became a voter 11 years ago but this is the first time I was able to cast my ballot.” In Dhaka, The Daily Star described voters chatting at a roadside tea stall and next to it jilapis being fried and selling out quickly with many people carrying bags of sweets home after voting, a small but telling gesture that turned the ballot into something to celebrate, something to take home and share.

The election’s scale further reinforced the sense of national participation. Bangladesh has roughly 127.7 million registered voters and more than 2,000 candidates. This year polling was held in 299 constituencies and voter turnout appearing to be settle just under 60% (59.44%). While that figure may not seem high at first glance, it carries more weight in the context that the Awami League was banned from contesting after the killing of thousands of protesters during the monsoon revolution. Despite this, Awami League leaders publicly predicted that voter turnout would not exceed 20-30% and called for a mass boycott. Therefore, the turnout in the election was a notable success both politically and by the standards of Bangladesh’s more recent elections. That renewed credibility was reinforced externally as well; the EU deployed a full EOM for the first time since 2008, sending over 200 observers and its preliminary statement described the process as “credible and competently managed.”

Two months of dawn and doubt

It has been two months since the election. While the country initially exhaled in collective relief, the question now looms as to whether that festive spirit can endure. People who had not felt their vote matter in over a decade spoke about the experience with an unfamiliar satisfaction that their ballot finally counted, that the act of voting was not a performance staged in advance but a genuine transfer of civic ownership. That mood carried into small but symbolic gestures of the new order when Prime Minister Tarique Rahman sat in Dhaka traffic without VIP road closures, waiting his turn like everyone else.

That civic warmth met its first disruption not from the streets but from within the new parliament itself. On February 17, when newly elected members were sworn in, BNP lawmakers holding a commanding two-thirds majority took only their constitutional oath and declined the second, which would have bound them to serve simultaneously as members of a Constitution Reform Council tasked with enacting the July Charter within 180 working days. Opposition members from the Jamaat-e-Islami-led 11-party alliance, including the National Citizen Party, took both oaths. Without BNP participation, the council cannot function. The ruling party argues that parliament already has the authority to pursue amendments through existing mechanisms. Opposition parties frame the refusal differently.

Alleging that the government had ignored public mandate and substituted reform with mere amendment, opposition leader Shafiqur Rahman led the Jamaat-led alliance in two parliamentary walkouts – the first on the opening day of parliament over the president’s address and the second on April 1 over the government’s continued failure to convene the Reform Council. Emerging from the second walkout, Rahman was unambiguous. “What other path do we have except a movement? We will organise a movement with the people,” he said. The 11-party alliance has since signalled that its top leaders will convene to formalise protest programmes.

The NCP, born from the very uprising that made this election possible, has been equally direct, warning that the BNP has begunjourneying in the opposite direction from the charter it once publicly endorsed. Compounding this, the question of how and when local elections will be held remains unresolved. While opposition parties continue to demand an early contest, the State Minister for Local Government has confirmed that polls will not be organised until parliament settles the contentious issue of party symbols. The question of whether the government will retain partisan symbols in local polls or repeal the 2015 amendment that introduced them has not been been addressed within BNP ranks with members now deflecting the question to parliament rather than offering the clear position the party once held.

Amid these unresolved national pressures, the escalating tensions between the US, Israel and Iran further intensified the burdens on the new government before it had fully found its footing. The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz shut down a key waterway through which nearly half of Bangladesh’s annual remittances, which total more than $30 billion, are indirectly sustained. Over 200 flights to Middle Eastern destinations were cancelled within days, stranding thousands of migrant workers and raising fears of a remittance shock that analysts warned could, under a prolonged conflict scenario, wipe out as much as 3% of Bangladesh’s GDP. Yet amid the anxiety, the new government earned a quiet diplomatic credit. Choosing pragmatic engagement over alignment with any belligerent, Dhaka communicated directly with Tehran and secured passage under coordinated arrangements. That success has not gone unnoticed. But it has not emptied the petrol station queues, which have grown long and routine across Dhaka and beyond. The new government’s central challenge is to hold together two things at once: the hope that February ignited and the weight that the months since have layered upon it. Elections gave people back a sense of ownership. What happens next will determine whether that ownership extends beyond the ballot, into the economy, the constitution and the rhythms of a daily life that people can finally, trustingly, call their own.

The post Bangladesh’s Post Uprising Election: The Future of Democracy After Two Decades of Doubt first appeared on Groundviews.

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and his National People’s Power (NPP) party swept into power with the support of voters in the North and East, voters who usually place their confidence in Tamil political parties. But one year one, while still popular, the president and his government are slowly losing support and credibility as they make little progress on the issues that are most important to the people in the North and East.

Groundviews spoke to Mahendran Thiruvarangan, Senior Lecturer at the Jaffna University and Suresh Premachandran former MP and head of the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF) about how they view the government’s performance. 

Mahendran Thiruvarangan

Is the government losing the support of the Tamil population by not addressing their grievances?

There was a lot of hope and optimism in the Tamil community when the NPP was elected to power in 2024. But people were not thinking about big changes like constitutional reforms and federalism but at least some of the low hanging fruits such as releasing the land, demilitarisation and creating livelihood opportunities for the community. These are issues where the NPP could have done better. So sections of the community feel very disappointed. For instance, although some roads were made accessible, people couldn’t use these roads after some time. Some army camps have been dismantled but is still a lot has to be done because there are still large areas that are under the control of the military. There are other issues like the Thaiyiddy Buddhist temple that was built after the war on people’s private land. This land was under the military who transferred it illegally to a Buddhist monk and he put up the Buddhist temple there. Every month on the poya day, people who lost their lands and their supporters gather there to demand the release of the land to its rightful owners. This is a clear cut issue where the land belongs to the people and it should be released to them. Likewise, if you look at the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), the NPP was fully committed to the abolition of the PTA and they were also equally committed to not replacing PTA with another anti-terror law but now they are introducing an anti-terror law that seems equally frightening. We know that the PTA was used against workers but later it was used against Tamils, Muslims and Sinhala activists in the South during the aragalaya. Sadly the government has gone back on its promise. These are issues they could easily address. So in that sense I think there is discontent brewing within the Tamil community, within the minorities. But at the same time, I also see that the president seems to be very popular in the North because he connects with the masses whether he’s in the South or the North. That charisma is still there. There is a section of the Tamil community that thinks that under this regime corruption will be tackled in a strong way. They are seen as people who are not wasting the public funds. But another growing concern is that there has been no move to call the Provincial Council elections. So when is it going to happen is a question we are asking.

Are many people from the North trying to go abroad?

