Saturday, July 02, 2011By Gamini Weerakoon
Sri Lanka’s friends - Dimitry Medvedev and Hu Jintao
Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa went into warm embraces with Presidents Hu Jintao of China and Dmitry Medvedev of Russia at the St Petersburg International Economic Conference last month but there were only brickbats for Rajapaksa from British political leaders such as David Cameron and the US State Department during the same period.
The Russian and Chinese leaders had assured the Sri Lankan president of their backing against attempts by the UN, which is strongly urged by leading western nations such as the United States and Britain, to compel Sri Lanka to probe alleged war crimes by its armed forces.
On Wednesday the US State Department urged the Sri Lankan government to ‘quickly address allegations of war crimes and ‘demonstrate that it is able and willing to meet these obligations as it seeks reconciliation’. If Sri Lankans do not do this there will be ‘growing pressure from the international community to examine other options’ the State Department had said.
While the issue of whether the United States and its allies have the moral right or the right under international law to make such demands on a sovereign state has been questioned before and will no doubt be reiterated, it also appears to mark a point of departure in foreign policy of Sri Lanka and the West.
Sri Lanka in Shanghai Organisation
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By IRR News Team
30 June 2011, 4:00pm
The government has been organising deportations of Sri Lankans and Iraqis despite the dangers they face on return - but has met with resistance.
On 16 June, just two days after the screening of Channel 4's shocking exposé of the war crimes against Sri Lanka's Tamils in 'Sri Lanka's killing fields' and the day after prime minister David Cameron called for an investigation into the allegations, forty-two refused Sri Lankan asylum seekers were deported from the UK to Colombo. The flight went ahead despite Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch expressing their grave concern that those deported face the risk of detention and torture, as most are Tamils, and are therefore suspected of belonging to or supporting the defeated Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Labour's Siobahn McDonagh MP claimed that when the flight landed, the Sri Lankan CID was waiting for it, but no representative from the British High Commission. But the Home Office claims that the situation in Sri Lanka has improved and that it is safe to remove people there. It was reported that on the eve of the flight, on 15 June, one of the detainees, 31-year-old Nagendrarajah Suthakaran, attempted to hang himself after receiving a phoned death threat from Sri Lanka. He and two others who had also had death threats won a last-minute reprieve from the High Court. According to the Medical Foundation, another removal flight to Sri Lanka was scheduled for today.
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