When BP CEO Tony Hayward testified before Congress this morning, many expected to hear him apologize for the disaster his company has caused. Instead, GOP Congressman Joe Barton was the one saying he was sorry — to BP.

In his opening statement, Barton, the top Republican on the committee overseeing the oil spill and its aftermath, delivered a personal apology to the oil giant. He said the $20 billion fund that President Obama directed BP to establish to provide relief to the victims of the oil disaster was a “tragedy in the first proportion.”

Other Republicans are echoing his call. Sen. John Cornyn said he “shares” Barton’s concern. Rep. Michele Bachmann said that BP shouldn’t agree to be “fleeced.” Rush Limbaugh called it a “bailout.” The Republican Study Committee, with its 114 members in the House, called it a “shakedown.”

Let’s be clear. This fund is a major victory for the people of the Gulf. It’s a key step toward making them whole again. BP has a responsibility to those whose lives and livelihoods have been devastated by the disaster. And BP oil executives don’t deserve an apology — the people of the Gulf do.

Rep. Barton and Republicans like him don’t understand that the real tragedy is what’s happening to the people in the Gulf Coast. They’re the ones who deserve his apology — not BP.

But big oil knows exactly who its allies are. And if Republicans win control of the House, Rep. Barton could be chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee — overseeing regulation of the oil and gas industry.

Notably, companies like Halliburton — the folks responsible for cementing the Deepwater Horizon rig — are directing their political committees to deliver thousands of dollars to GOP candidates this cycle. Barton himself has received more than $100,000 from the oil and gas industry this election cycle.

Barton should apologize to the people of the Gulf and he should step down as the highest-ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Adding your name to our open letter is one of the best ways you can show him and other Republicans that they weren’t elected to defend big oil.

David Plouffe

These are the guys who try to solve the world’s problems!! Also guys political corruption is a global phenomenon, yes should we tolerate it in SL? What options do we have.

The promise of no war and infrastructure development is happening for all to see. It is us who will need to stand up and move forward. It is time we waited for a white knight to rescue Sri Lanka, it will not happen.

This brings to mind a story a great advertising man (Udaya Tennakoon) told me once when I was a pup in the industry. He compared this countries moral direction to the way our public transport has transformed over the years. In Her hay day the country had the Ceylon Transport Board (CTB) which had clean buses, uniformed drivers and conductors which the commuters used.  When passengers got in the conductor rang the bell for the bus to pull out of the station once they were seated and he would come up to them and take the money and give a ticket. Separate seats were marked for clergy, a pregnant lady or senior citizen would never be standing and yes it was the best transport service in Asia during that time.

Then in the late 70′s came the private coach (now the famed private bus). People are worth as little as the money they spend for a ticket or less. All of them race from bus halt to bus halt, people are flung in and out similar to chicken taken to a slaughter and mutual respect is not a thing which you experience in these chariots from hell.  Yes it sums up what our country is at the present. They have the upper hand with the law as many of them are owned by politicians or someone connected to the police. They don’t respect any other vehicle or human being. You frequently witness people hanging for dear life on the foot board and the isles which can accommodate 10 people packed with 100! And let’s not even fathom the plight of a young girl standing in the midst of the crowded bus.

So what is next? All who hoped for a country without corruption and nepotism got a 57.88% slap in their faces. As I mentioned in my previous post of the obvious result to which some accused of me being bias, this is the sad truth about our country. We middle class citizens who hope for a fair life in this country are a minority whose vote cannot influence an election. The only way we will have a say in this country is when we all realize that we are a minority who needs representation in parliament. We need to pick a leader who will represent our needs like the Muslims have done with Muslim Congress, the estate workers with Ceylon Workers Congress and the Tamil people in the North and the East with the TNA.

