the news

4 Priests Arrested in China
Four priests have been arrested and detained for refusing to join the Patriotic Association, the government body that oversees religious practice in the country.Three of the priests were arrested July 24, at the home of Catholic faithful in the Ximeng region of Inner Mongolia, the Cardinal Kung Foundation reported. Father Liang Aijun, 35, Father Wang Zhong, 41, and Father Gao Jinbao, 34, were hiding in order to avoid arrest, but were finally caught by eight plainclothes men. During the initial phase of the arrest, the priests were locked up in a cage, prohibited from talking to anyone and refused water. They have now been transferred to an undisclosed location. The fourth priest, Father Cui Tai, 50, of Shuangshu Village, Zhuolu County, was detained after a minor motorcycle accident in early July. He has been detained at the public security and religious bureau since the accident.Father Cui, of the Diocese of Xuanhua, Hebei, has also refused to register with the Patriotic Association.According to the Cardinal Kung Foundation, at least five bishops are in jail and others are under house arrest and surveillance. About 15 priests and an unknown number of laypeople are also jailed.


PRE-CONDITION FOR TAKING WAR FROM EAST TO NORTH --Jehan Perera
The high cost of war and the purpose of war become agonizing questions when confronted face to face with the ground reality in the east. In the abstract, as powerfully articulated by President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his government, the reason for the war is to bring security and democracy by getting rid of the LTTE which has been banned internationally on account of its terrorist practices. It is still early after the liberation of the totality of the east, so the best may be still to come in the form of the government's eastern rising programme. But on the ground, the reality is different as I saw in the company of other journalists from the mass media during a five day visit of the three districts of the east. Instead of security and democracy, I saw a continuing high level of insecurity, little democracy and no evidence at all of economic development. Belying the government claims on political platforms and in the government controlled media that normalcy and reconstruction are, and will soon be, the features of the liberated east, I saw a present picture of utter misery that spread through at least two of the three districts in the east, the only exception being Ampara at the bottom of the Eastern Province and farthest from the north. In a place called Kilivetti, near Muttur, where fierce battles raged between the government forces and LTTE, and lines of control shifted with the rapidity of blitzkriegs, I saw a scene that I had previously associated with the civil war stricken areas of Africa.There was a vast grassless and treeless tract of land on which there were sheds made of corrugated metal, including both walls and roof. I saw about two thousand people, all of them citizens of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, many of them infants and toddlers, baking in the tropical sun at high noon under a cloudless sky. Some of the mothers who held these infants looked like children themselves, physically stunted by years of malnutrition and married off young to escape the forced child recruitment of the LTTE and the government-supported Karuna group against whom there are at least 175 outstanding cases of this evil practice.It was a sight that could even bring tears to the eyes of hardened and experienced leaders such as President Mahinda Rajapaksa, and even LTTE leader Velupillai Pirapaharan, who are well known for the love of their children, whom they have sent abroad to the best academies of the world for their education. But the continuing tragedy is that these desperately situated refugee populations are not seen by such leaders who decide on the fate of these people like gods from afar, and who therefore make plans for the country and its suffering people in the abstract.MADE WORSEIn a perverse way the liberation of the east by the government forces has made life even worse for some sectors of the liberated people of the east. The people in the welfare centre in Kilivetti were those displaced from East Muttur, which after the liberation has been declared a High Security Zone by the government, and so those people can never go back to their homes. They may have lived there for generations, on ancestral lands, but now they are thrown out by the liberators on the grounds of national security. These miserable people are being resettled in stages at a location called Eechalampattu, but I was also told that no suitable infrastructure had been laid for them by the government, and it was as if they were being dumped there and left to fend for themselves. The plight of anyone who gets displaced and the inability of the government to effectively cope with the refugee situation can be seen by the fact that in the east there still continue to be tsunami refugees. Not far from Kilivetti, in Habib Nagar, we saw over three hundred people who were angry and frustrated after being in refugee camps for nearly four years. The reason they could not go back to their tsunami destroyed homes was because they were within the 50 meter buffer zone. It is ironic that a government that cannot still find land for tsunami refugees should deliberately be displacing thousands of people from their places of residence on the ground that these are high security zones. There are other sections of the population also who are suffering as a result of the liberation. The fishermen of Muttur complained that after the liberation of the east the restrictions on their fishing had increased and they were no longer permitted to use their mechanized boats, but had to use canoes for shallow sea fishing alone. The denial of livelihood is not limited to these fisher folk. In Paddipalai a rice mill for the employment of women, a technical training centre to improve livelihood skills and a teacher training institute funded by an international donor agency have all been arbitrarily taken over by the security forces. These actions have been justified ostensibly on the grounds of national security, to which all branches of government give deference, so it is only to the gods that the people can appeal.Although the recent military operations in the east have successfully eliminated the LTTE's presence as an administrative and governing entity, it has not eliminated the fear of their capacity as a guerilla force. The capital of the Eastern Province, Trincomalee town, is like a garrison city with military personnel at virtually every street corner. Travelling becomes difficult with physical checks on vehicles taking place at intervals of a few hundred meters. The transport of goods becomes difficult, driving up the cost of living to people who have no stable means of earning an income. It is evident that the security forces fear either one of two things or both. One is that the LTTE continues to be present in the east as a guerilla force. The other is that the east cannot be insulated from the north where the LTTE continues to be entrenched. MOVING EXPERIENCEIn these circumstances, the military logic will be to seek to ensure the security of the east by neutralising the LTTE threat from the north. This will mean that the war cannot end with the liberation of the east, but must continue to the north. It is this logic that appears to be driving the government's military machine at this point of time. Virtually every day there are reports of skirmishes and military confrontations taking place in the north, and these could possibly build up into a major conflagration in the near future. An escalation of war in the north could also serve another useful purpose to the government of diverting the concern of the masses of people away from the economic crisis they are experiencing and towards the military battlefields. President Mahinda Rajapaksa is presently stomping the rich electoral grounds of the south affirming his government's determination to continue with the war and militarily vanquish the LTTE in the north, as it has done in the east. On the other hand, the costs of this war are bound to be much higher in the north than in the east. The north has always been the stronghold of the LTTE. The question of the cost of the war will surface in full measure with any government onslaught on the LTTE in the north. Once again there will be massive displacement of people, as occurred in the east, and very likely on a larger scale. The homes that people have built and protected over generations will be destroyed, and their properties looted, as they were in the east.One of the most moving experiences for myself and the team of journalists came when we stopped for a few minutes at a refugee camp on the side of the road to take photographs of the tents. Children who were playing nearby immediately stopped their games and came dashing to the scene. They were wide eyed and smiling with eagerness to be a part of the photographs. They were no different from children elsewhere in the country, in our own homes and towns. It was evident that their parents, who had lost their homes, had not told their children to hold grudges against those who were not of their community and from other parts of the country. The trust, the love and the fate of these fellow citizens in the liberated east is a clarion call against a repeat performance in the north.War in the north should only be a last resort. The country is not an abstract idea to be fought for, but a living organism comprising all of its citizens. Any government that deliberately pursues a military solution as its first option that leads to the eviction of hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankan citizens from their homes, and to the loss of their ancestral properties, will jeopardize its moral right to govern the country. Before taking the drastic step of stepping up the war in the north, the Rajapaksa government has a duty to present a reasonable political package that could be the basis for a just solution to the ethnic conflict, and is acceptable to moderate Tamil opinion. Only if such a political package is rejected by the LTTE should an offensive military campaign on the lines of the eastern campaign be contemplated for the north.