The United Nations is able to investigate the war crimes which occurred recently in Sri Lanka, British human rights lawyer and international war crimes judge, Geoffrey Robertson QC said Sunday, May 31.

The avenues for the UN include the UN Human Rights Committee, which can investigate individuals’ complaints against states under the International Convention on Human Rights, to which Sri Lanka is a signatory.

The UN Human Rights Council, by contrast, is a “highly politicized” body staffed by diplomats of various countries, including those abusing human rights, rather than human rights experts, he said.

Mr. Robertson has served as an appeal judge at the UN’s Special Court for Sierra Leone from 2002-2007 and is presently on the UN’s Internal Justice Council.

Having been counsel in many landmark cases in constitutional, criminal and media law in the courts of Britain and the Commonwealth, Mr. Robertson makes frequent appearances in the Privy Council and the European Court of Human Rights.

Asked on BBC radio about the UN Human Rights Council’s acceptance last week, by majority vote, of a self-congratulatory resolution tabled by Sri Lanka, Mr. Robertson said he wasn’t surprised.

“Well, the Human Rights Council is a highly politicised body. It is made up not of experts on human rights, but of paltering diplomats. Europe only has seven seats … We have countries like Russia and China obviously concerned to keep their own internal problems down and away from international oversight. So the decision [on Sri Lanka] is not really surprising.”

“[However] that’s not the end of the story because UN officials can [still] look into it,” he said.

“[ ] Sir John Holmes is concerned. [ ] Judge Navi Pillay wants to conduct an investigation.”

“More importantly, there is the UN Human Rights Committee which sits in Geneva. It is a kind of court and individuals can complain [to it]. Unusually, Sri Lanka has actually signed up to the International Convention on Human Rights which has this is the body that investigates complaints. So any individual can complain against Sri Lanka.”

“So there is certainly going to be an inquiry, I would have thought, by Human Rights Committee.”

“And there are other possibilities - the convention on Torture, the convention on Rights of the Child, even the Genocide convention, could all be applied in due course,” Mr. Robertson said,

“So there are ways and means of finding out – fact-finding in effect - as to whether there have been breaches of the Geneva Convention, the targeting of civilians, the bombing of hospitals, and so forth as has been alleged.”

Mr. Robertson was asked about Sri Lanka’s continued denial of access to the war-ravaged north where 20,000 Tamil civilians were massacred by Colombo’s military in recent months.

“The Sri Lankan government kept out the international media so that there would be no immediate eyewitnesses.”

“They allowed the Red Cross in, but … [it is] prevented from giving testimony in international courts. … That is the quid-pro-quo: they can be in on wars but are not allowed to testify if they see war crimes.”

“[Moreover] other humanitarian bodies were kept out and are being kept out.”

However, Sri Lanka’s actions will in any case eventually come out, Mr. Robertson said.

"In the fullness of time, of course, you do have witnesses, you do have thousands of people who were on that dreadful strip of beach," he said, in reference to the ‘no-fire zone’ in Mullaitivu where concentrated civilians were pounded by Sri Lankan artillery and planes.

Meanwhile, there were mass graves that would be excavated he said.

"This is the way, unfortunately, war crimes are now dealt with, through forensic investigators finding out the story by investigating mass graves.”

“And there do seem, from aerial photographs, to be some [that can be investigated there]."

Mr Robertson is the author of ‘Crimes against Humanity – The Struggle for Global Justice’, published by Penguin and the New Press (USA), now in its third edition and published in six foreign language editions.

Sri Lanka yesterday faced fresh calls for a war crimes inquiry after reports in The Times that at least 20,000 Tamils were killed, mostly by army shelling, in the closing stages of the civil war. But as Colombo clumsily denounced the reports and the photographic evidence as propaganda, evidence has emerged that not only the United Nations but several Western governments knew of the slaughter weeks ago but kept silent for fear of upsetting the Sri Lankan Government. Such a monstrous collusion in covering up an atrocity must not go unchallenged. If the UN Human Rights Council refuses to investigate what has happened, the West must do so forthwith.

An abashed UN yesterday admitted that the death toll from Sri Lanka's civil war was “unacceptably high”. But spokesmen still refused to confirm the total, compiled from UN sources on the ground. The figures were based on meticulous reports of the daily deaths among the desperate civilian refugees hit by army shells, and the UN rebuffed Sri Lanka's claim that not a single civilian had been killed by shelling. The “well-informed estimates” of casualties, it said, had been passed on to governments and the UN had been “ringing the alarm bells” for a long time.

Those bells were certainly muted. No Western government made public the scale of the killing. Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General, flew over the beaches where thousands of bodies are buried in fresh graves. But he has yet to speak out on the slaughter or confirm the authenticity of pictures ludicrously described in Colombo as “fakes”. Has no one learnt the lessons of My Lai or Srebrenica? If diplomats and top UN officials are too timid to denounce atrocities as they take place, what hope is there of preventing future efforts at extermination?

To the charge that the West, and this newspaper, is playing down the atrocities of the Tamil Tigers or belittling Colombo's success in eliminating the terrorist threat, there is a clear retort: nonsense. For years the West and The Times have denounced the suicide bombings, assassinations, recruitment of child soldiers and terrorist violence that were the hallmark of this blinkered and ruthless organisation. The Tigers were proscribed as terrorists across Europe. Their uncompromising commitment to violence and intimidation of their compatriots abroad were denounced. The Sri Lankan Government's success in freeing the country of their ravages is not in question.

