The nominee for the next US ambassador to Sri Lanka Alaina Teplitz acknowledged that “the Tamil community is very concerned about progress made towards reconciliation, accountability, justice,” in her testimony to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations last month.
Responding to questions posed by the committee on the “reconciliation prospects between the Tamil and Sinhalese communities”, Ms Teplitz said, “there remain significant differences”.
“The Tamil community is very concerned about progress made towards reconciliation, accountability, justice, specifically commitments made by the current government to the international community in that regard,” she stated.
“The government has established an office of missing persons, office of reparations was just gazetted; and we hope that this progress will continue at pace. However, I don’t think that is fully satisfactory to a community that is looking for constitutional reform and some political solutions to this in addition to efforts to address the past.”
She went on to add that she was “committed to helping the government to achieve their commitments to the people of Sri Lanka, but also to helping address openly and transparently the hard issues in the room which are the inter-ethnic and inter-religious strife”.
Senator James Risch told Ms Teplitz that the “ethnic strife in Sri Lanka is just stunning,” adding that it is about as obvious as anywhere in the world and really acts as a story for humanity about conflict between ethnicities”.
When questioned on US-Sri Lankan military relations, Ms Teplitz acknowledged that the United States was “slowly renewing relationship on a mil-to-mil level”.
“As you know in the aftermath of the conflict we’ve been very concerned about gross violations of human rights and progress made to address those atrocities,” she said. “Engagement is going very gradually and in proportion to progress on reforms in this area. Overall scope remains modest; but we have engaged in military exchange, have some limited engagement with discreet, carefully vetted units and individuals around maritime security. And we hope to build on those areas, again commensurate with progress and the limits established by congress, to strengthen our military relationship in order to address broader issues of national security of the region around maritime domain awareness and transnational crime.”
See video footage of her testimony and answers to questions here.
