From the day of nominations up to the 10th May – the day of the election – there was a full scale terror campaign of intimidation and fear launched by the armed groups which are supported by the Sri Lankan government.
High profile assassination demands massive response
socialistworld.net
On Friday morning, 10 November, a prominent Tamil MP in Sri Lanka, Nadarajah Raviraj, was killed . He was shot outside his home in Colombo soon after he had appeared on a breakfast-time TV programme. One of his four bodyguards was also killed. The assassins arrived in a three-wheeler ‘taxi’, fired the fatal shots as the MP was getting into his car and left on a motorbike.
Government isolated; workers need solutions
Sri Lanka is now most certainly experiencing its ’Fourth Eelam War’. But neither side – the Sri Lankan Government nor the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) – is prepared to accept this. According to the Sri Lanka Monitoring mission (SLMM), over 4,000 people were killed in the 15 months after president Mahinda Rajapakse came to power up to February 2007. This shows that the undeclared war between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE has escalated to the skies.
INDIA SAW more than 15,000 killed as the tidal wave pounded southern fishing villages with Tamil Nadu and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands the worst hit. Thousands are still missing. In Andhra Pradesh alone, 400 fishermen were missing immediately after the first strikes.
The Hindu newspaper, published in southern India, reported that 40 children playing cricket on a beach in Cuddalore drowned when a massive wave pulled them out to sea. One local man, who lost two sons playing on the beach, said: “I suddenly saw waves 30 to 40ft high. People just froze, they didn’t know what to do.”