After the 2022 crisis, some academics who obtained their qualifications abroad resigned from the university system and went abroad. So did medical professionals. This is a trend that is really worrying because we need these people and these institutions to keep our society alive, socially meaningful and vibrant. When they go away, it is a loss. For recovery after the devastation of the war, where will we find such human capital? You have to invest a lot in the local universities and schools. Also what resources are available need to be redistributed in a fair and just manner so that universities and institutions in the peripheries are supported better without resources being concentrated in Colombo.

Do people feel strongly that Provincial Councils are necessary so they have more power to govern themselves?

In the North this has been a longstanding demand because the Provincial Council system came out of a struggle so people still value it although they are also critical of it because of the lack of powers devolved to the provinces and that even some of those powers can be easily taken back by the central government. It is seen as an inadequate solution but at the same time people don’t want to get rid of it and think that you can build on it. They would like to see the elections to take place soon. This is part of the constitution of the country so they have to definitely hold the elections.

Why do you think the government is not doing moving forward on several of the promises it made to the Tamil people?

The government knows that the Sinhala Buddhist community is the major electoral constituency and it is very careful not to antagonise this community. As a recent editorial of a leading publication stated, they are governing in the anticipation of a backlash. Whenever you want to do something good, you are worried about the backlash from Buddhist monks; this is something that they fear a lot, which is not good for a healthy democracy. The Buddhist monks have so much power that even when the government wanted to abolish corporal punishment, there was a backlash from the monks and it took a step back. Similarly, it is worried about LGBTIQ issues. When it comes to educational reforms, it made a mess. They have to pacify the Buddhist monks so it shows that even under the NPP the Buddhist establishment remains very powerful. The real test will happen when there is a crisis. When we start to repay the debts in a few years, there will be public discontent. That is why the government needs the PTA or a replacement as a tool to control the masses. Another key promise was the abolition of the executive presidency but again little has been done towards this. The government says that there is a constitution making process underway but we haven’t heard much about that; there is lack of political will.

Are the local government bodies functioning satisfactorily?

They have started to function but then one is worried about the Praja Shakti initiative, which seems to function as an alternative or parallel decision making body and has a lot of power in the District Development Council meetings. When it comes to funds allocated by the central government to be utilised by the local government bodies, the Praja Shakti have a lot of say. If you are really committed to decentralising powers, regardless of who wins in the election, you have to let those bodies function and exercise the powers that were granted to them. Having alternative bodies creates unnecessary fear. Does this mean that the central government is trying to find extra constitutional mechanisms to undermine constitutionally elected bodies like the local government bodies? This is the new question that we are faced with now.

Suresh Premachandran

Are people in the North pressing for Provincial Council elections?

For the last seven years we haven’t had Provincial Council elections. The government is giving excuse that it wants to change the electoral system. But the Tamil parties are saying to have the elections under the current proportional representation system. After that the system can be changed. The government has allocated funds for the elections. It should allow the Tamil people to look after themselves. But the government feels it may lose the elections.

Is the NPPs losing support of the Tamil people?

Definitely. The president comes regularly to Jaffna and makes promises but in practice, there is nothing. The land occupied by the armed forces has not been released. The PTA is remaining under a new name. The government fears that like the aragalya, if another agitation comes, it has to be suppressed. Another issue is about religious sites. Some Buddhist monks and the armed forces have put up a Buddhist temple on private land. It is an illegal construction. I don’t understand why there are so many temples in places where there are no Buddhists. They are doing the same things as previous governments. Even the economic policies policies are what Ranil Wickremesinghe promised the IMF. But what are the new ideas? What are the new investments? What are the new policies on the economic front? We are asking the government to to develop the Kankesanthurai port and the Palali International Airport. But the government is not willing to develop the airport because it says that its is not commercially viable. But many Tamils will use it as well as south Indian tourists.

In one and a half years, what sort of development has taken place in the north? How many jobs are given to the youngsters? There is nothing. Definitely people are getting fed up with the government.

Could this disillusionment lead to another separatist movement?

The government losing the ground but doesn’t mean that there will be a call for separatism. The government promised a new constitution but so far there is nothing about the new constitution as such. Whether it will bring a new constitution and whether itwill resolve the Tamil national problem in a proper way nobody knows. But the government said it will abolish the executive presidential system. A lot of promises were given before the elections but in practice it is not doing anything. If there is no economic development in the north, there will be no jobs for the youngsters. In the 1960s and 70s the Northern and Eastern people felt abandoned and ignored so they revolted and the revolt became a separatist struggle. Because we lost so many of our people, going for another armed struggle is not relevant. But there will be peaceful agitation. I don’t know what form it will take but people will agitate against the government.

The post Little Progress Made on Issues Important to People in the North first appeared on Groundviews.

Words shape reality. In modern warfare, no phrase has done more to obscure atrocity than the two word construction: collateral damage. It is tidy. It is clinical. It is lethal to the truth.

The term entered military parlance in the mid-twentieth century. The US Air Force Intelligence Targeting Guide codified it as damage affecting facilities, equipment or personnel arising incidentally from actions directed at legitimate targets. The framing was deceptively simple. Death became damage. People became personnel. Intent vanished from the sentence.

Scottish linguist Deborah Cameron identified the mechanism precisely. The phrase is jargon. It conceals what is happening. It is abstract, agentless and affectless. It insulates the public from feelings of repulsion or moral outrage. That insulation, she argued, is its primary function.

In 1999, German linguists named collateral damage their Un-Word of the Year. They chose it to condemn its use by NATO forces during the Kosovo War. The scholars considered it an inhuman euphemism. NATO continued using it nonetheless.

The language of collateral damage functions as a shield for deliberate targeting. Documented conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, Sri Lanka, Syria and Iraq demonstrate a recurring pattern: systemic civilian destruction rebranded as unfortunate accident.

International humanitarian law rests on three pillars: distinction, proportionality and precaution. Distinction prohibits attacks intentionally directed at civilians. Proportionality forbids attacks expected to cause civilian harm clearly excessive in relation to anticipated military advantage. Precaution demands that commanders take all feasible steps to minimise civilian loss.

These principles are not without force. The Rome Statute criminalises both the intentional targeting of civilians and attacks launched in the knowledge that incidental civilian injury would be clearly excessive. On paper, the architecture of protection is substantial.

In practice, it fails. The ratio of civilian to combatant deaths has risen sharply over the past century. Aerial warfare, urban terrain and increasingly destructive munitions have made the neat distinction between combatant and civilian difficult to sustain operationally and convenient to abandon strategically.

Legal scholars have asked a harder question: when civilian deaths are the foreseeable and repeated consequence of a military campaign, at what point does the defence of incidental harm become organised deceit? The proportionality principle, one analysis concluded, has become a device to persuade the public that condoning the killing of civilians is permissible provided it is framed as incidental.

