The vote by the United Nations Human Rights Council to congratulate the Sri Lanka Government on its victory over the Tamil Tigers and to ignore calls for an inquiry into possible war crimes is a disgrace.

It marks a victory for all those countries facing domestic insurgencies who fear any serious investigation into their behaviour. It gives carte blanche to armies to use whatever means available to achieve victory.

And it is a terrible betrayed of the thousands of Tamil civilians who have been killed in the crossfire as the Sri Lankan army pounded the remnant of the Tamil Tigers.

The vote came after two days of heated debate in Geneva on the widespread charges that both sides committed atrocities in the final weeks of the long-running civil war on the island. The European members of the 47-strong council had asked for an emergency meeting to look into what they feared were very serious abuses.

But the council chose instead to debate a resolution submitted by Sri Lanka itself, which welcomed the “liberation” of tens of thousands of the island’s citizens, condemned the defeated Tigers, made no mention of the shelling of civilians and kept silent on the desperate need to allow the Red Cross and other humanitarian groups into the camps where some

200,000 Tamil civilians have been forcibly interned.

To many Western critics, the Council has failed one of its first and most important tests. For it was set up only three years ago, after a UN resolution, to replace the much criticised UN Commission for Human Rights. This body was widely regarded as toothless and ineffectual. It was always subject to the majority votes of members who had no interest in any outside investigation into their human rights records.

The new council set up a new “universal periodic review” mechanism, intended to assess the human rights situations in all 192 UN member states. The aim was to deflect accusations that the West never allowed scrutiny of its own record while picking on the behaviour of governments in the developing world.

This provision angered the Bush Administration, which feared that the United States would be subject to endless complaints from anti-American members wishing to hide their own poor records of human rights compliance. The US also said the council did not have adequate provision to keep states with poor records of their own from being members of the council.

Under the new structure, the General Assembly elects the members who will occupy the 47 seats, with each seat held for three years. No member can occupy a seat for more than two consecutive terms, and the seats are distributed among the UN’s regional groups — Africa and Asia each hold 13, Eastern Europe has 6, Latin America and the Caribbean have and Western Europe and others have the remaining 7.

The Bush Administration has been a frequent critic of the new council, and did not seek a seat on it for the first two years. It claimed that the body had lost its credibility with repeated attacks on Israel. But the Obama Administration has reversed that position and announced that America will join the council.

The vote on Sri Lanka, however, will reinforce the council’s critics in the West. It was not simply that the usual suspects — China, Russia, India and Pakistan — who supported the Sri Lankan resolution, on the grounds that the conflict there was an internal matter and that the council should not intervene on the conduct of the war. A clutch of Asian and Muslim countries, also wary of outside inspection of their record, also voted not to launch an inquiry into the events in Sri Lanka.

This fails the most elementary test of what the council is supposed to do. Human rights violations occur largely as a result of conflict. The civil war that has lasted 28 years in Sri Lanka has seen numerous examples of such violations, yet there has been no serious outside investigation.

As a result, Sri Lanka will set a precedent for the future workings of the council. Essentially, it declares that victory in civil war is paramount, and that any incidental abuses are no one else’s business. This is disastrous.

Sri Lanka has pointed a way that many countries faced with insurgencies are likely to follow: barring journalists and photographers in order to maintain a news blackout, keeping out aid agencies so that no one can criticise the treatment of civilians and using the latest heavy weapons, without discrimination, in civilian areas in order to rout their enemies.

It is a bad precedent, and one that has just been endorsed in Geneva. At least, however, Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights, was not accepting defeat. There was still a very real need, she said on Thursday, for an inquiry into “very serious abuses”. It does not seem as though that inquiry will now be held by the council, however. 

In what is seen as another blow to its already damaged credibility, the UN Human Rights Council on Wednesday, May 27, voted in favor of a resolution praising Sri Lanka, which western nations said would do nothing to help victims of the just-ended civil war or remedy widespread human rights violations.

