By Gareth Evans | Project Syndicate
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One of the worst atrocity crime stories of recent decades has barely registered in the world’s collective conscience. We remember and acknowledge the shame of Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur. We agonize about the failure to halt the atrocities being committed almost daily in Syria. But, at least until now, the world has paid almost no attention to war crimes and crimes against humanity comparable in their savagery to any of these: the killing fields of Sri Lanka in 2009.
Three years ago, in the bloody endgame of the Sri Lankan government’s
war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, some
300,000 civilians became trapped between the advancing army and the last
LTTE fighters in what has been called “the cage” – a tiny strip of
land, not much larger than New York City’s Central Park, between sea and
lagoon in the northeast of the country.
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AFP | Radio Netherlands Worldwide | [Photo courtesy: vikalpasl/flickr]
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The wife of missing Sri Lankan political cartoonist Prageeth Eknelygoda marked 1,000 days since his disappearance Monday with an appeal to UN chief Ban Ki-moon to intervene.
Sandhya Eknelygoda led a group of rights activists and staged a demonstration outside the United Nations offices in Colombo urging the world body to pressure Sri Lanka for information about her husband.
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By P K Balachandran | Indian Express
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The Indian government has invited Sri Lankan Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa to New Delhi for talks, ahead of next month’s session of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva, according to informed sources. The visit is expected to take place in the next few days because Sri Lanka’s case is to be taken by the UNHRC on November 1, under the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) scheme. India is in the three-nation panel which will oversee the review.
In the last session of the UNHRC in March, a US-sponsored resolution hostile to Sri Lanka was passed. In the coming session too, the council is expected to take a critical stance.
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Shiv Malik | The Guardian
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The high court has ordered that the imminent deportation to Sri Lanka of a number of Tamils be halted amid claims they may be tortured on their return.
Three solicitors' firms have confirmed to the Guardian that a number of their clients had been given last-minute reprieves and would no longer be flown out of the country on a specially chartered UK Border Agency (UKBA) flight that was expected to be leave on Tuesday afternoon. It is understood that a further 10 to 12 firms have also lodged last-minute appeals on behalf of their clients.
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By Alan Keenan | The Interpreter
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Masters of prevarication, the Sri Lankan Government is once again stalling the UN's attempt to ensure an open assessment of the brutal final stages of the country's civil war. The regime is probably hoping interest will fade, but every day it refuses a fair examination of some 40,000 civilian deaths is another small step away from reconciliation between the Sinhalese-dominated state and Tamils, and toward the next ethnic conflict.
Colombo's contempt for the international community seems to know no bounds. Six months after the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) requested
that Sri Lanka address its culture of impunity and badly damaged rule of
law, the regime has taken no concrete action.
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Xinhua Net
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Sri Lanka's government has confirmed that a United Nations (UN) team will visit the country next month to evaluate post-war reconciliation but insisted that their feedback would not be considered, an official said here on Thursday.
Cabinet spokesman and Media Minister Keheliya Rambukwella strongly responded to previous media reports that the UN team would provide expertise on reconciliation efforts made by the government.
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By Bob Dietz | Committee to Protest Journalists
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You would think that with fighting between government forces and secessionist Tamils finished in May 2009, the Sri Lankan government might ease its grip on public information--information which is really the property of the country's citizens, not whichever administration happens to be holding political power. In 2004, former President Chandrika Bandaranaike's cabinet did approve a Freedom of Information Bill, but parliament was dissolved and the bill never went further.
The issue has been coming and going over the years. The last attempt at legislative change came in 2011, when it was defeated by the government in parliament. One Sri Lankan editor recalls President Mahinda Rajapaksa as telling a group of editors around that time that the country doesn't need what has been relabelled as a Right to Information Act because he would answer whatever questions they might have.
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By Anuradha Sharma and Vishal Arora | Asia Times Online
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Sri Lanka is not only refusing to bring about reconciliation in the north of the island, where tens of thousands of civilians were killed in the last phase of the war against ethnic Tamil rebels in 2009, it is also fast descending towards dictatorship.
A key question surrounding the country's future is whether its two main trading partners, the United States and India, have the leverage to deter Colombo, or can it resist international pressure with China's help?
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Daily Mirror
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Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa said though the military presence in the north had been drastically reduced, troops would continue to remain at strategic locations for security reasons but their presence will be non-intrusive.
“The number of troops deployed and the number of camps remaining in the North and East has also been reduced to a bare minimum. Twenty eight battalions have been relocated in the South and East. The overall number of troops in the North has been reduced by more than 21,000 since 2009.
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