Demand US to provide war crimes evidence to UN Panel, urges Boyle

[TamilNet, Saturday, 13 November 2010, 20:45 GMT]
Pointing to the recent news stories on UN Sri Lanka Advisory Panel's willingness to review incriminating photographic evidence of graphic scenes with dead bodies blindfolded, hands bound and shot through the head, exposing alleged war crimes of Sri Lanka soldiers, Professor Boyle of University of Illinois, College of Law, said: "there is some precedent here in what happened to Milosevic. The Americans have all the intelligence the Tamils need. Tamil activists have to figure out a strategy to get the US Government to act."

Professor Boyle said, "[a]fter Milosovic started his campaign of aggression and genocide against the Kosovars, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met with the ICTY [International Criminal Tribunal - Yugoslavia] Prosecutor Louise Arbour and offered her US intelligence information to get him prosecuted. Arbour later prosecuted him for his crimes in Kosova.

"Then I later convinced her successor Carla del Ponte to prosecute Milosevic for his crimes in Bosnia, on the grounds that her predecessor had indicted him for allegedly killing ten thousand in Kosova and he had killed around ten thousand at Srebrenica alone. Del Ponte later expanded her investigation and indictment to include his crimes in Croatia as well. In Bosnia she indicted him for genocide, as I had requested," Professor Boyle said of his experience as the counsel for the Mothers of Srebrenica and Podrinja

"United States Defense Department will have all the evidence necessary to indict Sri Lanka officials who were responsible for the 2009 May massacre. Expatriate Tamils have to keep working until they find a way to have this information accessible to UN prosecutors," Boyle said.

Michael Posner, assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, Harold Koh, US Legal Advisor for the State Department, Samantha Power, National Security Advisor for President Obama and who has done a lot of good work in Bosnia are key individuals who will be charting the US's policy on these matters, according to political sources in Washington.

With China, India rivalry escalating in the Indian Ocean, China's domination in Sri Lanka may open political space for India-US to take a more assertive course to the benefit of Tamils, Boyle speculated.

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