As Sri Lanka goes to polls, calls grow for war

crimes trial over Tamil Tigers assault

Sri Lanka votes on Monday in parliamentary elections that could see Mahinda
Rajapaksa return to politics - just as the UN prepares to release a report into
human rights abuses under his rule

By Philip Sherwell, Jaffna-16 Aug 2015

In the peaceful confines of a church compound in the northern tip of Sri Lanka, its thick walls
offering a cool respite from the cloying tropical humidity outside, the diminutive middle-aged
woman quietly related the horrors that tore apart her family.
Jeyakumary Balendran was among the hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians trapped in
the merciless final weeks of Asias longest-running conflict in 2009.
By the end of the Sri Lankan army offensive, the Tamil Tigers fanatical rebels who
pioneered the use of suicide bombers and child soldiers in their violent insurgency were

wiped out.
Thousands of civilians were also dead, mostly killed by relentless government shelling as the
Tigers made their last stand in a sliver of marshland, penned in on by the Indian Ocean and
the jungle.
The brutality of Sri Lankas killing fields will be put back under the international spotlight next
month when UN human rights investigators releases an eagerly-anticipated report into the
atrocities carried out by both the Tigers and the Sinhalese-dominated military.
The government of then-president Mahinda Rajapaksa had designated the area a no fire
zone for civilians. But it was transformed into a free-fire zone as the army oversaw an alleged
indiscriminate slaughter in its mission to end the 26-year insurgency.
The shelling never stopped, said Mrs Balendran, 54. It came from artillery, from the air,
from the sea. We were on the move constantly and all around us people were being blown to
pieces. There were bodies everywhere, people with no heads, no limbs.

Jeyakumari Balendran with daughter Vibushika, her only surviving child

A previous 2012 United Nations investigation estimated that 40,000 civilians were killed in the
wars horrific last few weeks. Among the dead was Mrs Balendrans 19-year-old son
Kajeevan, ripped apart by a shell a few feet from his mother.
Another teenage son was shot dead three years earlier by a suspected pro-government
paramilitary group. And her third and youngest son, a 15-year-old conscripted by the Tigers,
disappeared from a government rehabilitation centre after the war, never to be seen again.
The new report from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights waschampioned by
America and Britain, with David Cameron throwing his weight behind the investigation after
he came under heavy criticism for attending a Commonwealth summit in
Colombo hosted by Mr Rajapaksa in 2013.
The report is expected to name army commanders and politicians responsible for ordering the
indiscriminate offensive, and will unleash calls for war crimes trials in Sri Lanka.
The reports impending release is the backdrop to fiercely-contested parliamentary elections
in the former British colony on Monday.
Mr Rajapaksa was surprisingly defeated by his party rival Maithripala Sirisena in the
presidential ballot in January, as voters turned against him amid widespread allegations of
corruption, nepotism and abuse.

Maithripala Sirisena (AFP)

But the self-styled political warrior king, who remains extremely popular with many
Sinhalese nationalists, is on Monday attempting a comeback. He seems certain to win a seat
as an MP and is hoping to stage a long-odds return to power as prime minister, although Mr
Sirisena has vowed to block that manoeuvre.
Hugo Swire, the Foreign Office minister for Asia, told The Telegraph that Britain would urge
the Sri Lankan government to ensure accountability.
Whatever mechanism is employed should be independent, credible and in accordance with
international standards," he told The Telegraph.
There needs to be accountability in order for Sri Lanka to move on from this extraordinarily
dark period. Sri Lankans need to know the truth about what happened.
Ruki Fernando, an adviser with Inform, a human rights centre in Colombo, urged the US and
Britain to take strong action in response to the UN report as champions of the investigation.
Mr Fenando called for international support to set up special courts, impose travel bans and
asset freezes on those named in the report, provide information to families of the disappeared
and repeal terrorism legislation under which he and Mrs Balendran were both detained last
year.

Supporters of Mahinda Rajapaksa attend a campaign rally in Kandy yesterday (Getty)

