[United to End Genocide]

Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war ended in May 2009 when the Sri Lankan military defeated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). For more than 25 years, the LTTE had been fighting for a separate state for the nation’s minority Tamil population.

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[World Socialist]

Amid police and military threats, about 200 mothers, wives and other relatives of disappeared persons held a protest on December 10 in Jaffna, northern Sri Lanka, to demand information about their loved ones.

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[International Crisis Group]

The International Crisis Group welcomes the public release of the report of Sri Lanka’s “Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission” (LLRC), presented to the Sri Lankan parliament on 16 December 2011. The report acknowledges important events and grievances that have contributed to decades of political violence and civil war in Sri Lanka and makes sensible recommendations on governance, land issues and the need for a political solution. But it fails in a crucial task – providing the thorough and independent investigation of alleged violations of international humanitarian and human rights law that the UN and other partners of Sri Lanka have been asking for. It is now incumbent on the international community, through the UN Human Rights Council, to establish an independent international investigation in 2012. Without such an investigation, accountability for the crimes committed at the end of the civil war is highly unlikely; without accountability, and a full understanding of the nature of the violations which took place on all sides, the seeds of future conflict will grow.

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[AFP]

Japan, a top aid giver to Sri Lanka, on Wednesday urged the island’s government to probe war crimes allegedly committed while defeating Tamil rebels and pressed Colombo to improve human rights.

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[BBC]

Weeping parents have been demonstrating in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, asking what has become of close family members who have disappeared.

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[AFP]

The body of a prominent Sri Lankan human rights activist missing since February last year has been found, the United Nations said Friday.

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[Radio Netherlands Worldwide]

First a damning UN report accused both sides in the country’s 30-year civil war of atrocities – a claim the current government refutes categorically. Then in June British TV station Channel 4 broadcast a devastating account of the closing weeks of the conflict in 2009. At this time, the programme said, the Sri Lankan military systematically murdered thousands of civilians. Colombo says the evidence is ‘fabricated’. Distinguishing truth from artifice is problematic in a country where the free press claims it is under constant threat. RNW sent a team to Sri Lanka to investigate.

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Letter from Jaffna: War has been hell in Sri Lanka, but peace may fall far short of heaven.

It’s only an hour’s airtime from Sri Lanka’s capital city, Colombo, to the Jaffna peninsula at the northern tip of the island, but getting there is a miserable ordeal that can kill nearly half a day. Suitcases in hand, heaving and sweating for hours under the blazing sun, passengers endure a gauntlet of checkpoints, where they are repeatedly stopped, questioned, frisked and hassled. Most of the travelers are ethnic Tamils, a minority on the island, although they’re the overwhelming majority in the battle-scarred north. Some, without the necessary paperwork, are turned back. No one dares to protest. The slightest disruption can halt air service at any time. After five sweltering hours of queuing up, a Tamil passenger elbows me in the ribs and mutters: “This is how you’re treated when you’re taken to a prison camp.”

http://www.newsweek.com/id/164219

[VoA]

As violence surges in Sri Lanka, so does the number of abductions and disappearance of mostly Tamil men. That is the assessment of human rights activists and international aid groups operating in the Indian Ocean nation. Raymond Thibodeaux files this report for VOA from Batticolao, on the eastern edge of Sri Lanka. Soli Chana, 23, is trying to find out what happened to her husband. Witnesses say three men in civilian clothes stopped him, not far from his house in Vanuniya in central Sri Lanka. They handcuffed him, shoved in a plain white van and sped away. That was a year and a half ago. He has not been heard from since.

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[Washington Post]

Under a recent military offensive to wipe out those rebels, government forces have abducted hundreds of members of the Tamil minority group, including civilians, according to human rights groups. Many of the “disappeared” never turn up again. Rights activists say Sri Lanka’s growing ties with Iran, China and Russia have emboldened the government to ignore criticism from the United States and other Western powers.

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