The Ravana Balaya, an organisation made up of Buddhist monks, has called for the arrest of Tamil clergymen who provided ‘false information’ about war crimes to the visiting US ambassador-at-large for war crimes, Stephen Rapp.

Canadian Member of Parliament Rathika Sitsabaiesan has stated that she was trailed and privately interrogated by Sri Lankan authorities, during a recent trip to her place of birth in the Tamil North-East of the island.

In her first interview since her arrival back in Canada, Sitsabaiesan told The Star how motorbikes followed her whilst she visited various places across the North-East, and on one occasion, three men took her into a room by herself, interrogating her on details of people she had been meeting during her trip.

Initially, as Sitsabaiesan began to realise her movements were being tracked, she said,

“And then the next day it happened, and we were like ‘Oh, this is a constant thing.’ And then outside my hotel, they would just hang out and give word when I left.”

She went on to tell The Star of how whilst visiting an orphanage, she was informed that the Sri Lankan authorities had arrived and with an apparent warrant for her arrest.

Northern Provincial Councillor and civil society activist Ananthy Sasitharan, has called the suggestion that she should be ‘rehabilitated’ an atrocious threat, made to silence voices like herself in the run-up to the UN Human Rights Council session in March.

Responding in a press release to the threat by a defence ministry official and to accusations that she was propagating ‘separatism’, Sasitharan accused the Sri Lankan government of encouraging Sinhalese supremacists and identifying extremists in the south as “patriots” while demonising human rights activists as separatists.

Sri Lanka has called on the US to reconsider its stance on human rights issues in Sri Lanka and urged it to support the government’s reconciliation efforts.

Justice minister Rauff Hakeem said the US and the international community should look at alternative mechanisms, like a truth commission, in order to see reconciliation on the island, instead of further aggravating divisions by digging for evidence to back war crimes charges, reported Xinhua.