Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at UN
www.innercitypress.com/un3may2srilanka051609.html
UNITED NATIONS, May 16 – Doctors who remained in northern Sri Lanka's bloody conflict zone are now being held incommunicado by the government in Omanthai, sources tell Inner City Press. Along with Doctors Varatharajah and Shanmugarajah, Dr.Thangamutha Sathiyamoorth, the regional director of Health Services in Kilinochchi whose May 13 dispatch about that day's the shelling of the last remaining hospital in the “No Fire” Zone was published in Inner City Press only yesterday, is being held without visits even from the International Committee of the Red Cross.
In New York, Inner City Press had asked top UN humanitarian John Holmes weeks ago if he had heard that the government had stopped paying doctors in the conflict zone, and was threatening them, if they provided casualty figures or other information, with interrogation, torture and even death when they were captured. Holmes said he hadn't heard of it.
In Sri Lanka, the UN provided assurances that it would provide security for the doctors when the time came, according to local sources. But now, even with Ban Ki-moon's chief of staff Vijay Nambiar in the country, nothing appears to be being done about these doctors. The question has been asked, but no answer received.
The UN previously said nothing when its own staff members were interred in IDP camps, or in other cases incarcerated by the government for not speaking Sinhalese, or in the case of the UN refugee agency's protection officer in Vanvuniya, for having a mother who inadvertently rented a room to an LTTE member.
Targeting doctors is a war crime, complicity in it no less so. Watch this site.
