Sri Lanka’s president has ordered authorities to free the country’s jailed former army chief, a man credited with ending the country’s long civil war, but who later was imprisoned after challenging the president in elections.
Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa signed papers ordering the release of former army chief Sarath Fonseka and handed them over to his chief of staff on Saturday before embarking on an official visit to Qatar, Sri Lankan presidential spokesman Bandula Jayasekara said yesterday.
The papers will be sent to the Sri Lankan Ministry of Justice today, Jayasekara said.
Photo: AFP
Rajapaksa’s move came after Sri Lankan Foreign Minister G.L. Peiris met with US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Friday in Washington, with the protection of human rights highlighted in their meeting.
The US has called Fonseka a political prisoner.
Fonseka is serving a 30-month jail term after a court-martial found him guilty of planning his political career while still in the military and of committing fraud in purchasing military equipment.
Separately, in November last year, he was sentenced to an additional three-year prison term for implicating the president’s brother, Sri Lankan Minister of Defense Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, in war crimes during Sri Lanka’s civil war. He has appealed that conviction.
Fonseka has said the cases are a political vendetta launched to persecute him for daring to run against Rajapaksa in the 2010 election. The government has denied any political motive for the legal action.
The details of Fonseka’s release — including when he will be freed and whether the release applies to all his cases — were not immediately clear.
According to Sri Lankan law, a person convicted of a crime and sentenced to at least two years in jail cannot contest elections for seven years if he has already served at least six months of the sentence. A full presidential pardon could restore those rights to Fonseka, who has served about 20 months of his 30-month term.
Government spokesmen over the past few days have been hinting that Fonseka will be given a full pardon. Rajapaksa also got approval from his Cabinet for Fonseka’s release, according to a government Web site.
Fonseka was hailed as a war hero in 2009 after he led Sri Lanka’s army to victory in its 26-year civil war with separatist Tamil Tiger rebels, and both he and Rajapaksa were immensely popular among the Sinhalese majority for defeating a rebel group that had seemed invincible for decades.
However, the two men had a falling out months after the war ended, and their relationship deteriorated further after the general challenged Rajapaksa in the Jan. 26, 2010, election. Fonseka was arrested about two weeks later.
Later that year, a court-martial convicted him and stripped him of his title, medals, pension and other honors, and dishonorably discharged him from the army.
While in detention, Fonseka won a parliamentary seat on the opposition ticket in April 2010, but he was disqualified from holding office after the court-martial.
During her meeting with Peiris on Friday, Clinton discussed a range of topics, including accountability issues in the island nation’s civil war and ethnic reconciliation.
Clinton “also stressed ... the importance of protection of human rights,” US Department of State spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.
Sri Lanka has faced growing criticism over alleged rights abuses in the final phase of the civil war. Its ties with Washington have been strained by US sponsorship of a resolution passed by the UN Human Rights Council in March to press Sri Lanka to conduct an independent probe into civilian deaths in the final months of the war.
The conflict that killed more than 80,000 people ended in May 2009, when government forces crushed the rebels who had fought for a separate state for ethnic -minority Tamils, claiming decades of discrimination by the Sinhalese majority.
Rajapaksa rejected calls from the US to close army bases in a former war zone as he celebrated the third anniversary on Saturday of the military’s victory over the Tamil Tiger rebels.
Fighter jets flew over Colombo and thousands of soldiers paraded in the streets flanked by tanks to mark the 2009 end to the war.
Rajapaksa said reducing the military camps in the former war zone would be a risk to national security.
“There are many who shout that the security forces camps in these areas should be removed. They ask us why they are not removed,” he said, saying the north was under civilian, not military rule. “We must ask if we are in a position to remove the armed forces camps in the north and reduce our attention to national security. That is not possible.”
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including