Showing all posts tagged Sri Lanka
Handy reminder that Sri Lanka wants to teach world how to use terror
Human Rights Watch issues a timely statement: Governments should decline the invitation to attend a Sri Lankan military conference that seeks to legitimize the unlawful killing of thousands of civilians during the armed conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Human Rights Watch said today.… The Sri Lankan government has invited 54 countries…
Remembering the war against Tamils; accountability required
Sri Lanka remains a country talking about recovery after decades of war and yet Colombo refuses to accept responsibility for the crimes committed during the conflict. This recently Wikileaks document from May 2009 gives an insight into the final days of the civil war, when the lives of civilians were irrelevant to government forces (and…
Sri Lanka cannot escape scrutiny over war crimes
An important editorial in the Financial Times: Last year, Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary-general, commissioned a report into human rights violations in the closing months of the decades-long Sri Lankan civil war that ended in 2009. The report points to credible evidence of mass shelling of civilians and summary executions. It also concludes that…
Why can’t we just leave glorious and triumphant Sri Lanka alone?
The world post 9/11 is polluted with “terrorism experts”, usually academics who love to be romanced by armies in the business of brutally killing declared “enemies”. Rohan Gunaratna is intimate with the thugs in Colombo. In an interview with a Sri Lankan newspaper he offers advice for the government to avoid having to take accountability…
ABCTV News24 on human rights in China, Gitmo torture and Sri Lankan war crimes
I appeared last night on ABCTV News 24’s The Drum alongside ABC journalist Marius Benson and lobbyist Sue Cato (video here). While China, we learn via Wikileaks, ignores Australia’s supposed concerns for human rights, I asked if Prime Minister Julia Gillard actually cared about human rights as there had been no public comments from her…
UN knows war crimes committed in Sri Lanka so act already
The UN-led report on the country’s civil war is clear. Death and destruction on a massive scale. Former UN spokesman Gordon Weiss in Colombo says that the UN kept quiet during the last months of the war instead of speaking honestly about what they knew was happening in the north of the country: ALI MOORE:…
Australian officials witness to Colombo-led torture
In how many countries is this kind of thing happening? Anything to keep those asylum seekers away from our shores is clearly the idea, whatever the human rights cost: The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFAT) has expressed concern over the conduct of security forces working in cooperation with the Australian Federal Police (AFP) in Sri…
