Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at UN
www.innercitypress.com/un2may2srilanka051109.html
UNITED NATIONS, May 11 -- As in Sri Lanka Saturday bombs rained down on the supposed Safe Zone, in New York UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon prepared to celebrate the wedding of his son, Ban Woo-hyun. The ceremony was kept secret. South Korean media quoted an unnamed Ban aide that “Ban may have thought that an ostentatious wedding party for his son would be inappropriate.”
Well, yes. Earlier in the week, in the run-up to what even the UN had predicted as a “bloodbath on the beach” in Northern Sri Lanka, Ban had been invited to visit the country. His spokesperson Michele Montas said that if Ban thought it would save civilian lives, he would go. Inner City Press, having been told by well-placed Security Council sources that Ban would not be going in the coming days for scheduling reasons, inquired into this at two separate UN noon briefings and otherwise.
“Scheduling is a separate matter,” Associate Spokesperson Farhan Haq insisted. A senior Ban political adviser told Inner City Press on the night of May 8 that, while he had been told to stop speaking to the Press, Ban would go if he thought it would save “even a single life.”
The Korea Herald also quoted the anonymous aide that Mr. Ban “could also have been burdened by a frequent mentioning of him as one of South Korea's next presidential candidates." A Security Council diplomat, speaking Monday morning as the UN confirmed at least 400 civilians killed over the weekend including over 100 children, told Inner City Press that perhaps it would be good for the UN for Ban to move on.
When Inner City Press pointed out that weddings like this are planned months in advance and are hard to reschedule, the diplomat countered that Ban never should have claimed he would go if it would save a life.
“Had he gone this weekend, the government wouldn't have bombed so freely,” the diplomat said, going on to wonder aloud if the Sri Lankan government may have known of the Bans quiet wedding plans.
Last month, as the pace of civilian death spiked up, Ban sent his titular chief of staff Vijay Nambiar to Colombo, ostensibly to request a “humanitarian pause.” Neither Ban nor Nambiar, who has yet to speak to the Press, have called for a cease-fire, nor have they explained why not.
While Ban claimed that Nambiar had won a commitment from the government to allow a UN humanitarian assessment team into the conflict zone, its members have yet to be named, much less be allowed anywhere near the zone of death.
At the time, many questioned the wisdom of sending Nambiar, the highest ranking Indian in the UN system, as the envoy to Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan government has spoken of extraditing the founder of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam to India, to stand charges for the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in the 1990s.
Recently Vijay Nambiar's brother Satish, a former Indian general and consultant to the Sri Lankan government, was quoted on the Sri Lankan military's web page praising the Army's and its commander's conduct of the war in the north, despite all the civilians killed. It is, the diplomat said bitterly, all a family affair.
