POREG VIEW: Sri Lanka defence secretary Gotabaya Rajapakse is inviting trouble for the government led by his elder brother. “If, in future, any substantial evidence is provided on crimes committed by its personnel, the Sri Lankan military will not hesitate to take appropriate action,” he reportedly told a post-war reconciliation conference. Put mildly, the influential minister is not willing to concede what the mountain of evidence in public domain has been saying about atrocities committed by the army particularly during the last phase of Eelam War –IV. The LTTE too committed brutalities and history will hold it guilty. But what LTTE did was no justification for the army to go on a killing spree, particularly of civilians. As the instrument of a duly elected civilian government, the army has to act with restraint and dignity while carrying out the mandate given.
For the past two years, President Mahinda Rajapakse has been pilloried on the charge that the final phase of the Eelam War had seen violation of human rights on an unprecedented scale. The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had even appointed a ‘fact finding mission to go into the issue but Colombo in its wisdom did not allow the UN panel to visit the country. On its part the panel has found “credible evidence” that the military killed thousands of civilians in the last months of Sri Lanka’s war in 2009 and that both sides committed atrocities
Only a week back the Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) set up by the government in the wake of universal condemnation of war time atrocities presented its report. Though its findings are yet to be made public, newspapers close to the establishment reported that the Commission had called for a probe into how the army went about its task in what critics see as a clever attempt to push the issue to the back burner. While the recommendation may appear to be an answer to the pressure on Colombo to be seen to be acting, it falls short of the calls for credible action against the guilty of perpetrating human rights abuses and political concessions to minority Tamils. As long as the demand is not met or local efforts if any are seen to be falling short of the goal, Rajapakse brothers will find it difficult to duck outside pressure for action.
Sri Lanka has consistently maintained its soldiers did not kill any civilians intentionally, and points to the fact troops rescued nearly 300,000 held by the Tigers as human shields. It holds civilian death tallies in the thousands as inflated. Since at least 6,000 soldiers died in the 34-month campaign, “it should be evident the number of LTTE casualties should be comparable or higher,” Gotabaya Rajapakse contends.
A government census, by Tamil civil servants, is in the process of being finalized to determine exactly how many people were in the former war zone, and what became of them. It will be possible then to name those who died and how, Rajapakse said. His contention is that war machinery had expanded rapidly in the final phase and a handful of undisciplined recruits could have joined the forces and committed crimes. “It is possible that a few individuals who lacked the capacity to withstand the pressures of warfare with the required composure may have been recruited,” he reportedly said. Rajapakse brothers cannot hope to get away with such after thoughts
