Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at UN
www.innercitypress.com/un3may8srilanka052009.html
UNITED NATIONS, May 20 – In Sri Lanka, access to the interment camps has been further reduced, the conflict zone still unvisited, doctors who worked there still detained. The day before the UN's Secretary General Ban Ki-moon gets on a series of plane with the Press to Colombo, his Deputy Spokesperson acknowledged the reports of the doctors' detentions, and that she had no update on the Red Cross getting access.
Inner City Press asked, to be sure, that Ban will be going to what was called the conflict zone. “He said he expected to go to the conflict zone,” she answered. Video here, from Minute 56:03.
With this understanding, the circus will leave the UN's host country on Thursday afternoon. Early Friday morning, a UN plane will continue on from Frankfurt. It will arrive, near midnight, in Colombo. The following day, Saturday, Ban and the Press will apparently be whisked north in government helicopters, to IDP camps in Vavuniya, and then expectedly to the conflict zone. Who is still alive there? What has been done to clear or cover up?
Wednesday in the UN, the main political adviser of a Security Council Permanent Member which supports Colombo's moves told Inner City Press, “Why are you going? The government has already won.”
When Inner City Press countered that the UN should be concerned about hundreds of thousands of IDP, now being denied basic aid, he replied that of course the government must screen for the LTTE. But are the NGOs whose vehicles are now barred from the camps accused of being LTTE? To this, he had no answer.
Nor did the spokesman for the President of the UN General Assembly answer, when Inner City Press asked for a read-out of his meeting Wednesday morning with India's new Abmbasssador to the UN. It seemed fair to ask what they dicussed, for example Sri Lanka. But the PGA's spokesman said, we don't provide read-outs of such meetings. Video here, from Minute 58:35.
In Geneva on Monday, the UN Human Rights Council has scheduled a session on Sri Lanka. There is talk of satellite photos being used, to show deep mortar craters in the “No Fire” Zone. There are stories of senior LTTE leaders trying to surrender, carrying white flags, shot to death.
The government's assumption, sources say, is that any civilians that remained last weekend in the conflict zone were “Tiger through and through,” and hence the action and blocked access. An evidentiary hearing or investigation would get to the bottom of these points. But where would one be possible? Colombo in Colombo, we'll call it, referring to the rumbled detective show in re-runs on American television. Watch this site.