But callousness, indifference to civilian casualties, triumphalism and mass internment of civilians have been the price of victory. The Government clearly believed that the war would be more easily won if no one was able to witness the tactics. That temptation appeals to every military commander. And where governments have backed them, as in Chechnya or Gaza, the results have been horrific, the country's name has been stained and the body politic has been damaged by the tolerance of the intolerable.

The casualties of wars deliberately waged out of sight of reporters, doctors and diplomats are not only higher, but they include also the victors. Sri Lanka's determination to exterminate the Tamil Tigers behind a wall of secrecy will have made ostensible military sense, but at the price of deserved obloquy for a debased cause.

Warfare can never be sanitised and civil wars are especially vicious. But countries and governments fighting for their rights must allow as much transparency as possible about their aims and methods. To embed journalists with the armed forces may give only a partial picture, but this tells more of the truth than blanket censorship. Where there has been excess, it must be exposed - if only to give reconciliation a chance. The UN must cry out. 

Ban Ki Moon the Secretary-General of the United Nations, visited Sri Lanka last week. He knew from his officials that at least 20,000 civilians had been killed by Sri Lankan troops in the offensive against the Tamil Tigers. Mr Ban never mentioned this figure to his Sri Lankan interlocutors. He saw, while travelling by air over a supposed “no-fire” zone, the evidence of a massacre of thousands of Tamil civilians caught between the army and the insurgents. Yet he has still not confirmed the authenticity of photographs taken from the same helicopter setting out that scene of carnage and mass makeshift graves.

There is a terrible augury for such inexplicable reticence. The day after Bosnian Serb forces seized Srebrenica, deemed by the United Nations to be a “safe area”, in 1995, Boutros Boutros Ghali, Mr Ban’s predecessor, was asked whether this represented the organisation’s greatest failure in Bosnia. He replied: “No, I don’t believe this represents a failure. You have to see if the glass is half full or half empty.”

The name of Srebrenica, in which 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were slaughtered, has become synonymous with insouciance and failure by the UN, and not only with the barbarism of the perpetrators.

Any parallel for the UN with what has happened in Sri Lanka must be scotched now. That can be done only by Mr Ban speaking forthrightly about what he saw. He is a civil servant rather than an executive; and the cause of historical truth as well as international protest depends on the UN Security Council’s having full and public knowledge of what he saw.

There is no case for restricting diplomacy to private channels. There is no confidential quality to what Mr Ban can testify. David Miliband, the British Foreign Secretary, was denied access to the north of the country when he visited Colombo a fortnight ago. He has a belated but important role now in pressing Mr Ban to speak.

There is no question but that the defeated Tamil Tigers were guilty of numerous depredations and horrific acts of suicide terrorism. Vellupillai Prabhakaran, the slain leader of the Tigers, denied, among other murderous acts, sending the assassin of Rajiv Gandhi, the former Indian Prime Minister; few doubt that he was lying. But the shelling of civilians in a supposed safe area and their deaths by the tens of thousands are not a matter for the Sri Lankan Government alone. UN sources have described the offensive as a war waged without witnesses. However just the cause and brutal the adversary, there must always be disinterested witnesses to military campaigns. That is particularly so with adversaries that practise indiscriminate attacks: there is always a temptation, in response, to suspend the laws of war and the observance of due process in the name of a higher necessity. And that temptation must always be resisted.

The Sri Lankan Government has much to account for. Yet it has responded with disingenuity and fantasy. It first denied the deaths of civilians and then claimed that the photographic evidence, repeated by independent witnesses, had been forged. In doing so, it is perpetrating sins of omission in order to obscure those of commission. Mr Ban must speak; the UN must investigate. Nothing else will demonstrate a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.

“Deeply disappointing” was how a human rights group yesterday described the vote in the United Nations Human Rights Council hailing the victory of the Sri Lankan Government. This is a breathtaking understatement. It was an utter disgrace. The 47-member body, set up in 2006 to replace the previous corrupt and ineffectual UN Commission on Human Rights, has abjectly failed one of its first and most important tests.

It was asked by its European members to investigate widespread reports of atrocities and war crimes committed by both government troops and the Tamil Tigers in the final weeks of the conflict. The council chose instead to debate a one-sided, mendacious and self-serving motion put forward by the Sri Lankans. This welcomed the “liberation” of tens of thousands of the island's citizens, condemned the defeated Tigers, made no mention of the shelling of civilians and kept silent on the desperate need to allow the Red Cross and other humanitarian groups into the camps where some 270,000 Tamil civilians have been interned.

Support for this deeply flawed resolution came from the usual suspects - China, Russia, India, Pakistan and a clutch of Asian and Islamic nations determined to prevent the council ever investigating human rights violations in their own or any country. It was sad to see Israel, for obvious political motives, joining in this charade, claiming that massacres, violence, repression and internment are an “internal affair”.