This party will demand rights before pledging support to any party who wants the support of the middle working class. Only then will we be able to make a change in this country as politicians will need our support to be elected. This party will have educated people heading it which will ask for parliamentary seats that will impact the members. This party will be able to set policies for the betterment of middle class citizens such as tax, education etc. This will also be the party which will cut across races and religions. It is time that we all realized that the hope of a Messiah to free the country will never be a reality and work towards a true dream of controlling the  nation that all of us help to fund from our hard earned money which is taxed. We have six years to do so and we can truly hope for a change from the private bus!

Let’s see the negatives of the President
He is accused of corruption, does it really matter to the masses?
The Colomboites complain that people are starving. But are people actually starving? Is there death due to starvation in this country which as is prevalent in the US, Europe and India.

Positives
He stopped the war which resulted in an immediate stop to our youth being maimed or killed. The majority of whom belongs to the 70% who will vote for him.
He is building the south (ironically Hambantota is his district) which is the region that started the first insurgency in 1971 way before the LTTE was formed and again in 1987 due to the frustration faced by the youth.
Rapid development is taking place in the East but I feel he will lose in that region due to the lack of support from the Muslim parties
At the last election the president did not get the 900,000 voter base in the North and East. But this year he is sure to get some of it which would be gratitude votes.
UNP has a voter base of 4.5 million of which all will not vote for the Genearl as the President gave them national pride and some view Ranil as a weak leader.
JVP has a voter base of nearly half a million which is now broken and has an alliance to Wimal Weerawansa. For many he is the JVP. Also the hard core would have got disgruntled with the party for joining the UNP! Even the University Student Councils are backing the government for the first time. JVP also lost badly in the South at the recent provincial elections.

Why the general will lose
There are many who view the present alliance as a stop gap which will never last, hence the country will be at a stalemate.
In his statement made to the Sunday Leader Editor Fredrica about the killing of LTTE leaders made the General lose respect with many as he broke the oath as a military man.
His wanting state benefits upon retirement which consist of 600 personnel, 12 vehicles and the right to occupy the army commander’s house which is a blatant misuse of public funds might make one wonder about what he will demand as executive president.
His taking the full credit for the victory will not sit well with the other forces. Agreed, the army faced the brunt of the attack but they were well supported by the other forces who were managed well as one team by the Defence Secretary, Gotabaya who is also a decorated military officer.
His reason for coming forth as a common candidate was purely for personal gain of getting back at those who pushed him out once the deed was done.
UNP is still accused of being traitors for having a secret pact with the LTTE and the recent media burst with regards to The General and the UNP signing a secret deal with the TNA is being exploited by the challenger’s camp.

My estimate would be that President Mahinda Rajapakse will win by a greater margin than he did the last time he was elected president.

Image credits : Wikipedia

NEW DELHI — A report on Sri Lanka to be released next week by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee urges a less confrontational approach to that nation, citing strategic American interests in the region.

The report says that while the Sri Lankan government has been widely criticized for its handling of the war against the Tamil Tigers, who were fighting for a separate state for the ethnic Tamil minority in northern Sri Lanka, the government has also achieved a measure of progress in resettling the conflict’s displaced and rebuilding the war-shattered east of the country.

“With the end of the war, the United States needs to re-evaluate its relationship with Sri Lanka to reflect new political and economic realities,” says the report, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. “While humanitarian concerns remain important, U.S. policy toward Sri Lanka cannot be dominated by a single agenda. It is not effective at delivering real reform, and it shortchanges U.S. geostrategic interests in the region.”

The bipartisan report, which was endorsed by Senator John Kerry, the Democratic chairman of the committee, as well as Senator Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican, is being released as the Obama administration is preparing to announce its new policy on Sri Lanka. It also comes as questions persist about what Western countries can do to influence the government there.

Concerns about human rights and humanitarian aid for the people affected by the conflict have dominated the relationship between the United States and Sri Lanka over the past few years as the hard-line government in the capital, Colombo, pressed its military offensive against the Tigers.

The tough strategy of Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka’s president, and his two brothers, Gotabaya and Basil, helped defeat the insurgency in May after more than two decades of war. The rebel group used brutal tactics like the use of child soldiers and female suicide bombers. It was also responsible for the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, a former prime minister of India who was hoping to return to power, in 1991.

