Arujuna Sivananthan: Sri Lanka must be subject to punitive economic sanctions unless its government accepts an independent war crimes inquiry

Arujuna Sivananthan is an Executive member of both Conservative Way Forward and British Tamil Conservatives, and a party activist in Greenwich.

The most heinous atrocity of the 21st Century was committed on the shores of an obscure lagoon eighteen months ago and six thousand miles away. The world was in the dark about it and if not for a few brave British journalists, and thanks to our free press, it would have gone altogether unnoticed.

Thousands of innocent Tamil civilians and surrendering rebels from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam were massacred by Sri Lankan armed forces. Recently screened television footage suggests that hundreds if not thousands of Tamil men were stripped naked, their hands bound, and shot in cold blood. Women were subject to severe sexual abuse and then murdered - and this is not even the beginning of it.

The Wikileaks revelations portray no leader in a worse light than Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse. They show his government was a large buyer of lethal weapons from North Korea. It also exposes the extra-judicial killing of elected Tamil politicians, kidnapping, extortion and the trafficking of Tamil children to fight and serve as sex slaves by paramilitaries working alongside the Sri Lankan army. There are more awful disclosures but not sufficient space to reveal them here.