Dispute on Sri Lanka War Crimes Escalates

NEW DELHI — About 100 government supporters marched to the American Embassy in Colombo, Sri Lanka, last week and smashed coconuts on the embassy’s doorstep in a Hindu ritual meant to curse an enemy. “We will not let them take our president to the electric chair!” the protesters shouted.

The next day, thousands of miles away, Jen Psaki, a spokeswoman for the State Department, performed a ritual of her own by releasing a statement that condemned Sri Lanka’s recent arrests of human rights activists.

“It is disturbing that the government of Sri Lanka has taken punitive measures against its own brave citizens who have devoted their careers and lives to investigating alleged human rights abuses by both sides during Sri Lanka’s long and brutal civil conflict,” Ms. Psaki’s release stated.

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The dueling rites were part of an escalating conflict between the United States and Sri Lanka that is expected to rise to another level this week with a crucial vote at the United Nations Human Rights Council on whether the international body will start its own investigation into possible war crimes committed by government forces and separatists during Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war.

On Tuesday, the Sri Lankan police released Ruki Fernando, one of Sri Lanka’s most prominent human rights activists, along with the Rev. Praveen Mahesan, a Roman Catholic priest and the former director of the Center for Peace and Reconciliation, based in Jaffna. But the two, who had been in custody for three days, were barred from speaking to foreign reporters and ordered to surrender their computers and cellphone memory chips.

Jeyakumari Balendran, an activist working on behalf of families still searching for loved ones who disappeared in government custody, remained in an infamous government detention camp. All three were detained because of their links with a militant, K. P. Selvanayagam, who escaped from government custody and then established an undercover rebel base in Norway, the Sri Lankan government said.

The government reported that it had uncovered a cache of weapons in Kilinochchi, a former rebel stronghold where all three human rights activists were detained. The cache included mortars, grenades and antipersonnel mines. Several human rights organizations condemned the arrests, and some have warned that Ms. Balendran could be tortured.

Also last week, Sri Lanka’s former president, Chandrika Kumaratunga, filed a complaint saying that state intelligence services had placed her under surveillance and were harassing her friends and acquaintances.

The arrests and complaints of harassment led Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, executive director of the Center for Policy Alternatives in Colombo, to question the government’s competence in its fight against the resolution at the human rights council in Geneva.

“Is the government trying to prove the case against it?” he asked in a recent interview.

The government sent a diplomatic note to other nations explaining that the police actions “are well within the existing legal framework and following due process.”

Five years after the end of a civil war in which government forces battled Tamil Tiger insurgents, the Sri Lankan government has shown little appetite for any robust investigation into possible war crimes. About 40,000 people, many of them civilians, are estimated to have been killed in the war’s final stages in 2009.

Fearing that a failure to investigate the past could rekindle a violent insurgency, the United States and other nations have lost patience with the Sri Lankan government and are now pressing for an outside investigation.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa is popular in Sri Lanka because he ended the insurgency, and the country’s economy has revived since the war’s end, but an independent investigation of conduct during the war would be risky for him and at least one of his brothers, Defense Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who led the government’s military campaign.


http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/24/world/asia/dispute-on-sri-lanka-war-crimes-escalates.html?ref=world