Government troops overran a narrow strip of beach where the leaders of the rebel group were pinned down, along with about 300,000 Tamil civilians. Human rights groups have pointed to evidence of an indiscriminate use of heavy weapons by government troops in areas crowded with civilians in the last weeks of fighting. The United Nations documented at least 7,000 civilian deaths in a tally that does not include the last, and probably bloodiest, weeks of fighting.

The government also faced pressure to release nearly 300,000 Tamils it had held in closed camps since the end of the war. Officials said the displaced people needed to be screened to weed out fighters, but conditions in the crowded camps deteriorated as the monsoon rains arrived. On Tuesday , the government said the displaced were free to leave, with some limitations.

Sri Lanka has resisted calls for an international investigation of its conduct of the war, and has dismissed the demands of the Western countries that have bankrolled much of its humanitarian aid effort as imperialism.

Sri Lankan government officials have repeatedly pointed to growing ties between their country and China as a sign that the West’s influence there is on the wane. Mr. Rajapaksa, who is running for re-election in January — and is staking his campaign on the war victory — has accused foreign aid organizations and Western countries of meddling in Sri Lanka’s affairs.

More broadly, government officials have expressed dismay at the barrage of criticism they received abroad after the defeat of the Tamil Tigers. Mr. Rajapaksa portrayed the conflict as part of a global fight against terrorism, and the victory over the Tigers as a model for anti-insurgency military campaigns elsewhere. Sri Lankan officials deny that large numbers of civilians were killed by government troops.

The United States and other Western countries abstained from a vote at the International Monetary Fund in July to lend $2.6 billion to Sri Lanka. The United States has also curbed military aid because of concerns about human rights abuses in the war against the Tamil Tigers.

But Sri Lanka is too important a country to be isolated from the West, the report argues.

“Sri Lanka is located at the nexus of crucial maritime trading routes in the Indian Ocean connecting Europe and the Middle East to China and the rest of Asia,” the report says. “The United States, India, and China all share an interest in deterring terrorist activity and curbing piracy that could disrupt maritime trade.”

Click to read original article

To hell with long term policy and development I want my parippu and paang now and I want it cheap!

Yes, Sri Lanka is recovering from a 30 year war and developing the north and east will ensure that we don’t screw the end game like the US does and keep doing. The south had the JVP and the north had the LTTE. Both preying on the hungry minds of the forgotten people whilst the western province enjoyed the fruits of their labour. The south is in the process of being developed with the building of the port which will bring livelihood to the people in the region and hopefully negate the need travel to Colombo in search of greener pastures. Though I haven’t visited the north and the east many say that developments in these areas are progressing and people can finally look to a brighter future and changes from being the land with draw wells, date palms and red onions.
The country rejoiced when the LTTE was defeated and a king ruled Sri Lanka for a few months! Yes it’s been only six months and the political landscape is changing at a rapid pace. Trade Unions are planning on work to rule campaigns again, surprisingly not taking note of the President’s promise of salary increments next year. The king is no more and there are whispers of Sarath Fonseka being the person responsible of winning the war! The Defence Secretary, a decorated military officer who was a hero suddenly is stuck in a stalemate of being accused of war crimes. If the party loses, he will not be able to go back to the US for the fear of being arrested as he is a green card holder. The morning (sinhala radio) show on the SLBC with Hudson Samarasinghe is trying desperately to change the views of the people by saying the valiant commander who stood next to the King during battle will not sell himself and join the LTTE supporting opposition party. Do the rulers fear being overthrown in the next elections? Have the tables turned so fast on them? Well, the pulse of the country is confusing for sure!

But what did they do wrong?

