Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at UN
www.innercitypress.com/untrip1may9srilanka052309.html
COLOMBO, May 23 -- In the wake of what UN officials called a bloodbath on the beach, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the Press are set for a sixteen hour jaunt around Sri Lanka on Saturday, which some call the victory tour. On military helicopters the entourage will travel to Manik Farm, which the UN's John Holmes has repeatedly called the largest camp for Internally Displaced People in the world. Only Zones 1 and 4 will be toured.
Currently, neither the UN nor non-governmental organizations are allowed to enter the camps with vehicles. A briefing will be given by, among others, Major General G A Chandrasiri and a hospital will be visited.
Next from Manik Farm's helipad, the group will "over fly [the] No Fire Zone," the scene of much firing and dying, including in the days after the government declared victory but neither the Red Cross nor UN were allowed into the zone to search for or help the wounded.
Ban's chief and staff and envoy Vijay Nambiar received a similar fly-over on May 22 and concluded from the air, according to UN officials, that no civilians remain in the Zone. Inner City Press has a camera with a zoom, but there's talk of bodies in bunkers, bodies buried, evidence destroyed.
The group will lunch at the government Air Base in Anuradhapura, the site of a prison in which as Inner City Press has reported UNHCR staff member Mr. Ragushankar Kulathaivelu has been imprisoned since last Fall. He and his mother were arrested on October 5, 2008.
From where he worked for UNHCR, in Mannar, he was visiting his mother in Vavuniya, when the authorities came to arrest his mother for renting a room to an alleged LTTE supporter, who had identified himself as a student.
The mother died in December, in jail. Ragushankar Kulathaivelu nevertheless remains in prison in Anuradhapura. Reportedly, even after the wipe out of the No Fire zone, conditions for such prisoners have grown worse, with verbal and other abuse.
This is a UN system staff member, arrested along with his mother for no reason, and still in custody. UNHCR's country representative has said nothing publicly about it, and has not responded to written questions on the matter. Inner City Press on the plane to Sri Lanka asked the UN's Holmes about the case. What will be done? Perhaps it will be a working lunch.
Ban's entourage includes not only Holmes and Nambiar but also the head of the UN Department of Political Affairs Lynn Pascoe, Ban's spokesperson Choi Soung-ah and Director of Communications Michael Meyer, as well as Department of Public Information staff. Much administrative work has gone into the trip, but its outcome is far from certain, in fact is heavily maligned from many quarters.
The group then flies en masse to Kandy, where Ban will meet with President Mahinda Rajapaksa then hold a half-hour press conference in the Queen's Hotel. Then Ban will dine with President Rajapaksa, as Ban told Inner City Press the two did in Seoul, before that sharing a helicopter ride over a port since re-development by the Chinese.
At the Sri Lankan Mission to the UN in New York, an official who restricted this reporter's passport to two days and said for any longer, a background check would be performed in Colombo told Inner City Press of the mixing of Sinhanese hoppers with Tamil those, "in food you see we fix," she said. What or who is on the menu and agenda at Ban's and Rajapaksa's dinner is not known.
Will Mr. Ban raise the incarceration of the doctors who remained in the No Fire zone offering treatment and casualty figures? Will he ask about Tissainayagam, a journalist held without charges for more than a year? Will the two discuss Amendment 13 to the Sri Lankan constitution, which promised too-limited devolution or powers but nevertheless was never implemented, and reportedly might now be further undermined?
What about the long-promised investigation into the killings of newspaper editors and aid workers, from Action Contre la Faim and elsewhere? What about what's called the government's blacklist of 837 internationals?
What about the Memorandum of Understanding now being demanded from NGOs by the government of Sri Lanka, which requires them to provide "all information" to the government? (See Inner City Press' exclusive report. here.)
What about Bousa prison, where witnesses tell of routine torture of those detained?
Unless something changes, the whole group will be packed back on the UN plane, at Katunayake International Airport, and will leave the country before Saturday at midnight. Watch this site for updates, whenever and wherever the Internet can be found.
And see, www.innercitypress.com/untrip1may9srilanka052309.html
