War-crimes film, Heyns report, drown Colombo theatrics on terror

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 01 June 2011, 00:22 GMT]
Channel-4's announcement of screening of an hour-long film on Sri Lanka's killing fields at UN on 3rd June, and the presentation of video footage to the UN Human Rights Council by the UN special investigator into extrajudicial killings, Christof Heyns, spread a gloomy war-crimes cloud over Sri Lanka making the terror-summit in Colombo, a holiday-extravaganza for the military brass of several rogue nations. The terror-summit is widely perceived as an ill-conceived attempt to whitewash the criminal enterprise the Rajapakse brothers took in slaughtering more than 40,000 civilians and incarcerating more than 300,000 Tamils in internment camps in the war to defeat the Tigers.

Heyns report confirming video authenticity

 

"It's very rare that you have actual footage of people being killed," Mr Heyns, a lawyer by training, told The Associated Press. "This is different from CCTV. This is trophy footage," said Heyns, adding, the video showed "definitive war crimes", believed to have taken place in May 2009 - that require both domestic and international proceedings to be launched.

Special Investigator on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions Christof Heyns

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay

Ms. Yasmin Sooka

"There is a prima facie case and it should now go to the next level," Heynes said, referring to the need for an independent international investigations.

Spokesperson for Tamils Against Genocide (TAG), a US-based activist organization, said, "its a strange quirk of destiny that three South Africans, concurrently holding key human rights positions, are dragging Sri Lanka's war-crimes to world's center stage. One can surmise that the chequered history of apartheid and the moral authority arising from the witnessed inhumanity to a people by another people are driving Navi Pillay, Christof Heyns, and Yasmin Sooka to stand up for justice. Tamil people are eternally grateful to these South Africans for taking the moral highground."

While UN sessions are taking place in Geneva, many rogue nations and alleged abettor nations of the war-crimes, Pakistan, India, Russia and China are attending the terror-summit being held in Colombo.

U.S., Britain, Japan, Australia and France declined invitation to attend the summit.

Meanwhile, , the announced film scheduled to be screened in Geneva and to air in Channel-4 on June 14th, presented by Channel 4 News journalist Jon Snow, features footage captured on mobile phones, both by Tamil civilians under attack and government soldiers as war trophies. It shows: the extra-judicial executions of prisoners; the aftermath of targeted shelling of civilian camps and dead female Tamil Tiger fighters who appear to have been raped or sexually assaulted, abused and murdered. Also examined in the film are some of the terrible crimes carried out by the Tamil Tigers, including the cynical use of Tamil civilians as human shields, Channel-4 said.

"The film, directed by Callum Macrae, provides powerful evidence - including photographic stills, official Sri Lankan army video footage and satellite imagery - which contradicts the Sri Lankan government's claims of a policy of ‘Zero Civilian Casualties'. The film raises serious questions about the failures of the international community to intervene and prevent the deaths of up to forty thousand people and lends new urgency to the UN-appointed panel of expert's call for an international inquiry to be mounted," Channel-4 said in its news report.

Callum Macrae, Director of Sri Lanka's Killing fields

Macrae said: "The Sri Lankan government wanted a war without witness - deporting journalists and pressurising UN representatives to leave - but it didn't allow for the extraordinary power of mobile phone and satellite technology. We have trawled through hours of painfully raw recordings of the some of the most awful events I have ever seen in many years of war reporting. Sri Lanka's Killing Fields raises serious questions about the consequences if the UN fails to act - not only for Sri Lanka but for future violations of international law," according to Channel-4.

The BBC's Imogen Foulkes in Geneva says that with more evidence of alleged atrocities due to be shown in the city later this week, the pressure is growing on the UN Human Rights Council to debate the role of the army in the closing months of the Sri Lankan civil war, BBC reported.
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Spain exercises universal jurisdiction in El Salvador killings
[TamilNet, Wednesday, 01 June 2011, 03:13 GMT]
Judge, Eloy Velasco Nuñez of Spain’s National Court, used the doctrine of universal jurisdiction to prosecute crimes committed outside of the country, to issue arrest warrants on Monday for some of the top military leaders of El Salvador’s civil war, accusing them of meticulously planning and carrying out the killings of six Jesuit priests in 1989, New York Times said in its Tuesday edition. The 77-page charging document said that the 20 men named in the warrants never had doubts about “carrying out the most execrable crimes against people merely to impose their strategies and ideas.”
“We wanted to walk the judge every step of the way,” said Almudena Bernabeu, a lawyer with the Center for Justice and Accountability in San Francisco, which brought the case to Spain’s National Court with the support of the victims’ families. “The defense has always argued that it all happened in the chaos of war. But there is no doubt that this was a very carefully planned military operation.”
Among the men named in the indictment: Rafael Humberto Larios, who was the Salvadoran defense minister at the time; Juan Orlando Zepeda, the vice defense minister; René Emilio Ponce, leader of the Army’s Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Inocente Orlando Montano, the vice minister of public safety. Mr. Ponce, who is believed to have given the order for the killings, died this month in El Salvador. Mr. Montano is in custody, New York Times said in its report.
Under international pressure, a Salvadoran court tried nine men for the killings and convicted two officers, including Col. Guillermo Benavides Moreno, who witnesses said gave direct orders to the commando who carried out the killings. Both Colonel Moreno and the other officer were freed after serving 15 months under an amnesty declared in 1993. They are both named in the new indictment. Judge Velasco argued that the earlier trial was a sham, the paper said.
In the U.K., British citizens can apply for an arrest warrant under the Magistrates Court Act 1980. Suspect Sri Lankan war criminal, Major General Chagi Gallage, a member of Sri Lanka's President, Mahinda Rajapaksa's, entourage to London, escaped arrest in December 2010 by his premature departure from Britain.
Tamil activists in Norway, has similary filed Genocide charges against Sri Lanka's Defense Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse and others in the Norwegian courts. If the Prosecutor determines there is reason to believe war-crimes were committed in Sri Lanka, the defendants will face the danger of being arrested if they happen to travel through Norway.