The human shields doctrine compounds the problem. States routinely invoke it to justify strikes on residential areas. Russian officials used it repeatedly during the invasion of Ukraine, attributing civilian deaths in Kharkiv, Mariupol and Kherson to Ukrainian forces stationing troops among civilian populations. The claim shifted responsibility and neutralised international criticism simultaneously.

No contemporary conflict has tested the limits of the collateral damage framework more severely than Gaza. Since October 2023, the density of destruction has been unprecedented in modern urban warfare.

The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated territories on earth. Military assets, when present, necessarily operate in proximity to civilian infrastructure. This proximity has been used to justify strikes on hospitals, schools, refugee shelters and residential towers. Each strike has been accompanied by the same language: military necessity, proportionate response, collateral regret.

International bodies have examined the pattern. Studies prior to the current conflict recorded that between combatants and civilians killed in Operation Protective Edge in 2014, roughly half of those killed were estimated to be non-combatants by the Israeli Defence Forces’ own assessments. The current conflict has produced far higher civilian death tolls. Independent researchers, UN agencies and human rights organisations have documented the repeated destruction of sites with no plausible military justification.

Attacks on food supply chains, water treatment infrastructure and medical facilities have been described by critics as resource denial – the deliberate deprivation of civilian populations of the means of survival. Under international humanitarian law, this constitutes a war crime. Under the grammar of collateral damage, it becomes a regrettable side effect of operations against tunnels and weapons caches.

The pattern in Gaza mirrors what was documented in Sri Lanka during the final stage of the civil war in 2009. UN investigators reported that military forces shelled hospitals and medical facilities even after their coordinates had been provided to the army. An estimated 40,000 to 70,000 civilians were killed in the final months of fighting. The UN described the outcome as carnage resulting from indiscriminate shelling. Government officials described it as the liberation of civilian hostages. The vocabulary of collateral damage served the same function: it cleared the space for accountability to evaporate.

Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, launched in February 2022, introduced a systematic campaign against civilian energy infrastructure. From late 2022, Russian forces conducted repeated missile and drone strikes against power plants, heating systems and electricity transmission networks. The stated objective was to degrade Ukrainian military capacity.

The practical effect was the deliberate exposure of a civilian population to sub-zero temperatures in winter. Hospitals lost power. Water systems froze. Millions of civilians were denied heating and light during the coldest months of the year. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights recorded more than 8,000 civilian deaths in the first year of hostilities alone, a figure that excludes casualties from the indirect consequences of infrastructure destruction.

Russian officials characterised each wave of strikes as targeting military infrastructure or dual use facilities. The language of collateral damage performed its expected function. It translated a deliberate campaign of civilian harm into a series of unfortunate technical incidents.

One journalist put the point with precision: a Russian soldier aims at an apartment block, sees the curtains in the window and fires anyway. The residents, mostly women, children and the elderly, are buried in the rubble. Calling this collateral damage does not make it accidental. It makes the language complicit.

The post Collateral Damage: How an Euphemism Launders Mass Killing – Part 1 first appeared on Groundviews.

The Meethotamulla garbage dump, which collapsed on April 14, 2017 killing 32 people, looks almost like a forest now. People in the area have even used the hill to build replicas of Mihinthale and Siripada from time to time during Vesak and Poson festivals. The former garbage dump stands as a quiet but powerful symbol of the environmental injustices faced by some segments of society.

On March 31 this year, the Supreme Court delivered a judgment in which the court found that the Colombo Municipal Council (CMC) had violated the fundamental rights of residents by continuing to dump garbage at Meethotamulla.

The judgment made me reach for my field notebook. In 2018, I spoke with some of the people who were part of the social movement against the Meethotamulla garbage dump for a case study on environmental injustices. I want to share some of their stories and experiences because the Supreme Court judgment becomes more meaningful when understood in the context of what those people lived through, the questions they continuously raised and about their desire for justice.

Since the early 2010s, the garbage dump had been severely impacting the daily lives of the surrounding community. People raised concerns not only about the volume of garbage but also its nature. Waste from butcher shops, chicken feathers and animal remains were a common sight. Crows would carry scraps from the dump and scatter them across the neighbourhood. Residents described finding animal remains left on treetops, which would rot, produce worms and fall on people walking below.

Beyond the visible waste, the dump was slowly making the area unliveable. Houses closest to the dump show structural damage. The canal running alongside the dump became blocked with waste causing floods and the floodwater that entered homes was heavily contaminated. The smell was unbearable and residents said they struggled to simply breathe. People began falling ill with increasing frequency and some were advised by doctors to leave the area entirely.

People from the area experienced the impact with a deep sense of injustice since the dump consisted mainly of garbage not produced locally but brought in from the CMC area. The Kolonnawa Urban Council (KUC) produced only around 15 tons of garbage a day while the Colombo Municipal Council was collecting approximately 1,200 tons daily, a substantial amount of which ended up being dumped at Meethotamulla. Adding to the sense of injustice, this was also a period when the beautification of Colombo was among the main priorities of the government. In that context, people questioned the fairness of being made to pay the price.

People were also angry about the fact that some were benefitting from their misery. Community members described how the dump had become a source of income for a network of politicians and businessmen. They alleged that members of the CMC and the KUC, along with private contractors, were financially benefitting from the operation through various arrangements including payments for machinery hire. The higher the dump rose, the higher the commissions since it demanded the use of more machinery. One local politician was specifically accused of exploiting the situation by allowing garbage from other urban councils to be brought in for a fee and of employing people to collect recyclables from the dump. Representatives from the people’s movement against the Meethotamulla garbage dump put it succinctly. “The garbage is an issue for us but an asset for some.”

The people’s movement was the first organised response to emerge from the residents themselves. It began in 2012 when houses closest to the rising dump started to show damage. The movement was led by people who had some social capital in the community such as retired government servants, professionals and businessmen. In the beginning building wider support was difficult. Many families were in a daily struggle for their livelihoods with little room to take on a political battle. Others were under the influence of local politicians who were silently profiting from the dump. But as the conditions worsened, more and more people joined. The movement eventually organised 15 protests, many of which drew significant attention from authorities, particularly when demonstrators succeeded in blocking the entrance to the dump and halting the garbage trucks.

The movement carried a telling slogan: “We don’t want Colombo’s garbage”. It captured the nature of the frustration rooted in the question of justice. Why should a densely populated community, most of whom had lived there for generations, suffer Colombo’s waste in their backyard?

The responses to the demands of the movement to stop garbage dumping in Kolonnawa were far from satisfactory and at times amounted to deliberate attempts to silence it. The first response was relocation. In 2012, a minister visited the area and offered residents a monthly rental allowance of Rs.10,000 and a promise of a permanent house within two years on the condition that they vacate within a week. Citizens considered this an irrational and unfair solution and residents asked why they should be the ones to leave. It was the garbage dump that had come to them, not the other way around. According to one of the residents, “We were here all this time. There was no garbage dump like this. What we are asking for is to relocate the garbage dump, not us.”

