Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa has appointed the eight member ‘Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation’ Commission with Chitta Ranjan de Silva Esquire, PC as Chairman, to report on the lessons to be learnt from the events in the period from Feb 2002 to May 2009. The appointment of this Commission comes almost a year after Sri Lanka achieved military victory over the LTTE. A ccording to the Government it has been influenced in part by the South African experience and the Iraq Inquiry of the UK. A press statement from the President’s office today said the Commission has been given the mandate to attend to the concerns and to recommend measures to ensure that there will be no recurrence of such a situation in the interest of national unity and reconciliation among all communities.