Well, in my opinion His Excellency made two mistakes which he has little time to correct. He let his party members run out of control and did nothing to stop it. I don’t think the people of Sri Lanka will ever want to see a tire burning and green Pajero culture emerging in this country. But now every peace-loving citizen has similar things to worry about. It is no longer the green Pajero, but the ministers, their families and even their friends who enjoy unlimited power to manipulate and exploit the ordinary citizens of this country. We heard stories of a son and wife of a senior police officer beating a schoolmate. I was shocked to see the same lady walking out of the court complex waiving to onlookers as a heroine when she was refused bail and was about to get into the prison bus. The police officer is still on active duty! The culture in this country is turning to be one in which power rules without considering the consequences. Herding in these forces before they ruin the President will be his priority as he is ultimately responsible for his parties actions.

The next is forgetting the affluent in Colombo…….though small in numbers the Colombo elite manage and help this country run. Easy as it seems we cannot run this country with taxi drivers as mentioned by one of our late executive presidents who also concentrated on the rural community. The elite are everywhere – they head banks, they own the garment factories, large conglomerates and most of all they own the media!! If one thinks they can survive without the private media backing they live in a bubble. Even Lee Kuan Yew didn’t allow freedom of press during the time he led Singapore to where it is now. Singapore even now (2009) ranks 133rd from 175 countries in the press freedom rankings (we are much worse in case you wonder – #14 from the bottom). Putin too brought the press under his thumb and was widely criticised for killing the famous Anna Politkovskaya who was critical of him. No, my idea is not to start a killing spree of independent journalists but to feed their masters well with respect.

It will be truly sad if His Excellency screws up his end game when he has achieved the impossible in so little time.

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without ploughing the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.” Frederick Douglass, American statesman

“Built over two hundred years ago the city of Colombo is today in a bad state. A new capital is under construction at Hambantota to meet the future needs of the country.” said Transport Minister Dulles Alahapperuma.

He made those comments at the opening of the Information Technology Training Centre of the divisional office of the Sri Lanka Foreign Employment Bureau, Matara last Sunday (27).

Put up at a cost of approx. Rs. 70 lakhs the centre will house a computer lab to be used by local emigrant workers and their kith and kin while also providing facilities for them to keep in contact with those abroad.

“The President has emphasized the need for a new capital as Colombo is now decaying and is lacking the necessary facilities.

Scientists earlier predicted an optional city which was not welcomed by our politicians. Today the President out of concern for the country’s future has decided to embark on a project to create a new Capital city.

Click to read the original article

Is THIS what it is REALLY then, this whole issue of the IDP’s in camps? Silly me, and I was actually naïve enough to think that BOTH SIDES were actually discussing the pro’s and con’s of WHY the IDP’s couldn’t be re-located to their natural residences soon.

Could it REALLY be that, IN FACT, what we (the Majority) is attempting to do is play for enough time to ensure that WHEN they are so re-located, there is sufficient communal percentages in those areas to even-out our “minority” equation, and we need some time to do that…AND whom I thought were the sympathizers of the issue are REALLY on about, with all these campaigns regarding “the plight of the IDP’s”, is that very reason: that THEY TOO have been smart enough to figure out that THIS is what the State is really up to, and THAT IS THE REASON for them to make all this noise; to ensure that these IDP’s are back AS SOON AS POSSIBLE in order to negate all those attempts?

AND here I was thinking that we were ACTUALLY discussing the plight of those poor innocent people! EVEN THEY have become a “political pawn” to both sides, have they not? BLOODY POLITICS!!! BUT then again, this is my PERSONAL opinion – you read the article and come to your own conclusion, I am simply the “messenger”:

Blood on our hands, but this too shall pass
M K Bhadrakumar – The writer is a former Indian diplomat who served in Sri Lanka in the 1980s

Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran’s death circa May 19, 2009, in circumstances we would never quite get to know, concludes a morality play.

As the curtain comes down and we leave the theatre, the spectacle continues to haunt us. We feel a deep unease and can’t quite figure out the reason. Something rankles somewhere. And then we realise we have blood on our hands.

Not only our hands, but our whole body and deeper down, our conscience what remains of it after the mundane battles of our day-to-day life is also dripping with blood.

