Sri Lanka to bar UN experts

Sri Lanka’s President Mahindra Rajapakse said that his government will not grant visas to United Nations investigators probing allegations related to the 26-year-long war with Tamil separatists.

"We will not allow them into the country," Rajapakse confirmed, adding that any allegations related to the war would be investigated through a local panel. The panel will have Sri Lankan officials, two experts from India and Pakistan as well as three international experts appointed last month.

This local commission will look into possible war crimes and rights abuses by Sri Lankan troops and Tamil rebels. According to Rajapakse, the panel received around 20,000 complaints and was about to begin examining the missing persons list. He said that some of these missing people had sought refuge in other countries and that details about them were hard to get.

President Rajapakse is under international pressure to cooperate with the UN probe, but has refused to accept the authority of the UN Human Rights Commission (UNHRC).

"We are saying that we do not accept it (the probe). We are against it," Rajapakse told international journalists in Colombo, adding that his government did not have a problem cooperating with UN agencies other than the human rights commission.

However, the UN rights Chief Navi Pillay said earlier this month that her investigators may not need to travel to Sri Lanka at all and that there was a “wealth of information” about the killings outside the country.

The UNHCR voted in March to investigate the deaths of nearly 100,000 people who died in the war between Tamil separatists and the Sri Lankan army. The 26-year-long war ended with the victory of the Sri Lankan army in 2009.

Around 40,000 ethnic Tamils were killed during the final weeks of the war, according to an estimate in a 2011 report by the UN.

mg/tj (Reuters, afp)