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Accused war criminal Gotabaya Rajapaksa, speaking at the “Discussions with Village” programme in Galle contested the recent report published by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights stating that he “does not know what human rights abuses we [Sri Lanka] have committed”.

“Discussions with the Village” a programme which began running September 2020, aimed to meet people in remote villages and inquire into their problems and discuss solutions. In this visit to Galle, Rajapaksa discussed the accusation levelled against his government for being complicit in the Easter bombing attacks and highlighted the need for increased militarisation in the North and East. He also commented on the recent damning report published on Sri Lanka by the UN human rights chief.

He stated,

"This is the first time that I have seen the Human Rights Council submitting a report with the highest number of allegations of human rights violations against the government. I do not know what human rights violations we have committed in the last one and a half years. It says that human rights violations have increased after this government came to power."

Criticising the ‘good governance’ regime Rajapaksa went to state that under their governance ‘our war heroes were imprisoned and were ill-treated’. All branches of the Sri Lankan military stand accused of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, senior military personnel who stand accused of being responsible for some of the most egregious crimes now occupy several high-profile cabinet positions. Currently, no military personnel who have been implicated in crimes against humanity have been charged or completed their sentence.  Last year Gotabaya Rajapaksa pardoned and released Staff Sergeant Sunil Rathnayake, a Sri Lankan Solider convicted of murdering 8 Tamil civilians, including 3 children, in the town or Mirusuvil.

Commenting on the government's promise of employment opportunities, Rajapaksa claimed to have provided employment opportunities to 100,000 low-income people and recruited 60,000 unemployed graduates. Though the success of the scheme is contested after the President, reneged on promises to provide jobs for candidates from the North-East. A government order passed last year essentially made candidates from across the eight districts in the North-East ineligible to apply for the scheme, with 20,540 applications from the North-East being rejected. However whilst the Northern and Eastern provinces have been rendered ineligible, the scheme had been allowed to go ahead in the rest of the seven provinces on the island, exposing the blatantly racist and discriminatory nature of this policy and inequal access to employment.

Rajapaksa commenting on his withdrawal from the co-sponsored resolution which mandated Sri Lanka to establish a hybrid court mechanism with international judges to investigate crimes against humanity, claimed that “one of the weaknesses of us as a government is [its] inability to spread true information to the people”. Sri Lanka alongside having one of the highest number of disappeared people in the world is also a country where the freedom of the press is of great concern with upwards of 41 media workers, the majority Tamil, being known to have been killed by the Sri Lankan state or its paramilitaries during and after the armed conflict.

Read the full transcript of the speech at the Presidents Media Division.