War crimes

In a new broadcast by Britain's channel 4, two Sri Lankan soldiers spoke to Channel 4 on condition of anonymity and claimed that orders to execute surrendering rebels came directly from the defense secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse. Sri Lankan military spokesmen Ubaya Medawela has dismissed the allegations as complete false.

In the new 13 minute program, one of the soldiers claims that Gotabhaya Rajapakse ordered Brigadier Shavendra Silva, a top military commander, to execute Tamil rebel leaders. The other witness also accused the defense secretary of ordering the military commander "to finish the job by whatever means necessary." He says this order was interpreted by soldiers as a license to kill.

Killing fields

Before this broadcast, Channel 4 aired a documentary film titled "Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields." The British TV channel collected amateur footage taken live during the civil war. The shocking images prove unequivocally that the Sri Lankan army committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in the final phase of the conflict. A report brought before the United Nations at the end of April comes to the same conclusion and accuses both the Sri Lankan army and the Tamil Tiger rebels of infringing massively on international human rights.

One scene in the documentary shows a soldier lifting the half-naked body of a woman just barely alive onto a trailer piled up with half-naked female corpses. A Sri Lankan soldier recorded the scene using a mobile phone in May of 2009 – during the last few days of the offensive against Tamil rebels in the north of the island. The scene is proof of the wide-spread sexual abuse that went on during the conflict.

Annihilation

In the last few weeks of fighting against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), government troops rounded up nearly 250,000 Tamil refugees and placed them into so-called "no fire zones," where many of the refugees were shot and killed. The government in Colombo claims to have been implementing a "zero civilian casualties" strategy during the war.

Gordon Weiss was Sri Lanka’s spokesman at the United Nations at the time. Like many of his colleagues, Weiss knew that the strategy the government had claimed to be following was far from the truth. "The government’s main goal was to destroy the Tamil Tigers. And they were willing to pay a high price in the process," which included great numbers of civilian casualties, says Weiss.

Over 40,000 civilian casualties

There were no independent witnesses in the battle zone. The Sri Lankan government ordered the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations to leave the north and President Rajapakse’s government used threats to silence critics. Rupert Colville, spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights says, what happened in Sri Lanka was out of the ordinary – that there was reckless bloodshed going on in the country but "nobody" there to see it happening.

According to the UN report’s preliminary estimate, over 40,000 civilians died during the final phase of the war.

Denial

At the beginning of 2009, the UN knew more about the crimes of war going on in Sri Lanka than it publicly admitted. Gordon Weiss says he did not agree with withholding information from the public. He says he tried very hard back then to get the organization to publish what it knew about casualty figures, but that his efforts were in vain as some people there did not want to corner Colombo. Exposing the government may have forced the UN to impose sanctions "and that would have made it more difficult to provide civilians with humanitarian aid."

President Mahindra Rajapakse maintains that the military action did not take the lives of any civilians, but that those who were killed were all terrorists. His government has dismissed the videos portraying rape and executions as ludicrous and claims they have been faked. Many of the country’s allies stand behind the Sri Lankan government’s take on the footage. These allies have been able to prevent the UN Security Council – the only international council with the power to order a criminal investigation into the matter – from mandating a probe.

International investigation

Colombo has insisted that it is conducting its own investigation. As of yet, it has not produced any evidence of war crimes.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay has recently demanded a trustworthy probe, saying, "there is now a high level of expectations expressed by member states that Sri Lanka should seriously inquire into these allegations". She stressed that it should not be an "open-ended process," noting that a previous Sri Lankan internal inquiry "failed to complete its task, never published its report and never led to a single prosecution." She warned, "if that should be the case again, then the international community will have to take further action. I certainly believe that the Human Rights Council should actively consider this matter."

Author: Claudia Witte / sb / Sachin Gaur
Editor: Manasi Gopalakrishnan / Sarah Berning