Sri Lanka’s War Crimes Controversy

By NILAN FERNANDOSEPT. 27, 2015

Earlier this month, the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights released its long-awaited investigation into alleged crimes during Sri Lanka’s civil war. The conflict, which began in 1983 and lasted nearly three decades, pitted the Sri Lankan government against various ethnic Tamil rebels, most prominent the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which were fighting for the creation of a separate state in the country’s north and east.

The 272-page report makes for grim reading. Focusing on alleged abuses committed by both sides between 2002 and 2011, it documents numerous crimes, including unlawful killings and sexual violence, especially at the hands of the military during the last phase of the war in 2009, under the administration of President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

The report contains few factual surprises, after years of drip-by-drip accounts of atrocities from journalists and human rights groups, and a previous United Nations investigation in 2011. But it is arresting for the disconnect between the seriousness of the abuses it documents and the mildness of its recommendations.

The report offers a slew of proposals better designed for strengthening human rights protection in the future than for prosecuting past atrocities. Its most salient proposal is a call to try suspected criminals before a hybrid special court with both international and Sri Lankan prosecutors and judges — but the idea is a nonstarter, as its proponents well know.

This outcome is a political compromise. The Western states that clamored for the U.N. investigation, especially the United States and some European countries, will push for accountability in Sri Lanka today only so far as doing so will not weaken the country’s fledgling pro-Western government. They will not force the administration of President Maithripala Sirisena, who defeated Mr. Rajapaksa in elections earlier this year, to take actions that the Sinhalese majority cannot tolerate, or that look like the government is turning its back on the armed forces and inviting foreign meddling.

The Ohchr report was ordered by a 2014 resolution from the U.N.’s Human Rights Council, after Mr. Rajapaksa’s government spent several years stalling on conducting a comprehensive probe of its own. His government also refused to cooperate with the U.N. team, never even allowing it into the country. But investigators managed to collect substantial evidence through affidavits and interviews with witnesses and secondary sources.                        Full Story>>>