Editorial: Sri Lankan war crimes

The Peninsula
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Wars are about death and destruction. So long after they end, its ripples haunt its perpetrators as justice has a way of catching up with those who have trampled on it.

A United Nations report published this week has put the spotlight back on the conflict in Sri Lanka where government troops crushed a Tamil separatist uprising in 2009. The report has said both the Lankan army and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam guerillas may have committed war crimes during the conflict. As expected, the publication of the report has led to international cries for an independent probe into the war to expose human rights violations and punish the guilty. The LTTE was decimated in the war, and as a non-existent group, has nothing to worry about charges of war crimes. But the government of Sri Lanka is finding itself in a precarious position and if the charges are proven, it will have serious consequences for them.

The UN panel gives a very different version of the final stages of the war than that maintained by the Government of Sri Lanka. The government maintains it pursued a humanitarian rescue operation with a policy of zero civilian casualties. In stark contrast, the panel found credible allegations, which if proven, indicate that a wide range of serious violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law were committed, some of which would amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Indeed, the conduct of the war represented a grave assault on the entire regime of international law designed to protect individual dignity during both war and peace.

The Government systematically shelled hospitals on the frontlines. All hospitals in the Vanni were hit by mortars and artillery and some of them were hit repeatedly despite the fact that their locations were well-known to the Government. At the same time, despite grave danger in the conflict zone, the LTTE refused civilians permission to leave, using them as hostages, at times even using their presence as a human buffer between themselves and the advancing Lankan army.

The Sri Lankan government has a duty to come clean on the war crimes charges leveled against it. For this, the government must agree to an independent international probe. Any probe conducted by the government will not be acceptable to the outside world as it’s a party to the war. The government even distrusts the UN and at one point organised demonstrations against UN staff in Colombo.

The responsibility for establishing the truth now lies with the UN. It has to finish the work it has started and the government has a duty to cooperate.

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