New UN report details alleged Sri

Lanka war crimes

UN releases most detailed account yet of alleged war crimes in Sri
Lanka, putting burden on government to prosecute

by Jyoti Thottam @jyotithottam & Amantha Perera @AmanthaP-September 17, 2015

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the Tamil separatist

group that for 26 years waged armed insurgency against the government of
Sri Lanka, always said that it would never surrender. It was part of their
mystique a promise that they would fight to the death.

And yet, according to a United Nations investigation released Wednesday,

top leaders of the LTTE did surrender days before the official end of the war
on May 18, 2009. At least, they tried to. The report is the most
comprehensive account to date of alleged war crimes during the last phase
of the civil war. It describes how the LTTEs senior leadership, including the
head of its peace secretariat, Seevaratnam Puleedevan, and the head of its

political wing, Balasingham Nadesan, gathered in the village of

Vellimullivaikkal in northern Sri Lanka, some of them with their families, and
began sending messages through local and international intermediaries to
the Sri Lankan government, including the former president, Mahinda
Rajapaksa, saying they were ready to surrender.

The Red Cross and representatives of foreign governments offered to serve

as observers to the surrender, but Sri Lankan authorities refused, according
the report. Instead, they told the LTTE leaders to surrender to Army troops
positioned nearby. According to several witnesses interviewed by U.N.
investigators, they did as instructed, walking toward the front line in civilian
clothes, unarmed, carrying a white cloth tied to a stick. But on May 18,
2009, the Sri Lankan Army announced that Nadesan and Puleedevan,
among others, were killed in fighting by the 58th Division. The UN
investigation concludes that there are reasonable grounds to believe that
LTTE senior political wing leaders Balasingham Nadesan and Seevaratnam
Puleedevan as well as Nadesans wife Vineetha Nadesan may have been
executed by the security forces.

The so-called white flag incident is one of several notorious allegations of

war crimes including the extrajudicial killing of the 12-year-old son of the
LTTEs leader and the shelling of civilians at a hospital inside a no-fire zone
described in the report. Investigators stopped short of naming names of
those who might be held responsible for the incidents, arguing that the U.N.
wanted to present a human rights investigation, not a criminal
investigation.

That job is now left to the new Sri Lankan government, which has vowed to
hold those accused of war crimes accountable. Their plan to prosecute
these cases through a domestic body, rather than through an international
human rights court, is a departure from the widely criticized war crimes
prosecutions in Rwanda, Sierra Leone and elsewhere. It could serve as a
model for other post-conflict societies. If handled well, the case of Sri
Lanka has the potential to constitute an example for both the region and
the world of how a sustainable peace ought to be achieved, says Pablo de
Greiff, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Transitional Justice.

The biggest challenges are internal. Some of the people who were in
command during the war are still serving in the army and are considered
war heroes. Maj. Gen. Shavendra Silva, for example, who was in command
of the 58th Division, is a serving general and was previously part of the Sri
Lankan mission to the United Nations in New York. But there is intense
pressure on the Sri Lankan government, internally and externally, to show
some progress in prosecuting war crimes, more than six years after the end
of the war. Without going through the pain of analyzing our past actions
we can not hope to have a better future, says Sandaya Ekenaligoda, the
wife of Pradeep Ekenaligoda, one of several journalists who went missing in
recent years after criticizing the Rajapaksa government. We need a
government that will make those hard choices.

So far, the new government under President Maithripala Sirisena seems

willing to do that. Having defeated Rajapaksa in presidential elections in
January, and then effectively shut Rajapaksa out of his own party, Sirisena
formed a broad-based alliance with his traditional political rival and with key
minority parties after parliamentary elections last month. The goal of this
national unity government is to move the country toward reconciliation,
and it made a significant step toward that goal with the announcement on
Monday of a new, South Africa-style truth and reconciliation commission,
something that human rights advocates have been calling for since 2009,
but Rajapaksa had dismissed. The new government has shown a

willingness that it is ready to take action that former administrations shied

away from, says Jehan Perera, Executive Director of Sri Lankas National
Peace Council.

But the U.N. reports call for a hybrid special court, including judges,
prosecutors and investigators from outside Sri Lanka, is likely to be a
sensitive issue.

The U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein argues that only an
international panel will be truly independent. "A purely domestic court
procedure will have no chance of overcoming widespread and justifiable
suspicions fueled by decades of violations, malpractice and broken
promises," he said in a statement. Many Sri Lankan and global human rights
groups also support international involvement.

There is strong sentiment in Sri Lanka against that idea, particularly among
those who have used the specter of foreign interference to argue against
any U.N.-sanctioned war crimes panel. Namal Rajapaksa, the former
presidents son and a member of parliament, called the idea of a hybird
court a complete insult to the entire legal system in this country,
signaling that allies of the ex-strongman would likely use any international
presence to play on nationalist sympathies.

The government of Sri Lanka has already proposed a domestic mechanism,

and U.S. officials have publicly expressed support for it. The U.S. will
sponsor a resolution in the Human Rights Council based on Wednesdays
report, and observers are watching closely to see whether all of the reports
recommendations are included. There could be lot of dilution by the time
when it comes up into the resolution, says Ruki Fernando, a Sri Lankan
human rights activist. It is what the council votes on that will be
important.

Posted by Thavam