SRI LANKA has accused the United Nations of launching a “crusade” to drag it before war crimes tribunals over a video that allegedly portrays its soldiers executing prisoners.
Sri Lanka’s human rights minister Mahinda Samarasinghe yesterday said Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, had failed in following “due process” in announcing that the disputed video was genuine.
“Philip Alston is on a crusade of his own to force an international [war crimes] inquiry against Sri Lanka,” Mr Samarasinghe said.
“He should have shared his information with us first,” he said in response to Mr Alston’s claims that three independent US-based experts had declared the video footage to be authentic and renewing calls for a war crime inquiry.
“As far as we are concerned, the video is not genuine and it has been doctored.”
The footage shows a man in army uniform shooting a naked, bound and blindfolded man in the back of the head. Eight bodies are visible in a nearby muddy field. It was not clear if the dead were Tamil Tiger rebels or civilians.
Another man – the 10th victim – was also shot in the same way near the end of the short video with men in the background gloating.
Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka said the video had been taken in January 2009 using a mobile phone during the final stages of the army’s bloody fight against the Tamil Tigers.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, one of the world’s deadliest guerilla groups, was defeated last May after almost three decades of fighting in which nearly 100,000 people died.
The government victory ended the Tigers’ decades-long armed struggle for an independent Tamil homeland in one of Asia’s longest-running ethnic conflicts.
The LTTE was the only terrorist group to have both a naval and air wing and a dedicated group of suicide bombers comprising young men and women, many of them children.
Ever since their victory, the Sri Lankan authorities have resisted international calls for a war crimes investigation after the UN alleged that more than 7,000 civilians were killed by the advancing army in the first four months of 2009 alone.