Daily Archive: September 3, 2015

Sri Lanka’s policy makers need to approach the issue of an investigation whether it is international or domestic by taking stock of the legalities and mandates legally in place. No inquiry can be limited to a period omitting the origins and terror unleashed over decades. No inquiry can omit to name and shame all parties that were connected to that terror directly & indirectly just because they are steering the investigation’s mandate and jurisprudence. None of the tribunals held thus far have provided solace or reconfirmed the truth as the sufferers know it and no amount of money can compensate for any loss except the realization that there is a root to the terror that prevails and it is not the counter measures for terrorism that needs to be pursued but the roots that create, cause and fan that terror. Unfortunately these parties are in the driver’s seat of all international investigations!

With just days for the UNHRC Panel to conclude accepting submissions it has emerged that the UNHRC has been cheating the system by providing UNHRC war crimes forms to only one party and that too clandestinely with links to LTTE-TNA. The shocking discovery immediately takes us back to sample formats appearing on internet to help Tamils compile cases against Sri Lanka during the Panel of Expert investigation. We now question how many of the ‘witnesses’ that the Panel of Experts claimed to quote from were bogus people. We question how many witness accounts were lies.

A two-day defence seminar, the fifth of an ongoing series, commenced at Galadari Hotel yesterday. This year’s sessions, themed on ‘National Security in the Context of Emerging Global Threats’, were segmented into a range of related issues, including ‘Terrorism and Challenges to National Security.’

The first three-day defence seminar was held on May 31, to June 2, 2011, two years after the conclusion of the war. The seminar dealt with Defeating Terrorism: Sri Lankan Experience.

The seminar series was the brainchild of the then Defence Secretary, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, whose contribution to Sri Lanka’s triumph over terrorism could never be matched under any circumstances. The Gajaba Regiment veteran ensured the largest ever combined security forces offensive, undertaken by the military, on track, until troops wiped the last organized LTTE resistance, on the banks of the Nanthikadal lagoon, in May, 2009.

It is reported that the US Assistant Secretary of State, Nisha Biswal, is so ‘upbeat’ about the mechanism adopted by the Government for a Domestic Inquiry Mechanism into accountability and reconciliation issues relating to the final phases of the conflict, that the US would sponsor a resolution supporting the Domestic Inquiry Mechanism at the next session of the UN Human Rights Council. (The Daily News. August 28. 2015). The report also states that Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labour, Tom Malinowski, speaking to reporters had stated: “The United States will sponsor another resolution at the UN Human Rights Council in September and we are not going to walk away from this process of encouraging reform and change after September. We very much hope that with the changes after January 8, the new government will work with us and work with the United Nations on a real process of accountability and reconciliation. The international community will remain involved in that process. It will continue to monitor that process. And as much as we are hopeful about the promises that the new government had made,we will judge it not by its promises but by its actions and achievements”.