PM outlines reconciliation measures

• South African-style Truth Commission coming

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe says his Government is in talks to establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission similar to the post-apartheid mechanism established by South Africa to deal with the thousands of lives lost during the final stages of the war in 2009.

“A large number of people have died. The only way to sort this out is through a Truth Commission,” Wickremesinghe told BBC in an interview.

 “We are also speaking with South Africa about establishing a truth commission,” the Prime Minister said.

The Sri Lankan Prime Minister ruled out the possibility of international prosecution for war crimes committed during the last bloody months of the country’s civil war.

 “Firstly we are not party to the Rome Statute. So there cannot be any international prosecution of war crimes,” the Prime Minister said.

Wickremesinghe said the UN war crimes report had to be studied within the framework of the agreement arrived at by Mahinda Rajapaksa, firstly with UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and the resolution put forward by the Government of Sri Lanka in 2009 at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, which sparked off the UN process.

The UN is due to release a long-anticipated report on alleged war crimes committed during the last seven years of the Sri Lankan war in September.

Prime Minister Wickremesinghe said the Government was willing to study the report.

 “We will look at it. And we will respond. Where we feel there has to be any investigation or inquiry we will launch it,” he said.

The Prime Minister insisted that any inquiry into allegations of war crimes would have to be launched domestically, through an internationally-accepted process.

 “We will have a domestic mechanism which will have the confidence of the different communities in Sri Lanka, plus the international community,” Wickremesinghe explained.