Sri Lanka to excavate alleged mass grave
Sri Lanka to excavate alleged mass grave
COLOMBO (AP): Sri Lanka's government announced on Thursday it would begin excavating the site where 300 Tamil civilians believed murdered by the military may be buried, and invited human rights groups and journalists to witness the investigation.
The excavation, set for March 5 in the Jaffna Peninsula, will be done by a team of scientists from two local universities and government forensics experts under the supervision of a local magistrate.
"With a view to be transparent on the allegations against the armed forces, the government will permit local and foreign non- governmental organizations to engage the services of independent forensic experts to observe the exhumation. Local and foreign media can also cover the exhumation," the foreign ministry said.
A site near the town of Chemmani is believed to contain bodies of about half the 600 Tamils who disappeared from military custody after government troops captured the peninsula in early 1996. Jaffna, a Tamil-majority area, was a stronghold of Tamil Tiger guerrillas fighting for a separate homeland for minority Tamils.
A soldier convicted last July of rape and murder of a family of Tamils told judges he had helped bury bodies near Chemmani. The area is about 300 kilometers north of the capital, Colombo.
Tamils say they face discrimination by the majority Sinhalese, who control the government and military. Over 57,000 people have died in the insurrection since 1983 in this country off India's southern coast.
The government first ordered an inquiry in July into the mass graves allegations. But work was delayed, the government says, because of floods, difficulties finding specialist investigators, and a court dispute over allowing relatives of the missing people to witness the digging.
The international human rights group Amnesty International has accused the government of stalling the investigation.
The announcement that the mass grave investigation would begin came a day after a court sentenced six soldiers and a school principal to 10 years in prison for kidnapping 25 high school students who disappeared in 1989 and 1990 in the south during a government crackdown on a Marxist group trying to topple the government. The Marxist uprising was unrelated to the Tamil fight.
On Thursday, Amnesty International welcomed the verdict in the students case, and said it should be an example to the international community that past abuses can be punished when there is political will.
The case was one of Sri Lanka's most infamous, symbolizing two years of terror in which human rights groups say up to 60,000 people were killed either by the government or by Marxists who assassinated politicians and government workers.
The students were believed to have been killed, but prosecutors could not press murder charges because no bodies were found.