To her credit, Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, insisted that there needed still to be an inquiry into “very serious abuses”. Those abuses, it now emerges, are far, far worse than the outside world imagined. The UN estimated that 7,000 people were killed in the first four months of this year; the figure now appears to be at least 20,000. Thousands of these victims died as a result of the shelling by the Sri Lankan Army of the strip of coastline where the final remnants of Tiger resistance were trapped, along with at least 100,000 civilians.

Photographs taken by The Times present clear evidence of an atrocity that comes close to matching Srebrenica, Darfur and other massacres of civilians. In the sandy so-called no-fire zone where the trapped Tamil civilians were told to go to escape the brutal army bombardment, there are hundreds of fresh graves as well as craters and debris where tents once stood. This was no safe zone. This was where terrified civilians buried their dead as the shells landed - after the Government had declared an end to the use of heavy weapons on April 27.

Some civilians were probably killed by the Tigers, whose brutality and ruthlessness over the past 28 years has fully justified their depiction as terrorists. Finding out what happened, however, is impossible: the army has barred entry to all outsiders. Food is short, sanitation appalling; wounded and traumatised civilians are in desperate need of help. That much is clear from those who have been able to escape. More sinister reports are now circulating of systematic “disappearances”, of families separ- ated and young men taken away. But until the Government allows in aid workers, the presumption must be that it wants nothing to be heard or seen of what is going on.

This tactic was used in the final push to beat the Tigers. The army wanted no witness to the onslaught, no journalists to alert the world to human rights violations, no photographers to record the suffering. Sri Lanka, now basking in its victory, may set the pattern for other nations battling against insurgencies. For them, victory is all that matters. Most of Sri Lanka may rejoice at the end of a bloody civil war. But the UN has no right to collude in suppressing the appalling evidence of the cost. The truth must be told.

However, US opposition to Sri Lanka’s request for a $1.9 billion IMF standby facility appears to be waning.

US Congressman Heath Shuler who was in Sri Lanka recently told reporters in Colombo that Sri Lanka deserves the loan for its development.

During the final phase of the war in Sri Lanka, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that “it was not the appropriate time to consider granting a massive IMF loan for Sri Lanka.’’

Asked to comment on Clinton’s statement, Shuler said that this was not the message he was getting from the authorities and also it is vital to separate economic issues from politics.

Following Clinton’s statement, Central Bank of Sri Lanka Governor Nivard Cabraal had said: "There is nothing in the governance structure of the IMF to indicate any political consideration be taken into account."

Also, the IMF has moved to asked the US Supreme Court to lift dismiss a case seeking to force the US to deny Sri Lanka the loan, arguing that the plaintiff has no standing, the court lacks jurisdiction, there is no private right of action to enforce "policy goals," and under federal law both defendants - Timothy Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury, and Meg Lundsager, Executive Director of the IMF - are immune from legal prosecution.

Tamils Against Genocide (TAG), which filed the original suit, is considering a response, but their ;lead counsel said he is leaning towards dismissing the IMF lawsuit voluntarily and let the political processes unfold.

"The resources needed to provide an effective rebuttal to the Government's position is very high," he told TamilNet.

Meanwhile, a number of humanitarian and rights organisations including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, International Crisis Group, the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, have urged the US other IMF member countries to block the loan to Sri Lanka.

Over the past three years, Sri Lanka’s regime has spent 602 billion rupees or about $US6 billion on the war – equivalent to 14 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2008.

Following the declared victory over the LTTE and the end of brutal military campaign, far from there being any reduction in military expenses, Sri Lanka Army commander General Fonseka says that the army would be expanded by 50 percent, leading to increases in defence expenses.

“Our strength is 200,000 and it will become 300,000 soon... We like to see young men joining us more quickly. We don’t mind enlisting even 10,000 a month; we need a lot more soldiers to reach our goal,” Fonseka told, ITN, a local Television station on Monday May 25.

According to Fonseka, this huge army, one of the largest per capita in the world, will be used for a military occupation of the North and East of the island, primarily directed against the Tamil population.

“It will not be easy for them to build up a terror group as they did before,” Fonseka told ITN. 

United National Party (UNP), Sri Lanka’s main opposition, has said the government should defeat the ‘Eelam ideology’ and stressed the need to take action on Tamil political parties to remove the Eelam ‘tag’ from their names.

Now that the LTTE is defeated, there is an urgent need to look at various ways of defeating the concept of 'Eelam' or a separate Tamil homeland through political means, UNP leader Dayasiri Jayasekara told reporters.

"Action needs to be taken regarding political parties carrying the name Eelam. The LTTE has imposed this concept on the minds of people who lived in the North and East.

"They have been made to believe they were living on a land described as Eelam under a separate flag. Now we have to through political means replace the Eelam concept or mindset with the one that we are all Sri Lankans," the UNP leader said.

‘Action needs to be taken regarding political parties carrying the name Eelam’ Jayasekara  added referring to Eelam People's Democratic Party (EPDP), Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation (TELO), Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF), People Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE) and Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students (EROS).

Jayasekara said the UNP was delighted at the government’s resolution being adopted at the United Nations Human Rights Council on Wednesday with 29 nations voting in favour and added the government should going forward look at the reasons for some European nations voting against Sri Lanka at the special session, and revamp Sri Lanka’s foreign policy to win them over.

“The United States and the European countries are our major trading partners. Without just focusing only on one section of the international community we should focus on the others too,” he said.

