Sri Lanka's Defence Minister addresses reconciliation committee

Sri Lanka’s Defence Minister Gotabhaya Rajapaksa on Thursday acknowledged for the first time that soldiers may have committed unspecified “crimes” during the nation’s decades long civil war. He said the government would begin its own count of how many civilians were slain at the end of the conflict, in an attempt to counter claims of genocide and war crimes.

The minister was speaking before a special committee created earlier this week by Sri Lanka’s parliament to tackle political and ethnic reconciliation. “This is the government’s response to the question as to why it has not come up with an acceptable political solution to the root causes of our war,” said the Executive Director of the National Peace Council, Jehan Perera. “The problem is, that Sri Lanka has experience of many such committees and conferences, and they have not yielded any implementable results”.

Listen to the full interview of Jehan Perera with Christopher Wells: