[AFP]

Sri Lanka on Thursday vowed to hold mass protests against US-backed moves at the United Nations to press for an independent probe into alleged war crimes during the island’s civil war.

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[BBC]

Campaigners in Sri Lanka have urged the United Nations to intervene in the case of two activists believed to have been abducted last month.

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[AFP]

Sri Lanka will hold its first post-war census in March which will cover the entire Indian Ocean island for the first time in over 30 years, officials said on Wednesday.

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[Al Jazeera]

A Sri Lankan government probe into the civil war against ethnic Tamil rebels has concluded that further investigations of alleged abuses committed in the final stages of the country’s 25-year conflict are necessary.

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[Huffington Post]

We failed to prevent a massacre in Sri Lanka. We must not fail to seek justice for it.

‘Never again’ is the promise that has followed the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda and Srebrenica; issued each time with outrage and contrition, and, in recent years, a report on the failure of the international community to act. Kofi Annan commissioned one such report in 1999 on the Rwandan genocide, declaring: “Of all my aims as [UN] Secretary-General, there is none to which I feel more deeply committed than that of enabling the UN never again to fail in protecting a civilian population”. Less than five years later, the UN was unable to galvanise international action in Darfur. Ten years later it failed to prevent tragedy unfolding in the final stages of Sri Lanka’s long-running civil war.

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[Channel 4 News]

One of these eyewitnesses, an army officer, accuses Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa - the president’s brother - of ordering Brigadier Shavendra Silva to execute Tamil rebel leaders, whose safe surrender had been guaranteed by the president.

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[Channel 4 News]

One week after broadcast, Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields has been watched by over a million viewers in the UK* and over 270,000 views worldwide on VoD. The film has been viewed on 4oD in over 30 countries. On Tuesday, the film was screened to diplomats and US media in New York. United Nations missions from the US, India, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and East Timor attended. The Sri Lankan government sent a delegation of eight with Mr Palitha T.B. Kohona, Ambassador & Permanent Representative of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka to the United Nations and Brigadier Shavendra de Silva both speaking after the film.

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[BBC]

Tens of thousands of civilians died in the final phase of Sri Lanka’s civil war - most of them killed in shelling by government forces, a UN panel says. In a report on possible war crimes in the last months of the war in 2009, the panel also says Tamil Tiger rebels used civilians as human shields.

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[New York Times]

A United Nations panel investigating allegations of war crimes by Sri Lankan troops at the end of the bloody battle against Tamil rebels in May 2009 found credible evidence that government soldiers made civilians a target, shelled hospitals and attacked aid workers, according to an unauthorized copy of the panel’s report.

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[UN News Centre]

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today reiterated his strong concerns over “unacceptably high” civilian casualties in the conflict between the Sri Lankan Government and Tamil rebels, while rejecting in the strongest terms any figure attributed to the United Nations. “I categorically reject – repeat, categorically – any suggestion that the United Nations has deliberately under-estimated any figures,” the Secretary-General underscored. “Let me also say, whatever the total, the casualties in the conflict were unacceptably high – as I have also said repeatedly,” he added.

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