News stories by Feizal Samath, page 6

World leaders, employers and trade unionists, meeting here at a crisis summit on employment, welcomed a new ‘Global Jobs Pact’, but warned that any delay in its implementation would worsen the problems created by financial speculation.

For people in Sri Lanka’s war-torn North, for many years life has meant virtually living out of a suitcase while moving from place to place to escape the rigours of war and bloody combat.

As Sri Lanka prepares for a new chapter of development after ending nearly three decades of conflict, ecologists among other experts here are calling for a ‘green’ revolution against the usual foreign investment, private sector-driven type of progress.

Trade unions from Bahrain, Jordan and Kuwait came together with their Sri Lankan counterparts here to strike an unprecedented agreement on the welfare of migrant workers.

In a spirit of South-South Cooperation Asian NGOs must take the lead from international and western NGOs working in war-torn Sri Lanka and across Asia, as they understand the local dynamics and culture much more deeply than anyone else, an experienced Asian NGO leader told IPS.

Government troops are closing in on the last remnants of Tamil Tiger resistance in northern Sri Lanka as an upsurge of more that two years of fighting winds down. But, the country’s economic woes aren’t over. More and more pressure it being put on President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s cash-strapped administration.

Ramani, 26, sits inside her small, dimly-lit boarding house room, cutting vegetables, in this industrial town outside Colombo. She plans to return to her rural village in May to get married.

Sri Lanka is going on bended knee to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - an institution it chased away two years ago - for a bailout package worth 1.9 billion US dollars, as authorities scrape the barrel for foreign exchange.

It was typical of what Sri Lankan media has been facing over the years: a pre-dawn raid on a media house, employees beaten up and costly equipment destroyed. Maharaja TV, the latest victim, was also promised the routine, impartial inquiry by the government.

If the global financial crisis slams the brakes on worker remittances from the Middle East, Sri Lanka’s top foreign exchange earner, it could severely exacerbate this country’s economic woes, analysts say.