Ram Manikkalingam is currently a visiting professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam. He has been a physicist, a radical activist, a political analyst, a political theorist, a presidential advisor, a beggar, a funder, and of course a slacker. He speaks four languages badly (and none of them are Urdu, Hindi or Punjabi). He likes to think he is a black New Yorker and a leftist Sri Lankan, but his friends and enemies say he is really a WASP from Boston.
by Ram Manikkalingam It was December 1999. Two years before the attacks on the Twin Towers by Al Qaeda. I landed at Geneva airport and checked into my hotel. I was on my way to Colombo. I had stopped in Geneva to meet David Petrasek. I had never met him before. But I knew that…
by Ram Manikkalingam I am sitting in Colombo, Sri Lanka. We are at peace and are enjoying real democracy after more than three decades of civil war and almost five years of creeping authoritarian rule under the previous president. I spend half my time in Amsterdam, just a two-hour train ride to Brussels and a…
by Ram Manikkalingam Barack Obama is the new Ronald Reagan. He can do for the Democrats what Reagan did for the Republicans. His election can set the stage for fashioning a new coalition of those who are left leaning on either economic or cultural issues, with those who have been traditionally left leaning on both…
by Ram Manikkalingam Twenty-five years ago Sri Lanka’s conflict was suddenly transformed into a violent civil war. The Tamil Tigers – then barely more than a couple of dozen – ambushed a convoy killing a dozen soldiers in Jaffna on July 23rd 1983. Instead of targeting those who carried out the attack Sri Lankan state-backed…
by Ram Manikkalingam The US is a strange place. How you look really matters. Of course it matters everywhere else too. The clothes you wear, the way you wear them, your hairstyle or lack of it, your shoes and the bag you carry, all of these make a difference wherever you live. But, in the…
by Ram Manikkalingam I recently visited Somalia to attend a meeting of religious leaders, clan elders and women leaders. Somalia is not a very stable place. But like all unstable countries – there are pockets of relative stability. While this is true of most countries that have an internal armed conflict, Somalia has the additional…
byRam Manikkalingam I sat in on a class that Obama also attended at Harvard Law School. I believe it was the Spring or Fall of 1991. The class was called “Re-inventing Democracy”. It was taught by Roberto Unger, who dresses like an undertaker, lectures like a prophet, and thinks like a philosopher in a hurry. …
by Ram Manikkalingam Prime Minister John Howard’s days were numbered the day Dr. Senan Nagararatnam, a radiologist in Sydney, took two weeks leave from work and went to Bennelong – Howard’s electorate – to campaign against him. I have known Senan since we were in first grade at Royal Junior School in Colombo. You couldn’t…
by Ram Manikkalingam My senior editor Morgan Meis and I were watching Sri Lanka play Australia in the Cricket World Cup, in an Australian pub in New York city last month. Morgan accused me of being a nationalist, because I did not agree with Amnesty International’s (AI) campaign for international human rights monitors in Sri…
by Ram Manikkalingam Borat was disappointing – long, tedious, and repetitive. Maybe I had already seen too many clips on TV. So there was nothing new, except a faux plot to link together a series of previous episodes. There were some scenes that made me laugh, some scenes that made me gag, and some scenes…
More than any other issue, it is the US invasion of Iraq that has separated the US from the rest of world after September 11th. It has also divided the United States internally, weakened its capacity to deal with the threat of extremist Islamic terror, and made a mockery of US power. While Guantanamo, Afghanistan,…
I was invited by Dr. Luis Rodriguez-Pineiro to give a lecture at his class on the History of Law at the Universidad de Sevilla. Dr. Pineiro works on indigenous rights and has just published a book, “Indigenous Peoples, Postcolonialism and International Law”. He asked me to speak on issues related to national identity and political…
I recently attended a conference on Central American peace processes in Toledo, organised and sponsored by the Project on Justice in Times of Transition and hosted in Spain by the Centro International Toledo para La Paz. The conference brought together many of the key participants in the peace processes in Central America during the mid-80s…
I recently visited Dien Bien Phu, a dusty nondescript Vietnamese border town near Laos. Here, French fantasies of re-colonialism were dashed by a Vietnamese peasant army. Visiting Dien Bien Phu is not difficult for a progressive anti-imperialist left liberal. There are no mixed emotions, at least politically. Who can begrudge Ho Chi Minh and the…
I recently read a memoir about rape in Russian-occupied Germany: A Woman in Berlin. In the book, an anonymous young woman recounts her experiences during the first few weeks of Russian occupation. The memoir was written in real time. It reflects the urgency and immediacy of the moment. The recounting was stark, unsentimental and lacked…