Pri's blog

I was spared the video because I don't watch television. Here it is from the Daily Mirror Website. Check it out here My September 26 vignette was about war. But this one is about something happening in peace time, in Bambalapitiya, in the heart of residential and commercial Colombo. The man who was bludgeoned to death was deranged and as such violent to those around him - but do our forces not have any training to overpower him without killing him? and what about all those people, civilians like you and me, who stood around watching this happen? Is this our post-conflict collective conscience?

Check this out if you haven't already. http://tinyurl.com/kw526a It is a video of the Sri Lankan army executing Tamils early this year and was shown on Channel 4 recently and did the rounds of emails, facebook etc. Naturally it sparked a huge row. GOSL denied it of course. Experts tried to prove it was a fake. Last heard, GOSL was going to sue Channel 4. The footage is udoubtedly quite horrific and irrespective of whether this video is a fake or not, I think it is quite possible that such incidents could have taken place. What I find disturbing is that responsible journalists, and responsible citizens are happy to accept 'evidence' that has so obviously not been triangulated, that is openly admitted to being 'unverified'. Is it not also an indictment of our times that no one is seeing the video as depicting the brutalising effect of war . Armed conflict creates monsters on both sides - and this for me is the most important message that this video needs to bri...

Create More Givers – Global Conference on “Enhancing the Role of Philanthropy in Challenging Times” was a conference held on the 22 and 23 July, at Hotel Nikko in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The Conference’s claim to being Global came from the range of speakers – even though the majority were from Malaysia, there were others from Indonesia, Australia, India, and one speaker from Trust Africa, Senegal.The participants however were mostly Malaysian: mostly Malaysian academics and NGOs – the latter from ‘charities’ rather than development NGOs, and several activist NGOs, mainly because I suspect Josie Fernandez, the Managing Director of Philanthropy Asia, comes from an activist background. A distinction that I remember we made a couple of decades ago when Professor Hiran Dias initiated the NGDO (Non-governmental development organizations) Management Consortium in AIT. There were I understood later, some representatives of Malaysian corporate giants in the audience, particularly of their trust...

A very provocative presentation at CEPA’s 38 th Open Forum entitled “Urban Poverty in the US and in Sri Lanka: how different is it?” was made by Professor Lakshman Yapa at CEPA yesterday evening. He argued that economic development, especially economic development of the capitalist kind, the dominant model running the global economy today, cannot and will not eradicate poverty in the US or elsewhere. This he argues is because economic development is itself one of the drivers that perpetuates poverty. The trouble with this is that we’ve all known this for sometime and some of us (and I mean the big players in development) are finally beginning to accept it, openly. Which is why the World Bank is making a greater emphasis on social protection and safety nets – the things one needs to do to relieve the deprivation of those who do not share the spoils of economic growth. Which is why ‘big’ philanthropy, of the scale of Gates and Buffet, are making headlines. We’ve made...

Was at a workshop organised on the above subject by the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) and the World Bank Sri Lanka mission . Think this is part of a series of WB/IPS collaborations. What was disturbing in the discussion of safety nets was the underlying assumption (as I understood Shekar Shah of the World Bank to say) that safety nets would give the opportunity for the politicians to carry on business as usual. It was interesting that the only politican present was against safety nets - but that is almost a different story. My questions are can poverty not be reduced without safety nets ? and doesn't the current multiple crisis situation the world is facing, provide the opportunity and the need to rethink business as usual? It is true Sri Lanka has been having safety nets since, as one presenter pointed out, World War II. But surely our much celebrated record of MDGs is a result not of safety nets, but of social policies concerned with equity and redistribution of res...

This is the story of a colleague working in an organisation of which I am a director. I have changed his name as a respect to his privacy, but the story remains the same. Mr Sivanathan’s family has been severely affected by the recent events in the previously rebel-held areas of North Eastern Sri Lanka. Mr. Sivanathan’s son and daughter-in-law were teachers in Kilinochchi before they and their four children were forced into the ‘No Fire Zone’ by LTTE rebels. Whilst being held in the ‘No Fire Zone’, the family’s young son was killed by a shell attack. The funeral was held on Tuesday 19 th May. The same shell seriously injured the child’s mother, who has been transported to hospital and is being cared for by a team of French Medics. Mr. Sivanathan’s son and three surviving grandchildren, girls aged 11, 9 and 4, were rescued by the Sri Lankan army, and transferred to an IDP camp in Setti Kulam. Security measures mean that they are unable to leave the camp to visit their mother ...

The war is going to end in the worst possible way. Huge number of innocent civilians are either dead, maimed or injured; a huge number of young soldiers will go home without some part of their body, or in body bags unopened, unidentified(army casualties is no one's business at the moment). Meanwhile both sides are throwing invectives at each other like they were teenage neighbourhood gangs. The moderate voice seems to be stilled. That is until I read this. http://kafila.org/2009/04/07/who-is-responsible-for-the-slaughter-of-civilians-in-the-vanni-by-rohini-hensman/

As both a coordinator and an evaluator of networks I have been frustrated at the lack of understanding about this organisational form or way of working despite the growing popularity of networks in the world of development policy and practice. The proposal for a roundtable was presented to the 3ie Conference on "Perspectives of Impact Evaluation" because of this frustration. (For more information about the conference check their website ) The roundtable was conceptualised in collaboration with three colleagues: Kate Czuczman from the International Forum for Rural Transport and Development ( www.ifrtd.org ), Sheila Oparaocha from ENERGIA ( www.energia.org ) and Paul Starkey, author of Networking for development ( P.H.Starkey@reading.ac.uk ), but unfortunately none of them could come to Cairo. We decided, in the true spirit of networking, that we would draw the 'expertise' for the roundtable from among the participants at the Conference. Finally, there were sevente...

The Aid Workers Network recently had a posting (see http://www.aidworkers.net/?q=node/2027 if you are interested) with a quote from an American who had worked in the developing world for many years, and who resigned as a field leader in a large American based child sponsorship organisation because his "conscience could no longer handle an increasing organisational focus on what was good for the organisation than what is best for the child and community”. He highlights the sophisticated marketing programme that tries to alleviate the donors’ guilt (“we have so much and they have so little”) and the imbeddedness in the America Knows Best scenario (also Britain, Europe, Australia etc knows best) that continues to be played out around the world and asks aren’t there better ways. Of course there are. What I find distasteful about the child sponsorship organizations is the parading of images of liquid-eyed poor children to elicit sympathy and raise funds. This is no different to beggar...

Today I attended the funeral of Lasantha Wickremetunge, the Chief Editor of the Sunday Leader who was brutally assassinated on Thursday. I didn't know Lasantha. I didn't even like his style of journalism. But I admired his courage. I didn't go to Kanatte to just mourn him but also to mourn the death of the Sri Lanka I knew and loved. The Sunday Leader of January 11 carried this editorial, written by Lasantha in anticipation of his assassination. It is worth reproducing in full but you can also access it on http://www.thesundayleader.lk/20090111/editorial-.htm Editorial -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- And Then They Came For Me No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed...