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.