Underlining the need for the government and his party to work to a common agenda at least on national issues Jayasekara said: “The government should stop criticizing the UNP leadership and it members. We should agree on a common programme. If the government needs our help, they should tell us. If not we could carry out our political work on our own,” he said.

The vote by the United Nations Human Rights Council to congratulate the Sri Lanka Government on its victory over the Tamil Tigers and to ignore calls for an inquiry into possible war crimes is a disgrace.

It marks a victory for all those countries facing domestic insurgencies who fear any serious investigation into their behaviour. It gives carte blanche to armies to use whatever means available to achieve victory.

And it is a terrible betrayed of the thousands of Tamil civilians who have been killed in the crossfire as the Sri Lankan army pounded the remnant of the Tamil Tigers.

The vote came after two days of heated debate in Geneva on the widespread charges that both sides committed atrocities in the final weeks of the long-running civil war on the island. The European members of the 47-strong council had asked for an emergency meeting to look into what they feared were very serious abuses.

But the council chose instead to debate a resolution submitted by Sri Lanka itself, which welcomed the “liberation” of tens of thousands of the island’s citizens, condemned the defeated Tigers, made no mention of the shelling of civilians and kept silent on the desperate need to allow the Red Cross and other humanitarian groups into the camps where some

200,000 Tamil civilians have been forcibly interned.

To many Western critics, the Council has failed one of its first and most important tests. For it was set up only three years ago, after a UN resolution, to replace the much criticised UN Commission for Human Rights. This body was widely regarded as toothless and ineffectual. It was always subject to the majority votes of members who had no interest in any outside investigation into their human rights records.

The new council set up a new “universal periodic review” mechanism, intended to assess the human rights situations in all 192 UN member states. The aim was to deflect accusations that the West never allowed scrutiny of its own record while picking on the behaviour of governments in the developing world.

This provision angered the Bush Administration, which feared that the United States would be subject to endless complaints from anti-American members wishing to hide their own poor records of human rights compliance. The US also said the council did not have adequate provision to keep states with poor records of their own from being members of the council.

Under the new structure, the General Assembly elects the members who will occupy the 47 seats, with each seat held for three years. No member can occupy a seat for more than two consecutive terms, and the seats are distributed among the UN’s regional groups — Africa and Asia each hold 13, Eastern Europe has 6, Latin America and the Caribbean have and Western Europe and others have the remaining 7.

The Bush Administration has been a frequent critic of the new council, and did not seek a seat on it for the first two years. It claimed that the body had lost its credibility with repeated attacks on Israel. But the Obama Administration has reversed that position and announced that America will join the council.

The vote on Sri Lanka, however, will reinforce the council’s critics in the West. It was not simply that the usual suspects — China, Russia, India and Pakistan — who supported the Sri Lankan resolution, on the grounds that the conflict there was an internal matter and that the council should not intervene on the conduct of the war. A clutch of Asian and Muslim countries, also wary of outside inspection of their record, also voted not to launch an inquiry into the events in Sri Lanka.

This fails the most elementary test of what the council is supposed to do. Human rights violations occur largely as a result of conflict. The civil war that has lasted 28 years in Sri Lanka has seen numerous examples of such violations, yet there has been no serious outside investigation.

As a result, Sri Lanka will set a precedent for the future workings of the council. Essentially, it declares that victory in civil war is paramount, and that any incidental abuses are no one else’s business. This is disastrous.

Sri Lanka has pointed a way that many countries faced with insurgencies are likely to follow: barring journalists and photographers in order to maintain a news blackout, keeping out aid agencies so that no one can criticise the treatment of civilians and using the latest heavy weapons, without discrimination, in civilian areas in order to rout their enemies.

It is a bad precedent, and one that has just been endorsed in Geneva. At least, however, Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights, was not accepting defeat. There was still a very real need, she said on Thursday, for an inquiry into “very serious abuses”. It does not seem as though that inquiry will now be held by the council, however. 

More than the massacre, maiming and incarceration, what causes the height of the trauma to Eelam Tamils is the utter disregard of the norms of civilization and shameful deceit committed by India, the International Community and the United Nations in the happenings of the island of Sri Lanka. This will remain as an indelible blot in the annals of history, irremovable scar in the minds of Tamils and will globally discredit the existing power systems, sowing seeds for their deconstruction in future, unless they at least act now in upholding political justice.

Any effort on their part to exploit the situation to impose political subjugation on Tamils, thinking that there is a political vacuum in Eelam Tamil nationalism, is sure to bring in further disaster.

The Tamil national cause cannot afford to be deviated and exploited by others through questions such as whether V. Pirapaharan is alive or not or whether the armed struggle has to be continued or not. The answer to the second question is going to depend very much on the successes and failures of the IC in resolving the conflict.

Meanwhile, the Eelam Tamil diaspora, the only section of the community that has the freedom and means to come out with authentic voice, has a historic responsibility in telling the world what they aspire for in no uncertain terms, and in seeing their righteous cause not hijacked by their enemies.

The Tamil diaspora in France and especially in Norway have already embarked upon this noble venture with foresight, by re-mandating the Vaddukkoaddai Resolution through unblemished popular politics.

It is high time the rest of the diaspora follow suit not only in specifying the course, but also in leading it further by democratically bringing in a political leadership to stand by that.

