groundviews journalism For citizens
30 Jun, 2011
Screen grab from Channel 4′s Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields
(New York) – The Sri Lankan government continues its diplomatic offensive, denying and dismissing the growing evidence of war crimes during the final bloody battles between the Sri Lankan armed forces and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) that ended in May 2009.
Last week, at a panel presentation of the Channel 4 film, the ‘Killing Fields of Sri Lanka’, Sri Lanka’s United Nations Ambassador Palitha Kohona said, “To suggest that the Sri Lankan military was so foolhardy as to deliberately target the civilians, I think is a blatant lie… We had no intention of creating martyrs, we had no intention of creating more volunteers for the LTTE.”
If the killings of civilians were not deliberate, the Sri Lankan army attacks were clearly indiscriminate, which is no less a war crime. The recent findings of the panel of experts set up to advise UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon concluded that up to 40,000 civilians were killed in the final stages of the conflict, many as the result of indiscriminate shelling by government forces. The report also concluded that both government forces and the Tigers conducted military operations “with flagrant disregard for the protection, rights, welfare and lives of civilians and failed to respect the norms of international law.” Continue reading »
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groundviews journalism For citizens
30 Jun, 2011
Two years after the end of the war in Sri Lanka
30 Jun, 2011 War Crimes 
Photo courtesy Deshan Tennekoon, Groundviews
The UN panel report or the Darusman report was condemned and rejected. The stand taken by the government was that “not a single civilian was killed during the last stages of the war. If some of those dead were found to be in civilian clothes, they were Tigers in disguise, even if they happened to be children or elderly women. No one can say we committed war crimes because no one saw what happened during the last stages of the war. Therefore we don’t have to answer any questions raised by UN or the international community.” In a way this is true – no one saw what happened at Mullivaikal, Pudukudiyiruppu and Nandikadal in May 2009. There were no witnesses. The UN and the international community actually abandoned those 300,000 civilians, who were left alone to face the LTTE on the one hand and the Sri Lankan army on the other, and God knows who killed more civilians, the army or the LTTE. We are only told that about 40,000 to 60,000 people died during the last stages of the war. Continue reading »
Photo courtesy Deshan Tennekoon, Groundviews
The UN panel report or the Darusman report was condemned and rejected. The stand taken by the government was that “not a single civilian was killed during the last stages of the war. If some of those dead were found to be in civilian clothes, they were Tigers in disguise, even if they happened to be children or elderly women. No one can say we committed war crimes because no one saw what happened during the last stages of the war. Therefore we don’t have to answer any questions raised by UN or the international community.” In a way this is true – no one saw what happened at Mullivaikal, Pudukudiyiruppu and Nandikadal in May 2009. There were no witnesses. The UN and the international community actually abandoned those 300,000 civilians, who were left alone to face the LTTE on the one hand and the Sri Lankan army on the other, and God knows who killed more civilians, the army or the LTTE. We are only told that about 40,000 to 60,000 people died during the last stages of the war. Continue reading »
