Sri Lanka’s former Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa on Monday (March 27) said if war crimes allegations are investigated, it would not bring communities together.
He made these remarks during an interview with an international media institution.
The former Defence Secretary disagreed with the UN figures of one lakh civilian deaths during the war as he said “there is no clarity on the actual number of casualties”. And amid mounting protests by families of disappeared persons in the Tamil-majority north, many of whom accuse the military of abducting their relatives, he said that going back and “harping on” it would not help bring communities together. “After a war what can we do?” he asked.
Recently, Sri Lanka’s Criminal Investigations Department (CID) told a magistrate court about “top-secret death squads”, reportedly linked to the defence establishment under former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, but Mr. Gotabaya Rajapaksa said there were no such units. Claiming that “a lot of things happened without my knowledge,” he added that he was working more at the “policy and strategy-level and not on things at the tactical-level”.
Mr. Gotabaya Rajapaksa currently faces corruption charges of “causing a $75 million loss” to the country. In the past, his name was also linked to Bodu Bala Sena, a group of hard-line Buddhist monks accused of hate speech and inciting violence against minority Muslims.