When relocation failed to quell the movement, the response turned darker. On the night of December 27, 2015 protesters who had been blocking the entrance to the dump for four consecutive days were violently attacked. One of the movement’s representatives described what happened during our 2018 interview. A local politician from the area arrived in a bus with a group of men and the attack began. The movement’s secretary was struck on the head with a nail-studded piece of wood. The organiser was beaten so severely that only the intervention of a family member prevented him from being thrown into the canal.

The message was obvious. As the movement’s organiser reflected afterwards, “We had to change our strategies after the attack. It was difficult to mobilise people after that. But we showed our continued commitment through judicial means.” Then came April 14, 2017 Sinhala and Tamil new year day. Part of the garbage dump collapsed killing 32 people and destroying almost 300 homes. Tragically, among them were people who had spent years fighting to prevent exactly this.

One of the movement’s leaders lost four members of his family. He described what he witnessed. “I lost four of my family members in front of my eyes. We lost our houses, our vehicles and everything we had collected during our lives. But mostly we lost the people we loved. My wife was under a cement block. Half of her body was visible and she was shouting, asking for help. I reached her but I could not remove the concrete blocks. I could see the hand of my granddaughter on the chest of my wife. I tried to get a backhoe from the Urban Council but was unable to until six in the evening. We got her out around nine and she died the next day in the hospital. I lost my wife, my daughter, my son-in-law and my granddaughter. My daughter’s body was found four days later. If we had not been attacked at the protest, we would have succeeded; we were determined to finish it with some kind of agreement. If so, we would not have lost our people.”

The government’s response after the collapse was to evacuate residents from areas identified as being at risk of further slides.

The fight of the people’s movement was a cry for justice, not simply a demand for better waste management. The interviews revealed that residents were deeply hurt by the injustices surrounding them as much as the environmental pollution itself. The sense of being neglected, of being subjected to corrupt politics and of being suppressed when they asked for nothing more than a decent life were the wounds that cut deepest.

This is why the Supreme Court judgment matters. The state has now formally acknowledged what the residents of Kolonnawa always knew: that their fundamental rights were violated. It will not bring back the 32 people who died. It will not return the years lost to illness, fear and grief. I am not certain whether the judgment fully answers the questions of injustice they raised back then yet it recognises that the lives and lands of the people of Kolonnawa, mostly from non-prestigious backgrounds, matter.

The former dump is now green and used to celebrate Vesak and Poson and beneath this new transformation, the people who died nine years ago are still lying there. May this judgment bring some relief to the souls of those who perished, to those who were displaced and to all who may face a similar fate in the future. And may it, at the very least, remind us to continuously engage with the question of justice in our society.

The post The Meethotamulla Judgment and What it Really Means first appeared on Groundviews.

Sri Lanka stands at a fragile yet defining moment in its economic journey. Emerging from one of the most severe financial crises in its post-independence history, the country continues to navigate debt restructuring, fiscal consolidation and a slow, uneven recovery. While recent stabilisation measures have helped restore a degree of macroeconomic balance, the deeper structural weaknesses that contributed to the crisis remain largely unresolved.

This situation raises a fundamental and unavoidable question: what kind of economic model will Sri Lanka adopt to secure sustainable, inclusive, and resilient growth by 2030? The answer will determine not only the country’s economic trajectory but also its political stability and long term social cohesion.

The current recovery is fragile. Without meaningful structural transformation, short term stabilisation could easily give way to prolonged stagnation. The coming decade will therefore be decisive; it will determine whether Sri Lanka emerges as a resilient, regionally competitive economy or remains trapped in recurring cycles of crisis and recovery.

Just across the Palk Strait, Tamil Nadu provides a compelling example of how long term economic transformation can be achieved through structured planning and decentralised governance. With a population of approximately 75 to 78 million, Tamil Nadu has set a clear and ambitious target of becoming a $1 trillion economy by 2030.

This ambition is not merely aspirational; it is supported by a strong industrial base, consistent policy direction, infrastructure development and export-oriented strategies. Over several decades, Tamil Nadu has developed a diversified economy encompassing manufacturing, information technology, textiles, automobiles, electronics and renewable energy.

One of the defining features of Tamil Nadu’s success is its decentralised growth model. Economic activity is distributed across multiple regions rather than concentrated in a single metropolitan centre. Industrial corridors, special economic zones and sector-specific clusters have been developed across the state, ensuring that growth is both inclusive and geographically balanced.

Sri Lanka’s economic structure remains highly centralised with the Western Province contributing nearly half of the country’s GDP. This concentration reflects decades of policy choices that have prioritised one region over others, resulting in a disproportionate distribution of economic activity.

While the Western Province has become the country’s commercial and financial hub, other regions, particularly the Northern and Eastern Provinces, have not experienced comparable levels of development. This imbalance has significant economic and social consequences.

The Northern and Eastern Provinces together contribute less than 10 percent of GDP. This figure is disproportionately low when compared to their geographic size, resource base and strategic importance.

These regions possess nearly two-thirds of the country’s coastline, offering significant opportunities in fisheries, marine exports, logistics and coastal tourism. Their location makes them ideally positioned to serve as gateways for regional trade, particularly with South India.

The concept of devolve to evolve represents a fundamental shift in how Sri Lanka approaches development. Traditionally, devolution has been viewed primarily as a political issue. However, it must now be understood as an economic imperative.

Economic growth cannot be effectively driven from a single central authority in a diverse and regionally varied country. Localised decision making enables better resource allocation, faster implementation and policies that are tailored to specific regional needs.

In this context, devolution is not an end in itself. It is a means to achieve economic evolution, unlocking productivity, innovation and inclusive growth across all regions of the country.

The post Sri Lanka Must Devolve to Evolve: A 2030 Economic Reality Check first appeared on Groundviews.

 After the end of the Civil War with its haunting legacy, Sri Lanka endured the Easter bombings, national bankruptcy and witnessed the aragalaya, which led to the ousting of the Rajapaksa dynasty as well as Ranil Wickremesinghe. With the new NPP government under President Anura Kumara Dissanayake for the first time in decades, change and progress seem to be possible but economic problems remain, just as Sinhalese ideas of supremacy linked to a unique kind of militant Buddhism, traumatized and marginalized minorities still awaiting meaningful accountability and a growing dependency on countries like China, India and the US. There is still a lot of work to do politically and otherwise.

