“We have a big challenge in March. We are ready to face any challenge,” said Mahinda Samarasinghe, plantation minister and the country’s human rights envoy.
Addressing a gathering in central Kandy town, he said while facing the challenge in the UNHRC, Sri Lanka would not let its troops down.
“We will neither betray the nation nor our gallant troops.” Samarasinghe said military had never committed any wrong while combating the rebel LTTE.
“We all know what the LTTE did. They took as human shields 300,000 civilians. They fired at troops from among the civilians.”
The minister said, “It was true that the civilians were caught in the crossfire. The army was trying to crush terrorism. But the figure given as 40,000 killed was a lie”.
He said it was not possible to take a count of the casualties during the final battle. “This false figure of 40,000 was given by a UN employee to help him sell a book”.
In Mannar a Mass Grave was unearthed , there is evidence of people having been shot point-blank and the toll as of now is estimated at 40.
Whether it is JVP or LTTE or civilians Sri Lanka seems to be following a policy of Genocide, as a solution.
Construction workers in the coastal district of Mannar stumbled on at least 10 skeletal remains buried at a location where they were laying a new water pipe, said police spokesman Ajith Rohana.
“A judicial medical officer has gone to the site. Further forensic examinations are underway to determine the age of the mass grave,” Mr Rohana said. “Additional staff are being inducted for the investigation.”
There was no immediate indication who the victims were or how and when they had died.
However, it is the first time that evidence of a mass grave has emerged in the former war zone since troops declared victory over separatist Tamil Tiger guerrillas in May 2009.
Both government forces and Tamil Tiger rebels have been accused of killing civilians during the 37-year separatist war.
Sri Lanka has denied allegations that its troops killed up to 40,000 civilians in the final months of fighting.
Earlier this year construction workers stumbled on another mass grave in central Sri Lanka, hundreds of kilometres away from the conflict zone.
At least 154 people had been buried in the grave at the central district of Matale, a hotbed of an anti-government uprising between 1987 and 1990.
Local forensic experts said it dated back to a period when the then-government led a crackdown on leftist Sinhalese rebels.
What more evidence is needed to indict Sri Lanka?
Despite its high decibel level UK can not raise the issue further for SAS had trained the Sri Lanka troops.
The same logic applies to India, which, in addition to training the troops ,provided critical intelligence during the last putsch against the Tamils.
In the mass of information on the killings of men and women in Sri Lanka by the Security forces , the fact that innocent children were massacred by the Army, in the name of maintaining the Security and integrity of Sri Lanka, whether it is the handling of the LTTE or the JVP, is overlooked.
Worse, it was condoned and abetted by the Government and ignored by the Judiciary!
The full implications of this horror came to light when a Mass grave was unearthed in Matale in Lanka.
It was obnoxious that the Magistrate refused to take even affidavits on this case!
“The Matale Magistrate yesterday (4 November 2013) refused to accept further affidavits from persons whose relatives have disappeared and were seeking to provide information to court on incidents relating to the mass graves discovered in Matale.”
The Sri Lanka Government has been saying that Videos showing the massacre of Tamils and the one showing two blind folded men being shot dead by the security forces is a fake and is being circulated by the sympathizers of the LTTE.
But the Video analysis proves that the Footage is original and has not been doctored.
From Tamilnet.
Sri Lankan Tamil Shot dead
On August 25, 2009 a UK-based TV station (Channel 4) revealed a video showing
summary execution of blindfolded prisoners by two men in Sri Lankan military uniform. The
video panned to show 8 bodies of men already executed, and captured the systematic
execution of two more men. The 9th victim is executed by one soldier 5 seconds into the
video and the 10th victim is executed after 41 seconds by the second soldier. The two men
in military uniform spoke casually in Sinhalese, the language of almost 100% of the Sri
Lankan armed forces, as they carried out the executions.
The video was delivered to Channel 4 by a German-based exile organization, Journalists
for Democracy in Sri Lanka (JDS). JDS is a multiethnic exile organization recently formed
by journalists who fled Sri Lanka out to fear for their own life. The release of the video sent
shock waves through international human rights groups.
Within 24 hours of the broadcast by Channel 4, the government of Sri Lanka (GoSL)
refuted the video, calling it doctored in order to discredit the armed forces of Sri Lanka.
Meanwhile, the GoSL moved quickly to secure all videotapes of the war front against the
Tamils owned by members of the military.
On August 28, 2009 the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary
Executions, Prof. Philip Alston, called for the immediate establishment of an independent
inquiry into the authenticity of a video which purportedly depicts the extrajudicial execution
of two men stripped naked with their hands tied behind their back by the Sri Lankan military
and the presumed prior execution of others. On August 26, 2009 Human Rights Watch
(HRW) issued a press release of its concern regarding the executions.
