Sri Lanka: Confronting the Killing Fields

• By Sam Zarifi Wednesday, 15 June 2011 at 11:49 am

Ban Ki-Moon has suggested that he can only establish an international investigation if the Sri Lankan government consents, It would be a sad day for the authority of the Secretary General if he could only authorise investigations approved by the government under scrutiny.
Far from the lenses of television cameras and the print of news headlines that typify war reporting today, tens of thousands of civilians – perhaps as many as 40,000 – were killed in the last terrible phase of fighting of Sri Lanka’s civil war between the brutal Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Sri Lankan government.             Full Story>>>
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Sri Lanka: Evidence that won't be buried

Editorial The Guardian, Wednesday 15 June 2011
The footage screened by Channel 4 last night ranks among the most horrific yet shown on British television. Naked prisoners shot in the head; the dead bodies of women who had been raped, dumped on a truck; the immediate aftermath of a shell landing on a hospital – images caught on mobile phones of the atrocities committed by government soldiers in the final months of Sri Lanka's brutal civil war. The story of what happened two years ago when government forces corralled hundreds of thousands of Tamils in horrific conditions into an ever-shrinking space, as they closed in the defeated Tigers, is well known. A UN panel last month found credible allegations of war crimes committed both by the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE. But the pictures of the shootings are new and Channel 4 has done what human rights organisations should have been doing in compiling and sifting through it.    Full Story>>>