UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Monday sent a report accusing Sri Lankan troops of killing tens of thousands of civilians to the UN Human Rights Council, bringing a potential international inquiry one step closer.
Ban has said he alone cannot order an inquiry into the killings during a final offensive against Tamil separatists in 2009 — which the Sri Lankan government has strongly denied — but that a forum such as the Human Rights Council could do so.
UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said the report had been sent to the Human Rights Council and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
A panel of experts named by Ban said in April that the Sri Lanka Army killed most of the tens of thousands of civilian victims of a final offensive against Tamil separatists in 2009, but both sides may be guilty of war crimes.
The panel’s report — angrily opposed by the Sri Lanka — painted a barbarous picture of the offensive on the Tamil enclave in the north of the island that ended a three-decade war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
“The Sri Lankan Government has been informed of the secretary general’s decision to share the report with the council and the high commissioner,” Nesirky said in a statement. “While the secretary general had given time to the government of Sri Lanka to respond to the report, the government has declined to do so, and instead has produced its own reports on the situation in the north of Sri Lanka, which are being forwarded along with the panel of experts report.”
Nesirky said Ban had not made a recommendation calling for an international inquiry.
“The secretary general is simply sending the report. Its [sic] for members to decide how to respond to it,” Nesirky said.
Hospitals, UN centers and Red Cross ships were deliberately shelled by government forces, prisoners shot in the head and women raped during the 2009 offensive, the panel said. LTTE leaders used 330,000 civilians as a human shield and deliberately shot those who tried to escape.
“Tens of thousands lost their lives from January to May 2009, many of whom died anonymously in the carnage of the final few days,” the three-member panel led by former Indonesian attorney general Marzuki Darsman said.
“Most civilian casualties in the final phases of the war were caused by government shelling,” the report added.
Sri Lanka has slammed the UN report as “biased” and launched an international campaign against it. While Western nations have backed calls for an inquiry, diplomats said Colombo would call on Asian allies to help block any action at the rights council.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing