Robert Mugabe is no match for Rajapakse

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Sri Lanka not fit to be in UN Rights Council- Tutu
[TamilNet, Thursday, 15 May 2008, 11:36 GMT]
"With a terrible record of torture and disappearance, Sri Lanka doesn't deserve a seat on the UN human rights council. It should be voted out," says the first black South African Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, in a comment that appeared on the daily Guardian, U.K., May 15th edition.

Full text of the article follows:

Archbishop Desmond TutuIt would seem self-evident that a country which tortures and kidnaps its own people has no place on the world's leading human rights body. Apparently not: Sri Lanka, despite repeated criticism for its human rights record, is running for re-election to the UN human rights council, with a vote to be held in New York on May 21.

Governments owe it to Sri Lankan human rights victims - and to victims of human rights abuses around the world - to ensure that the Sri Lankan bid fails. This will be an important test of the 47-member council, to show that the UN's standards for it will be honoured.

If Sri Lanka is defeated this year, that will be important not just for the Sri Lankan human rights leaders who, at great personal risk, have called for Sri Lanka's defeat, and for Sri Lankan civil society. In combination with the humiliating defeat last year of Belarus, it will send an important signal for the future: governments with track records of serious human rights abuses do not belong on a body set up to protect the victims of such abuses.

Sri Lanka has failed to honour its pledges of upholding human rights standards and cooperating with the UN since joining the council two years ago. Indeed, its human rights record has worsened during that time. The Sri Lankan idea of cooperation with the UN, meanwhile, has been to condemn senior UN officials (including the high commissioner for human rights, Louise Arbour, and the under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, John Holmes) as "terrorists" or "terrorist sympathisers."

The systematic abuses by Sri Lankan government forces are among the most serious imaginable. Government security forces summarily remove their own citizens from their homes and families in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again. Torture and extrajudicial killings are widespread. When the human rights council was established, UN members required that states elected must themselves "uphold the highest standards" of human rights. On that count, Sri Lanka is clearly disqualified.

Bomb explosion targets Police bus in Colombo, 10 killed, 95 wounded
[TamilNet, Friday, 16 May 2008, 07:00 GMT]
A three-wheeler fitted with a bomb rammed into a bus carrying riot control police personnel, few hundred meters away from the Sri Lankan Presidential Secretariat, Friday noon, killing 10 persons, 7 policemen and 3 civilians, and injuring 6 Sri Lanka Army soldiers, 30 policemen and 59 civilians. The explosion has taken place on Lotus Road inside the High Security area near the Hilton Hotel. 12 wounded policemen were in critical condition, according to medical sources in Colombo hospital.

Three of the seven police personnel killed were females.

The policemen were on their way to provide additional security as the swearing-in ceremony of the Eastern Province Chief Minister, postponed yesterday, was to take place, as scheduled earlier, Friday at 4:00 p.m.

Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan alias Pillaiyan, the de-facto leader of the paramilitary-cum-political party, the TMVP, also known as Pillayan Group, was scheduled to be sworn in as the Chief Minister of the Eastern Province. Pillayan's group contested the elections, with widespread vote-rigging and ballot-stuffing, on ruling UPFA-ticket, affecting the ultimate result of the election.

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