Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickremanayake yesterday charged several key foreign nations for questioning Sri Lanka’s human rights records despite their own human rights violations.  The Premier said that America accused Saddam Hussein of Iraq of possessing chemical weapons, who was later to be hanged despite the testimony of their own inspectors that there were no such weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.  “These are the people who are now questioning our human rights records at a time we are fighting against the world's most ruthless terrorist outfit,” the Premier said.

He was addressing the Regional conference of Parliamentarians and National authorities in Asia on the implementation of the International Chemical Weapons Convention, held at the Colombo Hilton yesterday.  The premier also said “it was terrorism when the British used gas to kill hundreds of Kurdish people in their wars in West Asia or in the Middle East early last century.” “It was terrorism when they dropped an atom bomb in Hiroshima Nagasaki killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese.

Those were weapons of mass destruction. That was terrorism.”  He also said, as far as the Government is aware there are no chemical weapons or any other weapons of mass destruction in Sri Lanka. 

“This is not to say that our local terrorists, whose terrorist acts for the last three decades or so have been directed only against our people - with the exception of the assassination of former Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi - have chemical weapons, ” he said.  “I am happy to be able to tell you that these terrorists - the LTTE, are on their last legs. The Government Security Forces have cornered them in their dens in a stretch of wilderness in the North of our country," the premier added.  He said the LTTE may or may not have chemical weapons, but they have caused and are causing enough death and mass destruction with or without them.  

(Courtesy : Daily Mirror )