By Colum Lynch | The Washington Post
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The panel recommended that Ban set up an “independent international mechanism” to carry out a more thorough probe into “credible” allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of the Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which held more than 300,000 civilians “hostage” to enforce a “strategic human buffer between themselves and the advancing Sri Lankan army.”
ri Lanka’s decisive 2008-09 military offensive against the country’s separatist Tamil Tigers may have resulted in the deaths of as many as 40,000 civilians, most of them victims of indiscriminate shelling by Sri Lankan forces, according to a U.N. panel established by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
The panel recommended that Ban set up an “independent international mechanism” to carry out a more thorough probe into “credible” allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of the Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which held more than 300,000 civilians “hostage” to enforce a “strategic human buffer between themselves and the advancing Sri Lankan army.”
The Sri Lankan commission is “deeply flawed, does not meet international standards for an effective accountability mechanism and, therefore, does not and cannot satisfy the joint commitment of the President of Sri Lanka and the [U.N.] secretary general to an accountability process,” according to the report.
The report offers an implicit criticism of Ban’s attempts to use quiet diplomacy to persuade Sri Lanka’s president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, a longtime friend, to bring a halt to the worst excesses in the conflict. It also faulted the U.N. reluctance to publish casualty estimates to rally international pressure against Sri Lanka.
At the time, the United Nations had informed diplomatic missions that more than 7,000 civilians may have been killed during the final stages of the conflict but was reluctant to make those figures public. Some U.N. officials in Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital, thought that the toll was far higher.
“Although senior international officials advocated in public and in private with the government that it protect civilians and stop the shelling of hospital and United Nations or [International Committee of the Red Cross] locations, in the panel’s view, the public use of casualty figures would have strengthened the call for the protection of civilians while those events in the Vanni were unfolding.”
Still, human rights groups praised Ban for authorizing the panel’s examination of excesses in the Sri Lankan war and pressed the United Nations, the United States and other key governments to establish an international investigation into the alleged crimes.
“The Sri Lankan government has thus far gotten away with doing the very thing the Security Council stopped [Moammar] Gaddafi from doing in Libya,” said Tom Malinowski, Human Rights Watch’s advocacy director in Washington. “The least the council can do is to pursue the truth about these tens of thousands of civilians who died.”
Malinowski said it would be reckless for the United States and other key powers to turn a blind eye to Sri Lankan excesses, saying it would encourage others to ignore the rules of war in prosecuting wars on their own insurgencies.
© The Washington Post
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