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MANILA: Reports of hundreds of disappearances in Sri Lanka are over-hyped and they can be explained by poor record-keeping rather than sinister activities, the country's foreign minister said on Friday.
Rohitha Bogollagama also told Reuters that the tropical island needed no external help to investigate cases of civilians who have disappeared amid renewed civil war between the state and separatist Tamil Tiger rebels.
“If there are disappearances it's only a few numbers. These are disappearances that can be investigated. Our legal system is so rich one can go to the supreme court of the country and raise any matter,” said Bogollagama in an interview in Manila.“They (the disappearances) are overhyped.”
Some officials have said many of those reported missing had gone on holiday abroad or eloped with lovers.
Colombo is under international pressure to investigate accusations of abuse by the military as it fights the separatist Tigers in a conflict that has killed about 70,000 people since 1983.
Rights groups say hundreds of people, many of them minority ethnic Tamils, have been reported abducted or disappeared this year and 1,000 more in 2006. Rebels, paramilitaries, members of the security forces and underworld gangs have all been blamed.Bogollagama, in Manila for a regional security forum, said many of the disappearances could be explained by people failing to registering properly or authorities not recording their moves to different provinces.
The trained lawyer said the government was introducing a new identification system to better track movements in the east of the country, where the military has captured vast swathes of territory from rebels in recent months.
TAKEN TO TASK: But he admitted that the army has failed in the past to properly probe disappearances and the government was trying to make its military more accountable.
“For the first time the law enforcement of the army is being taken to task by the government. There are prosecutions taking place against some of the failures to have these things carried out, we want to encourage that process.”
In May, Britain decided to halt millions of dollars in aid to Sri Lanka citing concerns about human rights abuses. A senior US State Department official urged Colombo to rein in paramilitaries that defence experts say are helping the army fight the Tigers.
The Sri Lankan government has repeatedly said it is ready to restart talks with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), or Tamil Tigers, which it has fought for more than two decades.
But military offensives and the Tigers' refusal to talk peace with President Mahinda Rajapaksa make discussions unlikely.
“We do not want a truce just for the sake of putting this behind (us). We want to see that terrorism no longer exists in Sri Lanka.”
Bogollagama, a father of two, said a tattered 2002 truce, brokered by Norway, had conceded too much to the Tigers.
“The application of that had become totally sided more on the LTTE trying to get ground,” he said. “There is one territory, that's called Sri Lanka.”
The Tigers have vowed to cripple the economy with guerilla-style attacks on major military and financial targets but Bogollagama said it was an empty threat.
“They have been doing and saying this for the last 30 years and in spite of that the economy has still grown.”—Reuters
