K

asippillai Manoharan listened to the frantic voice on the other end of the phone. His 20-year-old son, Ragihar, said he was surrounded by troops. Then the phone went dead.

Desperately, the Sri Lankan doctor tried to return the call but there was no answer.

Minutes earlier, Ragihar and his friends were sitting on the seafront in the port town of Trincomalee in north eastern Sri Lanka when an auto-rickshaw drove by. A grenade was tossed from the vehicle. It exploded, injuring several of them.

Violence was common in Trincomalee in 2006. The town had a substantial Sri Lankan military presence and was a target for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a brutal armed group that then controlled much of the country’s northern areas.

Navy guards quickly placed a security cordon around the area. Witnesses say that Special Task Force (STF) troops arrived, and initially threw the wounded students in the back of a jeep.

Dr. Manoharan was attempting to get through the cordon when he heard the young men pleading for their lives. Witnesses say the troops shot the students on the street.

The next time he saw his son was at the local morgue — he had a gunshot wound at the back of the head and four other bullet wounds.

The STF denied that they had shot the five students. They claimed Ragihar and his friends were killed by a grenade they planned to use against the security forces.

At a hearing investigating the incident a week later, Dr. Manoharan dared to disagree. He said STF troops had killed the students – who were to become known “Trinco 5” – and made a request: “All I want is a proper inquiry”.

Of the crowd of people on the seafront that night, Ragihar’s father was the only one prepared to speak out. Others were too scared.

And sure enough Dr. Manoharan’s courage triggered a campaign of intimidation against his family which would eventually lead to them fleeing Sri Lanka. They still live abroad.

Six years after his son’s death, Dr. Manoharan is still waiting for an inquiry. The Trinco 5 case is typical of the climate of impunity in Sri Lanka, where human rights abuses of all kinds go uninvestigated and unpunished.

Dr. Manoharan has become an outspoken campaigner, demanding justice not only for his son — and the others who died in Trincomalee — but for the thousands of Sri Lankans killed during the bloody final stages of the country’s decades-long conflict. He has joined calls from Amnesty International and others for the United Nations to establish an independent, international investigation into war crimes alleged in the conflict.

In April 2011, an independent panel of experts, appointed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, recommended the UN establish such an investigation after finding credible allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity by both government forces and the LTTE.

The panel concluded that up to 40,000 civilians might have been killed in the last months of conflict in 2009. It reported shelling by Sri Lankan forces of hospitals and civilian areas that the authorities had dubbed “no-fire zones”, and the use of civilians as human shields by the LTTE.

Facing domestic and international demands for accountability, Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa did as numerous Sri Lankan governments have done in the last two decades — establish a national commission of inquiry to blunt criticism, while ignoring the results.

President Rajapaksa launched the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) to investigate and determine responsibility for the failure of Sri Lanka’s 2002 ceasefire with the LTTE and “events” that followed, and make recommendations for post-conflict reconciliation.

Sri Lanka has been able to resist calls for international scrutiny by claiming that, through the LLRC, it is already conducting its own investigations. Headed up by the military and government, the LLRC was widely dismissed as lacking in credibility, including in an Amnesty International report. And yet, even this largely uncritical inquiry called on the government to investigate the Trinco 5 case.

Still, though, nothing has happened. According to Sri Lankan media, the country’s Attorney General has received no official request to reopen the Trinco 5 case.

Meanwhile, evidence of government knowledge of the identity of Ragihar’s killers has surfaced. In a leaked US embassy cable of October 2006 Basil Rajapaksa, brother and advisor to Sri Lanka’s president, put the blame for the killings squarely on the STF.

Now the issue is back on the international agenda. A resolution, calling on Sri Lanka to implement the LLRC’s recommendations and address alleged violations of international law will be voted on at the UN Human Rights Council this week — modest progress to ensuring that accountability and impunity in Sri Lanka are discussed at an international platform.

This resolution is a vital first step toward an independent international investigation into the war crimes alleged in the conflict, which Amnesty International believes is badly needed.

If the Human Rights Council fails to adopt the resolution on Sri Lanka, it risks seriously eroding its credibility as an institution able to protect and promote human rights.

As a member of the council, Indonesia can play a historic role by supporting the resolution, and thus ensuring that what has happened in Sri Lanka is not forgotten and impunity is ended.

The least the family of Ragihar Manoharan — and the thousands like them who have suffered through Sri Lanka’s violent troubles — deserve is surely the truth.

The writer is Secretary General of Amnesty International.