Prabhakaran’s blood. No, it is not only Prabhakaran’s, but also of 70,000 Sri Lankan Tamils who have perished in the unspeakable violence through the past quarter century.

All the pujas we may perform to our favourite Lord Ganesh each morning and evening religiously before we march ahead in our life from success to success cannot wash away the guilt we are bearing the curse of the 70,000 dead souls.

Our children and grandchildren will surely inherit the great curse. Oh, God, what a bitter legacy!

A long time ago, we created Prabhakaran. We picked him up as an urchin from nowhere. What we found charming about him was that he was so thoroughly apolitical almost innocent about politics. He was a simpleton in many ways, who had a passion for weapons and the military regimen. He suited our needs perfectly.

Which was to humiliate the J R Jayewardene government in Sri Lanka and teach it a hard lesson about the dangers of being disrespectful to India’s status as the pre-eminent power in the Indian Ocean. Jayewardene was too Western-oriented and behaved as if he never read about the Munroe Doctrine when he read history in Oxford. We didn’t like at all his dalliance with the Israelis and the Americans in our very backyard.

So, we fostered Prabhakaran and built him up as a pinprick on Jayewardene’s vanities as a Bhindranwale of the Deccan.

Then, as time passed, we decided that he had outlived his utility as we had come to develop an entirely different outlook towards the pro-Western orientation of the Colombo government by that time. Our egotistic leader in New Delhi who detested Jayewardene was no more in power and the new soft-spoken leader didn’t share his predecessor’s strong political antipathies.

So, we arm-twisted Prabhakaran to tone down and fall in line with our changed priorities. But we didn’t realise that by then he had become a fully-grown adult.

He resisted our blackmail and pressure tactic. When we pressured him even more and tried to collar him, he struck back. He dispatched assassins to India and killed our beloved leader. And he became our eternal enemy.

Yet, we couldn’t do anything to harm him. He had already become so strong an uncrowned king among his people. So we waited. We are a patient lot. Who can match us in infinite patience, given our 5000 years of history? Our cosmic religion gives us a unique wisdom to be patient and stoical and to bide our time.

And then, the opportune time came. We promptly moved in for the kill by aligning ourselves with Prabhakaran’s enemies. We armed them and trained them in better skills to kill. We guided them with good intelligence. We plugged all escape routes for Prabhakaran. And then, we patiently waited as the noose tightened around Prabhakaran’s neck.

Today he is no more. Believe it or not, we had no role in his death. How and when he died shall forever remain an enigma wrapped in a mystery. We will of course never divulge what we know.

All that matters is that the world woke up to the death only after the May 13 polling in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Otherwise, the parliamentary election results may have gone haywire against us. Strange are the ways of the Indian democracy.

We have had our revenge. Nothing else matters for the present.

What lies ahead? We will continue to make noises about a “political solution” to the Tamil problem that Prabhkaran championed through violent means.

Of course, let there be no doubt that we will periodically render humanitarian assistance to the hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians who have been herded into camps and may languish there till the dust settles down. We will demonstrate that we are indeed capable of the milk of human kindness. After all, the Sri Lankan Tamils are part of our historical consciousness.

But we must also be realistic. We know in our heart of hearts that the scope for a political solution in the fashion in which our leaders seem to suggest publicly is virtually nil.

The Sinhalese will never allow the world to dictate to them a political solution. More so, they will promptly and conclusively rebuff any attempt by us to seek a role in what they will now onward insist as strictly their internal affair.

Always remember that Sri Lanka is the last bastion of Theravada Buddhism and preserving that legacy is the Sinhalese people’s precious tryst with destiny. At least, that is how they feel. We have to accept the weight of their cultural nationalism.

They see Sri Lanka as the land of the Sinhalese. How would they allow us Indians who wiped out Buddhism with such ferocity from the subcontinent interfere with their keen sense of destiny as the custodians of that very same great religion? Never, never.

If we try to pressure the Sinhalese, they will approach the Chinese or the Pakistanis to balance our pressure. They are capable of doing that.

