‘Lanka to implement UN resolution demands except Intl probe’

Colombo: President Mahinda Rajapaksa has said Sri Lanka is in the process of implementing all demands made by the sponsors of the UNHRC resolution against it except for allowing an international probe into alleged human rights violations during the last phase of the war with the LTTE.
The assertion was made by the Sri Lankan President during a meeting yesterday with Seiji Kihara, Japan’s Parliamentary Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs. Rajapaka told the Japanese Minister, “Please tell this truth to rest of the world.
Except for an international inquiry we are in the process of implementing all other demands made by sponsors of the Resolution.”
The President’s office quoted Kihara as saying that the UNHRC resolution was unhelpful to Sri Lanka. “We considered whether the Resolution on Sri Lanka moved in the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva would help Sri Lanka. We decided it will not.
That is why we abstained when the vote was taken,” Kihara was quoted as saying. “We are not ready to accept biased reports prepared by international bodies. We are confident that Sri Lanka is capable of solving its problems one by one.
What is needed is to engage the international community,” he said. Japan along with India was one of the 12 countries which abstained in the UNHRC vote in Geneva in March. The US-sponsored resolution was adopted with 24 countries voting in favour.
The resolution demanded the setting up of an international investigation into alleged war crimes in Sri Lanka during the last phase of the nearly three decades-long conflict with the LTTE.
Sri Lanka has vowed not to cooperate with the investigation.
Meanwhile, a nationalist organisation demanded that Sri Lanka should not allow the officials of the UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay into the country to carry out the international investigation. “We ask the government what their stand on this.They must never be allowed into the country,” Dr Gunadasa Amarasekera of the Nationalist Organisation Collective said. (PTI)