Sri Lanka yesterday celebrated a major diplomatic victory over Western nations determined to investigate alleged war crimes committed during its offensive against the Tamil Tigers.
A little more than a week after government troops defeated the separatist rebels, the island’s diplomats managed to lobby Asian support and commandeer a special session of the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva.
The council session, called because of alarm over the high number of civilian casualties as well as the island’s treatment of displaced Tamil civilians, ended late on Wednesday with a resolution praising the outcome of the war.
“This is a strong endorsement of our president’s efforts to rout terrorism and the successful handling of the world’s biggest hostage crisis,” Sri Lankan Human Rights Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe said.
“This is a clear message that the international community is behind Sri Lanka,” he said.
Although the Tamil Tigers were accused of holding tens of thousands of Tamil civilians as human shields, government troops were alleged to have subjected rebel-held areas packed with civilians to intense, indiscriminate shelling.
The UN estimates that more than 7,000 civilians were killed in the first four months of this year.
UN human rights chief Navi Pillay had told the council that there was credible evidence both Sri Lankan forces and the defeated Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) grossly violated international humanitarian laws.
But Sri Lanka, backed by Asian countries including China, India and Pakistan, managed to torpedo any criticism.
The text condemns only the Tamil Tigers and “welcomes ... the liberation by the government of Sri Lanka of tens of thousands of its citizens that were kept by the LTTE against their will as hostages.”
It was adopted with 29 countries voting for, 12 rejecting and six abstaining from the vote — effectively handing the island’s hawkish government a diplomatic seal of approval for its offensive.
Rights groups and Western diplomats were furious.
“The Human Rights Council missed the opportunity to send a message” to human rights violators, a Canadian diplomat said.
Switzerland also criticized the “worrying absence” and “significant gaps” in the text, including a failure to make explicit reference to granting humanitarian groups full access to up to 300,000 displaced Tamils.
Ethnic Tamils displaced by the fighting are now being held in camps ringed by barbed wire and security forces, as the government seeks to weed out rebel fighters.
“It is deeply disappointing that a majority of the Human Rights Council decided to focus on praising a government whose forces have been responsible for the repeated indiscriminate shelling of civilians,” said Juliette de Rivero, Geneva advocacy director at Human Rights Watch.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS