Will the pressure on the regime ease?-International responses to the LLRC Report

Sunday 01 January 2012

Assessing how the international community is reacting, the LLRC Report is the strategic key for the regime. For the government, what the locals think is irrelevant. Not only Rajapaksa and his ministers but just about everybody in the country knows and has known for a long time how to reconcile with the Tamil community – substantial devolution, demilitarization of the N-E and release of thousands of illegally incarcerated Tamil youth. The government needed no commissions of inquiry to tell it any of this; the LLRC’s appointment had nothing to do with reconciliation; it was a ploy to get international pressure for war crimes and violation of human rights off the back of the regime. I said this last week in this column and the International Crisis Group echoed it as follows on December 22. 
“Appointed by President Rajapaksa in May 2010, the LLRC has been the government’s primary means of deflecting pressure for an international investigation into credible allegations of grave violations of international humanitarian and human rights law by both government forces and fighters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the final stages of the long civil war. The government has pledged that the Commission’s report would fully address the international community’s demands for accountability, as President Rajapaksa promised UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon after the government’s declaration of victory over the LTTE in May 2009.”
So is the international community satisfied that the government has conducted an adequate investigation, that the findings are acceptable and the world can stop breathing down the necks of the regime? Of course no one believes the LLRC’s whitewash of the military and the regime, but the point is whether the international community has been bamboozled into keeping quiet. If this much hasbeen achieved the game plan has succeeded and the LLRC has served its purpose in the eyes of the government. 

Western government responses            Read more...