![]() ![]() Since late 2022, Sri Lanka’s president and foreign minister have been saying they would form a “truth and reconciliation” commission of some kind to deal with the legacy of the civil war, which from 1983 to May 2009 (low-level clashes had begun earlier, in the late 1970s) pitted the Sri Lankan state against the Tamil Tigers. ![]() But this crucial venue could disappear in September 2024 unless a majority of members vote for a resolution that renews the basis for the Council’s regular engagement on these issues. It is the only international forum in which Sri Lankan leaders have been pressed to take the steps needed to move beyond the cycles of bloodshed that have bedevilled the country for too long. For more than ten years, the Council has pushed Colombo to hold accountable perpetrators of atrocities during the civil war and in the years since, as well as to address the underlying governance problems that led to hostilities. They continue to be discovered.Īs members of the UN Human Rights Council prepare to convene in Geneva starting on 11 September, the challenge of impunity in Sri Lanka will be on the agenda, with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights due to report on the human rights situation in the country. Mass graves – remnants of government campaigns against both Sinhalese and Tamil insurgencies – dot the island. The war saw atrocities committed by armed groups claiming to be defending either Sinhalese, Tamils or Muslims. Mothers of the thousands of missing, many of whom surrendered to the army and were never seen again, have been protesting continuously for more than five years, demanding (but not receiving) information about the fate of their children. As government forces cornered the Tamil Tigers in the island’s north, eventually defeating the rebels, they also killed tens of thousands of civilians. More recent still are the unanswered crimes of the bloody final months of the 26-year civil war that ended in 2009. 2023 marked the 40th anniversary of Black July – the days of state-sanctioned mob violence that, in 1983, killed some 3,000 Tamils, forced hundreds of thousands into exile, destroyed considerable property and plunged the country into full-scale war. Traumatic centuries of Western colonialism left a brutal legacy scarcely acknowledged by the states at fault. The country is haunted by the ghosts of injustices occurring in both the distant and recent past. Impunity has a long history in Sri Lanka. ![]()
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