Sri Lanka announced the government-appointed panel looking into the island's civil war that ended last year would hold its first public hearings on Wednesday.
The eight-member panel will hear testimony for five days in the capital Colombo and two days in Vavuniya, near the former war zone, an official statement said Tuesday.
The probe is expected to focus on why a 2002 truce between the government and separatist Tamil Tiger rebels collapsed and led to more fighting.
The president's office said in a statement that the panel was also tasked with recommending measures to ensure that Sri Lanka did not return to conflict.
Sri Lanka has rejected a separate United Nations probe into alleged rights abuses during the final stages of the war.
The UN has previously reported that at least 7,000 ethnic Tamil civilians were killed in the last four months of fighting before government troops finally defeated the Tigers in May.
Sri Lanka says that no civilians were killed while battling the rebels and that it would not allow the UN or any other independent body to probe war crimes allegations.
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This is the "mother of all bogus panels" with ZERO credibility to whitewash war crimes. What became of all previous Panels since 1975 will surely happen to this one too. Though held at public expense the public will never get to see the Reports, except the Dynasty Rulers.
To understand the purpose of this panel one has to remember what happened to another similar internal committee, All Party representative Committee' (APRC) appointed in February 2006 and what happened to its report. This committee was to find recommendations for a solution to the ethnic problem but carefully excluded the main minority party, TNA. After 118 sittings APRC is said to have handed over its report to the president and is kept somewhere for more than one year. Unless there is something to hide the government would have given support to the UN panel UNSG appointed to advise SG on accountability issues on human rights, instead of resisting it by every means available to the government.
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