Lanka's northern council backs int'l probe into war crimes

Sri Lanka's Northern Provincial Council (NPC) today adopted a resolution backing the call for an international probe into the country's alleged war crimes during the final phase of the military clashes with the LTTE.
A three-point resolution has been passed to bring to international attention Sri Lanka's lack of action to resolve Tamils' problems, said MK Shivajilingam, a Northern Provincial Council (NPC) member from the main Tamil party Tamil National Alliance (TNA).
He said Tamils have no confidence in the Sri Lankan government to do anything meaningful to address their concerns. Shivajilingam said they will seek an UN intervention for an international investigation into war crimes.

The resolution has come in the lead up to the next resolution on Sri Lanka to be moved at the UN Human Rights Council late March.
The TNA's backing for an international inquiry followed a similar call by British Prime Minister David Cameron.
During a visit to Colombo in November, Cameron announced that his government would press for an international probe into alleged war crimes if the Sri Lankan government failed to conduct its own.

Responding to the resolution at the NPC, senior minister Susil Premajayantha accused the opposition, including the TNA, of becoming agents of the West in their anti-Sri Lanka stance.

No one raised their voices when Prabakaran (the late LTTE leader) caused bomb explosions everywhere. They are now free to talk because we have ended it, Premajayantha said in an apparent reference to LTTE's armed campaign.
Sri Lanka denies that its troops committed any war crimes whilst combating the LTTE. It has resisted calls to probe claims that over 40,000 ethnic minority Tamils were killed by the military during the final phase of the civil war that ended in 2009.
They want the international community to give them time and space to have its own mechanism, the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission, to address Tamil grievances by putting in place relevant systems to achieve reconciliation.