The summary executions, if proven, violate Common Article 3 to the Four Geneva
Conventions of 1949, to which Sri Lanka is a contracting party, that in subsection I(d)
prohibit, “… the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a
regularly constituted court….” Violations of the Geneva Conventions are war crimes
according to Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois College of Law.
Realizing the gravity of the military execution, the US-based non-profit group Tamils
Against Genocide (TAG) authorized Image and Sound ForensicsTM (ISF), USA to evaluate
the video for its authenticity. After analysis of the video and extensive field testing with real
ammunition (an AK-47 with 7.62×39 mm ammo) recorded by an array of different recording
devices, ISF concluded that the video recording is authentic. A second company (Firearms
& Ballistics), subcontracted by ISF, concluded that the blood flow, blood color, damage to
central nervous system and posture of falling victims represented a real event of
executions. In the same time period The Times, UK, employing an independent forensic
expert, declared that the video is indeed authentic, and concluded that the fine details such 5
as the high speed expansion of gas following a rifle shot and the brain fluid exuding from a
victim would be impossible to re-enact.
The U.N. expert, Christof Heyns, reviewed the 5-minute, 25-second video frame by frame with a team of technical and forensic specialists to determine its authenticity, and concluded that the video suggests there is enough evidence to open a war-crimes case. Sri Lanka has claimed the video is fake.
In the video, several men lie on a muddy track, bound and motionless. The camera cuts and another man is shown being forced to sit upright by a soldier in camouflage carrying a rifle. Another soldier steps up behind the seated prisoner and shoots him in the back of the head, point blank. The prisoner slumps sideways as the camera pans across the road revealing nine bodies, most of them naked, with gunshot wounds clearly visible despite the grainy quality of the footage.
The uniformed men then force another blindfolded prisoner down into the dirt. A gunshot rings out and he, too, jerks and collapses. Later, the camera focuses on a young man, his skull blown open. Soldiers stand over the half-dressed corpse of a woman, gloating.
Heyns, a South African law professor who is also the U.N.’s independent investigator on extrajudicial killings, said the footage provides solid evidence for a prosecution case.
“It’s very rare that you have actual footage of people being killed,” the former lawyer told The Associated Press. “This is different from CCTV. This is trophy footage.”
The Sri Lankan government says the video is staged, an attempt by pro-Tamil Tiger groups to undermine its hard-won victory in the country’s 1983-2009 civil war.
“We have proven beyond any doubt that this is not authentic,” the director general of the government’s Media Center for National Security, Lakshman Hulugalla, said on Monday. The U.N. panel says it unpicked Sri Lanka’s claims and found them to be unsupported.
India has been reluctant to take on Sri Lanka on the genocide issue.
Tamil Kills India Involved?
The reason touted is the geopolitical considerations, implying that China might get a foot hold in Sri Lanka.
Creation of Tamil Elam might result in Greater Tamil Elam facilitating the secession of Tamil Nadu from India.
The third, in my view is the anger at the Tamils for the killing of Rajiv Gandhi.
All the political parties played the Tamil Card, for vote politics in Tamil Nadu, by alternately supporting and withdrawing support to the LTTE.
On the one hand, India will train LTTE, allow LTTE Chief Prabhakaran to stay in India excaping from Sri Lankan Authorities,
MGR will donate publicly to Prabhakaran and when Centre raised its eyebrows started condemning the Terrorists.
Karunanidhi can outclassed all, by speaking in all voices at the same time, for and against LTTE, for and against Tamil Elam!
Relatively Jayalalithaa is consistent in terming LTTE as Terrorists and wanted them banned in India and whenever she was/in power terrorist activities will wane.
Now onto India’s complicity.
Indi has contributed immensely by way of Intelligence to Sri Lanka in the final stages of the last war.
In fact India knew of the massacre.
PPT speaks of UK and US in being silent spectators, India has been said to be involved in the Killing of the tamils and India’s Role will be probed.
“While the judges held the USA and the UK to be complicit in the genocidal process, they were of the opinion that more evidence was needed as regards India’s role.”
Terming India its “closest ally”, Sri Lanka has said its support during the war with the LTTE helped “reduce the pressure” mounted by the world community and allowed it to proceed with humanitarian operations in the war-ravaged north unhindered.
“The relationship developed over the past four years with our closest ally, India helped us in many ways in our war against terrorism,” the powerful Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa said.