 Since politics has always been a fought terrain and continues to be so, 19 academics and artists decided to take a critical look at a sphere where creative thinking is rarely boxed in by party lines, history and politics, i.e. Sri Lanka’s vibrant art scene, and to explore how concepts of community, of living together, of building the new country are envisaged there. As the first of its kind, Contemporary Sri Lankan Literature and Art, co-edited by Stefan Horlacher and Thilini Meegaswatta, brings together contributions that look to literary and theatrical production and cinema as well as the performing and visual arts to explore timely concepts and questions ranging from Buddhist nationalism, Sinhala identity politics, truth in testimonial literature, the (im)possibility of transitional justice, surveillance and self-censorship to morality, the function of rituals, queer embodiment and community creation through performance. The book is supplemented with interviews, illustrations and unpublished short stories and poetry from well-known resident and diasporic Sri Lankan writers so that this volume does not only talk about but also withartists and their work.

The knowledge of the arts

 In this project, art is understood as a space in which ludic, creative and experimental thinking becomes possible, allowing us to transcend social, political but also epistemological and ontological boundaries to probe new ways of living (together) and alternative concepts of community. Art, we further argue, has the ability to confront us with a kind of knowledge which we usually either deny or do not have access to but which we must embrace if we want to make progress as a community. For these reasons, the works of art we selected for analysis in Contemporary Sri Lankan Literature and Art have not only made identity, community, the social fabric and socio-symbolic order we live in (and by) one of their most important topics but through their very functioning play a significant role in the construction of the identity of their readers, viewers and listeners. Through mechanisms of transfer, identification and empathy, these works communicate forms of shared existence that have the power to “[implore] us to act with a compassion born of familiarity towards our fellow human beings ” (Phillips 2011, 16-17). Moreover, they prove that through novels, films and paintings distances/differences can be bridged without being negated and that new forms of togetherness can be conceived and experienced. For these reasons, this volume does not primarily focus on traditional or mainstream artworks but centres on those works of art which are more likely to possess the power to interrupt the myth of completion and totality, to reveal the heterogeneity of community, to give voice to marginalized and minoritarian groups and discourses and to produce new and different forms of knowledge.

To lay a solid foundation, the volume starts with two extensive theoretical and con­textualising chapters by Stefan Horlacher, which focus on Sri Lanka’s postcolonial/post-civil war conundrum on transitional justice, the power of art and recent history up to the elections in 2024. The concepts of hybridity, difference and diversity introduced by Horlacher are then put to the test in Benedikt Korf and Thamali Kithsiri’s ethnographic chapter on hybrid culture and identity politics inside the ethnically mixed community of Paanama. Instead of hybridity, Korf and Kithsiri argue that what we find is an original syncretism that blends practices and rituals from Hindu, Buddhist and other local kinships; a syncretism that is being increasingly purified into proper Sinhala Buddhist hegemonic identity that people aspire to.

The contribution following Korf and Kithsiri’s chapter extends their ethnographic frame to the judicial system and the question of how to manage transition successfully and achieve transitional and affective justice. As objects of analysis, Lars Waldorf and Nilanjana Premaratna take two Sri Lankan films – Paangshu (2018) and Demons in Paradise (2017) – that depict how Sri Lanka’s best known militant groups practice violence against their own communities and demonstrate how both films recover traumatic counter memories and recuperate uncomfortable counter narratives that have been forgotten or silenced within the Sinhalese and Tamil communities. Most importantly, the analysis reveals how ordinary Sinhalese and Tamils are implicated in the violence that was committed in their names and how the films help create a shared story of mutual suffering among Sri Lankans, one that might provide a foundational narrative for a (re)imagined community one day.

The medium of film is also central to Neluka Silva’s chapter on Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and post-war Sinhala cinema. Here she demonstrates with the help of Anagarika Dharmapala Srimathano (2014) and Mahindagamanaya (2011) how the substantial patronage provided by the State Film Corporation had enabled mainstream Sinhala cinema to become a conduit for producing and reinforcing hegemonic ideologies in the post-war context. The overarching emphasis on Buddhism and its nexus with Sinhala in the films facilitates the forging of exclusionary cultural and national identities in the cinematic terrain, calling attention to the problematic role of history and memory in the landscape of reconciliation. However, it is not only cinema and film which are influenced by politics and the horrors of the past but more traditional forms of art such as landscape painting as well. This is demonstrated by Priyantha Udagedara who argues that it is imperative to critically explore and analyze contemporary paintings that often showcase the beauty of Sri Lanka but forget to acknowledge the depraved atrocities that took place within that landscape. This political and referential function of art is also central to Thamotharampillai Sanathanan’s contribution, which enquires into the notion of artistic freedom and the role of self-censorship in art production in the controversial space that exists between the majoritarian state and artists from minority communities.

The next two chapters are also dedicated to painting and focus on Sujith Rathnayake’s work during the aragalaya. A succinct report of Rathnayake’s Harrow Exhibition in London in 2023 is followed by an interview in which Rathnayake explains his motives for actively taking part in the aragalaya as an artist, discusses the precarious relation between art for art’s sake and art for an ethical or political purpose, and critically reflects on his own artistic process and the works of art he created during the aragalaya. Linked to this interview is Ruhanie Perera’s chapter on the enactment of community in artistic practice with a special focus on performance, public space and politics. Her analysis of an embodied act by Thilina Sampath and two performances by the Ogha Collective demonstrates how the works discussed present important parallel expressions of community articulated through performance as encountered in public spaces decentralized from art contexts and venues.

With Minoli Salgado’s chapter on Sri Lankan witness literature and the new poetics of affective truth telling in post-war testimonial narrative, this volume finally approaches the realm of literature. Based on a critical reading of Sunila Galappatti and Ajith Boyagoda’s survivor memoir A Long Watch (2016) and Anuk Arudpragasam’s novel A Passage North (2021), Salgado argues that the political discourse on the civil war is underscored by a contestation over facts that marks a crisis of truth and that Sri Lankan witness literature in English serves to fill the truth-bearing gap created by this contestation by mediating traumatic memory as an explicitly testimonial narrative. The question of truth is also important for Shermal Wijewardene’s chapter on queer voices in the narration of the ethnic conflict in Tamil diasporic women’s writing. In her analysis of V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage (2008) and S.J. Sindu’s Marriage of a Thousand Lies (2017), Wijewardene demonstrates how the trope of queer visceral embodiment depicts epistemic inequalities in war narratives and possibilities for alternative knowledges.

The civil war is also central to Stefan Horlacher and Thilini Meegaswatta’s chapter on the creation of meaning by means of rituals, taboos and the abject in Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016). The chapter follows Wijewardene’s lead in looking at what could metaphorically be called the small voices of history (Arundhati Roy) and analyzes how the protagonist navigates the impossible conditions of a state of exception and bare life by functionalizing the abject and resorting to rituals to sustain his humanity and make meaning out of the nothing­ness he is reduced to. Horlacher and Meegaswatta further argue that the novel offers its readers a possibility of renewal through cleansing by forcing them to work through the horror of the national (and individual) past. Arudpragasam’s second novel, A Passage North (2021) occupies a central position in Neloufer de Mel’s contribution. She traces morality’s immense authority (and therefore irreducibility) in relation to humanitarian aid, sovereign power and terrorism, particularly in contexts of natural disasters/states of exception and builds a strong argument for locating A Passage North as a compelling, if fraught, intervention on morality in and for the present.

