Sri Lanka's foreign minister said his government has no case to answer over the reported deaths of thousands of civilians at the end of its civil war, even as pressure grows for an international inquiry to account for the dead.
The UN's top human rights official said last week that Sri Lanka needs to show progress by next March or the international community should establish its own inquiry into allegations of civilian casualties and summary executions in the final months of the quarter-century conflict that ended in 2009, when government forces crushed ethnic Tamil rebels.
Speaking on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly on Monday, Foreign Minister GL Peiris defended the government's efforts in probing reported abuses by security forces, and said a commission of inquiry appointed by Sri Lanka's president in August to investigate disappearances would report back after six months.
"Sri Lanka is not stalling," Peiris told The Associated Press.
He contended that the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council and Western nations were discriminating unfairly against Sri Lanka as a result of disinformation circulated by Tamil separatists overseas, and were demanding quicker action on accountability than they had of other countries that had been through tumultuous conflicts, such as the former Yugoslavia and Cambodia.
"In no other post-conflict situation has there been this intensity of pressure in such a short period of time," he said.
A panel of experts appointed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon reported in 2011 that as many as 40,000 civilians were killed in the final five months of the war, a figure Peiris dismissed as pure conjecture.
The experts concluded most died as a result of indiscriminate shelling by the Sri Lankan military as it closed in on the Tamil Tigers, who had waged a ruthless battle for an ethnic homeland in the north of the island. The government has estimated about 9,000 people perished in those months.
