The United States has announced it will introduce a fresh resolution to the UN Human Rights Council, in a bid to force Sri Lanka to keep its promise to investigate the military for alleged war crimes and atrocities. The US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, James Moore, says Washington will sponsor a procedural resolution at the March sessions of the Rights Council.

Handed a snack, and then executed: the last hours of the 12-year-old son of a Tamil Tiger
Photographs show boy was held before he was killed at close range.New photographs have emerged which raise fresh questions about the conduct of Sri Lanka’s armed forces during the final stages of the operation against Tamil rebels and have led to claims the 12-year-old son of the militants’ leader may have been summarily executed.

IN JUNE, Australia watched with horror as televisions screened graphic scenes of scores of boatpeople crashing and thrashing against the rocks of Christmas Island's unforgiving coast. The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, cut short her leave and, later that month, about 130 people were rescued when their boat sank off Indonesia.

The Sri Lankan military is advertising a newly constructed hotel in the heart of the killing fields in the north of the island, where tens of thousands of minority Tamils were killed in 2009. The holiday resort, called Lagoon's Edge, caters for Sinhala war tourists who want to see the last bastion of the defeated Tamil Tiger rebels.

“As if by unspoken agreement, the rebels never attacked the holidaymakers. Europeans sipped coconut juice and stared out at the horizon of the ocean, unaware that just an hour’s flight to the north people were dying in First World War-style trench warfare.”

Since September, the Australian Labor government has forcibly returned more than 650 asylum seekers to Sri Lanka. Alongside members of the persecuted Tamil minority, they include poor Sinhala fishermen from western Sri Lanka.

The United Nations failed in its mandate to protect civilians in the last months of Sri Lanka's bloody civil war, a leaked draft of a highly critical internal UN report says. "Events in Sri Lanka mark a grave failure of the UN," it concludes. The government and Tamil rebels are accused of war crimes in the brutal conflict which ended in May 2009.

The UN does not comment on leaked reports and says it will publish the final version.

The 26-year war left at least 100,000 people dead. There are still no confirmed figures for tens of thousands of civilian deaths in the last months of battle. An earlier UN investigation said it was possible up to 40,000 people had been killed in the final five months alone. Others suggest the number of deaths could be even higher.