Ranil asks Govt. ‘regime or country’?

By Uditha Jayasinghe

The time has come to decide whether the Rajapaksa regime or country is more important insisted the main Opposition Leader yesterday, calling for the Government to implement key accountability processes including holding elections in the north before the island is labelled as a “pariah State” by the international community.

Taking an impassioned stance, United National Party (UNP) Leader Ranil Wickremesinghe requested the Government to hold a meeting with Opposition parties before the second US-backed resolution on Sri Lanka is passed at the ongoing United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) insisting that “it is still not too late”.

“We can meet in April and put together a plan on key issues such as the implementation of the LLRC report. Even if the resolution is passed, action will not be taken immediately so we can come to an accord in April.



We’ll even come to Mattala, we might not come by plane but we’ll come by car,” Wickremesinghe told media.  

The draft resolution presented last week in Geneva calls for international investigations into allegations of human rights including war crimes, which the Government has vehemently fought against and denied.

Questioning whether the regime led by President Mahinda Rajapaksa is more important than the country, Wickremesinghe demanded that the Government take urgent steps to promote human rights and reconciliation by kick-starting broken-down discussions with the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) and other parties for a political solution.

“So we are calling on the Government to implement the LLRC report. There are two options for us – either have international investigations or implement the LLRC and hold the northern provincial council elections by June the latest. If we do that we can avoid any more adverse steps by international organisations. We are willing to work with the Government but there is no response.”

Wickremesinghe insisted that the Government’s continuous stonewalling on addressing reconciliation issues was pushing Sri Lanka towards being labelled as a “pariah State”.

“Once an investigation begins in Sri Lanka, it affects all of us. We become the pariah State and we become the citizens of that pariah State. All this time when we went out, people said ‘you are from Sri Lanka, it’s a very good country,’ that is what our generation has enjoyed. The next generation if they go out will hear ‘you have come from this pariah nation, you have killed so many people and you are not even investigating into the human rights violations’. So it’s useless shouting at anyone else. It is the Government that accepted the human rights standards so now it is useless to shout and blame the TNA, UN or anyone else.”

Wickremesinghe recalled that in 2009 the Government gave a commitment to the Secretary General of the UN to work on a political solution that is acceptable to all parties and probe all the violations on international human rights law in Sri Lanka.

“This was further endorsed by the resolution which Sri Lanka and its friends introduced at the last Human Rights Council where we accepted the jurisdiction of the UN, the Human Rights resolution and the Council to go into human rights violations, further promising to bring about a political solution and then in 2011 further commitment was made before the Darusman Panel by the Sri Lankan delegation led by the then Secretary of Foreign Affairs M.S. Jayasinghe, Attorney General Mohan Peiris and Permanent Representative to the UN Palitha Kohana that the Government would take action either under military law or criminal law with regard to the violations of human rights by security forces personnel.”

Living up to these pledges is the only way to avert a second resolution, Wickremesinghe emphasised.