Sri Lanka war crimes: War survivors relive horror of Sri Lanka's killing fields

  Priyamvatha  | Vanni (Sri Lanka), August 9, 2011 | Updated 23:22 IST  

Scenes from a camp in Vanni

The closing stages of the Sri Lankan civil war were a story of extreme brutality against civilians by the army. Despite being widely documented, Colombo remains in denial about atrocities on Tamils in the country’s north and the east.
The survivors of the war still live in fear, in one of the most densely militarised zones of the world, devoid of any hope of ever getting justice.
Headlines Today correspondent Priyamvatha travelled (undercover) to Vanni, the former stronghold of the Tamil Tiger rebels in north Sri Lanka, to unravel the facts behind the claims and counterclaims in the land that was witness to one of the worst war crimes committed on civilians anywhere in the world.
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No One, in the US or Sri Lanka, Should Be Above the Law

Human Rights Watch  

by 

Brad Adams

Published in: 

Groundviews

August 9, 2011

 

In a report released last month Human Rights Watch called on the US government to launch criminal investigations into allegations of detainee abuse authorized by senior Bush administration officials. The 107-page report, “Getting Away with Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees,” presents substantial information warranting criminal investigations of former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and CIA Director George Tenet, for ordering practices such as “waterboarding,” the use of secret CIA prisons, and the transfer of detainees to countries where they were tortured. Such acts violated the Convention against Torture, the Geneva Conventions, and other international treaties binding on the United States. 

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