The volumes comes to a close with poems by Gratiaen prize-winner Vivimarie Vanderpoorten and Jaffna poet and writer Ayathurai Santhan as well as three short stories by Ameena Hussein and two diasporic Sri Lankan writers – Minoli Salgado and Romesh Gunesekera. Their contributions interact with and complement the critical pieces of this book, for example by illuminating how works of literature can be rich sites for negotiating history, identity, memory, politics and visions for future.

Art meets reality

To reduce Contemporary Sri Lankan Literature and Art to one single message is futile. What it demonstrates is the enormous rolethat art can play in peacebuilding and community building and how it can help to deal with the horrors of the past and pave the way to a different future. What it further demonstrates is the potential of art to crystallize moods, feelings and topics that are censored in public dis­course but part of the collective sub or unconscious; to create a connection between different individuals by giving them the opportunity to experience and understand other points of view and realities and thereby create (collective) identity, solidarity and community; to make us feel what it means to be human in contexts of conflict and to open up a space where values and norms are (re)negotiated and where horizons can be transgressed; and to make new alternative realities thinkable and liveable and finally to vigorously interfere with and change reality.

As the contributions in Contemporary Sri Lankan Literature and Art prove, art exposes culture and society as a constant process, a never-finished coming into being. Thus, it has the power to disrupt the foundational, the economic, historical, political, religious and ideological narratives dominant in society and to pave the way for new and different forms of sense and meaning. If this sounds too abstract, let’s tie it back to recent history, i.e. the aragalaya as a total work of art and an impressive space of national imagining (Klett 2022, para. 1). It is especially at Gota Go Gama (GGG), which had been shaped by the contributions of artists expressing their frustrations and aspirations as part of a peaceful movement of citizens voicing their dissent (Klett 2022, para. 1), that it becomes evident that the power of art to effectively shape and change reality and create new communities is no abstract theory or wishful thinking. Consider how in a notable moment for inter-ethnic solidarity, GGG was not just a future-directed protest against the government but also saw the first ever public commemoration held in the capital for the thousands of Tamils killed and disappeared during the final phase of the civil war (Waldorf and Premaratna 2023). As Naila Rafique (2023) points out, for the first time in the country’s history, Sri Lankans from diverse ethnicities, religions, generations, and social classes came together to collectively protest and to oppose corruption, violence and coercion and shape a new future. Significantly, it were the various forms of art – banners, posters, songs, sculptures, performances and films – that became the glue that brought people together and gave them a sense of community that transcended linguistic, ethnic, religious, and cultural demarcations.

The post Contemporary Sri Lankan Literature and Art: The Creation of a New Post-War Community first appeared on Groundviews.

On March 24, 2025 President Anura Kumara Dissanayake in his capacity as the Minister of Defense signed a detention order to detain Mohamed Rusdi under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). He was released on bail after more than two weeks in detention with police acknowledging they had no evidence he has committed any offence. But a restriction order was served on him even after that, compelling him to inform the Counter Terrorism Investigation Division (CTID) of the police if he planned to change his place of residence, seeking their prior permission for overseas travel and reporting to them every week.

This is despite President Dissanayake having been a vocal critique of the PTA as an opposition MP and his 2024 election manifesto promising to abolish the PTA. Rusdi was amongst the 49 arrested under the PTA between January 1 and May 23 2025, an average of about one every three days. Many are believed to have been released as not guilty after languishing in detention and causing lot of suffering to them and their families.

Under the Ranil Wickremesinghe presidency, Wasantha Mudalige, a prominent student leader and leading figure in the 2022 aragalaya, was arrested under the PTA on August 18, 2022. He was only released on January 31, 2023 after more than five months. He was subjected to cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment while in administrative detention. In a landmark judgement, on March 19, 2026 the Supreme Court ruled that his fundamental rights to equal protection of law (article 12-1 of constitution) and not to be arbitrarily arrested (article 13-1 of constitution) were violated and there was no legal basis for drastic measure of arrest and detention under PTA. The judgement indicated that there must be basis for reasonable suspicion for arrests, that the PTA cannot be used against suspects of ordinary crimes and that vague allegations of terrorist acts or threats to public order that’s unsubstantiated, unexplained, inadequate cannot justify arrests under PTA.

The tradition of detaining innocents using the PTA

The list of those detained under the PTA under various presidents and governments and subsequently determined as not guilty by courts is long. Below are 11 lesser known examples.

Nadesu Kuganathan, had surrendered to the army in the last phase of the war (2009) and released after rehabilitation in 2013 after about four years. But after about three months, he was re-arrested (in 2013) under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). He was released after about eight years in detention without any charges.

Malcom Tiron[i] was arrested under the PTA in 2008 and he was released due to lack of evidence after about 13 years in detention. The trial has been presided by nine High Court judges.

Chandrabose Selvachandran was acquitted as not guilty in 2019, about 13 to 14 years after his arrest. He about 27 years when he was arrested. One indictment against him was for an incident that had happened when he was in detention. He was a cancer patient and died one and half years after his release.

Vasanthi Ragupathy Sharma was arrested in December 1999, charged and acquitted as not guilty in 2015 after more than 15 years in detention.

Anthony Chandra was arrested in 2008, charged and acquitted as not guilty in 2015 after about seven years in detention.

Ramesh was arrested in December, 2008 when he was just 18 years old and released in October 2011. In April 2012, he was re-arrested and in February 2015 he was released due to lack of evidence. In total, he has been in detention for about five years and eight months.

Angela Croos[ii] was 25 years old when she was arrested in August 2009 and was released after about one and half years in March 2011. No charges have been filed against her. She was denied healthcare in detention and was only given healthcare after his father obtained a Supreme Court directive. Her health had deteriorated rapidly while in detention and she passed away in October 2012.

Solomon Caspers Paul and Muralitharan Raja[iii] were arrested in May 2008, charges were filed against both and both were acquitted as not guilty in February and December 2011.

Nandakumar and Chitrakumar were arrested in April 2008 and released in August 2010 without any charges being filed.

