US lauds Sri Lanka for Tamil reconciliation

The United States has praised Sri Lanka’s new government for speeding up efforts towards reconciliation with ethnic minority Tamils after a separatist civil war which lasted nearly three decades and killed tens of thousands of people.

Steps such as the return of land, efforts to find the missing and the lifting of bans on Tamil groups will help heal wounds that linger six years after conflict ended, said Samantha Power, US permanent representative to the United Nations.

“A lot has been done in a short period of time,” Ms Power told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Monday on the sidelines of a youth conference during a visit to the Indian Ocean island.

“The government has laid down a list of commitments and ... (is) making their way through those commitments, in terms of giving back lands, in terms of Prevention of Terrorism Act, in terms of missing people, implementation of the accountability mechanism.”

Since President Maithripala Sirisena was elected in January, he has tried to mend relations with the United States and other Western nations, strained under his predecessor Mahinda Rajapaksa who was criticised for not doing enough to promote reconciliation between Tamils and the majority Sinhalese.

Mr Rajapaksa won the 26-year war by crushing separatist Tamil Tiger rebels in 2009, but the United Nations accused his military of killing thousands of civilians, mostly Tamil, during the final weeks of the conflict.He rejected international calls for an independent investigation into alleged war crimes and refused to cooperate with UN officials appointed to probe claims of human rights abuses, including abduction, rape and torture. In October, Mr Sirisena’s government said it planned to find a middle way by establishing a credible judicial process involving foreign judges and prosecutors to investigate alleged abuses.