UN Humanitarian Chief on defensive over Sri Lanka

UN Humanitarian chief, John Holmes, rejected accusation by a British newspaper that UN had colluded with Sri Lanka in hiding the war crimes the government committed during the final phase of its war against the LTTE.

In an editorial, The Times wrote that "the U.N. has no right to collude in suppressing the appalling evidence" of a government-executed massacre.

This clearly annoyed Holmes.

"I resent this allegation that we've been colluding with the government in some way or not taking sufficient notice," Holmes said.

"We have been the ones drawing attention to this problem when the media weren't very interested several months ago."

He also disputed a death toll reported in The Times of London that cited a "U.N. source" to support an estimate that at least 20,000 people were killed during the months-long final siege.

"That figure has no status as far as we're concerned," Holmes said.

"It may be right, it may be wrong, it may be far too high, it may even be too low. But we honestly don't know. We've always said an investigation would be a good idea."

He said it was based on an unofficial and unverified U.N. estimate of around 7,000 civilian deaths through the end of April and added on roughly 1,000 more per day after that.

The UN humanitarian coordination office (OCHA), headed by Holmes, responding to Times said civilian deaths were "unacceptably high," but denied a cover-up.

"The UN has publicly and repeatedly said that the number of people killed in recent months has been unacceptably high and it has shared its estimates with the government as well as others concerned," OCHA spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs told AFP in Geneva.

"The point is the UN has not been shy about the scale of human suffering and civilian casualties. It has been ringing the alarm bells for a long time."

Holmes further said the world will probably never find out how many innocent civilians died during the bloody final phase of Sri Lanka's war against LTTE.

"I fear we may (never know), because I don't know that the government would be prepared to cooperate with any inquiry," Holmes said. But there was no doubt "several thousand" civilians had died during the siege, he added.

During that siege, the UN had repeatedly criticized the government for shelling areas where civilians were trapped, warning that it could lead to a "bloodbath".

There are “very large” numbers of civilians who are injured and “doubtless many of those civilians may die in the coming days because we cannot reach them with medical care,” UN’s Sri Lanka spokesman Gordon Weiss told reporters on May 10.

John Holmes, who on April 30 visited refugee camps in northern Sri Lanka, had warned of a “bloodbath scenario,” Weiss said, adding: “This is exactly the sort of scenario he was warning against.”