The existing structures should wholeheartedly, and in one voice, need to support it.

A grave concern of Tamils at this juncture is the stand of India. Whether it was in 1987 or now, the bitterness of Eelam Tamils about the Indian Establishment is its unrealistic stand of resolving the crisis within the state of Sri Lanka, not recognising the Tamil independence and sovereignty that have very much become a must today.

Tamil Nadu has a great role to play now. As both the major parties of Tamil Nadu have openly stated that Tamil Eelam is the solution to the crisis, they should not waste any time now in declaring that in the state assembly. This is sure to inspire the Indian parliament and various governments of the International Community.

A few who saw the spontaneous, democratic demonstration of the political will of Diaspora Tamils as 'LTTE orchestrations' need to realise that the model experimented in the Norway mandate took place without any compulsion either in participation or in expressing opinion.

It is surprising that certain sections, which accept intimidated elections taking place at gunpoint in Sri Lanka as 'democratic' and envisaged further elections like that to ensure their positions criticising the free political expression of the diaspora through self-evolved structures.

However, this is not the occasion for the Eelam Tamil nation, either in the island or in the diaspora to waste time in fruitless arguments.

The Sri Lankan state is not going to spare the non-LTTE Tamil political forces either, and danger is imminent to them.

Unconfirmed reports say that a Colombo based political entity, having Eelam in its name, has been 'ordered' recently to conduct elections in the island under the identity of the ruling party that is fighting 'Tamil terrorism'.

As has been already demonstrated in the East, the idea is to see that Tamils should not even have their own political parties. This political genocide is one of the many facets of Colombo's agenda.

It is also high time now that all Tamil entities join together in truly reflecting the minds of the people they claim to serve rather than serving the minds of others. Failing, they may never be able to find political or social platform among their own people.

If political war is what India and the International Community want the Tamils to take up, the ball is in the court of India and the International Community now. The right sign and support have to come from them. If they know how to handle the Sri Lankan state, that has to be clearly demonstrated by them now.

But, if deceit continues to impose half-baked solutions that don't match the long-sufferings and sacrifices of Eelam Tamils, then they only invite troubles.

So why are they bursting crackers in Colombo as if some IPL match was won? Velupillai Prabhakaran, the LTTE chief, may be dead or alive. But that's completely beside the point. What everyone should be asking is whether the Tamil question in Sri Lanka is dead. Let's make no fuzzy mistake. The answer is a resounding no.

The present triumphalism of the Sinhala government and the carousing people on the streets of Colombo is a display of a kind of political idiocy. They have learnt nothing from over sixty years of ethnic conflict and almost thirty years of armed insurgency, which has claimed an unconscionable number of dead soldiers and militants—not to speak of an unacceptably high number of civilian casualties.

The notion of a Tamil homeland is not going to perish with Prabhakaran. The militant movement, which began in the mid-1970s in Jaffna, was in response to three decades of unbridled majoritarianism by the Sinhala state, which tried to squeeze Tamil aspirations and snuff out Tamil identity. Broadly speaking, these conditions continue to exist.

The Sri Lankan state itself will be in no mood to address any of these long-standing grievances. It's up to India and the rest of the international community to effectively persuade Colombo to pay attention to redressing this. It is apparent that before the dust settles, the Sri Lankan government will do its best to send across Sinhala settlers into the Tamil regions of the north and east, even as a large segment of internally displaced people continue to languish in ruthlessly controlled 'refugee camps'. While humanitarian aid is sure to pour in, a substantial percentage of it is bound to be diverted to settle 'outsiders' in the newly depopulated Tamil regions. The strategy of demographic disaggregation is not unknown in our times and frequently used to neutralise nationalist ambitions. Ethnic porosity over geographic stretches becomes particularly achievable in smaller countries.

But what the Sinhala state now needs to heed is the new reality of a swelled out, prosperous and extremely vocal Lankan Tamil diaspora. Thirty years of militancy—topped by at least twenty years of LTTE hegemony—has decimated the Tamil youth, crippled the Tamil intelligentsia and denuded the Tamil population of any sort of alternative leadership at the local level. It is into this space that a newly articulate, million-strong, diasporic community with international connections is poised to step in. That is where the new leadership, new resistance and new political process will come from. This segment is better equipped to continue the struggle through constitutional means, even as it encourages stray elements to carry out neat surgical strikes on a vulnerable Sri Lankan state.

The Sinhala government is reportedly preparing to divide the newly conquered Tamil territories in the north and east for obnoxious renegade elements like Douglas Devananda, Pillaiyyan and Karuna to administer. This too is only going to lead to further alienation as armed acolytes of these warlords roam the streets bullying and extorting a beleaguered population. Some of it is already happening in the east. Sri Lanka will have no mechanism to demobilise this Falstaffian army. A quick slippage into another kind of a civil war is inevitable.

