U.S. Envoy to Visit Sri Lanka as Pressure Builds for War Crimes Inquiry

By GARDINER HARRISJAN. 30, 2014

A top State Department official is expected to arrive in Sri Lanka on Friday, just three days after the United States announced that it would again seek a resolution at the United Nations Human Rights Council pressing for an investigation into allegations of war crimes in Sri Lanka.

Nisha Biswal, the assistant secretary of state for Central and South Asian affairs, is expected to meet with government officials, members of the opposition and others in Colombo, the capital. She is also expected to travel to Jaffna, a city in the heart of the Tamil-dominated Northern Province of Sri Lanka.

The visit comes as relations between the United States and Sri Lanka have become increasingly frosty, largely because, nearly five years after the end of a nearly 30-year civil war in which government forces battled the Tamil Tigers — a notoriously brutal insurgent group — the Sri Lankan government has shown little appetite for any robust investigation into possible war crimes.

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