Sri Lanka celebrates victory over Tamil Tigers
(20 May 2009)

Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse claimed victory in the 25-year old war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in a speech on Tuesday (19 May 2009). Rajapakse offered compromise and reconciliation with the Tamil minority and declared a national holiday to celebrate the victory. He pledged rapid resettlement of the more than 250,000 Tamils now in internment camps and urged international investors to come to Sri Lanka and invest in its rebuilding. Meanwhile Sri Lankan security forces searched for bodies, weapons and any guerrillas who slipped through the military's net.

Hundreds of troops were deployed in the Muliyawaikal area where the corpse of Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran was found after the final showdown in the jungle on Monday, defence officials said. More than 400 dead rebels have been recovered from the scene of their desperate last stand, including several female fighters, according to military officials. Prabhakaran's eldest son, Charles Anthony, was among those killed in the area, but the military had no information about the leader's wife, Madiwadani, or their other two children.

"This is our country, this is our motherland. We should live in this country as children of one mother. No differences of race, caste and religion should prevail here," Rajapaksa, who is Sinhalese, said in Tamil. Tamils complain of marginalisation by successive governments led by the Sinhalese ethnic majority, which came to power at independence in 1948 and took the favoured position the minority Tamils had enjoyed under the British colonial government.

The LTTE sprang up in the 1970s to fight for a separate nation for Tamils. After destroying rival groups, it later grew into one of the world's best-armed irregular forces with a place on more than 30 nations' lists of terrorist groups.

Sri Lanka has a historic opportunity for lasting peace

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband commented on the latest situation in Sri Lanka during a statement to the House of Commons on Tuesday 19 May. In a statement, he said

"On 19 May, the Sri Lankan President formally announced that on 18 May military forces had retaken all the territory once held by the LTTE and that they had captured or killed the senior leadership of that organisation. Many Sri Lankans of all communities, Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim, will be relieved that the long and brutal conflict may at last be over. Sri Lanka has before it an historic opportunity to resolve the underlying causes of the conflict and ensure a lasting peace. We must continue to work with Sri Lanka’s Government and all its communities to ensure that this opportunity is taken and that it leads to a sustainable end to the conflict.

Our concern has never been whether it was right to defeat the LTTE. The issue has been the price in lives and the future in terms of reconciliation. We may never know exact numbers but thousands of innocent civilians have died, hundreds of thousands made homeless and confined to camps, caught up in a system which continues to restrict access to the international humanitarian agencies. For many, many people, the misery continues.

Our primary concern remains the immediate humanitarian crisis and the long-term political and economic peace and stability of Sri Lanka. We have continued to work with international partners in the EU, UN, and G8 to urge the Government of Sri Lanka to do all that it could to protect their citizens, minimise the risk of casualties and allow the UN and other international agencies access to the conflict area to oversee the possible surrender of the LTTE and the evacuation of the civilians. We also called on the LTTE to lay down their weapons and release the civilians. Tragically, these calls did not prevent the loss of many lives.

I welcome the assurance given to me by Foreign Minister Bogollogama yesterday that the UN and NGOs will now be able to enter the former conflict zone to provide whatever support is still needed. I would like to pay tribute to the courage of the staff of the ICRC and others who continued to try and deliver food, water and medical supplies into the conflict zone at enormous risk to themselves. Undoubtedly, their bravery in the face of great danger saved the death toll from being higher.

Although the territorial conflict seems to be over, the grave humanitarian crisis continues to unfold. Some 250,000 civilians who have fled the fighting are either being processed by the Government of Sri Lanka to ensure that they are not escaping LTTE members, or are being held in camps.

The Government does not have the resources to cope, but it has not yet offered international aid agencies unrestricted access to the camps. This risks exacerbating the humanitarian crisis and fuelling the resentment of the Internally Displaced People (IDPs). We urge the Government of Sri Lanka to allow full and unhindered access to the camps where the IDPs remain in urgent need of shelter, food, water, and medicine. The Government of Sri Lanka has also already committed to resettle 80% of IDPs before the end of this year. This will be a difficult task.

We and others in the international community stand ready to assist the Government of Sri Lanka to meet these humanitarian challenges. The Department for International Development has recently announced an additional £5 million of humanitarian funding for Sri Lanka, bringing our total contribution to the humanitarian relief effort to £12.5 million since September 2008. We will channel this funding through the UN and other humanitarian agencies.

We urge the Government of Sri Lanka to use the opportunity of the visits by the UN Secretary General’s Chief of Staff Vijay Nambiar and the UN Secretary General himself later this week, to recognise that the UN has a central role to play, both in the delivery of humanitarian aid and in encouraging the process of political reconciliation that must be an integral part of rebuilding Sri Lanka’s civil society.

Lasting peace can only come when all communities in Sri Lanka believe that they are accepted and valued members of society. We recognise that the process of political reconciliation will not be easy. There are many entrenched attitudes and resentments. Sri Lankan people from all communities, working on the basis of mutual respect and equality, need to agree the way forward.

On 18 May my Rt Hon Friend the Prime Minister urged President Rajapakse to be magnanimous in victory. I repeated the message to the Sri Lankan Foreign Minister the same day, saying that whatever process emerged, it needed to be inclusive and based on equality. We welcome the President’s statement to the Sri Lankan Parliament on 19 May that he will embark on an inclusive political process involving all communities on the basis of equality and absence of fear.

I endorse the conclusions reached at the European Council on 18 May calling for alleged violations of international humanitarian and human rights law to be investigated through an independent inquiry and for those accountable to be brought to justice. This could play an important role in the post-conflict reconciliation process.

The continuing focus of this Government’s activity over the coming days and weeks, will be to work with international partners in encouraging the Sri Lankan Government to devote as much energy to winning the peace as it did to winning the war. "

Urgent Needs for Human Rights Protection

Amnesty International called for key steps to be adopted to ensure civilians and captured LTTE fighters are protected. Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International’s Asia Pacific Director, said: “The Sri Lankan government must ensure that its forces fully respect international law, including all provisions relating to protecting civilians from the effect of hostilities. "

“The government should accept the surrender of any LTTE fighter who wants to surrender and treat humanely LTTE fighters who have laid down their arms. In turn, the LTTE must also protect civilians and any Sri Lankan soldier they take prisoner.”

There are more than 200,000 displaced people, including approximately 80,000 children, who need relief but also protection from abuses in Sri Lanka. Sam Zarifi added: “In addition, the international community must require the prompt deployment of international monitors to be stationed in critical locations, including registration and screening points, displacement camps and places of detention.”

Amnesty International is supporting the convening of a special session of the Human Rights Council to sustain attention to the evolving situation in Sri Lanka and is calling for the United Nations to immediately establish an international commission of inquiry. Sam Zarifi said: “The commission should investigate allegations of violations of international human rights and humanitarian law by all warring parties in the course of the conflict and make recommendations on the best way to ensure full accountability.”