No one speaks enough about India's own wretched role in the political and social mess that contemporary Sri Lanka is in today. In the 1980s, it was India's strategic interest in keeping president Junius Jayawardene from walking into the US camp (by allowing the American Seventh Fleet use of Trincomalee harbour) which led to the Indian state's alacrity in setting up training camps for militant Tamil youth groups like LTTE, TELO, EPRLF and PLOTE.These armed insurgents were to be used as a threat against any Sinhala intransigence. Ironically, India lost the plot pretty soon as the groups became involved in the usual internecine, inter-intelligence agency rivalries and dirty tricks. Soon, by 1987, the LTTE had ruthlessly decimated all other groups claiming to represent the Tamil cause and had declared itself independent of Indian control too. Subsequently, the role of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) in turning the guns on the Tamils in Jaffna and the recent Indian collusion with the Sri Lankan state to stomp out the Tigers in the Vanni are well known.

However, the closing of this chapter in Sri Lankan history is bound to see the inauguration of an even tougher phase of challenges for the Rajapaksa oligarchy. Lack of governmental enthusiasm to correct its historic misdeeds is sure to breed a new Tamil politics this time which will lay the foundations for a new nation-state in the neighbourhood. The Rajapaksa regime's time starts now. 

IT was a desperate last phone call but it did not sound like a man who would be dead within hours. Balasingham Nadesan, political leader of the Tamil Tigers, had nowhere to turn, it seemed.

“We are putting down our arms,” he told me late last Sunday night (May 17) by satellite phone from the tiny slip of jungle and beach on the northeast coast of Sri Lanka where the Tigers had been making their last stand.

I could hear machinegun fire in the background as he continued coolly: “We are looking for a guarantee of security from the Obama administration and the British government. Is there a guarantee of security?”

He was well aware that surrendering to the victorious Sri Lankan army would be the most dangerous moment in the 26-year civil war between the Tigers and Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority.

I had known Nadesan and Seevaratnam Puleedevan, the head of the Tigers’ peace secretariat, since being smuggled into rebel territory eight years ago.

At that time the Tigers controlled a third of the island; now these two men were trying to save the lives of the remaining 300 fighters and their families, many of them injured. Tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were trapped with them, hiding in hand-dug trenches, enduring near constant bombardment.

For several days I had been the intermediary between the Tiger leadership and the United Nations as the army pressed in on the last enclave at the end of a successful military campaign to defeat the rebellion.

Nadesan had asked me to relay three points to the UN: they would lay down their arms, they wanted a guarantee of safety from the Americans or British, and they wanted an assurance that the Sri Lankan government would agree to a political process that would guarantee the rights of the Tamil minority.

Through highly placed British and American officials I had established contact with the UN special envoy in Colombo, Vijay Nambiar, chief of staff to Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general. I had passed on the Tigers’ conditions for surrender, which he had said he would relay to the Sri Lankan government.

The conflict seemed set for a peaceful outcome. Puleedevan, a jolly, bespectacled figure, found time to text me a smiling photo of himself in a bunker.

By last Sunday night, however, as the army pressed in, there were no more political demands from the Tigers and no more photos. Nadesan refused to use the word “surrender” when he called me, but that is what he intended to do. He wanted Nambiar to be present to guarantee the Tigers’ safety.

Once more, the UN 24-hour control centre in New York patched me through to Nambiar in Colombo, where it was 5.30am on Monday. I woke him up.

I told him the Tigers had laid down their arms. He said he had been assured by Mahinda Rajapaksa, the Sri Lankan president, that Nadesan and Puleedevan would be safe in surrendering. All they had to do was “hoist a white flag high”, he said.

I asked Nambiar if he should not go north to witness the surrender. He said no, that would not be necessary: the president’s assurances were enough.

It was still late Sunday night in London. I tried to get through to Nadesan’s satellite phone but failed, so I called a Tigers contact in South Africa to relay Nambiar’s message: wave a white flag high.

I was woken at 5am by a phone call from another Tigers contact in southeast Asia. He had been unable to get through to Nadesan. “I think it’s all over,” he said. “I think they’re all dead.”

That evening, the Sri Lankan army displayed their bodies. What had gone wrong with the surrender? I would soon find out.

I discovered that on Sunday night Nadesan had also called Rohan Chandra Nehru, a Tamil MP in the Sri Lankan parliament, who immediately contacted Rajapaksa.

The MP recounted the events of the next hours: “The president himself told me he would give full security to Nadesan and his family. Nadesan said he had 300 people with him, some injured.

“I said to the president, ‘I will go and take their surrender.’

“Rajapaksa said, ‘No, our army is very generous and very disciplined. There is no need for you to go to a warzone. You don’t need to put your life at risk’.”

Chandra Nehru said Basil, the president’s brother, called him. “He said, ‘They will be safe. They have to hoist a white flag.’ And he gave me the route they should follow.”

The MP got through to Nadesan at about 6.20am local time on Monday. The sound of gunfire was louder than ever.

“We are ready,” Nadesan told him. “I’m going to walk out and hoist the white flag.”

“I told him: ‘Hoist it high, brother – they need to see it. I will see you in the evening’,” said Chandra Nehru.

A Tamil who was in a group that managed to escape the killing zone described what happened. This source, who later spoke to an aid worker, said Nadesan and Puleedevan walked towards Sri Lankan army lines with a white flag in a group of about a dozen men and women. He said the army started firing machineguns at them.

Nadesan’s wife, a Sinhalese, yelled in Sinhala at the soldiers: “He is trying to surrender and you are shooting him.” She was also shot down.

