By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, September 24, updated -- When Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa met on Saturday night with Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and an abnormally large team of UN officials, the session went ten minutes over the allocated twenty, leaving the next delegation from Montenegro waiting.
While most of Ban's meetings and photo ops this week have been entirely routine, according to officials who have been in the meeting, this one had more people at it. Before the 6:20 pm meeting began, Ivan Simonovic, the New York representative of the Office of the High Commission for Human Rights Navi Pillay, arrived and went in to wait.
Simonovic was followed in by Margot Wallstrom, the special adviser on Sexual Violence and Conflict. That is among the war crimes Sri Lankan forces are accused of, including in the Channel 4 documentary "Killing Fields" that Ban and his advisers have yet to watch.
Not surprising but worth noting was the presence of Ban's chief of staff Vijay Nambiar, who is accused of complicity in what are called the White Flag murders of surrendering Tamil Tiger rebels.
The White Flag incident also involved Palitha Kohona, who as Rajapaksa's Permanent Representative to the UN was also present at the meeting, along with foreign minister G.L. Peiris, who met on Thursday with Nambiar and Ban's top political official Lynn Pascoe, also present Saturday night.
Based on Inner City Press' reporting, media in Sri Lanka have extrapolated that Peiris lodged a complaint with Pascoe about the Panel of Experts report on war crimes in Sri Lanka having been transmitted to Pillay and the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Simonovic's presence at Saturday night's meeting would seem related to that. But Wallstrom's?
After the initial photo op, cameramen are usually shepherded off the North Lawn building's third floor. But this time, a Sri Lankan security officer arranged for the three other photographers, all Sri Lankan, to stay up at the entrance to Ban's office. Inner City Press stayed as well.
When ten minutes late the meeting ended, Ban escorted Rajapaksa to the elevator. There the two men engaged in discussion well out of the earshot of Ban's spokesman, Martin Nesirky, who stopped Ban on his way back in to the waiting Montenegro delegation and asked him questions.
Earlier on Saturday at the photo op of Ban and Madagascar coup leader Rajoelina, Nesirky had told Inner City Press, "You don't take pictures of talking points, okay? Now I know." A more senior Ban adviser later laughed, "there's nothing IN the talking points, they are as empty as the read-outs Martin gives."
