WASHINGTON: A new UN investigation into allegations of war crimes in Sri Lanka will intensify international pressure on its government and could probe the purported responsibility of senior Sri Lankan officials with US ties.
As many as 40,000 civilians may have died amid government shelling in the final five months of the conflict in 2009, according to a previous UN report. Government forces have also been accused of executing ethnic Tamil rebel leaders who tried to surrender.
UN high commissioner for human rights Navi Pillay had announced a heavyweight panel including a Nobel laureate and a former judge on a UN-backed tribunal trying former Cambodian leaders for genocide and war crimes, to advise a 10-month investigation by her office. Its goal, laid out in a US-backed resolution, is to establish the facts about alleged abuses by both sides in the conflict, “with a view to avoiding impunity and ensuring accountability”.
The government denies its forces targeted civilians or committed serious abuses in defeating the Tamil Tigers’ 26-year rebellion for an ethnic homeland.
“We have taken the view that this investigation is utterly uncalled for,” said Palitha Kohona, who was Sri Lanka’s foreign secretary at the end of the war and now serves as ambassador to the UN. “It’s like this poor third-world country is being punished in an unforgiving manner for having defeated a terrorist group.”
But the allegations could prove worrying to the ruling circle of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, notwithstanding his tightened grip on power at home in the five years since the fighting ended. In particular, one of his brothers, defence secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, who is a US citizen, has been dogged by allegations that he ordered rebel leaders killed. A recent report by a South African human rights lawyer also examines what Kohona knew of a purported surrender deal and the role of a senior military officer, who now serves as Kohona’s deputy at the UN.
Foreign diplomats say that in the final two days of the war in May 2009, the Tigers’ top two political chiefs, Balasingham Nadesan and S Pulidevan, had expressed a desire to surrender — a message diplomats conveyed to Sri Lankan leaders — but ended up dead. Six months later, victorious army chief Sarath Fonseka told a Sri Lankan newspaper that the defence secretary had ordered the commander of the army’s 58th Division, which pressed the final offensive, to kill rebel leaders attempting to surrender. Fonseka, who emerged as an opposition leader after the war, said he was misquoted, but was still sentenced to three years in prison for his comments under harsh emergency laws in a 2011 trial. He was freed in 2012.
Gotabhaya Rajapaksa is a decorated Sri Lankan army officer who migrated to the US in the 1990s and worked in information technology before returning to his homeland in 2005 to support his brother’s election as president. Although residing in Sri Lanka, as a US citizen he could potentially face prosecution under a US war crimes statute.
The department of justice declined to comment whether it has investigated the possible involvement of US citizens in war crimes in the South Asia nation. The statute, passed in 1996, has yet to be used.
But the Sri Lankan government has in the past complained to Washington about US authorities probing Rajapaksa.
Meanwhile, the government is also refusing to cooperate with the 12-member investigative team, which will be advised by former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, a former UN special envoy to Kosovo who won the Nobel peace prize in 2008; Dame Silvia Cartwright, who served as a judge on a UN-backed tribunal of former leaders of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime of the late 1970s; and Asma Jahangir, former chief of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. (Agencies)
