Sri Lanka to Set Up War Reparations Office, Create Truth Commission

Sri Lanka's new unity government is planning a range of measures to ensure reconciliation after decades of war, including creating an office for war reparations and a truth commission, Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera said Monday.

"The government of Sri Lanka recognizes fully that the process of reconciliation involves addressing the broad areas of truth seeking, justice, reparations and non-recurrence," Samaraweera told the United Nations Human Rights Council.

He said the country aimed to create a "Commission for Truth, Justice, Reconciliation and non-recurrence" with help from authorities in South Africa and other countries that have set up their own truth commissions.

The government also wanted to set up an office to "facilitate the implementation of recommendations relating to reparations" made by the proposed truth commission and other entities, he said. 

"The best guarantee for non-recurrence is of course a political settlement that addresses the grievances of the Tamil people," Samaraweera told the council. 

The Human Rights Council will on Wednesday release a long-awaited report on Sri Lanka's alleged war crimes during the war against the Tamil Tiger guerillas in which at least 100,000 people died.

The report had initially been scheduled to be published in march, but U.N. rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein had recommended it be delayed for six months to give the country's new government a chance to cooperate with investigators.

Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena came to power in January promising reconciliation and accountability for alleged war crimes committed by troops under the command of then-president Mahinda Rajapakse.

During his decade in power, Rajapakse resisted Western pressure to investigate allegations that up to 40,000 ethnic Tamil civilians were killed by his troops in the final months of the war in 2009.

Rajapakse did flag setting up a South African-style truth commission in the months before his defeat in January. 

But the idea was later dropped after Rajapakse's hardline supporters from the Sinhalese majority accused him of kowtowing to minority Tamils.

Sirisena's government earlier this year asked the international community for "advice, technical support and assistance" to address accountability for alleged war-time atrocities.

But the government has not until now raised the issue of reparation or paying compensation to war victims, including thousands of Tamils who lost family members and their homes and were forced to flee the conflict.