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Rejecting an international probe into the alleged atrocities committed during the war with Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Sri Lankan on Tuesday said right groups have displayed a 'colonial attitude' by refusing to testify before a Lankan government commission probing the violations.
Speaking at the International institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based think-tank, Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Gamini Lakshman Peiris said that the 'rights groups have displayed a most unattractive attitude' and we cannot accept their demand for international probe.
"It smacks of an attitude that is almost colonial, patronising and condescending, the assumption being that other people must step in because Sri Lankans are unable to chart a course for their own future," he said.
Certain pro-Tamil groups in Britain have intensified their demand for setting up a war-crimes tribunal to investigate alleged atrocities in the Sri Lankan civil war.
New York-based Human Rights Watch, London-based Amnesty International and Brussels-based International Crisis Group last week accused the panel of a cover-up and refused an offer from Colombo to appear before it.
Pictures including blood-stained bodies of young men and women who had been blindfolded and had their hands tied behind their backs, were released by the Global Tamil forum, a group that includes former supporters of the Tamil Tiger rebels, on Tuesday, a day before Prof Peiris is to meet the British Foreign Secretary William Hague.
A British foreign office spokesman said Hague would reiterate Britain's demand for a 'transparent investigation' into alleged war crimes. The rights groups have long accused government forces of ordering civilians into a 'no-fire zone' and shelling them in the final stages of fighting between government troops and Tamil Tiger separatist rebels in early 2009.
According to the United Nations 7,000 ethnic Tamil civilians were killed in the final months of the conflict. Rights groups say upto 30,000 civilians perished.
Sri Lanka has denied any civilians were killed by its troops and has rejected a separate UN probe into alleged rights abuses. The UN's offices in Colombo were blockaded by protesters earlier this year.
Peiris urged the rights groups and exiled Tamil organisations not to 'begin with negative presumptions.' "Let us begin with something benign and optimistic, something which carries a message of hope and fortitude. Let us not assume all of this is going to fail, it is our fervent wish that we will succeed, that we must succeed," he said.
The Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission began public hearings in August and is said to be taking testimony from ethnic Tamils in the island's former war zones. But international media have been barred from travelling to the area to cover the proceedings.
Image: Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Gamini Lakshman Peiris
Photograph: Reuters