{"id":149769,"date":"2025-05-23T16:08:54","date_gmt":"2025-05-23T23:08:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=149769"},"modified":"2025-05-23T16:08:54","modified_gmt":"2025-05-23T23:08:54","slug":"government-firms-up-against-genocide-allegation-foreign-minister","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2025\/05\/23\/government-firms-up-against-genocide-allegation-foreign-minister\/","title":{"rendered":"Government firms up against genocide allegation: Foreign Minister"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em>Courtesy The Daily Mirror<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n<p>Colombo, May 23 (Daily Mirror) &#8211; Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath said the government will not hesitate to take legal action against individuals or groups who promote the idea that the Sri Lankan military committed genocide during the civil war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Speaking in a recent interview, Herath strongly rejected growing international claims of a Tamil genocide, including recent remarks by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We absolutely do not accept that a genocide took place in our country,\u201d the minister said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Herath explained that according to the government, genocide refers to the deliberate targeting and killing of Tamil people by the Sri Lankan armed forces \u2013 something he insisted never happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He also pointed out that there are already laws in place banning the display of symbols and flags related to the LTTE, and these laws will be enforced wherever violations occur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In future, action will also be taken where the word \u2018genocide\u2019 is misused,\u201d Herath added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Courtesy The Daily Mirror Colombo, May 23 (Daily Mirror) &#8211; Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath said the government will not hesitate to take legal action against individuals or groups who promote the idea that the Sri Lankan military committed genocide during the civil war. Speaking in a recent interview, Herath strongly rejected growing international claims of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149769\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}