Foreign Secretary of Sri Lanka Admiral Jayanath Colombage denied that the genocide of Tamils took place in a press conference on Tuesday.
Speaking to journalists at the Presidential Media Centre in Colombo, Colombage said;
“Accusations that a genocide took place in Sri Lanka are baseless and it never took place.”
“The war was carried out in a just manner to rescue people who were caught in the middle of terrorists. To say that a genocide took place is a blatant lie,” said Colombage.
He went on to claim that a “section of people who get their salaries from abroad” are the people who spread such information. He also accused the Tamil diaspora, some of whom, he said, “are still wedded to the LTTE ideology.”
“Nothing will change by their protests in the streets,” Colombage said, referring to the diaspora again.
The final offensive in 2009 in the armed conflict between Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam resulted in a large-scale massacre of Tamil civilians.
Many Sri Lankan army officers and defence officials, including the current president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, have been credibly accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Read more here: How many Tamils were killed in 2009?
Colombage himself served as a Navy Commander in Trincomalee from January 2010 to September 2012 where he was implicated in the running of the Illegal detention and torture site known as “Gota's Camp” within the Trincomalee Naval Complex.
In the International Truth and Justice Project’s (ITJP) 2019 report, ‘The Sri Lankan Navy: A Collective Blind Eye,’ Colombage was listed as one of several navy commanders who “knew or should have known about ‘Gun Site’ (2009-2012) and/ or crimes allegedly committed by the special intelligence unit,” including torture and sexual violence.
The UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances visited the detention site in 2015 and noted that systematic torture had taken place in the underground cells. It also noted that the secret detention site was in existence for years and would not have been “unnoticed” by other officials.