India’s support greatly helped “reduce the pressure mounted by other nations,” which allowed us to proceed with our humanitarian operations unhindered, Rajapaksa the brother of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa said in Colombo on Sunday in Colombo.
“It is very important that we strengthen this key relationship even further in the years to come,” he said while speaking at a function in Colombo.
Persuading western countries that they must help Sri Lanka more meaningfully to combat this threat requires us to unite as a nation and speak with one voice, instead of being weakened and divided by petty considerations, he said.
He said significant support was also received from other key allies that helped withstand the pressure being “directed by the international community to leave the war unfinished.”
“These countries also provided us vital material assistance towards the war effort, when barriers were put in place that prevented our obtaining military hardware from our western allies,” Rajapaksa said in his address.
He said even though the Tiger rebels will not be able to resurface in Sri Lanka, their financial network was a matter of concern.”
3.2 Eelam War IV
The so‐called Fourth Eelam War resulted from a gradual breakdown of the 2002 ceasefire.
Specifically, in April 2003 the LTTE announced its unilateral withdrawal from peace negotia‐
tions after it was excluded from a preparatory meeting of a donor conference taking place in
the U.S., where the LTTE was categorized as a terrorist organization.4 At least formally, the
ceasefire survived for nearly five more years, but in 2004 an undeclared war between LTTE
and government forces flared up again (HRW 2005). By July 2006, the ceasefire had de facto
collapsed.
At the same time, the election of Mahinda Rajapaksa as Sri Lanka’s executive president in
November 2005 in a coalition with hard‐line Sinhalese parties constituted the precondition
for a much tougher stance against the LTTE. Rajapaksa strengthened Sri Lanka’s military ca‐
pabilities and established a “highly personalized, authoritarian regime, in which extreme na‐
tionalist views [were] widely accepted” (ICG 2007: 21). Not only the LTTE displayed a will‐
ingness to provoke the government and to resume the war, but also the government seemed
to be keen on a “fight to the finish” (Reddy 2006): “[w]hat was new in the Rajapaksa admini‐
stration’s approach was the goal of defeating, as opposed to weakening, the LTTE militarily
and then making the LTTE irrelevant to any political solution to the ethnic conflict” (Uyan‐
goda 2009).
3 At the same time, India refused to take part in multilateral initiatives regarding Sri Lanka, for example in donor
conferences. As one interviewee put it, “at the donor conferences India was present as an observer but it would
not join a multilateral agreement in its own region!” Interview with expert, New Delhi, November 25, 2008.
4 See “Exclusion from donors conference undermines peace process”, TamilNet, April 4, 2003, at:
net.com/art.html?catid=13&artid=8673> (May 25, 2009). Destradi: India and the Civil Warin Sri Lanka: On the Failures ofRegional Conflict Management in SouthAsia 11
In an unprecedented military offensive, Sri Lankan government forces gradually re‐con‐
quered the territories under LTTE control—the East in 2007 and, step by step, also the North‐
ern province. When the Sri Lankan military crossed the border of the Kilinochchi district, the
displacement of a huge number of civilians—estimated to be as high as 200,000—began
(Fuller 2009). On January 2, 2009, the city of Kilinochchi, which had been the Tigers’ adminis‐
trative capital since 1995, fell into the hands of the government forces after a long siege.
Trapped between the advancing Sri Lankan armed forces and the retreating LTTE rebels, the
civilians were used by the LTTE as human shields and subjected to “intentional shelling” by
the government forces (ICG 2010: i). By mid‐January 2009, the LTTE had been confined to a
small jungle area in the Mullaithivu district, a space that continued to shrink up until the
LTTE’s military defeat and the death of its leadership in May 2009.
Not only was the final phase of the war characterized by massive violations of interna‐
tional humanitarian law on both sides,5 but according to UN estimates, as of May 22, 2009,
there were also at least 300,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Sri Lanka (UN 2009a).
The civilians who managed to escape from the conflict zone were subject to a “screening” by
the government, which feared that LTTE cadres might have mingled with the refugees. Ap‐
proximately 250,000 IDPs were put in militarily controlled refugee camps, to which interna‐
tional aid agencies were given only partial access. Even though many countries pressured
Colombo, they did not manage to induce a policy change on the part of the Sri Lankan gov‐
ernment. China and Japan, along with Russia and Vietnam, prevented the UN Security
Council from discussing the Sri Lankan issue, defined as an internal matter of Sri Lanka
(Nessman 2009). And even India, as is illustrated in the following sections, supported the Sri
Lankan government.
