The Commission concludes that the substantial body of evidence it has gathered indicates that government took all possible measures to protect and rescue civilians and maintain supplies of food and medicine in very difficult conditions .The conclusions are that it was not a part of the government’s strategy to target civilians and hospitals, to kill civilians intentionally , or deliberately deny adequate food and medicine to the civilians in the conflict- affected zone. These conclusions rebut the allegations in the report of the UNSG’s panel that the Government implemented a strategy of exterminating a large section of the Tamil civilian population.
In the second set of conclusions relating to accountability the Commission concludes that there have been a considerable number of civilian casualties; there have been specific episodes in which civilians have been fired at by the security forces and killed, and a large number of abductions and disappearances have occurred, details of which are recorded by the Commission. In all these cases the Commission recommends specific mechanisms for taking further action. On the Channel 4 video the Commission provides the evidence of two experts who provided proof that the video itself is fabricated but states that further investigations should be conducted to ascertain the original source of the video and recommends an independent investigation for this purpose. On the estimate of civilian casualties the report contains a lengthy section which examines the various estimates that have been made ranging from 5000 to over 40,000 and states that none of these estimates are based on verifiable evidence. The deaths of combatants reported to the Commission number 22,000 LTTE cadres and 5556 from the security forces. In the circumstances the Commission makes the most practical recommendation – a household survey covering all affected families in all parts of the island to ascertain firsthand the scale and the circumstances of death and injury to civilians.
The first section of Chapter 4 of the report deals with a whole set of controversial issues regarding the applicability of the existing International Humanitarian Law (IHL) to the counterterrorist war against the LTTE. There the LLRC discusses the adequacy of the existing law to deal with extreme choices that arises. It is suggested that while we deal with that briefly in the we do not get stuck that, The TNA has devoted a large part of the report to the applicability and how the law is applied and we need to know more about what happened and the moral implications of that rather that how they fit into the law that exists. There is much however in this section of Chapter 4 that needs to be taken forward at the international level the task of unraveling and redefining some of the complex legal issues involved. The LLRC does not deal directly with the issues of retributive justice and restorative justice but in its approach to issues of reconciliation is informed by the values of restorative justice. It maintains a balance which upholds accountability and recommends investigation prosecution and 13