A key will be to focus on those most responsible for most serious crimes, he told The
Telegraph. Dropping the ball now, would be a great insult to survivors and victims families
and human rights defenders, who have been abandoned and let down by the international
community in the past, and who had yet taken great risks to share stories of suffering with the
UN investigation team.
Their right to truth, justice, reparations, guarantees of non occurrence and to be consulted
must be ensured.
It is cases such as that of Mrs Balendran that would be at the centre of any future war crimes
trials in Sri Lanka.
The widow, her 19-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter were among the Tamil civilians
in rebel-held territory who fled in front of a relentless army offensive as the Tigers were driven
into an ever-shrinking enclave in 2009.
Many of the civilians were effectively human shields for the Tigers, forced to abandon their
homes by the rebel leaders who calculated that deploying fighters among the ranks of women
and children might provide a defence against government attacks, according to an earlier UN
report and human rights groups.
By April, some 300,000 civilians were corralled in a small sliver of land with the remaining
Tamil Tigers, including their notorious leader Velupillai Prabhakaran.
The Rajapaksa government insisted to the world that it would respect the rights of civilians.
But with no outside groups allowed access to the region, the reality was very different as the
army launched an all-out bombardment under orders of the presidential strongman and his
brother Gotabhaya, the defence minister.
The shelling was never-ending and the air was so thick with smoke that we couldnt breathe,
said Mrs Balendran. There was no chance to bury the bodies. We had no food, no water, we
were out in the open with nowhere to sleep. It is impossible to describe the horror of what we
experienced. We were certain we would die.

Mahinda Rajapaksa, center, prays with his supporters during a campaign rally in Colombo earlier this
month (AP)

Her composure finally slipped as she described the events of May 5, 2009. There was yet
more shelling. I was with my daughter and my son was a few feet away with the same group
when more shells landed right by us.
We were all thrown to the ground, but Kajeevan didnt get up. He was killed instantaneously.
Shrapnel from a shell split his head apart.
I was howling and screaming, but there was no chance to say prayers or conduct any rites. I
had to save my daughter. I tried to spread some dirt across his body, but we had to flee. I had
to abandon my son like that, with the other dead.
Eventually, Mrs Balendran was able to wade through the lagoon to safety with her daughter.
Many others died in the water. Some were killed by the army onslaught, others by Tamil
Tigers firing at those trying to escape their grip.
The area is a now placid stretch of marshlands and islets, although yellow landmine warning
signs give some clue that it was not always so tranquil. Most notably, a sign erected by Mr
Rajapaksa at the end of the causeway across the lagoon boasts that this was the site of a
heroic victory over ruthless terrorists by the Sri Lankan army, which rescued 100,000
civilians in a humanitarian operation.

Human rights groups, the UN and survivors even some even former high-ranking officials
say that the heroic victory also involved indiscriminate carnage. An earlier UN panel of
experts estimated that 40,000 people were killed her, most buried in unmarked mass graves.
For Mrs Balendran, the loss did not end there. At that time, her third son Mahinthan was
missing after disappearing a few months earlier, reportedly abducted by the Tamil Tigers as
the rebels press-ganged children into their ranks.
After the war ended in May 2009, she searched frantically for the 15-year-old boy among the
displaced and refugees, showing his photograph to anyone she met in the hope of a sighting.
But there was no clue to his whereabouts until a Western journalist was allowed to visit a
rehabilitation centre being operated by the army for former child soldiers later that year.
A photograph showed Mahinthan doing exercises, but that was the last trace of him. Mrs
Balendran became a tireless and vocal advocate for the disappeared and was regularly
threatened by state security forces under the old government, before she was detained last
year under the Prevention of Terrorism Act for alleged harbouring a Tamil Tiger revivalist.
Mrs Balendran insisted that she had no connection with the named individual but was only
released after 362 days in detention, earlier this year following the election of Mr Sirisena as
president.
The Tamil nationalist movement was driven by growing resentment against institutionalised
discrimination under successive Sinhalese-led governments. In 1983, an all-out civil war
erupted as the Tigers fought to establish a homeland for the predominantly Tamil minority
independent of the islands Sinhalese Buddhist majority.
The rebels quickly established a reputation for fanaticism, with fighters issued with cyanide
capsules on strings around their neck to take to avoid capture. They conducted a series of
high-profile assassinations, including the murder of Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, and
several Sri Lankan leaders, both Sinhalese and Tamil.
But that goal of independence is now dead. In the battle-scarred streets of Jaffna, life has
slowly returned to some form of normalcy. The renowned neo-Moghul library has been rebuilt
after it was burned down by pro-government mobs with the loss of its treasured book
collection.
And at the offices of Uthayan, the main Tamil newspaper, where a war room contains the
evidence of the attacks over the years photographs of murdered staff, two shelves of
vandalised computer screens and bullet-holes in the wall journalists say they hope that the
days when their lives were at risk have passed.

But six years after the end of the conflict, the scars are still deep and visceral for those
such as Jeyakumary Balendran who lost so much.
How Sri Lanka votes on Monday and how the country reacts to next months UN human rights
report will do much to determine whether those scars begin to heal.
Posted by Thavam