Item! Big discount on luxury hotels in Sri Lanka!

SANKA VIDANAGAMA/AFP

The “travelista” column in How to Spend It, the weekend insert of the Financial Times, contains this item:

The big news in Asia, though, is Amanresorts’ (www.amanresorts.com) decision to slash rates in half for its two SRI LANKA resorts … Valid until September 2008, this is the luxury bargain of the year…”

Oh, it might have something to do with this, via the International Crisis Group (ICG):

The resumption of war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) has been accompanied by widespread human rights abuses by both sides. While the LTTE has continued its deliberately provocative attacks on the military and Sinhalese civilians as well as its violent repression of Tamil dissenters and forced recruitment of both adults and children, the government is using extra-judicial killings and enforced disappearances as part of a brutal counter-insurgency campaign.

I hear the Baghdad Hilton is cheap this year, too.

Note: Sri Lankan officials dispute the ICG’s account (and that of ICG chief Gareth Evans) of human rights abuses by the Sri Lankan government. This was sent to me by Rajiva Wijesinha, Secretary General, Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process:

[T]he suggestion that the Sri Lankan state has engaged in war crimes or crimes against humanity should be substantiated in a responsible fashion. The repeated violations of international humanitarian law that are alleged should be enumerated, and the catalogue of the recent ICG report, which deals largely with allegations based on largely dubious sources is insufficient for a charge of this nature…. Certainly there were enormous abuses in the eighties, and though the governments of the nineties tried to improve things, old mindsets seemed to have died hard. However no credit whatsoever is given to the armed forces which have largely eschewed such behaviour in the present decade.

But as far as I know, the ICG is standing by its report, and Human Rights Watch has similar, documented concerns about human-rights abuses by the Sri Lankan government.