The Sinhalese are a gifted people. We all know few can never match their terrific skills in media management. They have always lived by their wits.

Equally, they are fantastic practitioners of diplomacy. We suspect that they may in fact have an edge over us on this front, for unlike us who are dissimulating from day to day as if we’re a responsible regional power and dissipating our energies in pastimes such as hunting down Somalian pirates in distant seas, they are a highly focused lot.

They have the grit because they are fighting for the preservation of their country’s future identity as a Buddhist nation.

Only last week, they showed their diplomatic skill by getting the Russians and the Chinese to stall a move in the United Nations Security Council to pressure them.
The Europeans fancy they can try the Sinhalese for war crimes. What naivety!
We asked the Sinhalese in private many a time how they proposed to navigate their way in the coming period. They wouldn’t divulge.
But we know that it is not as if they have no solution of their own to the Tamil problem, either. We know they already have a blueprint.

See, they have already solved the Tamil problem in the eastern provinces of Trincomalee, Batticaloa and Ampara. The Tamils are no more the majority community in those provinces.

Similarly, from tomorrow, they will commence a concerted, steady colonisation programme of the northern provinces where Prabhakaran reigned supreme for two decades. They will ensure incrementally that the northern regions no more remain as Tamil provinces.

The Tamils will be made into a minority community in their own northern homelands. They will have to live among the newly created Sinhalese settlements in those regions to the north of Elephant Pass.
All this will indeed be within Sri Lanka’s “federal structure”. Sri Lanka will continue to adhere to parliamentary democracy.

Give them a decade at the most. The Tamil problem will become a relic of the bloody history of the Indian subcontinent. The Sinhalese are good friends of India. Our elite and their elite speak the same idiom. We both speak good English, play golf and like chilled beer. We should, therefore, wish them well.

As for the blood on our hands, true, it is a nuisance. But this is not the first time in our history that we’re having blood on our hands.

Trust our words. No lasting harm will be done. Blood doesn’t leave stains.

Yarl's Wood: strongly criticised by the children's commissioner for England. Photograph: Dan Chung

Ministers were facing accusations today that hundreds of children are being held unnecessarily in immigration detention centres as official figures revealed, for the first time, that 470 minors were being detained with their families.

The figures, made public following pressure from children’s rights groups and MPs, showed most were under five.

Many were from troubled countries such as Zimbabwe, Sudan, Sri Lanka and Democratic Republic of Congo.

The UK has one of the worst records in Europe for detaining children, but accurate figures on how many are held, or for how long, have remained elusive.

While the Home Office has not divulged the length of detention, it provided a “snapshot” picture of those held on a single day: 30 June 2009.

This shows that almost a third of children were held for longer than 28 days, which means that in each case an immigration minister had to sign an authorisation for their continued detention.

The figures also show that out of 225 children released from detention in the second quarter this year, only 100 were removed from the UK.

Yesterday, MPs and children’s rights groups called for an end to the “national scandal” that has allowed children to be locked up unnecessarily.

Sir Al Aynsley-Green, the children’s commissioner for England, welcomed the publication of the figures, but said they raised important questions.

He said: “If they were allowed to stay at the end of their release, why did they have to go through the detention process in the first place?”

He described the fact that one in three had been held for longer than 28 days as “extremely worrying”.

Earlier this year, Aynsley-Green published a critical report into Yarl’s Wood detention centre in Bedfordshire which found the average stay for children had increased, and the decision to detain for longer than 28 days failed to take into account any welfare concerns raised.

Damian Green, shadow immigration minister, described the government’s attempts to find alternatives to detention for families as “feeble”, adding: “It would be better and cheaper if we don’t have to lock up young children for weeks and sometimes months. Other countries seem to do better than we do at finding alternatives.”

The average cost of holding someone in an immigration detention centre is £130 per day.

The Guardian has spoken to three families held at Yarl’s Wood for between 19 and 71 days. One of the children has been diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, while another, Ibrahim Ssentongo, four, remains traumatised seven months after his detention.

