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Sri Lanka’s defence ministry yesterday announced new curbs on foreigners, including journalists, visiting the island’s former war zone and said the action was to protect “national security”.
Foreign passport-holders will require approval from the defence ministry if they want to travel to the battle-scarred Northern Province, military spokesman Brigadier Ruwan Wanigasooriya said.
“We have information some foreigners are trying to cause discord among ethnic communities,” Wanigasooriya told
reporters in Colombo.
“When there’s a tremendous threat like that to our national security, we can’t just wait. We have to take action.”
The new move came after foreign nationals were turned away from the Northern Province last Friday, ahead of a visit there by President Mahinda Rajapakse.
The president on Monday re-launched a rail link to Jaffna, the capital of the Northern Province, to restore train services after nearly 25 years.
The new controls come amid a UN-mandated international investigation into Sri Lanka’s war record.
Colombo has already accused several Colombo-based diplomatic missions as well as foreigners of trying to collect testimony from survivors to support allegations of rights abuses by security forces during the civil war which ended in 2009.
Sri Lanka has refused to cooperate with the probe ordered by the UN Human Rights Council and says it will not allow foreign investigators to probe allegations that up to 40,000 ethnic Tamil civilians were killed by troops in the final months of fighting.
Sri Lanka denies any civilian was killed by its security forces, but following intense international pressure agreed to probe the allegations through a domestic
commission of inquiry.
Foreign nationals, including aid workers were barred from the north from Friday just before Rajapakse visited the area.
Wanigasooriya said travel restrictions on foreign journalists will also be brought back three years after Colombo relaxed them.
He said journalists holding foreign passports will have to apply to the defence ministry for permission to travel to the north.
The new restrictions on all foreigners will affect a large number of Sri Lanka’s ethnic minority Tamils who have obtained foreign passports after having fled the fighting and living abroad as refugees for long periods.
Sri Lanka has repeatedly warned that minority Tamil groups abroad may try to revive the defeated Tamil Tigers, who fought for an independent homeland for the island’s main ethnic minority.
However, since the end of fighting in 2009, no attacks have been blamed on the Tamil Tiger rebels, who at the height of their power controlled a third of the country’s territory.
Military to return Tamil civilians’ gold
Sri Lanka’s military has announced it would return unspecified quantities of gold jewellery recovered from a battle site dating to the crushing of separatist Tamil Tiger rebels more than five years ago.
Security forces have identified 2,377 “legitimate claimants” and 25 of them were handed back their gold ornaments by President Mahinda Rajapakse, who visited the island’s Northern Province at the weekend, the military said in a statement on Tuesday.
It asked residents in the island’s battle-scarred region to lodge claims with the military and said pawning receipts issued by the Tamil Tigers would also be accepted as proof of ownership.
At the height of their power, the Tigers operated a banking system where they accepted jewellery as security and granted loans to civilians.
The military says they found the gold abandoned in the conflict area.
Where owners could not be found, the valuables would be handed over to the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, the military said.
“In order to expedite the process for return of remaining jewellery under safe keeping, civilians who still possess any LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) issued documents ... are encouraged,” to lodge claims, the statement said.
It did not say how much of jewellery was in military custody, but the government had said soon after the end of the war that some 110kg (242 pounds) of jewellery had been recovered from the battle zone by one unit of the military alone.
Tamil political parties have pressed for the return of jewellery as well as other valuables of some 300,000 Tamil civilians who were driven out of their homes in the final stages of the war.
Sri Lanka declared an end to 37 years of ethnic bloodshed after crushing the Tigers in May 2009, but the military campaign has also triggered allegations that some 40,000 civilians were killed by troops, a charge the government has vehemently denied.
