Talk:Black July

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A request to Ruchiraw and snowolfd4, you are both concerned about the POV of this article. How about expanding the section about compensation and prosecution section so that this will be a balance article ?RaveenS 15:17, 27 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

RaveenS, we could keep adding and removing the POV, WEASEL and all sorts of other tags for the rest of our lives and I don't think either of us will give up. Frankly it will be an utter waste of my time, as well as yours and everyone Else's I'm sure.

So please let's get on the same page here. I agree that incredibly heinous and disgusting crimes were committed against perfectly innocent people during Black July and everything that happened was just sick, plain and simple. And I deeply sympathise with everyone who was effected by what happened. I truly do. And anything other than a detailed account of what happened here wouldn't do.

But that said, this is Wikipedia and we have to stick to the reliably proven facts only. So you have to understand, that I don't consider sources such as tamilnation.org and sangam.org credible and I don't think that we should cite them.

So I suggest we do it this way.

(1)Detailing what exactly happened - I'm willing to accept the accounts given in the UTHR report and V. Suryanarayan's article at lankalibrary.com as credible. Unfortunately, I can't accept the reports on tamilnation and sangam. But since UTHR and Suryanarayan give detailed accounts of what happened, why don't we stick strictly to the facts give there and avoid any contention?

(2)Government Complicity Section - I think you have to agree that it hasn't yet been reliably proven that the government was in-itself complicit in what happened. However I agree that the government of the time did little to stop the violence in the early stages (and I think that is just terrible). So why don't we rename the section Government Inaction and say things like during the early stages the government did little to stop the violence that was going on

(3)Eye witness accounts - neither the UTHR report, the BBC report nor the article by Suryanarayan talk of any cases of rape. So I don't think we should include it. In this case I have no problem with links to sangam.org and genocide.org auricles/pictures, especially since they provide some very good pictures

(4)Casualties -No problem here. However the grammar needs to be corrected a bit.

(5)Context of the violence - again words like allegedly organized by the ruling party shouldn't be included here, since it violates WP:WEASEL. I also can't find any good material on the 1977 riots so can you please cite good sources. The rest seems OK for now.

(6)As a remembrance day - again, no problem with this section. (only the heading is misspelled :-o )

So please, everyone, I say we have a civilized discussion on this and agree on the final wording of this article. (We don't have to call each other names, do we Huracane?) --snowolfd4 06:58, 28 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I don’t have time today much to discuss, because my goal today is to start a stub on Welikade prison massacre a long overdue project and that's it. Anyway about point 1. I am not sure it would be prudent to restrict this article just to 2 sources and those 2 sources are not upto Wiki standards. Wiki standards say no original sources can be the sole references of an encyclopedia article, that is they have to corroborated by other sources. UTHR(J) and Suriyanarayan are both primary sources and some Tamils would argue that both are not neutral. UTHR(J) is primarily and ant-LTTE entity thus pro-state, it recently went to the extreme of claiming that one of the rape and murder victim Ilayathambi_Tharsini was a prostitute to cover Sri Lankan Navy complicity in the rape only to recant after protest about 2 reports later. Hence to write an important article on Black July based UTHR(J) author’s personal opinion alone will not suffice. Further some Tamils will argue that Suriyanarayan is not just anti-LTTE and pro-state but also an anti-Tamil racist, which UTHR(J) authors have not been accused of. Hence we have a problem with your definition of sources to begin with. In some quarters they are not neutral, they are primary sources and are their opinions. That’s all for today, we will continue this discussion later.Thanks for starting a discussion section, point by point. I have made one change that I agreed with on 5 and 6RaveenS 14:29, 28 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Summary of the above rambling :-(

(1) we need to come to an agreement as to what is a good reference, the 2 mentioned can be in the list but not the sole 2 references.

(2) Government complicity, I for one feel this article does not go deep into the commonly accepted consensus by subsequent Sri Lankan governments, academics and NGO that it is a pogrom because there was an element of government involvement and organization. May be we can rename it Government role instead of complicity and add a section on theories but we need links to Gamini Dissanayake and Lalith Athulathamudali the other 2 henchman along with Cyril Mathew

(3) You are dealing with eye witness accounts here, I saw Buddhist monks leading Ananda college students in white uniforms across Maradana Street into Borella to participate (there were hundreds of students they might be in their late 30's and early 40's by now) But we removed it out of this article because we still hav not found a reference to it. I‘ve heard and read but not witnessed that rapes did happen, Tamil women, mothers and grand mothers were gang raped and sometimes killed afterwards and those who survived some chose to commit suicide and The Hindu newspaper published articles on it in post October 1983. If we agree to create a list of things to do like a project page in which finding the sources for Buddhist monks leading students and Rape are included then I am willing to remove Rape till someone finds the source for it. Thanks RaveenS 03:21, 31 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed typos Huracane