2ND LEAD

Sri Lanka's commission to conclude "sittings"

[TamilNet, Saturday, 22 January 2011, 14:25 GMT]
Sri Lanka's Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), the mandate of which was deliberately designed to whitewash Sri Lanka's war-crimes, and invitation to three leading premier human rights watchdogs Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (HRW), and International Crisis Group (ICG) to attend LLRC's sittings was rejected due to LLRC "lacking the ability to advance accountability for war crimes," announced that the LLRC will "conclude its public sittings after the completion of sittings in the Ampara District in mid February" and would then would prepare its "final report that would be submitted to [Sri Lanka's] President Mahinda Rajapaksa in May," local media reported.

"Nothing in the LLRC’s mandate requires it to investigate the many credible allegations that both the government security forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) committed serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights law during the civil war, especially in the final months, including summary executions, torture, attacks on civilians and civilian objects, and other war crimes. The need to investigate them thoroughly and impartially is especially urgent given the government’s efforts to promote its methods of warfare abroad as being protective of the civilian population, when the facts demonstrate otherwise," the rights organizations earlier said in their letter of rejection to be part of the LLRC.

The LLRC's sittings have failed to investigate the serious violations of international norms of war as warned by the rights organizations.

• Sri Lanka's defence secretary, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, has taken creative accounting to new heights. In his recent statement before a Sri Lankan commission looking at lessons learned from the war, Gotabhaya claimed that injured Tigers "changed their uniforms into civilian clothes" and that the Tigers must have suffered at least 6,000 dead and 30,000 injured – suggesting those counted as civilian casualties were really just Tamil Tiger fighters who had shed their uniforms.LLRC commission members, tired and perhaps sleepless over their own pretentious exercises, were seen dozing off during the session in Mannaar.
• Members of the Sri Lanka Navy (SLN) Intelligence Unit and of the Eealam People’s Democratic Party (EPDP) intimidate many potential witnesses who were planning to appear before the Lesson Learnt & Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) in the SLN controlled islets of Jaffna
• Only fifteen of nearly four hundred persons, most of them women, were allowed to witness before Sri Lanka’s Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) in Mullaiththeevu Government Secretariat Monday while the others were driven away.
• BBC was blocked from attending hearings by the LLRC in the former LTTE stronghold in Ki'linochchi.

Also, Sri Lanka has refused to meet with the UN's Advisory Panel, when one of the objectives, as touted by the pliant UN including the US, was to provide assistance to Sri Lanka in the conduct of Sri Lanka's investigations.

A spokesperson US-based activist group, Tamils Against Genocide (TAG) said, "With the United Nations reluctant to assert its authority over investigating Sri Lanka's war crimes, and its ambivalence in creating the necessary legal space giving authority to the Advisory Panel to investigate war-crimes, under threat of sanctions if required, Sri Lanka has been using the LLRC to postpone establishing accountability for war crimes. Its dud commission was another manifetation of the delaying tactics Colombo has used with apparent success in postponing a full-scale investigation into the Vanni masscre of 40,000 unarmed Tamil civilians.

"Despite lack of witness protection, harassment to witnesses, apathy of the Commissioners, and Commissioners' blatant use of sympthetic leading questions to genocidaires to circumvent exposing accountability to crimes, a few courageous Tamil women affected by war and the Mannar Bishop have provided useful information to further highlight the need for independent investigation," TAG said.

• “We expected some country to step in to resolve the crisis... We believed that a dawn would come, a solution would come through [international] mediation after all the hardships we went through. But, nothing happened. Everything went out of hand for us to end up in the army-controlled area as living corpses. All countries have betrayed us,” told 40-year-old Ananthi Sasitharan, the wife of Elilan, the former Trincomalee Political Head of the LTTE.
• “Due clarification should be made regarding what happened to 146,679 people, which is the discrepancy between the number of people who came to government controlled areas between October 2008 – May 2009 and the population reported to be in Vanni in early October 2008,” said the Catholic Bishop of Mannaar, Rt. Rev. Dr. Rayappu Joseph.
• Mrs R. Mironio, the wife of LTTE's former Mannaar commander Antony Rayappu alias Yaan, said she has not heared from her husband or not told of the whereabouts of him after he surrendered in front of her in SLA controlled territory in Mullaiththeevu on 18 May 2009.
• The wife of Vijithan, a key person in Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) political wing, told the Lessons Learnt & Reconciliation Committee (LLRC) Friday in Changkaraththai in Vaddukoaddai that her husband and her brother were taken away after they surrendered themselves to Sri Lanka Army (SLA) at Vadduvaakal in Mullaiththeevu and that she had not had any information about her husband since then.

Chronology:


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