Sri Lanka: Diplomatic Offensive Won’t Make Killing Fields Disappear

(New York-by

Elaine Pearson

Published in:

Ground Views

JUNE 30, 2011) - The Sri Lankan government continues its diplomatic offensive, denying and dismissing the growing evidence of war crimes during the final bloody battles between the Sri Lankan armed forces and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) that ended in May 2009.

Last week, at a panel presentation of the Channel 4 film, the "Killing Fields of Sri Lanka," Sri Lanka's United Nations Ambassador Palitha Kohona said, "To suggest that the Sri Lankan military was so foolhardy as to deliberately target the civilians, I think is a blatant lie... We had no intention of creating martyrs, we had no intention of creating more volunteers for the LTTE."

If the killings of civilians were not deliberate, the Sri Lankan army attacks were clearly indiscriminate, which is no less a war crime.

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2011/06/30/sri-lanka-diplomatic-offensive-won-t-make-killing-fields-disappear