Sri Lanka may need Gaza-style rights inquiry says UN

An inquiry similar to one that looked into fighting in Gaza may be needed to determine if war crimes were committed in Sri Lanka in the final throes of its 26-year war this spring, a U.N. office said on Friday, October 23.

"There hasn't been a full inquiry into what did or did not happen in the last months of the war," Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner of Human Rights Navi Pillay, said.

"We still believe that something like the Gaza fact-finding mission is certainly warranted given the widespread concerns about the conduct of the war in Sri Lanka," said Colville.

Colville was referring to the controversial probe by former international war crimes prosecutor Richard Goldstone into the recent conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Goldstone's fact-finding mission was set up by a vote in the 47 member state UN Human Rights Council, which has so far not taken up the Sri Lankan issue.

Colville’s comments came the day after the U.S. State Department detailed atrocities toward the end of Sri Lanka's civil war.

He underlined that the US report did not constitute the necessary full inquiry but he acknowledged that it "catalogues in quite some detail specific events that have been reported."

"It seems that more clarity is likely to emerge about who did what to whom and whether or not war crimes and crimes against humanity and other very serious war crimes were committed by one or both sides," he added.

Colville, speaking to a U.N. press briefing in Geneva, said that while the State Department findings were not exhaustive, it was important to credibly lay out what civilians endured as Sri Lanka's conflict neared its end.

"We still believe that something like the Gaza fact-finding mission is certainly warranted," he said.

In late May, the U.N. Human Rights council passed a resolution celebrating Sri Lanka's victory over the Tamils and blocked discussion on a European-drafted text raising concerns about the conditions endured by war survivors housed in Sri Lankan camps.

Sri Lanka said the vote vindicated its prosecution of the war against the Tamil Tigers and should silence calls for a foreign probe into what it described as the Indian Ocean country's own internal affairs.

But the United Nations had then signalled that an inquiry could still happen down the line.

The 575-page Gaza report was produced by a four member team led by Goldstone, a respected South African judge and a former lead war crimes prosecutor for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, after a week long fact finding mission in Gaza.

It condemned rocket attacks by Palestinian armed groups against Israeli civilians, but reserved its harshest language for Israel’s treatment of the civilian Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip, both during the war and through the longer-term blockade of the territory, a New York Times report said.

The team focused on 36 representative cases, and in 11 of these episodes, the report said the "Israeli military carried out direct attacks against civilians, including some in which civilians were shot “while they were trying to leave their homes to walk to a safer place, waving white flags.”