New accusations of war crimes in Sri Lanka

By Robert Mackey - One year after Sri Lanka’s president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, declared victory and hailed his military for ending a decades-long separatist rebellion by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a British news organization aired new accusations that the country’s soldiers committed war crimes during the war’s final months.

On Tuesday, Britain’s Channel 4 News presented what it said was testimony from two former members of Sri Lanka’s military who claim that the government ordered the execution of Tamil prisoners captured at the end of a separatist rebellion last year.

The two men, both said to be in hiding, were granted anonymity by Channel 4 News. While The Lede has not been able to independently verify the accusations made by the men — one a former commander, the other a front-line soldier — Channel 4 News has produced credible reports on apparent human rights violations in Sri Lanka in the past.

Amateur video obtained by Channel 4’s Jonathan Miller last year — which showed, according to the exiled Sri Lankan journalists who smuggled it out of the country, the execution of Tamil prisoners by government forces — was later deemed authentic by a panel of experts who studied the footage for the United Nations.

Mr. Miller’s new report, also contains what he says are photographs taken by Sri Lankan soldiers last year of captured Tamil men and boys, including one image of the dead body of the leader of the Tamil Tigers.

The man identified in Mr. Miller’s report as a soldier who served on the front line against the Tamil Tigers said that when members of the rebel force surrendered with their families, “our commander ordered us to kill everyone.” Among those executed after surrendering was the 13-year-old son of the rebel leader, according to the man identified as a senior commander in the report.

The High Commission for Sri Lanka in London issued a statement denouncing the report, which was published on the Web site of Channel 4 News. The statement said, in part:

The High Commission of Sri Lanka in the United Kingdom totally deny the allegations made against the Government of Sri Lanka and its armed forces. As it has been repeatedly stressed and supported by evidence, Government’s security forces were engaged in a humanitarian operation with the objective of rescuing the civilians held as human shields by a terrorist outfit. [...]

The President of Sri Lanka has established the “Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission” of eight eminent persons reflecting all ethnic groups in Sri Lanka to inquire and report institutional administrative and legislative measures which need to be taken in order to prevent any recurrence of such concerns in the future, and to promote further national unity and reconciliation among all communities.

The Sri Lankan government insists that the presidential commission is sufficient to look into all accusations of atrocities that may have been committed by both sides during the war, but human rights groups and the United Nations have called for an independent inquiry.

As my colleague Lydia Polgreen wrote on Sunday, a new report by the International Crisis Group released on Monday, “which cites witness testimony, satellite images, documents and other evidence, calls for a wide-reaching international investigation into what it calls atrocities committed in the last months of the Sri Lankan government’s war against the Tamil Tiger insurgency.”

The International Crisis Group’s president, Louise Arbour, who is a former chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, explained to Channel 4 News why “a credible, fair, independent, international investigation,” is necessary because “Sri Lanka has a very long history of impunity and any national initiative in Sri Lanka would be bound to fail and certainly would carry no credibility.”

Following Ms. Arbour’s appearance, Palitha Kohona, the Sri Lankan ambassador to the U.N., disagreed sharply with her assessment that the presidential commission would not give a credible account of atrocities carried out by both its own forces and the Tamil separatists. Mr. Kohona said, “Sri Lanka has a history of a very highly respected judicial system and I have no doubt that this commission of inquiry will conduct its inquiries in a satisfactory manner — and to suggest that anybody from outside can do a better job, I think is simply colonialist. That era is gone now.”

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