The Sri Lankan government plans to mobilise tens of thousands of people ahead of a key human rights meet in Geneva which is expected to discuss alleged abuses in the country during a three-decade ethnic conflict.
The protest called the ‘people’s fortress to protect the nation’ are planned in 150 major towns coinciding with the 19th session of the United Nation Human Rights Council (UNHRC) sessions starting Monday. The government has described the move to discuss human rights abuses in Sri Lanka as an international conspiracy hatched in Geneva against President Mahinda Rajapaksa.
“This is clearly international revenge on the President for his action to end a 30-year curse of terrori
sm,” Dilan Perera, a senior minister told reporters here. “Forgetting all differences, people must rally to protect the President and the nation,” Dallas Alahapperuma, another senior minister said, adding,
“Please do not interfere in our internal affairs, let us solve our own problems, that is our message to international forces”.
The session would review the country’s human rights accountability during the last phase of the war with the LTTE that ended in May 2009.
The US government is the prime mover of a resolution, which calls for the implementation of Sri Lanka’s own Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) recommendations, which had recommended local investigations into alleged military excesses and prescribed a negotiated political solution to the political aspirations of Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority community.
The resolution seeks to bind Sri Lanka for action to implement recommendations of LLRC and obtain assistance of the UN Human Rights Commissioner for the purpose. Sri Lanka maintains that such a resolution is unwarranted as Colombo had already implemented some of the recommendations and needs some more time to implement the rest.
If the Rajapaksa government has initiated its ‘people’s fortress’, several Tamil people and organizations across the world have also launched a full-scale ‘offensive’ through statements, rallies and of course the new media, which includes the Twitter and Facebook, to press for international investigation of excesses in the Eelam war, particularly the final phase that is believed to have consumed about 40,000 lives.