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U.S. urges Sri Lanka to strike Tamil political deal

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 15:30 GMT

Source: reuters // Reuters

* U.S. diplomat urges deployment of Tamil police

* Sri Lank under increased pressure from West

* Accountability for alleged war crimes important-Blake

By C. Bryson Hull

COLOMBO, Sept 14 (Reuters) - The United States urged Sri Lanka on Wednesday to forge ahead with political talks with the main Tamil party, eliminate paramilitary groups in the former war zone and deliver a credible investigation into the end of its civil war in 2009.

Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affair Robert Blake, who served as U.S. ambassador to Sri Lanka at the end of its quarter-century civil war, also urged the government to deploy Tamil police in the island's north.

The Indian Ocean nation is facing increased pressure from the West to probe allegations of war crimes and humanitarian law violations at the end of its war with the Tamil Tiger separatists in 2009.

Sri Lanka's Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) is due to present its findings on the war's last months to President Mahinda Rajapaksa in November.

"We hope that will be a credible process. If it is not a credible process, there will be pressure for some kind of an alternative mechanism," Blake told a news conference at the end of a three-day trip to Sri Lanka.

Blake said accountability for alleged war crimes was as important as dealing with the political issues which remain unsettled after the government's victory.

"The solution to achieving a just and lasting peace in Sri Lanka is not just about accountability. It's a much wider series of things that have to be addressed, and I think the government is addressing them," Blake said.

A U.N.-sponsored report says there is "credible evidence" that tens of thousands of civilians died in the last months of an on-again, off-again civil war that flared in 1983 after decades of ethnopolitical tension between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon sent the report to the U.N. Human Rights Council on Monday. Sri Lanka has been on a diplomatic offensive in Geneva to discredit the allegations, which it has long said are biased, exaggerated and fronted by Tamil Tiger supporters.

Blake praised the government and the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) party for agreeing to resume talks on a post-war political settlement this week, which stalled when the TNA pulled out over what it called government foot-dragging.

"I did detect an element of sincerity there, and I hope that they (both sides) will follow through and that both sides will engage to produce that outcome," Blake said.

Tamil parties want a greater devolution of powers to the former war zone in the north and east, which the Tamil Tigers fought to turn into a Tamil-only state. Those include greater financial, land and police powers at a provincial level.

Blake urged the government to speed up plans to deploy Tamil police there to ease a language barrier that has aggravated ethnic relations for decades.

"Having Tamil police would make a particular difference up there, because it would very much help to improve community relations," he said.

He also urged the government "to diminish and ultimately eliminate the role and the influence and the intimidation of the paramilitaries," in the north. The government used armed paramilitary groups as proxies during the war.

Though the government has disarmed the groups -- or at least stopped them from carrying weapons in public, they remain a negative force, Blake said. He singled out the Eelam People's Democratic Party (EPDP), run by a cabinet minister.

"The EPDP continues to be an intimidating presence in the north, as we ourselves experienced," Blake said, referring to an EPDP protest that temporarily blocked him from having a meeting with university students on Tuesday. (Editing by Yoko Nishikawa)