Features | Online edition of Daily News

Tuesday, 25 January 2011

Home

dailynews
ONLINE

UN panel of investigators

The UN panel of experts inquiring in to ‘war crimes in Sri Lanka during the last stages of the war’ is in the process of finalizing their report to Ban ki Moon. The three-person panel will be chaired by Marzuki Darusman. The other two members are Yasmin Sooka of South Africa and Steven Ratner of the United States.

We wish to bring the following facts and circumstances about these ‘last stages’ so that the experts could bring a semblance of justice and balance in to bear on their report.

* Sri Lankan Forces were alleged to have killed that 7,000 - 21,000 civilians during the last stages by ‘deliberate firing at the no fire zones’. The Western media cited ‘reliable sources’ quoting medical personnel attached to the hospitals in support of this claim. This ‘reliable source’, was none other than the Tamil net which was partisan and hence could hardly be a ‘reliable source’.

This same Tamil net declared that Prabhakaran was alive and safe contradicting the Sri Lankan Government’s announcement of his death on the May 19, 2009 and it was only on May 26 that they admitted his death. Such was the ‘reliability’ of this source.

* In July 2009, those medical personnel who were quoted in the Tamil net in May 2009 on ‘mass civilian casualties’ retracted their statements (now in Government controlled area) and stated that ‘they had to exaggerate the figures to comply with the LTTE agenda of prompting Western powers to interfere’.

The BBC and Al Jazeera reported these retracting statements of medical personnel insinuating that ‘they must be retracting now under Government pressure’. These channels could only surmise of ‘pressure’ when the medical personnel make statements under the Government but treat what these same parties said when they were under the fascist LTTE as ‘reliable’.

This implies that these news channels were conducting an extremely hostile and partisan campaign against Sri Lanka on this issue for reasons best known to them.

* The Sri Lankan Government with its past experience in fighting the LTTE knew all along that the LTTE would try the ‘civilian card’ sooner or later.

Therefore the Government at the initial stages appointed a Commissioner General of Essential Services to ensure an uninterrupted supply of humanitarian needs to the fighting area.

In addition the Government appointed a Consultative Committee on Humanitarian Assistance (CCHA) headed by the Human Rights and Disaster Management Minister comprising Senior Presidential Advisor Basil Rajapaksa, Defence Secretary and the Government Agents of Kilinochchi, Mulaitivu, Mannar, Vavuniya, Trincomalee and Batticaloa.

* The Government took special care to ensure that they maintain ‘zero casualty of civilians’ as a policy because twice before the operations to eliminate the LTTE got mired in controversies over ‘civilian casualties’ and ‘marooned civilians’.

The Government was also aware of the propaganda outreach of the LTTE and that it would do its utmost to invoke the Western nations to interfere in the crisis.

* Further the Government was expecting and was prepared, to house the civilians during the last phase and if not they could not have coped with 280,000 influx of civilians at that stage.

The fact remains that 280,000 civilians walked in to the Sri Lanka Army control area from the clutches of terrorism. Hence no person with common reasoning will believe that the civilians would do that at the first available opportunity if the Army had been engaged in ‘deliberate’ or even callous killing of civilians during this time.

* The other point is when you study the battle calendar from January to May 2009 it is clear that the Sri Lanka Army took only a month to push the LTTE from Elephant Pass in to the Lagoon via their ‘stronghold’ Kilinochchi and that was the most intensified period of fighting that there ever was. On the other hand the Forces had to wait from February to May (three and half months) after having cornered the LTTE in the lagoon to finally finish them up.

This was because the civilian factor in the lagoon prevented the Forces from taking combative action. Had the Sri Lanka Army acted with the same level of fighting efficiency here as they did during the entire war the LTTE would have been over in February but that would have meant a few thousands of civilian casualties as well due to the way LTTE operated under civilian cover in the lagoon.

* As claimed by the Tamil net, if the aggression was only from the Sri Lanka Forces during this last stage, we may have difficulty in comprehending how this last stage caused 7,000 deaths of Government soldiers. Are we to assume that they died by tripping over each other and not from bullet and bomb wounds inflicted by the LTTE?

* If an average Sri Lankan is five foot and six inches tall and has a body depth of 30 inches, and if these bodies were heaped into a narrow sliver of land, it would have found itself to be the size of a mini-pyramid. Twenty thousand people would be a lot of bodies and to bury them one would have wanted a sizable grave.

The grave should have been at least 50 metres deep or more. Who buried these dead bodies and do the IDP’s have any evidence on this? An infra-red aerial scanner would have spotted this burial ground even now but they haven’t so far. While the Channel 4 was swift in showing alleged execution by Sri Lankan soldiers, they seem to have had difficulty in showing the mountain of the 20,000 dead bodies.

Therefore, the average Sri Lankan would be looking forward to see how the UN expert panel would explain these anomalies in their report.