UN: Sri Lanka committed war crimes in Tamil conflict's final days

Apr 26, 2011, 0:21 GMT

New York - The United Nations said Monday an investigation supported 'credible' allegations that the Sri Lankan government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa had engaged in a wide range of serious violations of international law including war crimes in the last days of the war against Tamil Tiger rebels.

The report blamed the government's attacks for 'tens of thousands' of civilian deaths.

The report by a three-member panel was made public by the UN in New York after it provided the document to the government in Colombo. Colombo subsequently leaked part of the report to local media, then asked the UN to withhold its publication.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon commissioned the accountability report in 2009 after the decades-old civil war in Sri Lanka ended. The panel members are Marzuki Darusman of Indonesia, Yasmin Sooka of South Africa and Steven Ratner of the United States.

Ban said in a statement on Monday that he was 'carefully reviewing the report's conclusions and recommendations' particularly with regard to events in the last stage of the conflict and allegations of serious human rights violations by both the government and Tamil Tigers.

The report said the killing of civilians from September 2008 to May 2009 amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity. The three-decade conflict ended on May 19, 2009 with the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), once considered a terrorist group.

It described how the fighting trapped 330,000 civilians into Vanni, a small area surrounded by fighting troops, where government troops launched 'large-scale and widespread shelling ... causing large numbers of civilian deaths.'

The civilians were 'trapped into an ever decreasing area, fleeing the shelling but (also) kept hostage by the LTTE.'

In the end, the government launched large-scale shelling on 'three consecutive no-fire zones,' where it had even urged the civilians to concentrate and had promised to 'cease the use of heavy weapons,' the report said.

Afterwards, the government sought to intimidate and silence the media and other critics of the war 'through a variety of threats and actions, including the use of white vans to abduct and to make people disappear,' the report said.

The United Nations hub, food distribution lines and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) ships were targetted by government mortars and artillery, as were all frontline hospitals, sometimes repeatedly, the report said.

The report noted that the locations of the hospitals were well- known to the government and charged that the government 'systematically' shut off the flow of food, medical and surgical supplies to civilians who had fled to the humanitarian zone.

'To this end, it (government) purposefully underestimated the number of civilians who remained in the conflict zone. Tens of thousands lost their lives from January to May 2009, many of whom died anonymously in the carnage of the final few days.'

The three-member panel concluded there were 'credible allegations' in five core categories against the government: killing of civilians; shelling of hospitals and other humanitarian facilities; denial of humanitarian assistance; human rights violations to victims and survivors, including suspected LTTE cadre; and rights violations outside the conflict zone against the media and critics.

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