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Probe Sri Lanka war crimes, says UN expert Philip Alston
The Times - January 9, 2010
Catherine Philp and James Bone, New York – A UN expert yesterday called for a war crimes inquiry in Sri Lanka after his investigation concluded that a video showing soldiers summarily killing Tamil prisoners last year was authentic.
In a damning report citing top scientific experts, Philip Alston, UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings, dismissed the Sri Lankan government's claims that footage shown by Channel 4 in Britain had been fabricated.
He urged Colombo to allow UN experts to investigate "persistent" allegations of war crimes in the final stages of its three-decade civil war. "In light of these conclusions and of the persistent flow of other allegations concerning alleged extrajudicial executions committed by both sides during the closing phases of the war," Professor Alston wrote, "I call for an independent inquiry to be established to carry out an impartial investigation into war crimes."
Amnesty International Asia-Pacific director Sam Zarifi said: "Once again the available evidence has indicated that serious human rights violations and possible international crimes took place, and the Sri Lankan government has to allow an independent inquiry.
"Now that the security situation has stabilised there's no excuse left."
The Sri Lankan government denies that its military committed war crimes during the final offensive against the Tamil Tigers last May.
Last month, however, the former army chief turned presidential challenger, Sarath Fonseka, said Defence Minister Gotabaya Rajapaksa ordered that rebels who surrendered should be killed rather than taken prisoner.
The UN's 15-nation Security Council has the power to refer Sri Lanka to the International Criminal Court but Professor Alston said he doubted that would happen "given the constellation of political support Sri Lanka has".
That was an apparent reference to China, which has veto power on the council and is Sri Lanka's most powerful ally and key investor.
Professor Alston began investigating the execution video after the Sri Lankan government dismissed it as a fake and then ran an inquiry that arrived at the same conclusion.
The UN investigation, carried out by experts in video technology, ballistics and pathology, demolishes Sri Lankan claims the footage was faked.
The video of the alleged battlefield executions, broadcast on Channel 4 in August, shows a naked man, bound and blindfolded, being made to kneel. Another man, dressed in what appears to be Sri Lankan army uniform, approaches from behind and shoots him in the head.
"It's like he jumped," the gunman laughs. The camera then pans to show eight similarly bound corpses.
Sri Lanka denied claims the video was shot in January last year by soldiers using mobile phones, saying it had been "established beyond doubt" that the footage was fake.
The UN report concludes that "most of the arguments relied upon by the government of Sri Lanka to impugn the video have been shown to be flawed".
The experts "found no evidence of breaks in continuity in the video, no additional video layers and no evidence of image manipulation".
"Together, the reports by these experts strongly suggest that the video is authentic," the report concludes.
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