Sri Lanka’s Finance Minister Mangala Samaraweera accused former president Mahinda Rajapaksa of branding Sri Lankan soldiers as “war criminals” in a statement released today, reports ColomboPage.
Mr Samaraweera said the forces loyal to the former president were “political ghosts who introduced the white van culture” to Sri Lanka and accused them of “misleading the people as usual”.
Speaking on Mr Rajapaksa’s opposition to the International Covenant on Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, Mr Samaraweera went on to say,
"Not only that, the Rajapaksa loyalists by claiming that the bill would harm the war heroes have told the entire world that the Security Forces were responsible for all the abductions, disappearances and extrajudicial killings committed during their reign.”
“Is that not branding the war heroes as war criminals?"
He went on to call Mr Rajapaksa a “power-hungry double-standard politician" and added “the time has come to wipe out such double-standard politicians from the democratic political plane”.
See more from ColomboPage here and the Sri Lankan Mirror here.
