Colombo: The Sri Lankan government has denounced a UN call for an international investigation into human rights abuses in its long civil war as 'unwarranted interference' The government statement, released on Tuesday, rejecting UN call for international probe said “it reflects a preconceived, politicised and prejudicial agenda" against the island nation. Pillay's recommendation "gives scant or no regard to the domestic process" in Sri Lanka, the government's statement said in response to a draft report that precedes the release next month of a UN Human Rights Council review of Sri Lanka's progress in investigating alleged war crimes.
More than forty new bodies were found in a mass grave in Sri Lanka's Tamil north, officials said on Tuesday, after the government rejected a UN call for an international inquiry into alleged war crimes. The discovery of the grave in Mannar, a key battle zone in the last stages of Sri Lanka's long civil war, will increase pressure on the United Nations Human Rights Council to support an independent war crimes investigation when it meets in Geneva next month. Eighty bodies, including those of children, have now been recovered there and another mass grave with 155 bodies was discovered in 2012.
The report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, highlighted these mass graves in her report and said they demonstrated the "magnitude and gravity of the violations alleged to have been committed" by both sides. The thousands of civilians killed in the last months of the war in 2009 and allegations of summary executions of surrendering or arrested Tamil Tiger leaders demanded an independent investigation, the report said. The UN believes 40,000 Tamils were killed in the last months of the war before the defeat of the LTTE in May 2009. Many of them were killed in Army shelling of civilians in official "no-fire zones".
TNA backs UN report
Meanwhile, Sri Lanka's main Tamil party on Wednesday backed a damning UN report which has called for an international probe into allegations of war crimes during the final battle with the LTTE. The Tamil National Alliance, in a statement, backed the report ahead of the next UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) session next month where a resolution against Sri Lanka is to be taken up. The TNA said, "The High Commissioner has raised a number of serious concerns in her report which also pertain to the entire country: the treatment of former combatants and detainees; attacks on religious minorities; the attack on dissent and the freedom of expression; the government's dismal record in implementing LLRC recommendations; and the government's disinterest in making progress on accountability. The TNA is particularly concerned over the impact of the high levels of militarisation on the security of women in the Northern and Eastern Provinces."
David Cameron, the prime minister, and other leaders had warned President Mahinda Rajapaksa at last year's Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Colombo that there would be an international inquiry if Sri Lanka did not launch its own credible and independent inquiry before March 2014.
