I haven't actually seen that, to be honest. It doesn't surprise me. It's the kind of thing that they say they will do all the time. They've set up commissions into the disappeared that constantly promised to give information to the relatives and that never did.
The trouble is that there is a pattern of the government making these kinds of announcements. It's what it does. They never turn out to be true. You have to remember that this government, during the war, said that not a single civilian had died. At the end of the war, they said they had rescued all of the hostages. They said that not a single civilian had been injured as a result of government shelling. Now, since then, they've revised that to 7,000. They will no doubt revise that up.
It is an appalling indictment that we don't know how many people died. There are a lot of figures circulating. The UN suggested 40,000. The Panel of Experts report suggests in the subsequent internal review that it could be as many as 70,000. The World Bank, I think, has estimated that something like 120,000 people are unaccounted for. That doesn't mean they're dead, of course. Many of them will have left or have gone to India or whatever.
Four and a half years later, the fact that nobody knows is astonishing. This is a country that has censuses, that has votes. It's not a country where they don't know who they have. The fact that nobody knows this late and that the government is leaping from no dead to 7,000 dead is an absolute indictment.
If I believed I could take this latest government announcement seriously, then I would think it was good. The trouble is that there is absolutely no evidence. There is such a historical pattern of these kinds of commissions of inquiry being announced, coming to nothing, and not being reported or just being sheer fakery from the word go, that I'm afraid I'm deeply cynical about it.