Personal experience

Although nowhere as drastic as these and many others, I too experienced the trauma, fear and other consequences of being arrested and detained under the PTA. I was arrested on very serious but vague allegations that’s unsubstantiated, unexplained, inadequate of being involved in re-organizing the LTTE as well as aiding and abetting. I was also accused causing discomfort to the state and collecting money by giving information to other countries. I was arrested in Kilinochchi on a Sunday night about 10.30 pm in March 2014. That night, in between few minutes breaks of intense interrogation and while being taken away to an unknown place, I recalled the horror stories I have heard from other PTA detainees and was in great fear not knowing whether I would be tortured, disappeared, killed or languish in detention for most of my life. I later learnt how my elderly parents had been in fear and cried throughout the time I was detained while putting up brave fronts when they visited me and talked to others. I believe I was not physically tortured due to visits of multiple lawyers despite me not being allowed to see any of them and a visit by big team from the Human Rights Commission the morning after my arrest. Intense national and international media coverage and campaigns that started minutes after my arrest and continued throughout my detention would have contributed to my safety and was key in my relatively quick release.  But my ordeal was not over after release. I was almost abducted at gunpoint, police obtained court orders restricting my overseas travel and freedom of expression and my iPad and hard disk were quickly confiscated. My traumatised parents were summoned to a local police station, which was only stopped after strong interventions from my lawyers. The case against me continued for nearly five years before the police, on the advice of the Attorney General, asked the Magistrate to release me due to non-availability of evidence. It took around 10 years and much effort by multiple lawyers (all pro-bono) to get back my electronic equipment that were confiscated. In meantime those who went to school with me, went to church with me, relatives and media had labelled me as a terrorist. Complaints to the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka are pending after 12 years.

Tragedy of detaining innocents

Mrs. Sharma and Mrs. Chandra, detained for about 15 and seven years, had three children. Mr. Nadesu and Mr. Tiron who had been detained for 12 to 13 years had three and two children respectively. The social, economic and emotional difficulties young children would have faced, including the stigma of being children of “terrorist suspects” is unimaginable. The release as not guilty would have come far too late to mitigate all these. Mr. Paul’s child was born while he was in detention and had not recognised him as the father after his release.

Many of the detainees reported having being subjected to torture. Confessions obtained with torture or threats of torture were used as primary evidence against most of those who had charges filed against them and different courts have refused to accept such confessions.

The NPP and previous governments have done nothing to prevent or even do damage control to address the agony and pain of innocents detained under the PTA, their children, parents, brothers and sisters. We have not heard of any formal acknowledgement by any government or of survivors and their families being offered formal apologies, compensation, livelihood support, counselling and medical care. No one is also held accountable for these grave injustices. With some exceptions media, religious leaders, professionals and society in general have been complicit in these tragedies, sometimes by justifying, sometimes by covering up and sometimes by silence.

There have been people in detention for as long as 18 to19 years under the PTA without having their cases concluded and, in some cases, charges were not filed for 15 years. According to the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka, as of January 31, 2018[iv]about 15% of PTA suspects had been in detention for 10 to 15 years, about 41% had been in detention 5 to 10 years and about 32% had been in detention for 1 to 5 years without having their cases concluded.

PSTA: license to continuing the tragedy

Article 13 (5) of the constitution guarantees that every person is innocent until proven guilty but all those named and their families have been severely punished with up to 15 years in detention without being proven guilty by a court. There must be many others like the 13 mentioned above.

This tragedy is likely to continue if the government enacts the proposed Protection of State from Terrorist Activities (PSTA). Many more innocent persons and their families will suffer and minority ethnic religious communities and critiques will continue to live in fear.

Through Detention Orders (DOs) the PSTA, just like the PTA, allows the executive to decide what is terrorism, who is a terrorist and mete out de-facto punishment in form of detention without judicial discretion. There is no need for executive to wield detention powers and any detention must be by judicial authorities.

The government must release all political prisoners as promised in the NPP manifesto. The Attorney General can advise the police to release any PTA detainees not charged for several years and withdraw charges against those whose trials are not concluded even after many years of detention. The president must pardon those convicted under the PTA and in detention for many years, considering also detention periods before and during trials. Acknowledgement of harm done, apologies and reparations are essential to move forward and will require political honesty, humility and courage, which I hope President Anura Kumara has. There must be moratorium on the use of PTA, the PTA must be repealed and proposed replacement (PSTA) must be withdrawn. It is only then that these tragedies can be avoided in the future.

[i] Letter of September 4, 2021 from the Committee for Protecting Rights of Prisoners (CPRP) to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

[ii] Notes of organization that provided legal aid

[iii] Ibid

[iv] Prison Study by the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka, December 2020. Table 20.3, page 526

The post PTA and PSTA: A License to Detain Innocents at Executive Convenience first appeared on Groundviews.

By the time Christians complete their Holy Week observances on Easter Sunday, at one end of West Asia, the Holy Land itself will be nearing a genocide count of 80,000 and at the other end, Iran is “being bombed back to the Stone Age” according to a twisted fantasy of the bombers.

The bombers themselves are the most malignantly innovative in hominin history; worse, the most prolific serial bombers. Imagine if the Al Queda had access to just a tenth of the explosives – non-nuclear kilograms that is – that have been dropped on West Asia alone by the armies of the “Free World”.

At the Mediterranean end of West Asia the direct, precisely targeted, genocide of Gazans has been a gory accumulation of West-funded Israeli bombardment over the past three years, intensely perpetrated in the tiny enclave of the strip. Some 2.6 million people are packed into the strip that is only half the size of Colombo District but far more densely urbanised and 80 per cent of which is now rubble with human and animal bodies underneath. The officially estimated death toll was close to 75,000 at the end of the (Western) Holy Week (the Eastern Orthodox Holy Week soon follows).

Iran                

And now at the Indian Ocean side of West Asia the Western power bloc, including proxy Israel, is busy reducing once-stable and prosperous Iran not only to urban rubble but also to blasted mountain ranges and scorched fields. The Hormuz Strait and Persian Gulf, usually crowded with shipping carrying oil to much of the world, is being invaded by Western naval forces and air forces with imminent potential for a land invasion as well.

Gulf air traffic, usually crowded with shuttling migrant workers and pilgrims, is now wholly disrupted by Western aerial strikes and retaliatory strikes by Iran. Aside from fears of an imminent land invasion, there are also intense rumours of a nuclear bombing of an Iranian nuclear industry plant by Israel.

Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons stockpile (never investigated, let alone monitored, by the International Atomic Energy Agency) is therefore a non-mentioned dangerous factor in world politics.

Thus at the end of Holy Week 2026, even as Christians celebrate the hope given to us by the liberating power of the cross, the world slides further into a chaos that directly and already inflicts suffering on billions of people, especially the Global South has begun experiencing surging living costs, starvation or malnutrition and loss of livelihood.

Holy Week                       

Holy Week commemorates the last stage of Jesus Christ’s life on earth and mission to humanity. In that gospel narrative of a week from Palm Sunday to Easter, we see Jesus Christ climaxing his mission by confronting the combined forces of earthly satanic machinations.

