As the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) opens its 30th session in Geneva this week, 62 leading human rights activists have signed an open letter calling on the world body to ensure justice, truth and peace in Sri Lanka, where the unhealed wounds of three decades of war continue to plague the country’s 20 million people.
Among the letter’s signatories are John Cavanagh, director of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies; Medea Benjamin, cofounder of CODEPINK; Norita Cortiñas, cofounder of Argentina’s Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Disappeared); and Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute.
Six years after the island nation declared an end to its longstanding civil conflict, the statement calls on the UNHRC, and the international community more broadly, not to “fail” the victims of Sri Lanka’s war and to “fulfill its duty by establishing an international independent judicial process under UN auspices.”
Sri Lanka’s human rights record has been front and center in Geneva since May 2009, when the government of then-President Mahinda Rajapaksa defeated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), an armed group that fought for years to carve out a separate state for the minority Tamil community in the north and east of the country.
While his military victories won him massive popular support at home among the majority Sinhala population, the final armed operations in the north (conducted amid a near-total media blackout and virtual humanitarian blockade) earned Rajapaksa a gaping black mark abroad.