A top minister in Mahinda Rajapaksa regime has publicly accepted the mass-scale killing of Tamil civilians during the final months of the war in 2009. SL Minister and the leader of Democratic Left Front (DLF), Vasudeva Nanayakara on Tuesday said that his party accepted the important fact that innocent civilians have been killed during the Vanni war. Amid growing international pressure for an international probe into the credible allegations of war crimes in Sri Lanka, Mr. Nanayakara, who was on a propaganda drive seeking the public in Jaffna to support the Rajapaksa alliance in the upcoming civic elections in North, said that Tamils could only exert meaningful pressure on the SL government by supporting his alliance.
![Vasudeva Nanayakara [middle] addressing press in Jaffna](https://www.tamilnewsnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Vasudeva_Nanayakara_press_meet_94301_445.jpg "Vasudeva Nanayakara [middle] addressing press in Jaffna")
Vasudeva Nanayakara [middle] addressing press in Jaffna
Stating that even the TNA has to negotiate with the Rajapaksa government, Nanayakara urged the people of Jaffna to vote for Rajapaksa’s symbol of beetle leaf to “ensure that there was no foreign interferences”. Nanayakara was addressing a press conference at a hotel near the Kachcheari in Jaffna.
“It is not a problem when armed people get killed when a war is taking place, but the killing of innocent civilians matters very much,” Nanayakkara told reporters.
Responding to a question relating to the UN expert panel report and the Channel 4 documentary, the SL minister said that it was “better to help the people who survived the war rather than counting the number of people who were killed”.
“The people who survived the war should be resettled. They should be helped to get back to their normal life. I too really do not know the exact number of people killed in the war,” Nanayakara said.
“I do not wish to talk about the number of people killed, but I agree that there should be proper statistics of people killed. I have urged the Sri Lankan police chief in writing to investigate into the scenes shown by the Channel 4 television,” he said.
Answering to a question about the non-resettlement of people in the Vanni, he said that it was “very important to resettle people in their native places whether it is Jaffna or Vanni”.
“These people need to be resettled in their native places before we focus on other issues. Those who killed innocent civilians in Vanni should be identified and properly brought before the government, so that it can launch proper investigations based on the evidences.”
Claiming the credit for easing the pass system for diaspora Tamils to visit the north, SL Minister Nanayakkara said that the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) was holding talks with the government knowing well that confronting the government will be of no use”.
“However, the TNA is contesting this election alone. It is not going to gain anything by going alone. Anybody who wish to exert a meaningful pressure on the government can only do it by supporting the UPFA in the elections," he said seeking to justify his alignment with the Rajapaksa regime.
Nanayakara has also gone on record stating that he was totally against the alleged use of state resources for the party election purposes.
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