Sri Lankan Buddhist monks protest UN rights panel

(June 28, 2010) Clerics and lay members of a Buddhist nationalist party in Sri Lanka protested on Monday in the capital Colombo against a United Nations' panel tasked with investigating alleged human rights violations during the nation’s civil war. The National Heritage Party consisting largely of monks said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's appointment of the three-member panel last week was interfering in Sri Lanka's domestic affairs and helping terrorism. “The U.N. has no right, authority or mandate to appoint a committee. It's an interference with Sri Lankan affairs,” party leader Rev. Omalpe Sobitha told the gathering, condemning the world body as “an agent of terrorism.” Sri Lankan military forces last year ended 25 years of civil war, defeating the Tamil Tiger rebels who fought for an independent state for ethnic minority Tamils, mostly Hindus, after decades of marginalization by successive governments controlled by majority ethnic Sinhalese, most of them Buddhists. According to the U.N., more than 7,000 Tamil civilians were killed in the last five months of the war that ended in May 2009. Human rights groups have accused both government forces and the now-vanquished Tamil Tiger rebels of deliberate targeting of civilians. Ban's committee led by former Indonesian Attorney-General Marzuki Darusman, has been asked to advise him on the alleged abuses during the war's final stages. The Sri Lankan government has already opposed the move as “an unwarranted and unnecessary interference with a sovereign nation.”