Sri Lanka: In search

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neighbours m g devasahayam

 

Sri Lanka: In search

The 26-year war left at least 100,000 people dead. There are still no confirmed figures for tens of thousands of civilian deaths in the last months of battle.

 

EVENTS in Sri Lanka mark a grave failure of the United Nations to adequately respond... during the final stages of the conflict and its aftermath, to the detriment of hundreds of thousands of civilians” – so said an internal UN report on the BBC in mid-November. The report condemned the UN’s failure in its mandate to protect civilians in the last months of Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war that ended in May 2009. Ironically, it is India that was largely responsible for this failure!

 

The 26-year war left at least 100,000 people dead. There are still no confirmed figures for tens of thousands of civilian deaths in the last months of battle. An earlier UN investigation said it was possible that up to 40,000 people had been killed in the final five months. Others suggest the number of deaths could be even higher. The final months of the war saw hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians, 330,000, according to the UN Panel of Experts report of 2011, trapped in the territory held by the Tamil Tigers. READ MORE