Sri Lanka’s External Ministry Wednesday dismissed the report submitted to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon by his specially appointed 3-member panel of experts as "fundamentally flawed," and added that the report dealing with possible war crimes is based on "patently biased material which is presented without any verification." UN Office said Moon will Colombo the opportunity to review the report first, before making the report public. Meanwhile, human rights organizations exerted pressure on the UN for public release of the report, while expressing concern that UN is capable of "just burying the report."
Alan Keenan is a senior analyst on Sri Lanka with the International Crisis Group. He says he hopes the U.N. experts will ratchet up international pressure to get answers, VoA reported.
"We hope that they will concur with us that the current Sri Lankan government initiative is not adequate, and that therefore some kind of an international commission of inquiry is required," VoA said quoting Keenan.
Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia Director for Human Rights Watch (HRW) told VoA, "[i]f Sri Lanka now becomes the proponent for a government that carpet bombs civilians to win a war, that is not the message that is going to be acceptable to most that believe in human rights. And Sri Lanka, in a way, is destroying its own credibility by doing this kind of thing, so eventually it will hurt them."
The three-strong expert panel is chaired by Marzuki Darusman from Indonesia, the UN’s special envoy for North Korea. The other two members of the panel are human rights expert Yasmin Sooka from South Africa and Steven Ratner, an expert in international law of war from the United States.
Mr. Ban launched the investigation "to advise him on the issue of accountability with regards to any alleged violations of international human rights and humanitarian law during the final stages of the conflict in Sri Lanka."
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