The source said all in the group were killed. He is now in hiding, fearful for his life. Chandra Nehru has fled the country after being threatened, the MP says, by the president and his brother.

Over the past few days, Nambiar’s role as UN envoy has come into question. His brother, Satish, has been a paid consultant to the Sri Lankan army since 2002. Satish once wrote that General Sarath Fonseka, commander of the Sri Lankan armed forces, “displayed the qualities of a great military leader”.

Although the Tamil Tigers are internationally banned because of past acts of terrorism, including suicide bombings, Nadesan and Puleedevan favoured a political solution to the conflict. Had they lived, they would have been credible political leaders for the Tamil minority.

I am in a difficult position as a journalist reporting this story. I first went to Sri Lanka in 2001 to investigate reports that the government was blocking food and medical supplies to half a million Tamils. Journalists had been largely banned from the northern Tamil area for six years.

I found people living in squalor and doctors pleading for medicine. Leaders such as Nadesan and Puleedevan told me they had reduced their demands from independence to autonomy within Sri Lanka.

As I was being smuggled out of the area at night, we were ambushed by the Sri Lankan army. I was unhurt until I shouted, “Journalist, journalist.” Then they fired an RPG at me, severely wounding me.

After intermittent contact with the Tamils since then, I had a series of phone calls from the leadership in recent months as the Tigers fell back in the face of the army’s new offensive. In one call, Nadesan said the Tigers would abide by the result of any referendum and begged for a ceasefire. His plea was rejected by Colombo.

There was dancing on the capital’s streets last week after the defeat of the Tigers. Victory has come, however, at a shocking cost to Tamil civilians. The United Nations says that at least 7,000 died in the last onslaught, although the toll is believed to be much higher. Some 280,000 who had been trapped by the fighting have been herded into “welfare” camps surrounded by razor wire where conditions are said to be deteriorating fast.

International aid agencies claimed up to three families were crowding into each tent and being forced to queue for hours for water and food. One aid worker said there was only one doctor in a camp holding 44,000 people.

Refugees reached by The Sunday Times through aid organisations vented their fury. “Look at how we live,” said one woman in a camp with her two children. “We have no space, no protection from the sun. We are prisoners with armed guards and barbed wire. What do they think I will do – a mother and her two children? Why are we here?”

Reports were circulating that members of paramilitary gangs were seizing young people from the camps, accusing them of being Tigers and holding them in secret facilities, although this could not be confirmed.

The president has talked of reaching out to the Tamil community, unifying the country and resettling 80% of the refugees by the end of the year.

“I do not think that is realistic,” said Anna Neistat, of Human Rights Watch. “There is no procedure to release anyone.”

Whatever the declared intentions of the government, there seems to be little prospect of uniting Sri Lanka in the foreseeable future unless the Tamil grievances that enabled the Tigers to flourish are dealt with.

(Edited for space)

In the final hours of the war, Sri Lanka executed a well-planned massacre of several unarmed civil officers of the LTTE with the aim of annihilating its political structure.

At the orders of a 'top defence figure,' an international arrangement involving ICRC, European diplomats and a Colombo government diplomat to arrange safe exit to the civil officers was defied, according to informed sources.

On Monday May 18, early hours around 3:00 a.m. Vanni local time, the LTTE Political Chief Balasingham Nadesan and LTTE Peace Secretariat Director Seevaratnam Puleedevan telephoned their contacts in Europe and informed them to tell the ICRC Head Office that only around 1,000 wounded cadres, civil officials of the LTTE and civilians remained in the so-called safety zone and there was no firing from the LTTE side.

They urged the ICRC to evacuate the wounded. A few hours later, Colombo's Defence Ministry website claimed finding the dead bodies of Mr. Nadesan, Mr. Puleedevan, Mr. Ilango (Tamileelam Police Chief), and LTTE Leader V. Pirapaharan's son Mr. Charles Antony.

On Sunday, May 17, , SLA Commander Gen. Sarath Fonseka told AFP that he will not allow the LTTE to 'regroup' and will ensure that there is 'no future' for the Tigers.

He also said that "the firm decision of the political hierarchy not to go for talks with the LTTE terrorists until they lay down arms had contributed significantly to all these war victories."

According to a press released from the LTTE’s head International Relations, Selvarasa Pthmanathan, subsequent to LTTE’s announcement that it has decided to "silence the guns" in view of the unbearable civilian carnage at the hands of the Sri Lankan military and the heavy weaponry donated to it by third parties, they were informed by some member states of the International Community that arrangements had been made with the Sri Lankan military for discussions on an orderly end to the war.

The political and civil administration memebers of the LTTE were instructed to make contact with the 58th Division of the Sri Lankan forces in the war zone, un-armed and carrying white flags. Head of our Political Wing, Nadesan and Puleedevan then proceeded to do so. They were un-armed and carrying white flags and were called on by the Officers of the 58th Division to come forward for discussions. When they complied they were both shot and killed.

The press release vehemently condemned Sri Lanka Army’s action urged the International Community to take this into account in its deliberations about charges of "Crimes against Humanity" against the members of the Sri Lanka Government and its military establishment.

“This act is even more unpalatable when one takes into account that the LTTE released as an act of goodwill, seven Sri Lankan Prisoners of War the day before totally unharmed.” said the press release.

