Full Coverage: South Asia

30.01.2009 Himal magazine assesses the prospects for Sri Lanka as the government closes in on the Tigers.

30.01.2009 Sri Lanka's president declares a safe zone for civilians as the UN's human rights chief voices concern over the rapidly deteriorating conditions - including human rights abuses - for some 250,000 civilians trapped in the country's war-torn north.
+ Sri Lankan Bishop on hunger strike
+ Humanitarian catastrophe unfolding
+ Civilians trapped
+ UK Foreign Office statement

28.01.2009 More than 20,000 Indians marched through dense forest to create a 17-kilometre human wall across the holy mountain that provides their livelihood and is now under threat from British mining company Vedanta.

27.01.2009 Hundreds of people have been killed and scores of wounded are overwhelming understaffed and ill-equipped medical facilities in Sri Lanka's northern Vanni region, following intensified fighting between security forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
+ OneWorld Guide to Sri Lanka

21.01.2009 A campaign to press the Pakistan government to prevent Islamic militants in the border region with Afghanistan from destroying girls' schools has been started by a leading Asian rights group.

21.01.2009 More than 7,000 people from all over India's Niyamgiri region marched at the weekend against British mining company Vedanta and their project on the unspoiled mountain range that is ancestral home and place of worship for local tribal people.
+ New Year card for Vedanta’s shareholders predicts Indian tribe’s destruction

20.01.2009 Sri Lanka's "culture of impunity and indifference" over attacks on journalists is condemned by international media groups.

19.01.2009 Setting the final scene of Slumdog Millionaire in Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus unwittingly links the film with the recent terrorism outrage. Can the "war on terror" hope to end as happily as the film?

18.01.2009 David Miliband's speech at the Taj Hotel, Mumbai, in which he condemns the concept of the war on terror as "misleading and mistaken"

18.01.2009 The moving final testimony to press freedom by Lasanthe Wickrematunge, Editor of the Sunday Leader, written a few days before his murder in Sri Lanka.

18.01.2009 The Sri Lankan government may be winning a shooting war with the Tamil Tigers but its despicable elimination of those who wield the pen plumbed new depths this week. Time.com

13.01.2009 Key medicinal plants used for cancer, malaria and other remedies are being over-exploited — potentially putting the health of millions at risk, warns an international conservation group.

10.01.2009 Nearly seven years after the Sri Lankan government lifted a ban on the secessionist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelan to facilitate a peace process, the the organisation has been proscribed again, following military battles in which the government has regained strategic territory once held by the LTTE.

08.01.2009 Sri Lankan military successes against secessionist rebels must not be seen as a green light for death squads to sow terror among government critics, an international media group said as it condemned the murder of a newspaper editor in Colombo today.

07.01.2009 A blockade mounted by more than 50 protestors stopped British mining company Vedanta entering tribal land under cover of darkness in India last night.

07.01.2009 A pre-dawn attack by heavily-armed men on a Sri Lankan broadcasting network - accused of insufficient “patriotism” in reporting the civil war - has been condemned by an international media freedom group.

05.01.2009 The Sri Lankan government's claim that it has "defeated terrorism" highlights the need for a new alliance to resolve lawlessness, corruption and the loss of authority of the public institutions of democracy, according to a leading Asian rights organisation.
+ OneWorld Guide to Sri Lanka

02.01.2009 Following the Sri Lankan army's capture of Kilinochchi, headquarters of the Tamil Tiger separatists, President Mahinda Rajapaksa today urged the anti-government fighters to surrender in the face of imminent defeat.