COLOMBO, March 25 (Xinhua) — Sri Lanka’s foreign ministry said Wednesday that the figures given by UN Colombo office on civilian deaths and casualties in the northern no fire zone were wrong and asked the office to issue a formal clarification.
The figures of 2,683 civilian deaths and 7,241 injuries mentioned in a UN report had not been attributed to any reliable or independent source, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed in a statement.
“The UN Resident Coordinator and Humanitarian Coordinator in Sri Lanka, Neil Buhne has stated that he is unable to confirm the veracity of the figures of civilian casualties since Jan. 20, 2009in the conflict area of Mullaittivu District, contained in an official report issued by his office recently,” said the statement.
The statement said Buhne acknowledged in a meeting with Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama on Tuesday that the report had been prepared by his office, and was meant only for circulation among the donor community, but could not independently verify the authenticity of the figures of civilian casualties mentioned in the report.
Bogollagama urged Buhne to issue a formal clarification on this matter “in order to rectify the negative and damaging inferences that may be drawn from the said report,” said the statement.
The government says its military offensive against the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is coming to an end as the LTTE have been confined to an area of just 20 sq km in Mullaittivu from over 15,000 sq km they held in the north and east when the offensive began in 2006.
However, how to hand over the large number of civilians still trapped behind the defence line of the LTTE poses a serious challenge to the government as the international community expresses concerns over the safety of the civilians.
The LTTE began to rebel against the government to set up a separate homeland for the minority Tamils in the north and east in the mid-1980s, based on claims that the minority Tamils had been discriminated by the majority Sinhalese dominated government.
More than 70,000 people have died in the conflict since the mid-1980s in one of the world’s longest civil wars.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-03/26/content_11073140.htm