An emergency session of the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) was initiated by the council’s European Union members and supported by Argentina, Bosnia, Canada, Chile, Mexico, Mauritius, South Korea, Switzerland, Ukraine and Uruguay.

However, by passing procedures, Sri Lanka pre-empted scrutiny from a UN HRC emergency session by tabling its own resolution, supported by 12 allies, that praises itself and calls for funding by the international community.

Entitled “Assistance to Sri Lanka in the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights,” Sri Lanka’s text was co-signed by Indonesia, China, Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Bahrain, Philippines, Cuba, Egypt, Nicaragua, and Bolivia.

The Sri Lankan-proposed resolution described the conflict as a “domestic matter that doesn’t warrant outside interference”.

The resolution also supported Colombo’s insistence on allowing aid group access to 270,000 civilians detained in camps only “as may be appropriate”.

The resolution condemned attacks on civilians by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and their use of civilians as human shields in the final stages of the conflict, but said nothing about mass scale civilian killings committed by government forces or other human rights concerns including forced disappearances and the harassment of human rights activists and journalists.

The European Union and some other countries sought to make amendments to the Sri Lankan resolution.

However, Cuba tabled a ‘no action motion’ claiming that the proposed changes would alter the tenor and intent of the consensual resolution.

Subsequently, the Sri Lankan resolution was voted on and carried by a majority of 17 member states.

Western diplomats and human rights officials were shocked by the outcome at the end of an acrimonious two-day special session to examine the humanitarian and human rights situation in Sri Lanka after the blitzkrieg of the final military offensive that wiped out the Tamil Tigers.

Twelve countries, mostly European and including Britain, opposed the resolution after failing to win support for their version, which called for unfettered access to detained civilians and an internal investigation of alleged war crimes by both sides.

The Sri Lankan government hailed the outcome as an emphatic “diplomatic victory".

While the army and state-run newspapers continued to celebrate the victory on the battlefield, the government celebrated what it saw as a triumph on the diplomatic front.

"This is a strong endorsement of our president's efforts to rout terrorism, and the successful handling of the world's biggest hostage crisis," Sri Lanka's Human Rights Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe said.

"It is a clear message that the international community is behind Sri Lanka."

Samarasinghe thanked the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Group and the Organisation of The Islamic Conference (OIC) Group - two important cross-regional groups at the HRC - and in particular the support of the African Regional Group as well as some countries of the Latin American and Asian Groups for their support to Sri Lanka.

The Sri Lanka Ambassador in Geneva said that European nations had failed with their “punitive and mean-spirited agenda” against his country.

“This was a lesson that a handful of countries which depict themselves as the international community do not really constitute the majority,” Dayan Jayatilleka said.

“The vast mass of humanity are in support of Sri Lanka.”

Western diplomats said that the result called into question the entire purpose of the HRC – where the 47 members sit as equals with no right of veto for any country.

The US and other newly elected members of the council did not vote.

They are due to take their seats in mid-June.

The United States only recently agreed to join it in the belief that the council had been reformed.

Many rights organisations calling for an independent probe into atrocities the Sri Lankan military committed against Tamils in the past few months were dismayed at the results.

Tom Porteous, the London director of Human Rights Watch, said: “The Human Rights Council had a chance to prove itself by calling for a serious inquiry into violations of the laws of war and human rights abuses in Sri Lanka, and they failed dismally.”

Juliette de Rivero, advocacy director in the Geneva office of New York-based Human Rights Watch, said: “This is a step backwards for the human rights council. The resolution fails to hold the Sri Lankan government accountable.”

 “The vote is extremely disappointing and is a low point for the Human Rights Council. It abandons hundreds of thousands of people in Sri Lanka to cynical political considerations,” Amnesty International said.

The European Union also expressed regret at the failure to launch a probe into alleged war crimes committed by the Sri Lankan military during its offensive against Tamil Tigers.

"The EU regrets that it was not possible for the Human Rights Council to agree on an acceptable outcome of the special session addressing the serious human rights violations and the humanitarian crisis," a statement said.

