A chink in the armour!
Thursday 03rd April 2014
The Government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa is having a spectacularly bad week.Technically, with the two assemblies lapsing in late April, March 29 elections for the Western and Southern Provincial Councils took place on schedule. But the polls were also extraordinarily timed – with a little help from the Elections Department – to take place 24 hours after the UN Human Rights Council vote on a US resolution that would launch a war crimes investigation into the last seven years of Sri Lanka’s war against the LTTE. Calls had been mounting for an international investigation to be set up by the Council in March 2014 and President Rajapaksa, who has mastered the art of using international pressure to galvanise support domestically, saw the perfect opportunity.
In Geneva, since early March momentum was building to use the third US resolution on Sri Lanka to set up an inquiry mechanism that would be conducted by international independent experts about allegations that have deeply shadowed the last weeks of the Government’s ‘humanitarian operation’ in the north in 2009.
