UN under fire over Sri Lanka response

An aerial photo of the devastation in the former conflict zone on the northeastern coast of Sri Lanka Keystone

The United Nations has been accused of failing in its duties to speak out against abuses in Sri Lanka and release credible information in its possession.

The UN European headquarters in Geneva on Friday denied there had been a cover-up.

Le Monde newspaper accused the UN of covering up the “severity of the massacres” in Sri Lanka for fear of compromising its humanitarian operations and of being expelled from the island.

The French newspaper cited UN figures putting the death toll in the Sri Lanka government’s final onslaught against Tamil Tiger rebels at 7,720, including 678 children, between January 20 and May 13, while 18,465 people were injured, 2,384 of them children.

But there had been “an attempt to systematically suppress this material”, a UN official told the French daily.

The story was published at the same time as a report in the British newspaper The Times, citing its own investigation, that more than 20,000 people were killed in the final throes of the civil war.

The Times reported that apart from confidential estimates of about 7,000 civilians who died up to the end of April, UN sources said the toll mounted thereafter with an average of 1,000 civilians killed daily until May 19. The Sri Lankan government has strongly denied the figures.

Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch, said the Le Monde article was “spot on” and The Times estimate was a “very conservative one”.

“This has been the dirty secret in Sri Lanka for months,” he told swissinfo.ch on Friday. “I know how frustrated the UN staff in Sri Lanka have been over the refusal of the UN leadership in Sri Lanka to take on their mandate to protect civilians and speak out against grave war crimes.”

Bouckaert said the UN faced a Sri Lanka government that acted extremely aggressively against its critics.

“But the UN should have taken their international diplomatic status to speak out against what was happening in the Vanni war zone. They had dozens of their own staff stuck in the Vanni region as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) refused to allow them to leave. They were getting daily satellite calls telling them exactly what was happening there,” he said.

No cover-up

Elisabeth Byers, spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Geneva, denied there had been a cover-up by the UN.

“We were ringing the [alarm] bells for a long, long time,” she told swissinfo.ch.

“The UN has publicly and repeatedly said that the number of people killed in recent months has been unacceptably high and it has shared its estimates with the government as well as others concerned.”

She said the estimates attributed to the UN were taken from internal donor briefing documents that circulated in New York.

“We never gave precise figures as we were working on estimates,” she said. “How could we verify these figures when you have no access to the conflict zone?”

Sri Lanka authorities have insisted their forces stopped using heavy weapons on April 27 and respected a no-fire zone where 100,000 Tamils were sheltering. They blame civilian casualties on rebels hiding among the civilians, The Times said.

Aerial photographs, official documents, witness accounts and expert testimony tell a different story, says the British paper.

A spokesman for the Sri Lankan High Commission in London dismissed the report.

“We reject all these allegations. Civilians have not been killed by government shelling at all,” he told the paper. “If civilians have been killed, then that is because of the actions of the LTTE who were shooting and killing people when they tried to escape,” he added.

Dire camp conditions

Byers said the UN’s main concern now was the plight of the estimated 300,000 Tamils living in dire conditions in government camps in Sri Lanka, where access was “slightly improving”.

The Swiss-run International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said it currently had “full access” to the Manik Farm refugee camp, where some 220,000 people displaced by the fighting have been relocated, and had started to register people. But the situation was fluid and access had to be negotiated on a daily basis.

The ICRC said it still could not access Sri Lanka’s former war zone from which hundreds of thousands of people fled, stalling efforts to help people return home.

On Thursday UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay maintained her demand for an investigation into abuses allegedly carried out by both sides in Sri Lanka’s civil war.

Pillay has said the LTTE recruited child soldiers and used civilians as human shields during the conflict, while the military had indiscriminately shelled areas packed with civilians. Both sides have denied the allegations.

Council failure

Western governments seeking to examine allegations of war crimes during the conflict suffered a major setback this week at the UN Human Rights Council, when Sri Lanka gathered its allies – including China, India, Egypt and Cuba – to pass a resolution celebrating its military success and asserting its right to act without outside interference.

The resolution praised Sri Lanka’s pledge to resettle “the bulk of” those driven from their homes within six months and “to further facilitate appropriate work” by aid groups to meet urgent needs in displaced-persons camps.

Bouckaert felt the special session on Sri Lanka in Geneva had been a “complete failure” by failing to act to protect the civilian population in Sri Lanka.

“But more is at stake than Sri Lanka,” he said. “If the world can indict Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir for war crimes but can look away from serious human rights violations in Sri Lanka, it raises questions about fair and impartial international justice.”

Simon Bradley, swissinfo.ch

Tamil diaspora in Switzerland

The Tamil community includes more than 40,000 people

More than 15,000 of them have obtained Swiss nationality.

The majority of Tamils live in the German-speaking part of the country, mainly in canton Bern.

There are nearly 8,000 Tamils in the French-speaking part of the country, including 3,000 in canton Vaud.

The largest waves of Tamil refugees came to Switzerland in the 1980s.

Asylum demands from Sri Lankans have been on the rise since the beginning of the year. In four months there have been 587 requests.

According to the Swiss Refugee Council (SRC), the number of requests doubled in 2008 to 1,262 (636 in 2007).

Only 170 obtained asylum in 2008, while 192 were granted provisional admission.

The SRC is calling on the authorities to stop sending people back to Sri Lanka whose requests have been turned down.

Swiss government position (extracts)

“Switzerland calls on Sri Lanka to grant rapid and unimpeded access for humanitarian aid to the distressed population, particularly for internally displaced persons.

“Switzerland calls on all parties to refrain from incitement to hatred and to work towards reconciliation by means of unilateral or jointly agreed measures.

“All parties and groupings as well as members of the diaspora should work openly and in conjunction with international institutions to initiate a reconciliation process and a sustainable solution in the framework of a political dialogue.”

swissinfo.ch