Crisis lifts Sri Lankan Marxists
CS Monitor,
Jan 25, 2005.
BALAPITYA, SRI LANKA – In the early morning hours at a rural Buddhist temple, a medical team from the revolutionary JVP party is treating villagers injured in the tsunami.
The chief doctor, Pasanna Cooray, has been working 19-hour days up and down the Sri Lankan coast. Here he has just given a very public blood pressure check to the temple's chief monk. The act is part of a new convergence between leftist JVP radicals and Buddhist monks, who are emissaries of mystical Sri Lankan nationalism.
For the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), a disciplined and once powerful and brutal Marxist movement, the tsunami is proving to be a vehicle for its vision of people's liberation and its own popular comeback.
"When people are suffering they need a friend, and we are taking steps to 'serve the people,' " Dr. Cooray says, quoting a phrase made popular in Maoist China.
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Published: Tue Jan 25 19:18:51 EST 2005
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Tea with the Tamil Tigers
Salon - Free Pass Required,
Jan 25, 2005.
an. 25, 2005
Today, Dwayne and I pile into our muddy four-wheeler and stop at the Mercy Corps office to pick up the ever-patient Mr. Tangal, a local employee who will serve as our translator and liaison during our journey to Muthur. Muthur lies only 10 miles south, across Kodiyar Bay and along the coast, but we will have to detour far inland to reach the place. The camp itself is in a nearby village called Samboor.
The trip is significant, for this will be our first sojourn to a camp located in territory controlled by LTTE (the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) or, as they're more infamously known, the Tamil Tigers. Since the early 1980s, the militant Tigers have been fighting, violently and futilely, to divide Sri Lanka into two nations: Sinhalese and Tamil.
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Published: Tue Jan 25 19:22:49 EST 2005
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STF-LTTE working together in East