President Rajapaksa, strengthened by his military victory, quickly consolidated his power
position by winning the presidential election of January 2010 and, with his party, the general
election of April 2010. Rajapaksa repeatedly refused an international investigation of war
crimes and human rights violations, as he argued they impinged on Sri Lanka’s sovereignty
(ICG 2010: 31). The Sri Lankan regime, in the meantime, has been assuming increasingly au‐
thoritarian traits, exemplified by the power concentrated in Rajapaksa’s family’s hands, an
almost total lack of press freedom (Schlütter 2010: 1), about 10,000 Sri Lankan citizens being
held for over a year for assumed involvement in LTTE activities (ICG 2010: 31), an increasingly
militarized governance culture (Senanayake 2009: 824), and no signs of willingness to find a
political situation providing for a meaningful devolution of power to the Tamil minority.
The Permanent People’s Tribunal , an international body has indicted Sri Lanka as Guilty of war crimes in killing the Tamils, under the guise of ending Terrorism in the Island Nation.
Channel 4 exposed the gruesome killing of innocent Tamilians point-blank, children and women included.
Recently David Cameron, PM, UK, met with the survivors of the Genocide when he attended the CHOGM Summit in Colombo.
“After an assessment of evidences presented by eyewitnesses and experts, judges of the Permanent People’s Tribunal reached unanimous consensus that the Sri Lankan state was guilty of crimes of genocide against the Eezham Tamils and that the genocide is continuing even after the end of the military operations against the LTTE. Concluding the four day session with a press conference at Bremen on Tuesday, the judges also noted that the Sri Lankan military did not have capacity to commit genocide on its own and that it was supported by the UK-USA-India axis. While the judges held the USA and the UK to be complicit in the genocidal process, they were of the opinion that more evidence was needed as regards India’s role.”
The PPT Report on Tamils Killing by Sri Lanka.
”
The Second Session of the Peoples’ Tribunal on Sri Lanka concluded today in Bremen, Germany, with
the presentation of its verdict. The panel of eleven judges unanimously found Sri Lanka guilty of the
crime of genocide against the Eelam Tamil people, and that this crime continues today.
The Tribunal specified that the victims are in this case the Eelam Tamils as a national group.
The Tribunal found that genocide against the Eelam Tamil group has not yet achieved the total
destruction of their identity. The genocidal coordinated plan of actions reached its climax on May 2009,
but it is clear that the Sri Lanka Government project to erase the Eelam Tamil identity, corroborated by
the above mentioned conduct, shows that genocide is a process and that process is ongoing. The
genocidal strategy changed once the perpetrators gained control of the territory. The killings are being
transformed into other forms of conduct, but the intention to destroy the group and its identity remains
and continues, through causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the Eelam Tamil group…
The Tribunal considers that the proofs established, beyond any reasonable doubt that the following acts
were committed by the Government of Sri Lanka
(a) Killing members of the group, which includes massacres, indiscriminate shelling, the strategy of
herding civilians into so‐called “No Fire Zones” for the purpose of massive killings, targeted assassinations
of outspoken Eelam Tamil civil leaders who were capable of articulating the Sri Lankan genocide project
to the outside world
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, including
acts of torture, inhumane or degrading treatment, sexual violence including rape, interrogations
combined with beatings, threats of death, and harm that damages health or causes disfigurement
or injury.
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction
in whole or in part, including
* expulsions of the victims from their homes, * seizures of private lands, * declaring vast areas as military
High Security Zone (HSZ) to facilitate the military acquisition of Tamil land
Further, the Tribunal considered evidence related to
(d) Imposingmeasuresintended to prevent births within the group
including forced sterilization and coerced contraception of Eelam Tamil women. Further investigation is
required on the extent of this practice in other regions before a determination is made on whether these
could be considered genocidal acts.
The UK and USA were found to be guilty of complicity in the crime of genocide, including
‐‐ complicity by procuring means, such as weapons, instruments or any other means, used to commit
genocide, with the accomplice knowing that such means would be used for such a purpose;
‐‐ complicity by knowingly aiding or abetting a perpetrator of a genocide in the planning or enabling acts
thereof;
Recognizing that the Sri Lankan state alone did not have the capacity to achieve their genocidal
ambitions, and given the evidence presented, the Tribunal believes that the UK, the USA and India are
guilty of complicity in genocide. However, given time constraints the Tribunal decided to withhold its
decision pending the consideration of additional evidence as to the possibility that India, as well as other
States, are indeed guilty of complicity in the crime of genocide against the Eelam Tamils.
More than 30 direct eye‐witnesses and experts testified in support of the Prosecution’s case, providing
evidence on various alleged crimes that could be determined to constitute the crime of genocide, as well
as on the legal and historical background and the charges of complicity.
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