| Sisira Jayasuriya | |
|---|---|
| Born | Sisira Jayasuriya Sri Lanka |
| Residence | Melbourne, Australia |
| Occupation | Professor |
Sisira Jayasuriya, is professor of Economics at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He has extensive experience with research and policy advisory activities on agricultural and trade policy issues in developing countries His research papers include Food safety issues, trade and WTO rules; FDI liberalization in industrial growth; Cost of War in Sri Lanka, soil erosion and environmental problems, macroeconomic and exchange rate policies in Sri Lanka and Tsunami reconstruction.[1][2][3] He is an internationally known scholar of the political economy of developing countries and conflicts and has published widely cited several scholarly articles on the Sri Lankan conflict in international journals such as World Development, Oxford Development Studies and the Economic and Political Weekly.
He 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 has generated a campaign of abuse, threats (including death threats) and vilification by extremist Sinhalese groups who want uncritical and unconditional support for the military. They have even attempted to intimidate his University in a failed attempt to get the university authorities silence him. He has been accused of supporting the LTTE terror because he has pointed out that there has been discrimination against Tamils in Sri Lanka and that there are likely to be civilian casualties in the current battles. The civilian casualties in the current battles are now well documented by UN and other independent sources and confirm his predictions.