The Lord had earlier built up his mission in the countryside among the common people, intervening in their own conflicting interests and injustice toward each other. He engaged with tax collectors, rich exploiters and male domination of women, among other human transgression, devoutly quoting scripture and sternly upholding God’s challenge of the commandments and the examples of the prophets.

On Palm Sunday Jesus leads his growing, inspired following into the centre of Judaic and Roman power, Jerusalem. The gospel narrative of Palm Sunday describes what can only be a public action by a new community leader and his responding social constituency. Indeed, the specific highlighting of Jesus’ welcome by the people waving palm fronds is perhaps the most political moment of the gospel narrative.

Palm Sunday                

The date palm in Judaic tradition symbolises the fertility of the land of Canaan, later known as Israel and still later (under Roman rule) as Palestine. By the time of Jesus, palm fronds had become especially sacred after victorious Jewish rebels waved palm fronds on defeating the occupying forces of the Seleucid empire and cleansing the temple after its desecration by the Seleucids.

Thus, by waving palm fronds to welcome Jesus, the common people are seen as hailing Jesus as their leader in rebellion and the rebellion, in accordance with Jesus’ confrontation of injustice, itself being defined as resistance to oppression. And Jerusalem, the place of power, was the seat of both Roman occupation as well as the Jewish monarchy and allied temple clergy establishment. Indeed, Jesus’ first act on entering Jerusalem was to go to the temple and strongly reject the temple’s role in economic and social injustice and exploitation.

Satanic                  

Jesus, therefore, (according to the gospels) spent his final week on earth in preaching and acting in ways that challenged the anti-human injustices of imperial occupation on the one side and, on the other, national (Judaic) elite dominance and exploitation. It is this explosively political week that Christians commemorate as Holy Week.

During this Holy Week, the Holy Land itself is being desecrated by the most powerful military and political forces that have trod and dominated this planet. The Western power bloc and its European client colony of Israel embody a geopolitical culmination of the most satanic machinations humanity has experienced.

They include a planet-wide military devastation and building of exploitative colonial empires, genocide and enslavement of whole populations that previously inhabited these colonies. And the colonial era transitioned to an unequal politico-economic postcolonial world system that subjects these same previously colonised nations to a continuation of those same injustices in new forms.

Bases                        

This same anti-human monster that is the Western power bloc has begun wreaking even wider military havoc from its epicentre in Palestine-Israel to the rest of the region of West Asia and also into other parts of the planet. Once more, the world is seeing the revival of those first marauding colonial forays by colonising Europe to the ends of the earth.

Today there is a far bigger, more deadly, Western (i.e. extra-regional, foreign) military presence across West Asia than there ever was in colonial times. There are some 22 military bases and surveillance posts operated by US and other NATO forces that are active in attacking or helping attack various parts of West Asia simultaneously inside Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, parts of northern Iraq, Yemen and Iran, which is already the most devastated.

At the same time, Western bases similarly implanted in other regions from Greece to Cyprus to Diego Garcia to even the UK are participating in this ongoing new subjugation of West Asia. This subjugation for most of these West Asian states whose regimes are military allies of the West is not of those regimes but of the mass of people who are subjugated also by those monarchies or military dictatorships.

Significantly, Iran has long been the only major state in the region that had remained independent of the Western power bloc and wholly unsympathetic to the West’s implanted client colony of Israel. Syria and Iraq, when they had somewhat popularly supported Baathist regimes, had also been similarly autonomous from the West and likewise fully unsympathetic to Israel.

Libya, in neighbouring north Africa, when it was ruled by a popular military government headed by Colonel Muammar Khaddafi was also similarly geopolitically distant from the West and firmly anti-Israel.

We know what happened to all three countries subsequently. Libya and Syria were degraded by the West at the able hands of Nobel Peace Prize awardee and US president Barak Obama. President Obama then continued the West’s degradation of Somalia, another of those states run by a government formed by radicalised rebel military officers, which had similar geopolitics.

Clearly Iran, being the most resistant to the Western power bloc, needs harder punishment. Certainly, Iran is being inflicted a severe physical degrading first. This is just in case the West cannot inflict on Iran the political and institutional decapitation that Libya, Somalia and Syria have suffered. Indeed, this satanic hegemon run from Washington and Brussels seems to be at a loss for a suitable name for their final solution for Iran.

Stone Age                          

If Operation Epic Fury was meant as a longer, more destructive, round two to the first round in last June’s fortnight of bombing, clearly the resistance and defiance shown by Tehran has left the West floundering around for a next step. It was not for nothing that Islamic Revolutionary Iran baptised the US as the Great Satan.

It is this Great Satan that has officially announced the latest goal of the West’s assault on Iran: bombing Iran back to the Stone Age. This new goal was first announced by President Donald Trump in an official address to the nation on the subject of the war on Iran. He was quickly followed by the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth in reiterating the new goal.

Washington has a decades-long history of making threats to send countries back into the Stone Age. While the previous threats were made in informal situations and by either military officers or by non-Cabinet civilian officials, Donald Trump is the first president to make this threat and also to make it from an official platform (the White House) and in an address to the nation.

But no one has detailed what is meant by Stone Age because modern US does not have its own collective historical memory beyond 400 years at most but there are basic differences between 21st century life and life in the iron age (starting about 1000 BCE) and before that in our Stone Ages over a million years before that.

Most important is that Stone Age implies a complete reversal of a country’s modern capacities and conditions of life: no electricity, machinery or communications equipment. Humans will possess implements limited mainly to shaped pieces of stone designed for various purposes. None of this, however, reflects on the thinking capacities of people.

In scientific terms, intellect must be presumed to be no less or no more than that of current humans. While some kinds of knowledge will not be available to Stone Age humans, other kinds of knowledge will be kinds not available to humans today except to highly specialised palaeontologists.

This above definition summarises what the White House vaguely and in unintellectual, non-specialist, terms hopes to achieve in Iran with this military onslaught. All it wants is a generally complete degradation of Iran’s capacities as a regional power.

The other Western allies balk at such crudities but what they too desire for Iran may differ only marginally. The entire Western bloc is actively supporting the war and has not lifted a finger to block the onslaught or even reduce its severity.

Washington and the Western alliance overall wants to bring Iran to the current level of incapacity as that of Lebanon, a weak but functional state, if not to the level of institutional and territorial decapitation currently suffered by Syria, Libya and Somalia.  And after Iran, Yemen is likely to be next – the last entity standing against Satan in the Holy Land.

That presumes that Iran can and will be reduced to the level of state capacity of Lebanon. Many analysts feel Tehran will not be so subdued. Whatever President Trump may brag, his political constituencies are already showing fatigue. Iran will very likely rise up again although she will probably need years and not a mere week.

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