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Sri Lanka - United Nations

Sri Lanka scathing over UN war crimes panel

Sri Lanka has accused the UN of a "hidden agenda" after Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced plans to investigate alleged human rights abuses by soldiers in the final months of Sri Lanka’s civil war.

Reuters
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Ban’s appointment of a high-level panel to look into allegations of international human rights violations was "an attempt to provide oxygen" to the defeated LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), said the government’s spokesman, Keheliya Rambukwella.

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Amal Jayasinghe in Colombo

Christine Buckley

"The United Nations and its secretary-general have revealed their hidden agenda in no uncertain terms," Rambukwella said in remarks posted on a government website.

After decades of ethnic fighting, Sri Lankan troops wiped out the separatist guerrillas in May last year, and the government has denied repeated allegations that thousands of civilians were killed in the fighting.

Ban's probe follows international pressure for an independent probe into the allegations that thousands of ethnic Tamil civilians were killed by government troops, and surrendering rebels executed in the final offensive.

UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said in a statement Tuesday that the panel would be chaired by Marzuki Darusman from Indonesia, the UN's special envoy for North Korea, and hoped to complete its work in four months.

President Mahinda Rajapakse has always rejected calls for a war crimes probe and in March he warned Ban that he would take "necessary and appropriate action" if a UN panel was set up.

The government's response is that "anyone who criticises the government or its human rights record is trying to resuscitate or revive the Tamil Tigers, whom the government say was defeated in May last year," says correspondent Amal Jayasinghe… "The government is trying to take the position that the international community is trying to punish the administration for crushing terrorism.”

Up to 70,000 Tamils remain in government-run refugee camps, he adds.

“Most of them have their houses either partially damaged or completely destroyed, so they are still in an interim situation … I would say that very few people have really begun to get back to any sort of normality. For most of these people, normality is still living with a lot of uncertainty.”
 

 

 

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