Sri Lanka agrees to UN panel's visit

Sri Lankan government announced Saturday that it has decided to allow a three-member panel of UN-appointed experts to visit the country and share the findings of their probe into alleged war crimes committed during the country's civil war with its own inquiry commission.

"This position has already been conveyed through diplomatic channels to the United Nations in New York," Sri Lanka's Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Friday, marking a reversal of its earlier decision not to allow the panel to visit the country to conduct investigations.

The Foreign Ministry statement came a day after UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told reporters in New York that the Sri Lankan government had agreed to let the UN panel visit the country to hold consultations with the government's own inquiry panel.

"I sincerely hope that the Panel of Experts will be able to have good cooperation, to have an accountability process and make progress as soon as possible. This is a result of long consultations, and I appreciate the flexibility of the Mr. Rajapaksa on this issue", Ban added.

Sri Lanka had witnessed massive anti-UN protests in July over the setting up of the panel to investigate into allegations of war crimes committed by the security forces during the civil war that ended last year with the defeat of Tamil Tiger rebels.

Those protests, led by Housing Minister Wimal Weerawansa, had forced the UN to withdraw its special envoy to Sri Lanka, Neil Buhne, from the South Asian country. He has since returned to Sri Lanka after conditions there improved.

The UN had set up a three member independent panel led by former Indonesian Attorney-General Marzuki Darusman in June to investigate claims that government forces committed atrocities against minority Tamils during the final phase of the country's quarter-century civil war.

However, the Sri Lankan government reacted by voicing its strong objections to the UN-sponsored independent inquiry and refused to issue visas to the members of the three-member panel for conducting investigations inside the country.

Insisting that the UN-sponsored probe was an interference in the country's internal affairs, the Sri Lankan government set up its own inquiry to probe war crimes allegedly committed by its security forces and the Tamil Tiger rebels in the final phase of the civil war.

In May, the Sri Lankan military claimed victory in its 25-year civil war against the Tamil Tiger rebels after recapturing rebel-held areas and eliminating major rebel leaders, including Tamil Tiger founder and leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, in an year-long final offensive.

Official figures indicate that the final military offensive against the Tamil Tiger rebels in the northeastern regions of the country left over 300,000 people homeless, while some 7,000 civilians were killed in the final months of the civil war. An estimated 80,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in the country's civil war after the Tamil Tiger rebels launched an armed rebellion in 1983, demanding an independent state for the Tamil minority in the island nation's northern and eastern regions.

Kilde: RTTNews