VIDEO: Sri Lanka Tamil killings ‘ordered from the top’: Channel 4 claims again
May 19, 2010 01:41 am
In its latest report, Channel 4 claims that it was correct in stating that the video it obtained soon after the Eelam War IV ended was authentic. In a report filed last night (May 18), it claims that a senior Sri Lankan army commander and a frontline soldier have told Channel 4 News that such killings were indeed ordered from the top.
The news report in full:
In August 2009 Channel 4 News obtained video evidence, later authenticated by the United Nations, purporting to show point-blank executions of Tamils by uniformed Sri Lankan soldiers.
Now a senior army commander and a frontline soldier have told Channel 4 News that such killings were indeed ordered from the top.
One frontline soldier said: “Yes, our commander ordered us to kill everyone. We killed everyone.”
And senior Sri Lankan army commander said: “Definitely, the order would have been to kill everybody and finish them off. I don’t think we wanted to keep any hardcore elements, so they were done away with. It is clear that such orders were, in fact, received from the top.”
Despite allegations of war crimes,
So decisive was Sri Lanka’s victory over the Tamil Tigers last year that other nations facing violent insurgencies are now citing the “Sri Lanka option” as a model for crushing rebellion, writes Channel 4 News foreign reporter Jonathan Miller.
International lawyers, human rights and conflict prevention
groups are alarmed, accusing the
Last night Louise Arbour, a former chief prosecutor in international war crimes trials, told an audience at Chatham House – the foreign policy think tank – that “the [Sri Lankan] government’s refusal to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants” and the “sheer magnitude of civilian death and suffering” dealt what she called “the most serious of body blows to international humanitarian law”.
Now, the International Crisis Group, of which Ms. Arbour is the president, has joined forces with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to demand an independent international investigation into what they brand “massive human rights violations” and “repeated violations of international law” – by both sides.
The Sri Lankan government has repeatedly rejected the charges of civilian deaths as grossly exaggerated and has denied that any of its security forces have committed war crimes or violated international humanitarian law.
Tonight Ms. Arbour will appear live on Channel 4 News to
outline options available to the international community to prevent the “
Ms. Arbour will also be responding to dramatic new evidence
contained in a film we will be broadcasting tonight. The fresh evidence,
detailing extremely serious allegations of possible war crimes, has been
gathered in an extended undercover investigation in
Chief among these: the accusation that Sri Lankan soldiers
were responsible for extrajudicial executions - as graphically illustrated by
the disturbing video we aired last August. The video – long dismissed as a fake
by the government in
The clamour from international rights groups for an impartial investigation into alleged atrocities contrasts sharply with the failure of the UN to demand accountability from the Sri Lankan government. Last year, the Sri Lankan president promised the UN Secretary General that he would look into the question of accountability.
On Monday President Mahinda Rajapaksa named an eight-member panel to glean lessons learned from the war. But members of the group say they have no legal power to investigate alleged abuses. “If this is ‘it’,” Louise Arbour said last night, “there’s no reason to expect from the government’s past record that it’s got any intention to investigate or put in place an appropriate accountability mechanism.”
The UN Human Rights Council seems to provide little hope of investigating war crimes, having congratulated the Sri Lankan government on its victory, within days of the war ending.
Meanwhile, the UN Security Council holds out no hope at all. The Sri Lankan issue has failed to force its way onto the UNSC agenda – and were it to do so, China and Russia would likely stand in the way of any unlikely referral to the International Criminal Court in the Hague.
The secretary general has also so far failed to appoint international experts to investigate – as he’s previously promised he might.
Amnesty and the ICG have taken the UN to task for its
failure to act decisively to push for accountability. Crisis Group went so far
as to recommend that the UN should open an inquiry into its own conduct in
In January 2009, as the final chapter opened in the
30-year-long Sri Lankan civil war, I was in
Within months of the
There has been no investigation in
You can kind of see why the “Sri Lankan Option” might just catch on. – (By Jonathan Miller for Channel 4)