Sisira Jayasuriya
Sisira Jayasuriya, is a Professor of Economics at Monash University, Melbourne. His research and policy advisory activities cover trade, macroeconomic, environmental and food policy issues in developing countries, with a focus on Asia. He has published widely on natural disaster, food security and food safety issues, trade and WTO rules, foreign investment, soil erosion and environmental problems, macroeconomic and exchange rate policies in Sri Lanka and Tsunami reconstruction.He is also an internationally known scholar of the political economy of developing countries and has published several widely cited scholarly articles on the Sri Lankan conflict in journals such as World Development, Oxford Development Studies and the Economic and Political Weekly.Professor Jayasuriya is an ethnic Sinhalese from Sri Lanka. In January 2009, he was interviewed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on the ongoing Sri Lankan Civil War. This interview generated a campaign of abuse, threats (including death threats) and vilification by extremist Sinhalese groups who wanted to cover up the war crimes committed by the military and the government, including an unsuccessful attempt to intimidate his university to silence him. Professor Jayasuriya was accused of supporting the LTTE terror because he highlighted the roots of the Sri Lankan conflict in the discrimination practised against Tamils in Sri Lanka for decades; his prediction of large scale civilian casualties are now well documented by UN and other independent sources.