Thank you, Mr. Rae. I'd be glad to do so, in a sort of encapsulated form.
The Government of Sri Lanka invited IIGEP to come to Sri Lanka. It wasn't imposed on them. By the way, I'll say right now, in case I forget to say it later, that I think this is the last time any international body will be invited by the Government of Sri Lanka, at least under the Rajapaksa government.
That's because we did our work quite thoroughly, and it was found to be too hard for the government to swallow--what we were offering in terms of what we felt our mandate was. The mandate was to observe a committee struck in Sri Lanka of Sri Lankans, including three Sinhalese, two Ceylon Moors, and two Ceylon Tamils. So it was a multicultural panel. Many of them were lawyers. They were all distinguished people. They were all hard-working and certainly they were all honest. But they had a limited budget and they were very carefully controlled by the Attorney General's office.
The Attorney General in Sri Lanka should not have been a part of the commission of inquiry's work, which had, as its mandate, to find out why 16 particular atrocities had occurred. The commission of inquiry should have asked the question of the whole apparatus or system of state. What is it that failed in the state, its police, and its judiciary? Why did the police and judiciary fail in not being able to solve these human rights atrocities or abuses initially? And why have they been lingering in the background for three or four years and still haven't been solved?
Instead, that commission of inquiry got itself bogged down in trying to establish an initial prospect on all of these cases, not questioning why the system failed, but going back to square one and interviewing all the so-called witnesses from the original atrocities. This took endless time. Everything was done in English and had to be translated into Sinhala. I was the only person in the IIGEP who could speak Sinhala. So it was necessary to do this and make it available in English, yet that added 30% to our time. So the sessions became extremely tedious, and furthermore, they weren't going anywhere.
We would periodically give our advice. Every six weeks we would offer our advice to the commission of inquiry and we had two weeks in which they could respond. After they responded, we published our observations and they were in the press, and they were not always complimentary.
Some of these so-called atrocities involved just a single person, for instance, the assassination of Foreign Minister Kadirgamar. Some of them were huge cases, like the death of 137 sailors who were blown up at a bus stop near Dambulla.
But the one that was particularly poignant to us was the assassination of 17 aid workers for Action Contre la Faim, a French NGO that was working in the Muslim village of Muttur, south of Trincomalee. Bernard Kouchner, the now current foreign minister for France, was on IIGEP at that time. He really wanted to press that, so we pressed it. We found that this took 6 months of our 14 months, and still it was not a case that came anywhere near being solved, even though it was quite self-evident that it had been perpetrated by the forces of the state.
After a while it became quite clear that the directives to the commission of inquiry were coming from the Attorney General's office, or even higher. They became quite insulting to P. N. Bhagwati, who was the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India and who was the chair of IIGEP. He basically said that if this didn't improve, we should resign, so we did. We resigned after 14 months.
I don't say it's a failure, just like I don't think the Forum of Federations initiative was a failure. I think we added something to it.