WikiLeaks cables: 'Sri Lankan president responsible for massacre of Tamils'

Tamil activists in Britain - where Mahinda Rajapaksa is currently visiting - are seeking an arrest warrant for alleged war crimes

Sri Lanka's president, Mahinda Rajapaksa. Photograph: Keystone/Rex Features

American diplomats believed that the Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, bore responsibility for a massacre last year that is the subject of a UN war crimes enquiry, according to a leaked US cable.

Lawyers for Tamil activists in Britain are seeking an arrest warrant against President Rajapaksa - who is currently visiting the UK and is due to meet the defence secretary, Liam Fox, tonight – for alleged war crimes committed last year at the bloody end of the long-running civil war against Tamil separatists. Rajapaksa had been due to address the Oxford Union tomorrow but that appearance has been cancelled due to security concerns.

More than 10,000 Tamils, are thought to have died in the space of a few days in May 2009, when a large concentration of both Tamil Tiger guerrillas and civilians, crammed in a small coastal strip, came under heavy bombardment from Sri Lankan government forces.

In a cable sent on 15 January this year, the US ambassador in Colombo, Patricia Butenis, said that one of the reasons that there was so little progress towards a genuine Sri Lankan enquiry into how so many people were killed was that the president and the former army commander, Sarath Fonseka, were largely responsible.

"There are no examples we know of a regime undertaking wholesale investigations of its own troops or senior officials for war crimes while that regime or government remained in power," Butenis noted.

"In Sri Lanka this is further complicated by the fact that responsibility for many of the alleged crimes rests with the country's senior civilian and military leadership, including President Rajapaksa and his brothers and opposition candidate General Fonseka." Fonseka was convicted of corruption by a court martial earlier this year.

In her cable to Washington, Butenis seeks to explain where there is so little momentum towards the formation of a "truth and reconciliation" commission, or any other form of accountability.

Most Tamil Tiger commanders, also under suspicion for war crimes such as the use of civilians as human shields, had been killed at the end of the war.

President Rajapaksa had meanwhile fought an election campaign promising to resist any international efforts to prosecute "war heroes" in the nation's army.

Not only was the Colombo government not interested in investigating itself, but Tamils in Sri Lanka – unlike those abroad – were also nervous about the issue at it might make them targets for reprisals.

Butenis wrote: "While they wanted to keep the issue alive for possible future action, Tamil leaders with whom we spoke in Colombo, Jaffna and elsewhere said now was not time and that pushing hard on the issue would make them 'vulnerable'.

"Accountability is clearly an issue of importance for the ultimate political and moral health of Sri Lankan society," the ambassador concludes, but she does not think it will happen any time soon.

Last month David Cameron endorsed calls for an independent investigation into the end of the Sri Lankan civil war in 2009. The UN has set up a enquiry into the events of last May, but Butenis thinks that any overt foreign push for prosecutions would be counter-productive.

"Such an approach, however, would seem to play into the super-heated campaign rhetoric of Rajapaksa and his allies that there is an international conspiracy against Sri Lanka and its "war heroes," Butenis argued.

A spokesman for Fox said: "Dr Fox will be meeting President Rajapaksa in a private capacity. This reflects Dr Fox's long standing interest in Sri Lanka and his interest in, and commitment to peace and reconciliation there."