A 140-page report about sexual violence against Tamils by Sri Lankan security forces prepared by the Human Rights Watch (HRW), a global human rights organization, is expected to be released today. The UN Human Rights Council is to open its 22nd session next week. All this is enough to embarrass Sri Lanka, under increasing international pressure to conduct a serious investigation into crimes that may have been committed by its security forces in the final months of the war against the Tamil Tigers. But there is more. The most important and the most shocking are the pictures of a 12-year-old boy murdered in cold blood allegedly by Sri Lankan security forces when he was in their custody. The boy is Balachandran Prabhakaran, the son of Tamil Tiger leader Villupillai Prabhakaran. The photographs, obtained by Britain's Channel 4 Television and published in several newspapers around the world, may provide a grim backdrop to the findings in the HRW report and deliberations of the HRC. Last year, when another photograph showing the body of Prabakaran Jr. with visible bullet wounds on his chest surfaced, the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa said the boy died in a crossfire. Now the government is likely to describe the new photographs as fabricated. But this is a government which continued to speak of “zero civilian casualties" for three years before they accepted that some civilians had indeed died. How many and in what circumstance? According to UN, up to 40,000 civilians may have died in the government's final offensive, resulting in the total defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May 2009. Tigers were fighting for a separate homeland for Tamils who are in a majority in the north and east of Sri Lanka. The ethnic conflict lasting some 25 years blighted and brutalized the island. It destroyed Sri Lanka's economy and torn apart its social fabric. Tigers were fiendish killers. But President Rajapaksa erred grievously in thinking that the crimes of Tigers, however grisly, justified the conduct of his government which stands accused of some of the most horrific war crimes of the 21st century. Now the emergence of the Balachandran Prabhakaran photographs is likely to add force and urgency to the calls for an independent inquiry into the conduct of Sri Lankan forces during the closing stages of the war. These photographs leave President Rajapaksa with a lot of troubling questions to answer. If they are fabricated or concocted, he should allow an honest and credible investigation by an international body to find out how Balachandran died, and make the findings public. This is the only way to clear all doubts. Colombo is due to host the Commonwealth summit in November this year. Some members wanted to shift the venue of the summit or boycott it if Sri Lanka is the host. So Rajapaksa has no time to lose if he wants to reassure his friends and silence his critics in international community. At home, he should work for reconciliation between the majority Sinhalese and the Tamil minority. The rout of the Tigers does not mean the end of the Tamil problem. The exit of the most intransigent Tamil group should be an added reason for him to launch a campaign aimed at winning the hearts and minds of ordinary Tamils.