"We regret that the proposals presented by the EU to amend the Sri Lankan draft resolution could be neither discussed nor considered by the council" after a "closure of debate" rule was supported by a majority of members.

"Such motions contradict the very spirit in which the Human Rights Council was conceived," the Czech presidency of the 27-nation bloc said.

The EU said that the outcome of the rights council meeting in Geneva "does not, in our view, address the complexity and the seriousness of the situation on the ground."

It said it would continue to work with the UN and its agencies to alleviate the suffering of civilians on the ground and to work for the achievement of durable stability."

UN Watch, a non-governmental organization based in Geneva described Sri Lanka’s preemptive move as an outrageous abuse of the system.

"Sri Lanka’s action today constitutes an outrageous abuse and show of contempt for the international human rights process," said Hillel Neuer, an international lawyer and the executive director of UN Watch.

"Sri Lanka does not deserve to be praised, but rather condemned for blocking humanitarian emergency relief to thousands, creating conditions leading to the spread of diseases, and for seizing doctors who exposed to the world the untold suffering of innocent civilians.”

Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois College of Law, referring to the resolution passed at the United Nations Human Rights Council on the Sri Lanka war, said: "This is one of the most unprincipled and shameless resolutions ever adopted by any body of the United Nations in the history of that now benighted Organization. It would be as if the U.N. Human Rights Council had congratulated the Nazi government for the "liberation" of the Jews in Poland after its illegal and genocidal invasion of that country in 1939,"

"This Resolution simultaneously gives the imprimatur of the U.N. Human Rights Council to the ethnic cleansing, genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes that the Government of Sri Lanka has already inflicted upon the Tamils in the past , as well as the Council's proverbial "green light" for the GOSL to perpetrate and escalate more of the same international crimes against the Tamils in the future," Boyle said.

The next time you buy some lingerie, a T-shirt or a pair of rubber gloves, you may want to reflect on this: they were probably made in Sri Lanka. And like it or not, your purchase plays a role in the debate over how to respond to the Sri Lankan Government's successful but brutal military campaign against the Tamil Tiger rebels, which reached its bloody climax this week.

Since 2005 Sri Lanka has been allowed to sell garments to the European Union without import tax as part of a scheme designed to help it to recover from the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004. That means its clothes are 10 per cent cheaper than those from China and other competitors - helping the island to earn at least $2.9 billion from the EU annually. Britain accounts for much of that.

Britain has also helped to rebuild Sri Lanka's tourist industry: Britons accounted for 18.5 per cent of the foreigners who visited the former colony's famous beaches, wildlife parks, tea plantations and Buddhist temples last year. Only India sends more tourists. Many Britons also own property there, especially around the southern city of Galle, not far from where Arthur C.Clarke, the British science fiction writer who settled in Sri Lanka, used to love to scuba dive.

So the question facing British shoppers and holidaymakers is this: should they continue to support Sri Lanka's garment and tourist industries? Sadly, the answer must be no.

Britain should welcome the defeat of the Tigers, a ruthless terrorist organisation that forcibly recruited children, pioneered the use of the suicide bomb and killed thousands of innocent people. But Britain must also condemn the Sri Lankan Government's conduct of the war - and take punitive action against it both to discourage other states from using similar methods, and to encourage proper reconciliation between the Tamil and Sinhalese communities. With the UN paralysed, economic sanctions are the only practical options left.

Many will ask why they should care: there are bigger conflicts in the world, and Sri Lanka's is mercifully confined to its own shores, with no risk that British troops might be deployed.

The response to that is simple: what about next time? Sri Lanka's war has been discrete only because it is an island; many other conflicts in have spilt across borders, forcing military intervention to prevent a humanitarian disaster or a greater conflagration. Consider the crack-up of Yugoslavia or Sierra Leone.

