Former Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa rejected claims that he had agreed to investigate mass atrocities committed on the island and claimed his government was never at risk of facing sanctions, as he denounced the OISL report today.
In a statement released online, Mr Rajapaksa stated that Sri Lanka was never at risk of facing economic sanctions over the refusal to account for the final stages of the armed conflict, which saw tens of thousands of Tamil civilians killed.
“Such measures are very rarely implemented because the country imposing sanctions ends up making a permanent enemy of the people of the country at the receiving end,” said Mr Rajapaksa. “Unilateral sanctions against Sri Lanka was never on the cards during my tenure.”
Instead the former president said that “during the war, Sri Lanka and the USA had a mutually helpful exchange of information on security matters” and that “throughout my tenure, the main foreign investors in the Sri Lankan long term sovereign bond market and the securities exchange were from America and Europe”. “It is only after I was voted out of office that these investors started withdrawing their money from Sri Lanka,” he claimed.
Stating that a hybrid court “is not feasible”, he went on to say “if there are allegations of wrongdoing against any member of the armed forces, I strongly believe that those should be tried under the existing Sri Lankan law, under our present courts system and by our judges and our Attorney-General’s department”.
His comments echo those made by current Sri Lankan president Maithripala Sirisena last week, who reiterated "our stand is to have a domestic inquiry”.
Mr Rajapaksa also accused “some politicians” of carrying out “a deliberate attempt to mislead the people and seek justification for their own cooperation with interventionist foreign forces”.
His statement seems to be response to Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe's comments that Mr Rajapaksa agreed to carry out a domestic inquiry into reports of human rights violations in a meeting with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon in 2009. “I could not say anything since it has already been adopted,” claimed Mr Wickremesinghe on Friday.
The former president though dismissed this, stating his government only agreed to “address ‘grievances’”.
See the full text of his statement here.
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