UN Secretary-General plans to create panel to look at allegations in Sri Lanka.
NEW YORK — One year after the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war, controversy is raging over whether war crimes were committed in the island conflict.
The United Nations, the government of Sri Lanka and human rights groups are embroiled in battle over who will establish the definitive account of the civil war’s last months and establish whether or not atrocities took place.
In recent weeks, three international human rights groups — International Crisis Group, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International — have publicly demanded that independent inquiries be undertaken into war crimes perpetrated in 2009 by both the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam and the Sri Lankan government.
In return, the Sri Lankan government has slammed the rights groups, saying that they have singled out Sri Lanka unfairly and are “front NGOs” representing Western powers seeking to destabilize the country.
“We don’t want Amnesty International telling us what to do,” said External Affairs Minister G.L. Peiris. “Why single out Sri Lanka. Is it because Sri Lanka is a poor country, Sri Lanka can be pushed around — kicked around like a football?”
The Sri Lankan government has adamantly denied the accusations of war crimes made against them and resisted any moves toward international inquiries, arguing that it was the government’s sovereign right to militarily defeat the LTTE, a terrorist organization, within its own borders.
Pieiris has said that the pursuit of any outside inquiry by the U.N. would be "repugnant to the basic values and principles that are enshrined in the U.N. system,” according to the BBC.
Human rights groups, however, charge the U.N. is doing far too little. They claim the international body repeatedly looked the other way in the last months of the civil war when faced with evidence that the Sri Lankan government pursued a campaign that is reported to have caused high numbers of civilian deaths.
Estimates vary widely of the number of civilians killed from January to May 2009, when the government staged its final offensive against the LTTE. The U.N. has said that 7,000 were killed but the ICG claims that at least 30,000 and as many as 75,000 may have died.
The government of Sri Lanka has said that no civilians were killed during the last stages of the battle.
"The U.N. never revealed what it knew about the final days of the conflict, acknowledged the scale of the abuse that took place, or pushed for accountability," said Madhu Malhotra, Amnesty International's deputy director for the Asia-Pacific. "At the end of the war, atrocities against civilians and enemy combatants appeared to be fueled by a sense that there would be no real international consequences for violating the law."
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/asia/100609/un-investigate-sri-lanka-human-rights-charges
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