Britain may have, in the eyes of the world, ceded much of the moral high ground over human rights when it shed civilian blood during the invasion and occupation of Iraq. But that does not mean that Britain should abandon its role in defending international law that protects civilians in conflicts and holds governments accountable for their actions during war.

Yes, international humanitarian law is based largely on Western values, and enforced imperfectly, but the world would be a much more violent, unjust place without it. Put simply, every war might look like Sri Lanka's.

In an ideal world the UN, not the EU, would take the lead. But the UN, even in the face of a clear humanitarian disaster and blatant war crimes by both sides, has been compromised. By cosying up to China, Russia and other countries facing their own separatist problems, Sri Lanka managed to keep its own war off the formal agenda of the UN Security Council until the last minute. Without the UN Security Council's backing, an independent war crimes investigation will struggle to get off the ground.

Thus it is once again up to the democratic world to take action - even if that means muddling the issues of trade and human rights.

A key point to bear in mind is that human rights are an explicit part of GSP Plus, the EU's scheme that gives preferential trading rights to 16 developing nations, ranging from Guatemala to Mongolia. These nations must all comply with 27 international conventions covering environmental, labour and human rights standards. Many have gone to great lengths to adhere to them.

That may sound like excessive EU bureaucracy, but the system is designed to ensure the products we import meet EU standards - no child labour, for example. It is also designed to give developing countries an incentive to improve their own standards to the benefit of their own people.

That is where Sri Lanka has let itself down. Last year the EU expressed its grave concerns about human rights abuses committed during the conflict and that it might not renew the GSP Plus deal after it expired in December.

Sri Lanka's response was to dismiss the EU out of hand, accusing it of violating Sri Lankan sovereignty. The EU then announced that it was launching a rights investigation, pending the results of which GSP Plus remains in place - but Sri Lanka has so far refused to co-operate, banking on EU inaction.

Since then, the situation has deteriorated dramatically. Sri Lankan armed forces are now suspected of repeatedly shelling civilian targets including hospitals, and of shooting dead at least two Tiger leaders as they were surrendering. They have also herded more than 200,000 Tamils into internment camps, splitting up families. These squalid places have insufficient water or medical supplies, and aid workers have been blocked from helping in these camps. Even the Red Cross has been forced to suspend its operations in the barbed-wire facilities, which the Sri Lankan Government calls “welfare villages” but Tamil activists liken to concentration camps.

Renewing GSP Plus in these circumstances would make a mockery of human rights and set an awful precedent for other nations. Withdrawing it could cost Sri Lanka 2 per cent of its GDP and thousands of jobs, which will hit many innocent civilians. But the fault, if this happens, will lie with its Government for failing to address the EU's concerns.

As to whether Britons should visit Sri Lanka as tourists, well that's a matter of personal choice - just as it is whether to visit Burma. But until the international community pulls together and formulates its own robust response, there is no clearer way for individuals to register their disapproval for the actions of Sri Lanka's Government than simply to stay away. 

United National Party (UNP), Sri Lanka’s main opposition, has said the government should defeat the ‘Eelam ideology’ and stressed the need to take action on Tamil political parties to remove the Eelam ‘tag’ from their names.

Now that the LTTE is defeated, there is an urgent need to look at various ways of defeating the concept of 'Eelam' or a separate Tamil homeland through political means, UNP leader Dayasiri Jayasekara told reporters.

"Action needs to be taken regarding political parties carrying the name Eelam. The LTTE has imposed this concept on the minds of people who lived in the North and East.

"They have been made to believe they were living on a land described as Eelam under a separate flag. Now we have to through political means replace the Eelam concept or mindset with the one that we are all Sri Lankans," the UNP leader said.

‘Action needs to be taken regarding political parties carrying the name Eelam’ Jayasekara  added referring to Eelam People's Democratic Party (EPDP), Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation (TELO), Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF), People Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE) and Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students (EROS).

Jayasekara said the UNP was delighted at the government’s resolution being adopted at the United Nations Human Rights Council on Wednesday with 29 nations voting in favour and added the government should going forward look at the reasons for some European nations voting against Sri Lanka at the special session, and revamp Sri Lanka’s foreign policy to win them over.

