Lanka to refuse entry to UN investigators

Sri Lanka will not grant visas to UN investigators probing war crimes allegedly committed during the island's decades-long separatist conflict, President Mahinda Rajapakse said yesterday.

Sri Lanka has refused to accept the authority of the UN Human Rights Council, which voted in March to investigate allegations that the military killed 40,000 civilians in the final months of the separatist war in 2009.

But it is the first time that Rajapakse has said UN investigators will not be allowed into the country, effectively barring them from face-to-face access to Sri Lankans wanting to testify.

"We will not allow them into the country," said Rajapakse, who is under international pressure to cooperate with the UN-mandated investigation.

Rajapakse said however that his government was cooperating with all other UN agencies.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and other leaders have urged Colombo to cooperate with the UN Human Rights Council after ending a prolonged separatist war that pitted ethnic minority Tamil rebels against the largely Sinhalese army.

Outgoing UN rights chief Navi Pillay earlier this month suggested that her staff investigating allegations of mass killings may not have to travel to Sri Lanka at all.

She said there was a "wealth of information" outside the country.

The remarks prompted allegations from Sri Lanka's foreign ministry that her investigation was on a "preconceived trajectory" and that her "prejudice and lack of objectivity" were unfortunate.

Colombo maintains that its troops did not commit war crimes while crushing the Tamil Tiger rebel movement at the end of a conflict which lasted more than three decades and claimed more than 100,000 lives.

Pillay, who visited Sri Lanka last year, has previously accused Rajapakse's government of becoming authoritarian, and warned that rights defenders and journalists were at risk in the country even after the end of the war.

The government gave some ground last month when it asked a commission already looking into missing persons to expand its work and investigate the actions of both troops and Tamil rebels.

Rajapakse said Tuesday that he was naming two more foreign experts -- an Indian and a Pakistani -- to join three international legal experts already on a panel of advisers helping the presidential Commission of Inquiry.

In a government decree published last month, Rajapakse said the commission would investigate the military's "adherence to or neglect... of laws of armed conflict and international humanitarian law".