“We appeal to the International Community to act now to ensure the safety and basic needs of the displaced people who are suffering in the prison camps of the Sri Lankan military. The onus is now on the International Community to see that further war crimes and crimes against humanity are not committed on Tamils by the Sri Lankan state and to force the Sri Lankan state to yield in to the political aspirations of the Tamil people.” the press release added.

The next time you buy some lingerie, a T-shirt or a pair of rubber gloves, you may want to reflect on this: they were probably made in Sri Lanka. And like it or not, your purchase plays a role in the debate over how to respond to the Sri Lankan Government's successful but brutal military campaign against the Tamil Tiger rebels, which reached its bloody climax this week.

Since 2005 Sri Lanka has been allowed to sell garments to the European Union without import tax as part of a scheme designed to help it to recover from the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004. That means its clothes are 10 per cent cheaper than those from China and other competitors - helping the island to earn at least $2.9 billion from the EU annually. Britain accounts for much of that.

Britain has also helped to rebuild Sri Lanka's tourist industry: Britons accounted for 18.5 per cent of the foreigners who visited the former colony's famous beaches, wildlife parks, tea plantations and Buddhist temples last year. Only India sends more tourists. Many Britons also own property there, especially around the southern city of Galle, not far from where Arthur C.Clarke, the British science fiction writer who settled in Sri Lanka, used to love to scuba dive.

So the question facing British shoppers and holidaymakers is this: should they continue to support Sri Lanka's garment and tourist industries? Sadly, the answer must be no.

Britain should welcome the defeat of the Tigers, a ruthless terrorist organisation that forcibly recruited children, pioneered the use of the suicide bomb and killed thousands of innocent people. But Britain must also condemn the Sri Lankan Government's conduct of the war - and take punitive action against it both to discourage other states from using similar methods, and to encourage proper reconciliation between the Tamil and Sinhalese communities. With the UN paralysed, economic sanctions are the only practical options left.

Many will ask why they should care: there are bigger conflicts in the world, and Sri Lanka's is mercifully confined to its own shores, with no risk that British troops might be deployed.

The response to that is simple: what about next time? Sri Lanka's war has been discrete only because it is an island; many other conflicts in have spilt across borders, forcing military intervention to prevent a humanitarian disaster or a greater conflagration. Consider the crack-up of Yugoslavia or Sierra Leone.

Britain may have, in the eyes of the world, ceded much of the moral high ground over human rights when it shed civilian blood during the invasion and occupation of Iraq. But that does not mean that Britain should abandon its role in defending international law that protects civilians in conflicts and holds governments accountable for their actions during war.

Yes, international humanitarian law is based largely on Western values, and enforced imperfectly, but the world would be a much more violent, unjust place without it. Put simply, every war might look like Sri Lanka's.

In an ideal world the UN, not the EU, would take the lead. But the UN, even in the face of a clear humanitarian disaster and blatant war crimes by both sides, has been compromised. By cosying up to China, Russia and other countries facing their own separatist problems, Sri Lanka managed to keep its own war off the formal agenda of the UN Security Council until the last minute. Without the UN Security Council's backing, an independent war crimes investigation will struggle to get off the ground.

Thus it is once again up to the democratic world to take action - even if that means muddling the issues of trade and human rights.

A key point to bear in mind is that human rights are an explicit part of GSP Plus, the EU's scheme that gives preferential trading rights to 16 developing nations, ranging from Guatemala to Mongolia. These nations must all comply with 27 international conventions covering environmental, labour and human rights standards. Many have gone to great lengths to adhere to them.

That may sound like excessive EU bureaucracy, but the system is designed to ensure the products we import meet EU standards - no child labour, for example. It is also designed to give developing countries an incentive to improve their own standards to the benefit of their own people.

That is where Sri Lanka has let itself down. Last year the EU expressed its grave concerns about human rights abuses committed during the conflict and that it might not renew the GSP Plus deal after it expired in December.

Sri Lanka's response was to dismiss the EU out of hand, accusing it of violating Sri Lankan sovereignty. The EU then announced that it was launching a rights investigation, pending the results of which GSP Plus remains in place - but Sri Lanka has so far refused to co-operate, banking on EU inaction.

Since then, the situation has deteriorated dramatically. Sri Lankan armed forces are now suspected of repeatedly shelling civilian targets including hospitals, and of shooting dead at least two Tiger leaders as they were surrendering. They have also herded more than 200,000 Tamils into internment camps, splitting up families. These squalid places have insufficient water or medical supplies, and aid workers have been blocked from helping in these camps. Even the Red Cross has been forced to suspend its operations in the barbed-wire facilities, which the Sri Lankan Government calls “welfare villages” but Tamil activists liken to concentration camps.

Renewing GSP Plus in these circumstances would make a mockery of human rights and set an awful precedent for other nations. Withdrawing it could cost Sri Lanka 2 per cent of its GDP and thousands of jobs, which will hit many innocent civilians. But the fault, if this happens, will lie with its Government for failing to address the EU's concerns.

As to whether Britons should visit Sri Lanka as tourists, well that's a matter of personal choice - just as it is whether to visit Burma. But until the international community pulls together and formulates its own robust response, there is no clearer way for individuals to register their disapproval for the actions of Sri Lanka's Government than simply to stay away.