Writing on the online site OpenDemocracy.net, Frances Harrison argues that the government's treatment of witness is "short-sighted" and "will hamper any kind of reconciliation or understanding between the different ethnic groups".

See here for full article. Extracts reproduced below:

At first Dr Niron assumed the attacks on his makeshift hospitals were a terrible accident. He had red crosses painted on the roofs of his buildings so they’d be clearly visible from the air. He sent the GPS coordinates of each new hospital to the International Red Cross so they could share the information with the Sri Lankan military. Every time he did this the makeshift hospitals were hit within days, if not hours. Eventually he learned his lesson. There were five smaller hospitals, with no red crosses, whose locations he never passed on. Not a single one of those five buildings was ever hit. Dr Niron concluded that the military were deliberately targeting hospitals. ‘They were attacking purposefully; they wanted to kill as many as possible,’ he says.

His conclusion is borne out by a United Nations report that found that all civilian hospitals on the frontline were systematically shelled by the Sri Lankan government during those months, some even “hit repeatedly, despite the fact that their locations were well-known to the Government”. The authors of the report said that in early February one of the two remaining hospitals in rebel territory was attacked with multi-barreled rocket launchers and artillery for five days in a row while up to 800 patients were inside. Human Rights Watch also documented more than thirty attacks on hospitals in those months. One incoming rocket was even captured on video. International staff from the ICRC were present during an attack on a hospital and called the army six times to warn them their shells were falling dangerously close to the hospital building. They were not given proper access to the war zone again. When the war ended, the ICRC said it had seen a lot of wars, but rarely one where civilians had been so badly affected. It was, they said, an ‘unimaginable humanitarian catastrophe’.

Dr Niron is the only one of his colleagues who managed to evade arrest at the end of the war.  Strangely this brave man feels he failed because he abandoned 150 patients under a tree to die on the last day of the war as he ran for his life. He can’t stand the sight of blood anyone and no longer wants to be a doctor. There have even been times when he’s contemplated suicide.

There are other medics and volunteers from the hospitals still emerging from Sri Lanka with testimony that supports the doctor’s account and the findings of lawyers and human rights researchers. But the Sri Lankan government and many of its supporters in the south of the island simply deny any of this happened and blame everything on the Tamil Tiger rebels. It’s a short sighted policy that will hamper any kind of reconciliation or understanding between the different ethnic groups. The trauma for Tamil survivors like Dr Niron is so deep that it’s simply not possible to forgive and forget and move on. At the very least their suffering - unprecedented even by the bloody standards of Sri Lanka’s civil war - needs acknowledging.

See also: Frances Harrison's book, 'Still Counting the Dead', is out (04 Oct 2012)