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Rajapaksa cautions West against LTTE propaganda

COLOMBO: Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa has invited U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to visit the nation for an assessment of the situation of nearly two lakh civilians accommodated in temporary government shelters in the North.

The President’s Office said here on Wednesday, Mr. Rajapaksa told Mr. Ban during a telephonic talk on Tuesday that the visit would also help him assess the conditions faced by the Tamil civilians still held hostage by the LTTE in a small stretch of the Civilian Safety Zone.

Meanwhile, the military said troops had further advanced towards Karayamulliavaikkal amid stiff resistance by LTTE cadre.

It said the remaining cadre and leaders of the Tigers including its chief Velupillai Prabakaran are now pushed into a four sq km area inside the No Fire Zone (NFZ) and are holding an estimated 20,000 civilians as hostage.

Mr. Rajapaksa told a group of visiting cross-party Members of Parliament from the U.K. not to be misled by the increased false propaganda of the LTTE regarding the IDPs. They should instead visit Vavuniya to better understand the LTTE’s nature. The British team asked Colombo to honour its commitment not to use heavy weapons in the NFZ and urged the LTTE to free the civilians.

The delegation visited IDP facilities in Vavuniya and had a series of meetings in Colombo with Mr. Rajapaksa, Foreign Minister Rohith Bogollogama, opposition political parties, civil society and humanitarian actors.

Des Browne, the delegation’s chairman said, “Our primary concern is for those civilians who remain trapped in the conflict zone and are living in terrible conditions. The LTTE has ignored repeated calls for the release of these civilians. Only an end to intense fighting will offer them any respite.

Meanwhile, the pro-LTTE TamilNet in a feature said, “If there is any meaning for the word humanitarian, the minimum humanitarian act right now is to drop food to the civilians of Wanni without wasting a minute”.

“The U.S. government and the world should realise that the situation culminating in the most inhuman act of Colombo calculatedly inflicting starvation death on civilians is ultimately a consequence of the lopsided application of a U.S. policy, and the U.S. has every responsibility to remedy it. Failure amounts to connivance to the crime. U.S. has to immediately airdrop food,” the website quoted an unidentified relief official in Wanni as saying.

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