JAFFNA, Sri Lanka\u2014Sri Lanka\u2019s ethnic Tamil-run provincial administration said Monday it wants to prove that the central government carried out an operation \u201cakin to genocide\u201d to win a long civil war against Tamil rebels.<\/p>\n
The Northern Provincial Council wants to conduct its own internationally supervised count of the dead and missing civilians to back its claim.<\/p>\n
The council, in a resolution passed Monday, also rejected a census of war deaths taken by the central government, calling it unjust.<\/p>\n
The moves come ahead of U.N. Human Rights Council sessions in March where member countries will review Sri Lanka\u2019s post-war accountability process.<\/p>\n
The U.N. human rights body has passed two resolutions calling on Sri Lanka to conduct its own investigations into war crimes allegations against government troops and the now-defeated Tamil Tiger separatist rebels who fought a quarter-century war that ended in 2009.<\/p>\n
Countries like the United States and Britain have warned that the\u00a0South Asian\u00a0island nation could face an international inquiry if it fails to do so.<\/p>\n
A U.N. report previously said some 40,000 Tamil civilians died, mostly in government attacks in the final months of the fighting.<\/p>\n
Sri Lanka has repeatedly denied it deliberately targeted civilians, and last month it took a census of the dead, wounded and missing civilians. Its report is expected to be out in time for the U.N. session.<\/p>\n
The provincial council resolution also urged that investigations on a mass grave found recently be held with the help of U.N expertise. At least 48 human skeletons have been found in the grave in northern Mannar district.<\/p>\n
The Sri Lankan government has been accused of deliberately targeting hospitals and blocking food and medicine as a war strategy. It also has been accused of deliberately undercounting the number of civilians who were trapped in the fighting zone from which authorities evicted U.N and other aid workers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
JAFFNA, Sri Lanka\u2014Sri Lanka\u2019s ethnic Tamil-run provincial administration said Monday it wants to prove that the central government carried out …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-news-w"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/956\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}