When I returned home in 1995 with our pet Dalmatian with its spots, hostile crowds gathered around us at Katunayake with shouts of Koti-Balla (Tiger-Dog). On other trips I had been taken straight to the Katunayake Police Station, and held up at Vanuniya and released after my friend travelling with me was arrested.
Would be shot
I […]

“….Cicero’s tongue will have to be torn out, Copernicus’s eyes gouged out, and Shakespeare stoned. That is my system.” – Dostoyevsky (The Possessed)
Removed as usual
With the speed of lightening and without as much as a nano-ripple, the Rajapaksa regime
removed Neville Gunawardana, the ‘crime-busting’ Director General of the Customs.
Probing the leak rather than the company
Mr. […]

“This event is the commencement of my process of transition. I have begun my farewell with
this gathering of friends from the Sri Lankan community in Paris because my wife Sanja and I
shall be leaving France, somewhere early in the New Year in January. My two year term has come to an end or will come […]

Determined to impeach
The government appears determined to go ahead with the impeachment of the Chief Justice. So
far the attempts to broker a mutually acceptable solution have not yielded success. Not even the messages sent by the highest religious dignitaries or their joint statements have had their desired impact. There have also been civil society initiatives […]

“…..to not to be a fanatic means to be, to some extent and in some way, a traitor in the eyes of the fanatic”–  Amos Oz (How to cure a fanatic)
Removing a Nail in the Tiger’s Coffin, on VP’s Birthday

What if after the defeat of the JVP insurgency, the Premadasa administration prevented Sinhala families from […]

I had been asked to speak on the votes of the Ministry of External Affairs
during the Committee Stage of the Budget Debate, but was subsequently told that there was no time for this. Since I had prepared a text, which I felt discussed urgent issues in the current context, I thought it would be useful […]

Kamaya Jayatissa participated at the French-Sri Lankan Diaspora Youth Workshop “Post-War Reconciliation Dialogue for a Sustainable Peace”, which took place in Paris, on October 27th, 2012. She intervened as a panelist on the theme “Individual and collective identity(ies): between search and struggle”.
The event was organized by What’s Next!, an independent forum comprising of post-graduates and […]

 “In the end the impeachment is really about us, our security and our future. Are we going to allow the Rajapaksas to do to the judiciary what they have done to politics and economics? Are we going to prove that there is no sleep like the feigned sleep of the cowardly and the indifferent?”
“We can neither […]

“The Rajapaksas want more power. Again, according to Basil Rajapaksa, “In other countries who are successful, they were successful because immediately one person he takes the decisions. In Sri Lanka, the main problem is that that is not there, more decisions have to be centralized” (ibid). Wade through the grammatical-mire and the meaning is as […]

Two examples from Sri Lanka in the context of post-conflict reconciliation
Speaking about the capacity that art may have to contribute to a social achievement like building sustainable peace or national reconciliation goes somewhat against the tide of the Western contemporary art. This approach could easily be perceived as naïve in the context of today’s contemporary […]