UN says it was approached by LTTE officials to surrender

UN Under Secretary General for Humanitarian affairs Sir John Holmes, in an interview with CNN’s Christiana Amanpour, said that the UN had offered to monitor the surrender of senior LTTE officials during the last stages of the war but that access to the site was not given nor was there enough time.


The top UN official confirmed that there was communication from the LTTE for a surrender and that the communication was transmitted to the relevant officials in the UN. However Homes asserted that the last stages of the war ended so soon that there was no time for the UN to intervene.
Several senior LTTE officials were found dead during the last stages of the war despite reports they had surrendered to the military. However the government strongly denied that they were killed while surrendering.

Palitha Kohona, the Sri Lankan Ambassador to the United Nations, insisted his government treated hundreds of thousands of refugees humanely after the war ended in May.

Human rights groups and Western governments, though, strongly criticized conditions in the camps, saying the conditions amounted to an illegal form of collective punishment.

"It's only six months after the war ended. In May, we had over 300,000 people pouring into camps, which were run by the government in order to feed the people, provide them with shelter, and to provide them with health care," Kohona said. "Now almost 60 percent or maybe even 70 percent have returned to their own homes. At the end of last week, there were only about 114,000 still remaining in the camps."

The 26-year-long civil war, one of Asia's longest-running insurgencies, ended with a crushing military victory by the government.

The war cost at least 70,000 lives.

Kohona refuted charges the Sri Lankan military shot and killed many Tamil Tiger rebels who tried to surrender.

"This is an allegation which popped up very recently, not at the time. And the government has categorically said that this scenario never happened," he said. "When you're caught up in a firefight and you are the one engaged in the firefight, it's quite likely that you get shot."

His remarks follow allegations from former army chief Gen. Sarath Fonseka that the government issued orders "not to accommodate" any Tamil Tiger leaders when the war ended. Government officials quickly denied the allegations, saying those claims were an effort by Fonseka to win political advantage in the upcoming presidential election. Fonseka is challenging President Mahinda Rajapaksa in the poll, scheduled for January 26.

Kohona insisted the government is doing everything possible to reconcile with the Tamil community.

"The Tamil language is an equal official language of the country, Tamil is now being taught extensively in our schools," he said. "Thirty-nine percent of Colombo (Sri Lanka's capital) is now Tamil. Fifty-four percent of the Tamils live amongst the (majority) Sinhalese in the south."

Srilanka's human rights dilemma - Interview by CNN
http://us.cnn.com/video/?/video/world/2009/12/14/amanpour.sri.lanka.cnn