Ibrahim’s father, Stephen Ssentongo, 35, from Uganda, said: “When he sees people in uniforms of white shirts and black trousers, like bus drivers or security guards in shopping centres, he stops. He wants to hold your hand or to stand in front of you, so that you will hold him. He is scared.”

Sheila Melzak, a consultant child psychotherapist who has worked with families in detention, said Ibrahim’s trauma was far from unusual.

“All the young people I have been talking to have lingering effects, after months and even after years” she said.

“It is frightening for children to see their parents in tears. They see adults in a high state of stress, they hear a lot of shouting and crying. It is a highly institutionalised environment and that leads to problems with eating and sleeping and learning.”

Bethlehem Abate, 12, from Ethiopia, described the day she and her mother were seized in an early morning raid as “one of the worst days I ever had to experience”.

The schoolgirl, who has been living in Leeds for four years after fleeing her home country to seek asylum, said she was disillusioned by the British government, because she felt sure “they would understand our situation and help us”, but instead they have “turned everything around.”

Family and children’s support groups said the statistics showed the UK Borders Agency was failing in its duty to detain children only “as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time”.

Amanda Shah, of Bail for Immigration Detainees, said: “Fifty-six per cent of detained children were released back to their communities in the UK, their detention having served no purpose other than wasting taxpayers’ money and traumatising the children involved. Children we have supported have suffered depression, weight loss, bedwetting and even self-harm as a result of their detention – that is the human reality behind the statistics.”

Lisa Nandy, policy adviser at the Children’s Society, said children were being detained unnecessarily because the asylum system was “chaotic” and because the UK Border Agency and private contractors who work for them often targeted families to increase their removal rates.

The Home Office said today : “UK Border Agency fully recognises its responsibilities towards children but these responsibilities have to be exercised alongside our duty to enforce the laws on immigration and asylum. If a family decide to appeal against the courts decision while being detained the removal process is halted. If a judge agrees that there are fresh grounds for an appeal the family are usually returned back to the community until the case has been reviewed.”

Link to original article

I received this email written by Farah Azoor Tennakoon who is friend of the family.

My name is Farah Azoor Tennakoon, the best friend of Mrs. Sandhya Jayawardene, the mother of Kavindi Jayawardene, the 14-year old girl from Museaus College who hung herself with her school tie on 22nd July 2009. Kavindi’s mother and I are best friends since August 2000 and Kavindi was a dear friend of my daughter, who was two years younger to her. I have known Kavindi quite closely since she was in Montessori with my daughter.

Her father is a professional/graduate Accountant and her mother too was in the accountancy field before she gave up her job upon marriage. Her mother is from Kegalle, an innocent, down-to-earth, virtuous woman. Kavindi was an only child, extraordinarily beautiful and was very shy. She was a studious girl whose report cards received from school always described her as a “Siyalu Dena Samaga Sahayogayen Kriya Karana, Vineetha, Keekaru, Sisuwiyeki”. Anyone can take a look at her school books and report cards and see if she seems a disturbed or disobedient girl.

Kavindi’s mother was the kind of woman who even went to the extent of having a Bodhi Poojawa for my daughter who was a non-Buddhist, when she was sitting for her 5th Grade Scholarship exam, thinking of someone else’s child as her own.

It is so saddening to hear that her name has been tarnished by the school making her look like a girl who was into porn, boyfriends and similar stuff whereas in actual sense she was a girl who did not even collect pictures of movie stars, cricketers or any such thing that a teenager of today would do but was always getting good grades at school and excelling in studies.

In fact, Kavindi was the pillar of strength to her mother during their family ordeal of Kavindi’s father going through a kidney transplant about two years ago. Athula, her father was not the “STRICT” father as depicted in the media. He in fact would return home and keep Kavindi on his lap and ask her what happened at school or joke with her about things on TV. Even after Kavindi attained age and showed all signs of a beautiful young lady, Athula petted her like a little girl.

