The United Nations on Wednesday called on Sri Lanka to set up a special court, including international judges and lawyers, to investigate what it called “horrific” abuses committed by both sides during the country’s 26-year civil war, and by the government in the suppression of critics and opponents after it ended.
The recommendations came in a landmark report released on Wednesday, which found that both government forces and Tamil Tiger rebels had committed “the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole,” which it said could amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
“Our investigation has laid bare the horrific level of violations and abuses that occurred in Sri Lanka, including extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, harrowing accounts of torture and sexual violence, recruitment of children and other grave crimes,” Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the United Nations’ top human rights official, said in a statement accompanying the report.
The creation of a special, hybrid court, involving Sri Lankan and international jurists, prosecutors and investigators, was just one proposed step in a process of far-reaching institutional reform that the United Nations said would be essential to achieving the reconciliation that has eluded the country since the civil war ended in 2009.
The 261-page report and a 19-page overview were produced by a core team of seven investigators with advice from three prominent international judicial experts. It followed years of resistance to an independent investigation by Sri Lanka’s former president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, who commanded the armed forces in the closing years of the civil war.
The election of President Maithripala Sirisena in January and the formation of a new government ushered in “a new political context in Sri Lanka which offers ground for hope,” Mr. al-Hussein said.
But though the report said the new government’s offer to introduce a domestic process for reconciliation was “commendable,” it bluntly asserted that circumstances in Sri Lanka would “require more than a domestic mechanism.”
Sri Lanka’s criminal justice system “is not yet ready or equipped,” it said, to conduct a credible investigation that would deal with the legacy of anger and skepticism left by the previous government, as well as the sheer scale and gravity of the violations committed during the conflict.
The report documents widespread killings by security forces and Tamil Tiger rebels during the civil war and the disappearance of tens of thousands of people, including large numbers who were never seen again after surrendering to government forces at the war’s end.
A particularly shocking finding, the report said, was “the extent to which sexual violence was committed against detainees, often extremely brutally, by the Sri Lankan security forces” during and after the conflict, with both men and women victimized.
Torture by the security forces was widespread, systematic and premeditated, particularly in the aftermath of the conflict, the report said, describing centers equipped with metal bars for beating, barrels of water for waterboarding and pulleys for suspending victims.
For their part, the Tamil Tigers abducted adults as part of a strategy of forced recruitment that intensified toward the end of the war, and they made extensive use of children in armed conflict, the report said.
“Ending the impunity enjoyed by the security forces and associated paramilitary groups, as well as holding to account surviving members” of the Tamil Tigers “will require political will” to ensure that such crimes do not recur, the report said.
(NY Times)
