Cameron to demand Sri Lanka war crimes investigation

British Prime Minister David Cameron said on Thursday he will demand that Sri Lanka investigate allegations of war crimes and human rights abuses when he visits the country for a meeting of Commonwealth leaders next week.

Cameron said he wanted to "shine the international spotlight on the lack of progress" in the country since the end of a long civil war in which the Sri Lankan government defeated separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebels, better known as the Tamil Tigers, in 2009. 

The government has come under increasing pressure from the international community to try those responsible for rights abuses during the near three-decade-long conflict.

Groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have called on the 53 Commonwealth heads of government not to attend, or to only send a low-level delegation to the Indian Ocean island to put pressure on the country's President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

But defending his decision to attend the biennial Commonwealth leaders' meeting in the capital, Colombo, Cameron said he would have a better chance of securing changes if he pressed ahead with his visit to the former British colony. 

"I will demand that the Sri Lankan government independently and transparently investigates alleged war crimes and allegations of continuing human rights abuses," Cameron wrote in an article for the London-based Tamil Guardian newspaper.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said he will not attend.

Harper said last month he was disturbed by on-going reports of intimidation and incarceration of political leaders and journalists, harassment of minorities, reported disappearances and allegations of extra judicial killings. 

However, he is the only Commonwealth leader to plan a boycott of the biennial meeting.

The Sri Lankan government says its rights record has improved since the war and has rejected the criticism as unsubstantiated.

Tens of thousands of civilians died in the last months of the war between the government and the LTTE rebels, who lost their fight for a separate state for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority, a U.N. report estimated. 

Cameron said he would become the first foreign leader to visit the north of the island since the country's independence from Britain in 1948. 

"Four years after the conflict, no one has been held to account for grave allegations of war crimes and sexual violence, journalists are routinely intimidated and thousands of people have yet to find out what has happened to their missing relatives," Cameron wrote.

Britain's opposition Labour Party said Cameron had failed to exploit his visit to push for improved human rights.

"The British government's handling of this issue has been characterized by misjudgments and missed opportunities," Labour foreign affairs spokesman Kerry McCarthy said. 

Meanwhile, South African peace campaigner Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for speaking out against white minority rule in South Africa and supported the economic boycott of country during the apartheid era, said he supported a boycott.

"If there are enough reasons to suggest that the Sri Lanka government have not been doing things with integrity, I think the world has to apply all the screws that it can," Tutu told a select group of journalists during a visit to New Delhi. 

Wire services