The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

War crimes: US wants Lanka to hold ‘guilty’ accountable
Ashish Kumar Sen in Washington

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Friday pushed Sri Lanka to hold accountable those responsible for committing war crimes during the nearly three-decade-long civil war with the Tamil Tigers.

At a meeting with Hillary at the State Department, Sri Lankan Foreign Minister GL Peiris outlined the steps his government has taken on post-conflict issues, including accountability.

“We did discuss accountability and informed them of the machinery that has been set up to deal with that,” Peiris told reporters on Friday. Peiris said he gave Hillary a “comprehensive account” of the steps his government has taken so far.

“We said, ‘This is the work that we have undertaken and completed so far,’ and we gave them some indication of our priorities,” he added.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Hillary emphasised the importance of accountability, strengthening public confidence in the process, and speeding up the healing of the country.

Hillary told the minister: “Good plan, now you really need to make it public; now you really need to show your people, the world, the concrete implementation steps going forward,” Nuland said.

Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa appointed a Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission to examine the conflict and post-conflict efforts in 2010. The commission’s report, which lists almost 300 recommendations, does not name any official, military or civilian, against whom allegations of war crimes have been made.

Peiris said Sri Lanka’s attorney general has been tasked with examining the commission’s report to determine whether there is any evidence that would justify the institution of criminal proceedings and stand up in a court of law. No one would be immune from prosecution, the minister said.

Peiris said Sri Lanka is not in favour of an international inquiry into alleged atrocities during the civil war that resulted in the deaths of thousands.

“The local inquiry has just started,” he said. “It has to be given reasonable opportunity to move forward and to come to a conclusion. Until that is done, any kind of intervention by any kind of international tribunal is premature.”

The Obama administration has urged the Sri Lankan government to develop a comprehensive action plan for implementing steps on reconciliation and accountability for alleged war crimes that took place during the conflict.

The United Nations Human Rights Council passed a US-sponsored resolution in March that also asked Sri Lanka develop such an action plan. India voted in favour of the resolution.

Colombo rules out troop withdrawal from North
Chandani Kirande in Colombo

As Sri Lanka celebrated the third anniversary of the defeat of the Tamil Tigers on Saturday, President Mahinda Rajapaksa ruled out the removal of military camps from the North of the country despite the end of terrorism.

“Armed services camps are not found in the North alone. They are seen throughout the country. They are in Colombo and in the South, the President said addressing hundreds of men from the armed forces and the police who took part in the Victory Day parade.

“Some are shouting remove military camps from the North and East,” Rajapaksa said at a ceremony to mark the third anniversary of crushing of the Tamil Tigers, claiming “the LTTE diaspora had not given up their separatist ideas.”

“We cannot jeopardise national security by removing camps,” the Lankan President declared in sharp comments, hours after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that Colombo should demilitarise the Tamil dominated embattled north and do more to protect human rights.

American House passes $643 bn defence bill

Washington, May 19
Defying the White House veto threat, the Republican-majority US House of Representatives has passed the $643 billion defence authorisation bill for 2013 that among other things calls for certain conditions for American aid to Pakistan.

The White House, in a statement this week, had said such conditions and certification regarding aid to Pakistan would be counter-productive.

The National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) 2013, passed by the House - 299 votes to 120 - yesterday now heads for a showdown with the Democrat-majority Senate.

The NDAA imposes conditions on Pakistan for receiving economic and military aid from the US based on Islamabad’s action against terrorists and IEDs.

Among other things, it prohibits the preferential procurement of goods or services from Pakistan till Islamabad re-opens the crucial NATO supply routes to Afghanistan, which were closed in the aftermath of the death of 24 Pakistani soldiers on November 26 last year in a NATO cross-border fire.

The bill also calls for the construction of an East Coast missile defence system in the United States by the end of 2015 and has budgeted $100 million in this regard for next year.

The NDAA authorises $643 billion in spending for Department of Defence and overseas contingency operations, $8 billion above the spending caps in last year’s Budget Control Act (BCA) and $3.7 billion higher than the request made by President Barack Obama. — PTI

2 dead in Italy school blast

Rome, May 19
Two 16-year-old girls died today after a powerful bomb blast outside their school in the southern Italian city of Brindisi, with another seven injured, one critically.

School officials said the blast, which went off as the students were arriving for class at the all-girls Francesca Morvillo Falcone vocational school, knocked several of them to the ground.

No one has claimed responsibility for the blast caused by gas canisters hidden in a container or backpacks placed near a wall of the school grounds, according to initial indications.

Italian media noted that the school is named after the wife of the famous anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone, who was killed in a bomb attack along with her and their three bodyguards 20 years ago on Wednesday.

Brindisi Mayor Mimmo Consales, suspecting a connection, told the ANSA news agency there were “too many coincidences in this affair.” “The first people to come to the aid of the injured were a teacher, a monitor and a technician (who) described a powerful explosion that knocked several students to the ground,” the school’s director Valeria Vitale told the daily La Repubblica.

“The students are in shock, and the head teacher went straight to the hospital.” The injured schoolgirls are suffering from burns of different degrees of severity, media reports said. — AFP

20,000 march at Frankfurt Occupy protest rally

An Occupy activist is carried by the police in Frankfurt.

Berlin, May 19
Some 20,000 activists took part in a major rally of the local Occupy movement in Frankfurt today, the German police said.

Protesters peacefully filled the city centre of continental Europe’s biggest financial hub in their protest against the dominance of banks and what they perceive to be untamed capitalism, Frankfurt police spokesman Ruediger Regis said.

The police revised the initial turnout estimate of 10,000 quickly upward to 20,000 as protesters jammed Frankfurt’s downtown business district on what was a warm and sunny Saturday afternoon.

A spokesman for the organizers, Roland Suess, said the turnout had already reached 25,000. Organisers had told authorities that they expect between 10,000 and 40,000 participants. The protest group calling itself Blockupy has called for blocking the access to the European Central Bank (ECB), which is located in Frankfurt’s business district.

Last year, thousands in Germany took to the streets in rallies during the worldwide Occupy movement. But as Germany’s economy is proving to be robust and unemployment at a record-low those protests have mostly fizzled out.

But Europe’s lingering debt crisis has given new fuel to some protests, even though Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, suffers none of the austerity measures now heavily affecting some southern European nations such as Greece, Portugal and Spain.

An Occupy tent camp in front of the ECB was cleared Wednesday as a safety measure ahead of today’s protest. Some 340 activists left, some of them carried by police. Authorities say the camp can be re-erected late tomorrow.

The police yesterday temporarily detained some 400 demonstrators during unauthorised Blockupy protests by thousands of activists after they erected barricades and staged sit-ins. Some 5,000 police officers are assigned to keep the weekend protests in check. — AP