Sri Lanka said yesterday it would allow the UN to send a representative to a locally appointed war crimes panel, reversing an earlier ban on international involvement, but analysts said the move would do little to add credibility to the commission.
The island nation had rejected a three-member UN panel convened by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to look into possible war crimes in the 25-year war and ruled out visas for members of the panel if they wanted to visit Sri Lanka for any investigations.
However, a statement by the foreign ministry said the government would now welcome UN involvement in the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), a local panel appointed by Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa to probe the end of the war and which has been criticized by human rights groups as lacking independence.
“In the event of the panel of the Secretary-General wishing to present representations to the commission, the Ministry of External Affairs will make the arrangements that are necessary to enable the panel to do so,” the ministry said in a statement.
“This position has already been conveyed through diplomatic channels, to the United Nations in New York,” the ministry added, without giving any details.
Analysts described the government statement as a small, and ineffectual, concession to demands by Western governments and human rights groups for an international probe into the military’s crushing defeat in May last year of the Tamil Tiger separatists after a quarter--century of civil war.
Sri Lanka’s failure to set up an independent probe into the alleged war crimes has already cost the nation US$150 million in trade concessions from the EU annually. Economists also said it is hampering foreign investment.
“There is no point of a UN panel coming here, if it is only allowed to meet only the LLRC and not allowed to meet the civil society and people affected by the war and to travel around the country,” said a political analyst asking not to be named fearing repercussions.
“The submissions the LLRC have got is mostly on reconciliation for the future and not what happened in the last day of the war. The UN panel is meant to see what happened in the last day of the war,” the analyst said.
Human rights groups, Tamil pressure groups overseas and some Western governments accuse the government of responsibility for what they say are thousands of civilian deaths or other atrocities that could constitute war crimes.
Allegations of war crimes by the Sri Lankan military against Tamil rebels resurfaced after Rajapaksa’s recent visit to Britain, where a university canceled his speech after protests by Tamil groups.
US diplomatic cables, released by the WikiLeaks Web site, also put the alleged human rights abuses in the spotlight, revealing that the US believes there is little prospect Sri Lanka will hold anyone accountable for the bloody end of the war because of the top government figures involved.
Sri Lankan Tamils, who have been mostly affected in the war, have complained of disappearances, abductions and abuses by the military before the LLRC, but the government has not yet started an official probe to investigate.
Economists attribute the government’s failure to begin the probe for slowing foreign investment, which has fallen 12 percent in the first nine months of this year year-on-year, despite the end of the war.
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