Sri Lanka's Tamil leaders want to prove 'genocide' in civil war, propose their own death count

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka – Sri Lanka's ethnic Tamil-run provincial administration wants to prove that the central government carried out an operation "akin to genocide" to win a long civil war against Tamil rebels.

The Northern Provincial Council wants to conduct its own internationally supervised count of the dead and missing civilians.

The council, in its resolution passed Monday, also rejected a census of war deaths taken by the central government, calling it unjust.

The move comes ahead of U.N. Human Rights Council sessions in March where member countries will review Sri Lanka's post-war accountability process.

A U.N. report previously said some 40,000 Tamil civilians died, mostly in government attacks in the final months of the fighting in 2009.

Sri Lanka has repeatedly denied it deliberately targeted civilians.