{"id":101930,"date":"2013-08-23T00:10:05","date_gmt":"2013-08-22T18:40:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=101930"},"modified":"2013-08-26T16:55:58","modified_gmt":"2013-08-26T11:25:58","slug":"sri-lanka-the-smugglers-prey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/sri-lanka-the-smugglers-prey\/","title":{"rendered":"Sri Lanka: The Smugglers&#8217; Prey"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By\u00a0<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Eric_Ellis_(journalist)\">Eric Ellis<\/a><\/span>\u00a0&#8211;<\/strong><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_101767\" style=\"width: 160px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/sri-lankas-army-of-buddhist\/eric-ellis\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-101767\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-101767\" class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-101767\" title=\"ERIC ELLIS\" src=\"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/ERIC-ELLIS-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/ERIC-ELLIS-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/ERIC-ELLIS-50x50.jpg 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-101767\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Eric Ellis<\/p><\/div>\n<p><em><strong>Holding Australia\u2019s domestic \u201cstop the boats\u201d politics to ransom, the Sri Lankan military is accused of grabbing land in traditional Tamil areas, ordering soldiers to marry Tamil women, even \u2013 as arrests this week show \u2013 fostering the people smuggling trade.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong><\/strong><span style=\"font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;\">What does a Sri Lankan would-be asylum seeker look like? Many look like this man. His name is Gnanaseelan. He\u2019s 32. He\u2019s a Tamil, though never a Tiger. A father. A widower.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>He lives in this desperate shanty outside the seaside hamlet of Mullaitivu, on Sri Lanka\u2019s war-ravaged north-east coast, with nine relatives, six of them motherless children.<\/p>\n<p>Gnanaseelan and his family were caught in the crossfire of the last murderous days of Sri Lanka\u2019s civil war between the Tamil Tigers and the mostly Sinhalese government forces in Colombo, which\u00a0<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/2009\/05\/17\/us-srilanka-war-idUSTRE54D1GR20090517\">ended in May 2009<\/a><\/span>\u00a0on a blood-soaked spit of sand about three kilometres from here.<\/p>\n<p>He was maimed when his leg was struck by a random shell. Four years on, Gnanaseelan is an itinerant, unskilled labourer, taking a day\u2019s work whenever he can find one, which isn\u2019t that often. His limp and his ethnicity are hard to disguise and the Sinhalese contractors building new roads around here, on deals from government friends in distant Colombo, prefer their labour to be able-bodied and of their own kind.<\/p>\n<p>Read more in the\u00a0<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/sri-lanka.theglobalmail.org\/smugglers-prey\">The Globalmail<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p><em>*<strong><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Eric_Ellis_(journalist)\">Eric Ellis<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0is an award-winning journalist who writes about the politics, economics and societies of South and South-East Asia.\u00a0He has written for a range of international journals;\u00a0Fortune Magazine,\u00a0Forbes, the\u00a0Financial Times,\u00a0Time Magazine,\u00a0The Times,\u00a0The Bulletin\/Newsweek,\u00a0The Spectator,Institutional Investor,\u00a0Euromoney,\u00a0The Sydney Morning Herald,\u00a0The Age,\u00a0The Australian Financial Review\u00a0and the\u00a0International Herald Tribune.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p> [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":101767,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-101930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-colombotelegraph","category-constitutional-reforms"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Sri Lanka: The Smugglers&#039; 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