Ranil meets India’s FM to discuss fishermen killing row
Thursday, 22 August 2013 00:48
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REUTERS: Leader of the Opposition in the Sri Lankan Parliament, Ranil Wickremesinghe, met India’s Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid to discuss the fishermen killing row in New Delhi on Wednesday (21 August).
According to the Indian Fishermen’s Association, as many as 3,000 fishermen, who gave up their work fearing attack by Sri Lankan Navy in southern city of Rameswaram, have moved to neighbouring Kerala and Karnataka to earn their livelihood.
While talking to reporters, Wickremesinghe expressed the desire to improve India-Sri Lanka relations in future.
“We had a fruitful session talking of the Indo-Lanka relationships which I hope will keep improving in the future,” he said.
Earlier in the day, he also had an hour-long meeting with the Indian President Pranab Mukherjee and discussed the political situation in Sri Lanka and the status of Indo-Lanka ties.
He is on a three-day visit to India where he also had talks with the members of the ruling Congress and India’s main opposition party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Sri Lanka has repeatedly rejected calls for an independent, international probe into accusations of war crimes committed during the war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which ended in May 2009.
Tens of thousands of civilians, mostly Tamils, were killed in the final months of the war, according to a UN panel.
Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa is under fire from the UN Human Rights Council, which last year adopted a United States-sponsored resolution demanding that Sri Lanka ensure Government troops who committed war crimes during the final stages of its war against Tamil rebels are brought to justice.
The 30-year-long civil war between the Government and the Tamil tiger rebels who at one time controlled large swathes of north of the island state is estimated to have left tens of thousands of people dead or injured.
International investigators, whose findings have been rejected by the Sri Lankan authorities, have said the army committed large-scale abuses and was responsible for many civilian deaths in the final stages of war.
The International Commission of Jurists said that the failure to submit those abuses and others committed by the tigers to a court was a symptom of the overall lack of accountability in the country, where rights groups say abductions and attacks on media are also common.
