Sri Lanka’s Secrets: How the Rajapaksa Regime Gets Away with Murder by Trevor Grant

Excerpt

For several decades, Sri Lanka was embroiled in a bloody civil war that claimed tens of thousands of lives. In March 2015, the United Nations Human Rights Council announced it would defer publication of a major report investigating allegations of serious human rights violations and related crimes during the last years of Sri Lanka’s civil war. The war had ended in May 2009 with the military defeat of the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Tamil Tigers), who had fought for an independent state for minority Tamils since 1983. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, whose office had been entrusted with the task of establishing the facts and circumstances of alleged rights violations and war crimes perpetrated by both sides, had asked the Council to delay the report’s release until September 2015 based on a request by Sri Lanka’s new government. In 2009, former President Mahinda Rajapaksa (who lost elections and was replaced in February 2015 by his contender and former ally Maithripala Sirisena) had barred outside observers from entering the war zone in the final days of the conflict, when civilian casualties were high; that action has made it difficult to independently establish and verify the facts. …