A report on Sri Lanka released by the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein on 16 September (Wednesday) gives details of the atrocities committed during the 26-year long LTTE insurgency in the island nation.
The 261-page report was prepared by Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Investigation on Sri Lanka (OISL) following a US-sponsored resolution passed in the UN Human Rights Council in March 2014.
The report reveals the war resulted in the deaths of about 200,000 people, the majority being Tamils. The OISL gathered evidence from satellite pictures and photos from various sources as well as eyewitness accounts. The time frame of the report is from 2002 to 2011—the period from the 2002 ceasefire to the LTTE’s defeat in May 2009 and beyond. It does not cover the previous two decades of the war that a UNP government began in 1983.
Presenting the report, Zeid noted: “Importantly, the report reveals violations that are among the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole.” It does not, however, name the perpetrators of the war crimes.
President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minster Ranil Wickremesinghe were delighted. According to the Daily Mirror, Sirisena told a meeting of Colombo media heads that the report was “100 times or 1,000 times milder than that would have been presented at the UNHRC if not for the change that took place on January 8.”
Sirisena, who won the presidency from Mahinda Rajapaksa in January, declared the “danger of several names being included in the report” was averted by “the positive image” of the present United National Party (UNP)-led government.
Despite its failure to name those responsible, the report’s conclusions are a devastating indictment of Rajapaksa government as also its predecessors. It pointed out that there were “extensive and endemic patterns of extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, abductions, unlawful arrests and arbitrary detention, torture and sexual violence committed with impunity by the government forces over many years, as well as by paramilitary organisations linked to them.”
The report also pointed to extensive human rights abuses by the LTTE, whose agenda of Tamil separatism represents the interests of the island’s Tamil elites, not the Tamil workers and rural poor. Unable to make any appeal to working people, the LTTE increasingly resorted to anti-democratic methods to maintain its territory and deliberately whipped up communal hatreds by attacking Sinhalese civilians.
Having won the 2005 presidential election, Rajapaksa plunged the island back into civil war in mid-2006, boosted the military budget, trebled the army’s fighting strength to 300,000 and launched massive offensive operations against the LTTE, first in the East and then in the North.
Like a previous UN investigation, the report focuses on the final months of the civil war in 2009 when hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians were trapped in shrinking LTTE-controlled territory and subjected to deprivation of food and medical facilities. The No Fire Zones declared by the Sri Lankan military inside LTTE-held areas offered no protection. In order to cover up the military’s activities, the government ordered all UN agencies and non-governmental organisations to leave the remaining LTTE-controlled area in the North in September 2008.
The report concluded: [T]he intensive shelling by the armed forces caused great suffering and loss of life among the civilian population of the Vanni. Witnesses gave harrowing descriptions to the OISL of the carnage, bloodshed and psychological trauma of bombardments in which entire families were killed. Lack of food, water and medical treatment because of strict controls of supplies allowed into the Vanni by the government further impacted on their well-being and undoubtedly caused additional deaths.”
The OISL concluded that “the patterns of commission of gross human rights violations and serious violations of international law, the indications of their systematic nature, combined with the widespread character of the attacks all point to the possible perpetration of international crimes.”
These crimes included attacks on hospitals despite, or perhaps because, their location had been provided to the Sri Lankan armed forces. The first shelling on Vallipunam hospital in January 2009 resulted in “damage to the main building, medical infrastructure, ambulances and temporary medical shelters. At least five civilians were reportedly killed and 22 others were injured in the incident.” It was followed by attacks on the Pudukudiyirippu, Valayarmadam, Mullivaikkal and finally Vellimullivaikkal health facilities.
As the report explained, “the plight of the civilians did not end once the war was over.” More than 250,000 people were herded into internment camps, known as “welfare villages,” under the direct control of the military.
Manik Farm in Vavuniya “spanned some 500 hectares and several kilometres, and was comprised of seven zones, each one surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by military personnel.” About 220,000 people were detained there. Around 12,000, mainly young people, were branded “LTTE suspects” and taken to secret locations where they faced torture. Some simply “disappeared.”
The report examines several notorious cases including the murder of 17 aid workers from the French-based Action Contre la Faim (ACF) in the eastern town of Muttur on August 4, 2006. Fifteen of them were lined up in a row and shot execution-style in the head. Two others were killed while trying to flee. The subsequent investigations were a whitewash.
The report stated: “The Executive [President Rajapaksa] interfered with the inquest and shifted the case to a jurisdiction in a Sinhalese area where Tamils had difficulty attending the proceedings. The magistrate initially assigned the case was threatened. The international forensic pathologist appointed to oversee a second autopsy was harassed and retracted his finding that a bullet likely to be from a STF weapon was lodged in the skull of one of the victims.”
In another high profile case, the report declared that there were “reasonable grounds,” contrary to government denials, to believe that the security forces murdered surrendered LTTE members. The most prominent were Balasingham Nadesan, the leader of the LTTE’s political wing, and Seevaratnam Puleedevan, the head of its peace secretariat, who died after surrendering to security forces on May 18, 2009.
The OISL recommended the establishment of “hybrid special courts integrating international judges, prosecutors, lawyers and investigators” to investigate the crimes it identified. The report is due to be discussed at the UN Human Rights Committee on September 30.