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Lanka orders probe into war crimes against Tamil civilian population

The Sri Lankan government has ordered an inquiry into a soldier's claim that he helped bury hundreds of Tamil prisoners killed by security forces in northern Sri Lanka.

The soldier made the claim while appealing a death sentence in his conviction for rape and murder. Since then, human rights groups and Tamil political parties have urged the government to investigate the allegation.

The government "does not condone such atrocities'' and is fully committed to the safeguarding lives, said M S Wiackramarachchi, a senior defence ministry official who ordered the inquiry.

Wiackramarachchi said in a statement that the inquiry will be conducted by the criminal investigation department which is independent of the police and the army.

The government admits as many as 500 Tamil civilians have disappeared in the northern Jaffna peninsula, the Tamil heartland, since the military drove out rebels and took control in May 1996.

The rebels are fighting for an independent homeland for the ethnic Tamil minority which they claim is discriminated against by the majority Sinhalese who dominate the government and the military.

In Parliament, Opposition political parties demanded that the government should appoint a presidential commission to investigate the charges, which would have greater weight.

"We are going to be very tough and we will ask the government to make the details public,'' said Murukesu Sivasithamparam, president of the Tamil United Liberation Front. The TULF will support a motion to debate the issue, Sivasithamparam said.

Four Sri Lankan soldiers and a police officer were sentenced to death on July 3 for the rape and murder of a Tamil schoolgirl and her family. They claimed they merely buried the victims and could show authorities the graves of hundreds of other Tamil civilians killed by security forces.

"We didn't kill anyone. We only buried bodies. We can show you where 300 to 400 bodies have been buried,'' Corporal Dewage Somaratne said when judges asked him why he should not be given the death sentence. His co-defendants, three privates and a police constable, seconded his claim.

The case has been closely followed in Sri Lanka as a test of the government's commitment to protect minorities and punish attacks against them in a country torn by ethnic war.

The government said it was determined to ''get to the bottom'' of the reported mass grave in the Jaffna peninsula, as Tamil and Muslim MPs demanded excavation of the site.

''The government is determined to get to the bottom of it,'' cabinet spokesman and media minister Mangala Samaraweera said in response to questions at the weekly press briefing.

He noted that today was the 15th anniversary of the "worst holocaust'' against the minority Tamils in the country and the government would not allow a repetition of such violence.

Hundreds of Tamils in Colombo and elsewhere were killed and their properties destroyed by Sinhalese mobs in July 1983 in retaliation for the killing of 13 soldiers by Tamil militants in Jaffna.

Participating in a debate over the mass grave in Parliament yesterday, Tamil and Muslim members demanded that the government investigate the grave to do justice to the Tamil people.

Member after member said the government was not showing the same keenness in investigating the grave, said to contain over 500 bodies of Tamil civilians killed by the security forces, as it had in the case of Sinhalese victims of excess during the previous regime.

''The government did justice to the Sinhalese people by excavating the graves at Sooriyakanda. In the same way, why can't the government do the same at Chenmani?'' asked D Sithadthan of the Democratic People's Liberation Front.

The independent Human Rights Commission is also probing the grave. Rauf Hakeem of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress noted that while the allegation by the soldier had been prominently published in the Tamil newspapers, Sinhalese and English newspapers gave it less prominence.

''The issues of the minorities are gradually fading away,'' he said, adding that this gave rise to the question as to why the government did not give equal priority to the Chenmani grave as the one in Sooriyakanda.

President Chandrika Kumaratunga, then in the Opposition, had led a group of her party supporters to Sooriyakanda in Ratnapura district in January 1994 to excavate mass graves of Sinhalese youths killed during the insurgency in the south in the late 1980s.

Neelan Tiruchelvam of the Tamil United Liberation Front said the public had a right to full, impartial and professional investigation into the alleged graves in Chenmani, just as similar graves in Argentina, El Salvador, Gautemala, Iraq, the former Yugoslavia and Ethiopia were investigated.

A H M Azwer of the United National Party said according to the statement made by the convicted soldier, there were over 500 bodies of ''fathers, mothers and other residents of the district'' buried in the grave.

Ali Zahir Mowlana (UNP) said the ''landmark judgment'' in the rape and murder of the school girl would be a good lesson for the members of the armed forces and wanted to know why the government was ''hesitant'' in investigating the mass grave.

R Sambanthan (TULF) noted that Amnesty International had said in its report that there were over 546 cases of disappearances in Jaffna. The government had ''every obligation'' to probe the veracity of the statement made by the soldier.

''The government should probe the Chenmani graves,'' he said, adding that killing of Tamil people had been going on since 1983.

UNI

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