She was very close to her mother and till her death Kavindi’s world and after school activities involved playing with her little cousins next door and helping her mother with housework. She encouraged her mother to do home-gardening and have plenty of vegetables grown in their 15 perch house and land and loved seeing the produce being consumed. She was never into facebook, computer games, hip electronic gadgets or any such thing. I was always in and out of their house as Sandhya was one of the few persons (except my own Mother) that I would trust to leave my daughter with whenever I had to leave my daughter with someone.

During the past 8 years, my daughter spent most of her holidays at their home where I would drop her off in the mornings and pick her up at evening and stay on for at least 1-2 hours chatting with my best friend. Whenever I called my daughter in between, Kavindi would talk to me too and relate what they had been playing during the day and tell of their plans for evening play and I would often find Sandhya feeding both my daughter and hers, if I happen to call during lunch time. Kavindi played hide and seek, dolls, imaginary house, Lego and similar games with her mother, my daughter and her little cousins from next door and was innocent and unspoiled and a far cry from what is being told about her now.

It is sad to learn from her classmates that a Prefect from her school actually dragged her by her tie upon confronting her for playing around with a mobile (which did not even belong to her) and taken her to the Principal’s office. This fact would now be denied by school authorities for obvious reasons but for a child who has never been reprimanded in her entire life for indiscipline just cannot bear such humiliation and public embarrassment.

The school authorities should also appoint Counselors in schools who are qualified enough to handle these kind of situations instead of having Teachers and mere school girls (Prefects) handling situations involving human emotions.

Even when her body was discovered hanging in the toilet, the teachers or authorities of the school had not even loosened her tie around the neck or given appropriate first aid to revive her. The only thing Museaus can do now is to tarnish her good name and make her look like a “bad girl” who committed suicide, thereby deviating the attention of the public to the fact that the girl was suspected, embarrassed in public, emotionally abused and mishandled by Prefects and Teachers who were not capable of understanding emotions of a 14-year old and never thought of repercussions of misjudgment, harshness, cruelty and public humiliation. She had in fact begged that it is okay to tell about the incident to her mother but never to tell her father because he was a kidney patient whom Kavindi always feared would die if he faces sadness.

Kavindi was the type of girl who was so shy that she would even nudge me and her mother in embarrassment if we ever spoke out in public in protest for small injustices such as being over-charged at stores or such similar small incidents and tell “aney randu karanna epa ammey, nikam innako ammey, etc…” and blush in embarrassment. She is the type of girl who encouraged and loved the fact that her mother was among the very few mothers at her school who only wore a simple ‘Osariya’ whenever she had to visit Kavindi’s school. She never even allowed her mother’s Saree blouses to have a deep-cut neckline and would protest against any body part of her mother being shown in public. It is this virtuous charactered Kavindi who today is being portrayed as the girl who would pose nude for her boyfriend and allow to be photographed or filmed.

Since the Police have found out that Kavindi is not the owner of the mobile in question, then why isn’t anyone talking about the true owner of the mobile phone (the other student of the same school)?

I migrated to Canada 7 months ago but today each and every person I talk to in Sri Lanka knows Kavindi as the “girl who watched porn on her mobile and committed suicide in shame”, or “the girl who had her nude pictures in her mobile”, or “the girl who was mentally ill or depressed”, or “the girl whose parents were too strict” and such ghastly impressions.

Today, my best friend is a woman who hears her only child’s voice echoing around the house, sees her face every where, a broken woman with no hope for the future and a woman who wishes she died with Kavindi. She is a well-read but simple housewife whose world was woven around her only child. She is still that woman I knew who forgives the media for tarnishing her precious daughter’s name, forgives the people who did not provide timely first aid to her daughter when they found her hanging, forgives the prefects who manhandled her daughter, but the fact remains, Sandhya’s soul died along with her only child. Athula would have no interest in getting his regular dialysis treatment anymore as he was doing it all for his wife and daughter.

My only appeal to you is appropriate investigation and justice to Kavindi’s name unduly tarnished along with her parents reputation.