More than 20,000 Tamil civilians were killed in the final onslaught by the Sri Lankan government on separatist rebels this month, which ended Asia’s longest civil war, a British newspaper said yesterday.
The figure was three times the official casualty figure, the Times said.
Fighting ended when Sri Lankan troops crushed Tamil Tiger rebels accused of holding tens of thousands of civilians as human shields, the Times said. Citing its own investigation, the paper said most of the 20,000 deaths were caused by the government.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Sri Lanka has insisted its forces stopped using heavy weapons on April 27 and respected a no-fire zone where 100,000 men, women and children were sheltering, the newspaper reported.
Confidential UN documents indicated 7,000 civilians died in the no-fire zone up to the end of last month, said the Times, noting that journalists had been barred from the conflict zone.
But citing aerial photographs, official documents, witness accounts and expert testimony, the paper said the death toll mounted, with 1,000 civilians killed each day until last Tuesday, the day after the death of Tamil Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran.
Photographs published by the Times appeared to show sand mounds, indicating makeshift burial grounds, the paper said, citing analysis of the images by independent defense experts.
A spokesman for the Sri Lankan High Commission in London dismissed the report.
“We reject all these allegations. Civilians have not been killed by government shelling at all,” he told the paper.
“If civilians have been killed, then that is because of the actions of the LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam], who were shooting and killing people when they tried to escape,” he added.
On Thursday UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay maintained her demand for an investigation into abuses allegedly carried out by both sides in Sri Lanka’s just-ended civil war.
Human right groups on Thursday accused the UN of failing to hold the Sri Lankan government accountable for the alleged abuses against civilians.
The accusations followed a resolution in the UN human rights council welcoming the Sri Lankan government victory, with no reference to human rights concerns over civilian casualties and the 300,000 Tamils made homeless, many of whom are interned in government camps.
But criticism was also aimed at UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who visited the biggest camp over the weekend and complimented the Sri Lankan government on its humanitarian role, and the Security Council for not speaking out officially about the human cost of the military victory.
“The human rights council performed abysmally,” said Tom Porteous, London director of Human Rights Watch. “It’s there to monitor human rights and the laws of war, and it completely failed — and failed to register any concern over the situation.”
The Sri Lankan government took the unusual step of submitting its own resolution to a council session in Geneva convened to examine its conduct in the conflict. Colombo won substantial support from friendly governments, derailing an attempt to launch an inquiry into war crimes allegations.
“It was a deplorable result, a self-congratulatory resolution that Sri Lanka imposed on the council,” said Peter Splinter, Amnesty International’s representative in Geneva.
Sen Kandiah, a Tamil community leader in Britain, said: “The Tamil diaspora feel the system is not working. We feel justice is not going to be done.”
The Geneva resolution hailed “the liberation by the government of Sri Lanka of tens of thousands of its citizens that were kept by the LTTE against their will as hostages.”
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