Three US Senators have written to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, urging her that if the LLRC report was found to be neither credible nor independent, that an “independent international accountability mechanism” be established.

The letter, signed by Senators Patrick Leahy, Benjamin L. Cardin and Robert P. Casey, cited allegations of government shelling of no-fire zones and hospitals, as well as extrajudicial executions of detainees.

Sri Lankan defence secretary Gothabaya Rajapakse has told a conference on reconciliation in Colombo that the number of civilians killed during the final phase of the military conflict was far too small to be classed as war crimes or genocide.

The brother of the Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse, also revealed that the government was in the final stages of completing a census on the number of killed during the war.

Reports have emerged that the Sri Lankan Navy has explicitly banned Hindu temples in Kaarainagar from tolling their bells, in the week leading up to Remembrance Day on 27th November.

Orders to prohibiting the lighting of any lamps and the use of microphones have also been issued by the Navy. Many Hindu priests have been threatened and intimidated.

The Economist Intelligence Unit has stated in a report that Sri Lanka’s latest expropriation laws would only serve to further harm the economy and scare off any potential investors.

It comes as the Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse announced plans to acquire 37,000 acres of land from plantation companies and redistribute them among certain farmer families in the country.

Mahinda Rajapaksa warned that "terrorists" were using the "cover of human rights" to attack Sri Lanka, when addressing the graduation ceremony at the General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University (KDU) at Temple Trees on Tuesday.

Rajapaksa said,

"Terrorists who attacked us once hiding in the civil society, attack us in the cover of human rights today."

“If this was a personal attack, it would have been easy for me to tolerate. But this is not so. These attacks are against the motherland. You need to understand that it is a threat posed to national security."

“It is the duty of all of us to work towards taking the country to a top position in the world. After the liberation of the country we did not forget our war heroes. We love them respect them and trust them forever”.

According to the Sri Lankan government's official news portal, Rajapaksa added,

The Sri Lankan army escorted a South African and Chinese delegation around Vanni on Friday.

Major General Perera, Commander of Sri Lanka's Army, met with Mr Ebrahim Ebrahim, South Africa’s Deputy Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, and Ms Yang Suping, Ambassador from the People’s Republic of China.

Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse received the long-awaited Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Committee report today, but it is still unclear when it will be made available to the public.

Bandula Jayasekara, the president’s director general of media, said,

One of the world’s best known aid agencies, Médecins sans Frontières, has released a collection of essays which has revealed some of the controversial policies that they undertook when negotiating with governments during their work.

Amongst those examined was their work in Sri Lanka where after being accused of being pro-LTTE, the agency found itself working within a government "pacification policy that had settled the ethnic question in Sri Lanka by bombings and military surveillance".

Alistair Burt, British Foreign Office minister has today called on Sri Lanka to release the report on the findings of the controversial Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission.

“Many hope this report will mark a significant milestone in Sri Lanka’s recovery from conflict, and I call on the Government of Sri Lanka to seize this important opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to national reconciliation and accountability.

Sri Lanka’s present political predicament is already somewhat hastily being described as ‘post-conflict’ by both international and local actors, for example by both the Government of Sri Lanka and the IMF.

However, there are very good reasons for remaining sceptical about the use of this terminology, not just because of the nebulousness of definitions of conflict (and a simplistically assumed opposition with peace), and its injudicious past use in places like Afghanistan, but also due to present dynamics in Sri Lanka which are being deliberately papered over and viewed through a skewed lens.

Indeed, ‘post-conflict’ is a misnomer that flows from the predominance of a particular international common sense knowledge and the way it understands the power dynamics in the interface of the global and local that we find in Sri Lanka.