COLOMBO (Reuters) – Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron on Saturday said he would push for an independent inquiry into allegations of war crimes at the end of Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war, drawing an angry response from the island nation’s president.
“People who are in glass houses must not throw stones,” President Mahinda Rajapaksa said, after Cameron said Sri Lanka should conduct its own investigation by March 2014 or face an international inquiry.
Cameron has been the most vocal critic of Sri Lanka’s rights record during a summit of Commonwealth nations being held in the capital Colombo. The normally sedate event has been shaken by the row over atrocities during the final months of the civil war and subsequent abuses.
The Sri Lankan army crushed Tamil Tiger separatists in the final battle of the civil war in 2009, in a strategy partly drawn up by Rajapaksa’s brother, defence secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
Some 300,000 civilians were trapped on a narrow beach during the onslaught and a U.N. panel estimates 40,000 non-combatants died. Both sides committed atrocities but army shelling killed most victims, it concluded.
“Let me be very clear. If an investigation is not completed by March, then I will use our position on the UN Human Rights Council to work with the UN Human Rights Commission and call for a full, credible and independent international inquiry,” Cameron told reporters.
Rajapaksa’s reaction appeared to be a reference to Northern Ireland, which suffered decades of sectarian violence between Protestants wanting the province to remain British-ruled and Catholics wanting unification with the Irish republic, until a 1998 peace deal.
The Sri Lankan president made a veiled reference to the Bloody Sunday shootings, when British soldiers killed 14 unarmed protesters in 1972. It is a topic he has spoken of before.
“We have done what we can but there are other countries after 40 years they still couldn’t publish a report,” he said. Britain published the results of an inquiry into the killings in 2010.
