LTTE killed many civilians in the final war - Paranagama report

Maxwell Paranagama Commission report tabled at the parliament yesterday.

The Paranagama Commission report has said: "In coming to its findings about the LTTE, the Commission was cognisant of the fact that every major NGO and many international organisations recognized the parasitic conduct of the LTTE in its treatment of Tamil civilian population, including the forcible recruitment of children as soldiers, particularly in the last stages of the war. It has been estimated by a respected Jaffna-based NGO that in the final 12 hours of the conflict the majority of the Tamil civilian casualties were caused by the LTTE," Paranagama Report said. The report "rejects the suggestion that civilians were either targeted directly or indiscriminately by the SLA as a part of an alleged genocide plan." "The Commission finds that the Darusman Report, as well as other reports, have taken a particularly narrow and restricted view of the obligation upon the GOSL to prosecute international crimes." The report says, "The LTTE was principally responsible for the loss of civilian life during the final phase of the armed conflict through their actions which included taking 300,000 to 330,000 civilian hostage, implementing a strategy of killing Tamil civilians to suit their military aims, using civilians as a strategic human buffer leading to considerable loss of civilian life, using hostages to dig trenches and build fortifications thereby exposing them to harm, sacrificing countless civilian hostages to keep the LTTE leadership in power, arming hostages and forcing them into the front line leading to the deaths of large numbers, forcing a great number of children to man the frontlines; deliberately preventing civilians, under their effective control, from fleeting to areas away from the fighting and executing civilian hostages for attempting to escape their captivity; shelling civilian hostages in order that the LTTE might assign those deaths to the SLA for media purposes to provoke international humanitarian intervention; placing their heavy weaponry amid civilians making it inevitable that there would be civilian casualties; killing civilians through the use of suicide bombers; placing mines and other explosive devices that resulted in civilian deaths; causing the deaths of civilians who drowned in an attempt to flee their LTTE captors; and adopting a practice whereby a significant number of its cadres fought in civilian clothes, thus blurring the distinction between combatants and civilians inevitably leading to civilian deaths."