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The so-called “white flag incident” is one of several notorious allegations of war crimes — including the extrajudicial killing of the 12-year-old son of the LTTE’s leader and the shelling of civilians at a hospital inside a no-fire zone — described in the report. Investigators stopped short of naming names of those who might be held responsible for the incidents, arguing that the U.N. wanted to present “a human rights investigation, not a criminal investigation.”

That job is now left to the new Sri Lankan government, which has vowed to hold those accused of war crimes accountable. Their plan to prosecute these cases through a domestic body, rather than through an international human rights court, is a departure from the widely criticized war crimes prosecutions in Rwanda, Sierra Leone and elsewhere. It could serve as a model for other post-conflict societies. “If handled well, the case of Sri Lanka has the potential to constitute an example for both the region and the world of how a sustainable peace ought to be achieved,” says Pablo de Greiff, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Transitional Justice.

The biggest challenges are internal. Some of the people who were in command during the war are still serving in the army and are considered war heroes. Maj. Gen. Shavendra Silva, for example, who was in command of the 58th Division, is a serving general and was previously part of the Sri Lankan mission to the United Nations in New York. But there is intense pressure on the Sri Lankan government, internally and externally, to show some progress in prosecuting war crimes, more than six years after the end of the war. “Without going through the pain of analyzing our past actions we can not hope to have a better future,” says Sandaya Ekenaligoda, the wife of Pradeep Ekenaligoda, one of several journalists who went missing in recent years after criticizing the Rajapaksa government. “We need a government that will make those hard choices.”

So far, the new government under President Maithripala Sirisena seems willing to do that. Having defeated Rajapaksa in presidential elections in January, and then effectively shut Rajapaksa out of his own party, Sirisena formed a broad-based alliance with his traditional political rival and with key minority parties after parliamentary elections last month. The goal of this “national unity” government is to move the country toward reconciliation, and it made a significant step toward that goal with the announcement on Monday of a new, South Africa-style truth and reconciliation commission, something that human rights advocates have been calling for since 2009, but Rajapaksa had dismissed. “The new government has shown a willingness that it is ready to take action that former administrations shied away from,” says Jehan Perera, Executive Director of Sri Lanka’s National Peace Council.

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