[According to Mr. Samaraweera,
the government planned to set up the reconciliation commission with advice from
South Africa . It also proposed the creation
of an Office of Missing Persons to identify the fate of people who disappeared
during the civil war, and an Office of Reparations to address compensation. It
also planned to create a “constituent assembly of Parliament” to prepare a new
constitution in order to avoid a recurrence of conflict, he said.]
By
Foreign Minister Mangala
Samaraweera of
Rights Council in Geneval on
Monday.CreditJean-Marc Ferre/
United Nations, via Agence
France-Presse — Getty Images
|
The foreign minister, Mangala Samaraweera, announced the
measures in a speech to the United Nations Human Rights Council here. His
address came three days before the release of a long-awaited United Nations
report on the killing of an estimated 40,000 ethnic Tamil civilians in 2009 by
armed forces under President Mahinda Rajapaksa.
The report was supposed to have been presented to the council in
March but was delayed to give President Maithripala Sirisena, who had defeated Mr.
Rajapaksa in an election two months earlier, time to come up with plans for achieving
reconciliation and accountability and for cooperating with international
investigators.
According
to Mr. Samaraweera, the government planned to set up the reconciliation
commission with advice from South Africa . It also proposed the creation
of an Office of Missing Persons to identify the fate of people who disappeared
during the civil war, and an Office of Reparations to address compensation. It
also planned to create a “constituent assembly of Parliament” to prepare a new
constitution in order to avoid a recurrence of conflict, he said.
“We would want international
judges in special courts that the government sets up, independent prosecutors
and, importantly, laws to incorporate crimes into the body of offenses in Sri
Lanka with retroactive effect,” Abraham Sumanthiran, a member of Parliament
from the Tamil National Alliance, the biggest Tamil party, said in an
interview. Human rights observers also stress the need to protect witnesses to
atrocities.
Those concerns underscore the
persistent sense of insecurity in Sri Lanka , particularly among Tamils,
despite President Sirisena’s pledges.
“The anti-terrorist mechanism that was so
ferocious under Rajapaksa is still there,” said Alan Keenan, a Sri Lanka specialist at the
International Crisis Group. “People can complain more freely but the apparatus
that watches them closely and harasses people remains.”
The government has so far committed itself to a domestic process
of investigation. In his statement to the council on Monday, Mr. Samaraweera
spoke only of accepting financial, material and technical support from
international partners.
Still, Mr. Samaraweera made sure to address broader concerns
about the direction of reforms. He pledged the that government would strengthen
the national human rights commission, disengage the military from commercial
activities and issue instructions to the security services that torture, rape,
sexual violence and other abuses they were accused of having committed were
prohibited.
The process of reform “may not
be as fast as some may want it to be. And for some, we may have already gone
too far,” Mr. Samaraweera told the council, but the president and prime
minister have “the political will and the courage of their convictions to
ensure that we take the country forward.”
Dharisha
Bastians contributed reporting.