Lanka comes under heavy fire at UN Security Council

By Thalif Deen

NEW YORK - The United Nations Friday singled out Sri Lanka as one of several crisis-stricken countries — along with Sudan, Lebanon and the Central African Republic — that have failed to track down the killers of humanitarian workers.

Addressing the Security Council, the UN Under-Secretary-General John Holmes who is in charge of Humanitarian Affairs said that in 2006, twenty-four aid workers were killed in Sri Lanka, including 17 from Action Contre Le Faim, "in a single horrifying act." Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has already demanded an investigation into the killings.

The perpetrators of all these crimes — including the killing of two Red Cross workers in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon and the murder of a Caritas International aid worker in Darfur, Sudan — "are yet to be brought to account," Mr. Holmes said.

At least four countries – Britain, France, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Canada, along with the European Union — identified Sri Lanka specifically for its continued human rights abuses and the lack of protection for civilians caught in the crossfire.

At no time has Sri Lanka come under such intense scrutiny of member states at a Security Council meeting, as it did on Friday.
Mr. Holmes told the Security Council — which held an open debate on the "Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict" — that civilians were too often deliberately targeted to create a climate of fear and to destabilize populations.

"In Sri Lanka, over 600,000 inhabitants of the Jaffna peninsula have faced shortages of basic necessities since August of last year when the government and the LTTE restricted access to the peninsula by road and by sea respectively," Mr. Holmes continued. Implying Sri Lanka was virtually culpable of war crimes, he added: “Killing humanitarian staff and arbitrarily denying access violate international humanitarian law”.

Ambassador John McNee of Canada placed Sri Lanka in the company of Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, northern Uganda, Lebanon and Somalia as countries that have failed to provide protection to civilians in war zones.