“The United States and the European countries are our major trading partners. Without just focusing only on one section of the international community we should focus on the others too,” he said.

Underlining the need for the government and his party to work to a common agenda at least on national issues Jayasekara said: “The government should stop criticizing the UNP leadership and it members. We should agree on a common programme. If the government needs our help, they should tell us. If not we could carry out our political work on our own,” he said.

Over the past three years, Sri Lanka’s regime has spent 602 billion rupees or about $US6 billion on the war – equivalent to 14 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2008.

Following the declared victory over the LTTE and the end of brutal military campaign, far from there being any reduction in military expenses, Sri Lanka Army commander General Fonseka says that the army would be expanded by 50 percent, leading to increases in defence expenses.

“Our strength is 200,000 and it will become 300,000 soon... We like to see young men joining us more quickly. We don’t mind enlisting even 10,000 a month; we need a lot more soldiers to reach our goal,” Fonseka told, ITN, a local Television station on Monday May 25.

According to Fonseka, this huge army, one of the largest per capita in the world, will be used for a military occupation of the North and East of the island, primarily directed against the Tamil population.

“It will not be easy for them to build up a terror group as they did before,” Fonseka told ITN. 

However, US opposition to Sri Lanka’s request for a $1.9 billion IMF standby facility appears to be waning.

US Congressman Heath Shuler who was in Sri Lanka recently told reporters in Colombo that Sri Lanka deserves the loan for its development.

During the final phase of the war in Sri Lanka, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that “it was not the appropriate time to consider granting a massive IMF loan for Sri Lanka.’’

Asked to comment on Clinton’s statement, Shuler said that this was not the message he was getting from the authorities and also it is vital to separate economic issues from politics.

Following Clinton’s statement, Central Bank of Sri Lanka Governor Nivard Cabraal had said: "There is nothing in the governance structure of the IMF to indicate any political consideration be taken into account."

Also, the IMF has moved to asked the US Supreme Court to lift dismiss a case seeking to force the US to deny Sri Lanka the loan, arguing that the plaintiff has no standing, the court lacks jurisdiction, there is no private right of action to enforce "policy goals," and under federal law both defendants - Timothy Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury, and Meg Lundsager, Executive Director of the IMF - are immune from legal prosecution.

Tamils Against Genocide (TAG), which filed the original suit, is considering a response, but their ;lead counsel said he is leaning towards dismissing the IMF lawsuit voluntarily and let the political processes unfold.

"The resources needed to provide an effective rebuttal to the Government's position is very high," he told TamilNet.

Meanwhile, a number of humanitarian and rights organisations including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, International Crisis Group, the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, have urged the US other IMF member countries to block the loan to Sri Lanka.

“Deeply disappointing” was how a human rights group yesterday described the vote in the United Nations Human Rights Council hailing the victory of the Sri Lankan Government. This is a breathtaking understatement. It was an utter disgrace. The 47-member body, set up in 2006 to replace the previous corrupt and ineffectual UN Commission on Human Rights, has abjectly failed one of its first and most important tests.

It was asked by its European members to investigate widespread reports of atrocities and war crimes committed by both government troops and the Tamil Tigers in the final weeks of the conflict. The council chose instead to debate a one-sided, mendacious and self-serving motion put forward by the Sri Lankans. This welcomed the “liberation” of tens of thousands of the island's citizens, condemned the defeated Tigers, made no mention of the shelling of civilians and kept silent on the desperate need to allow the Red Cross and other humanitarian groups into the camps where some 270,000 Tamil civilians have been interned.

Support for this deeply flawed resolution came from the usual suspects - China, Russia, India, Pakistan and a clutch of Asian and Islamic nations determined to prevent the council ever investigating human rights violations in their own or any country. It was sad to see Israel, for obvious political motives, joining in this charade, claiming that massacres, violence, repression and internment are an “internal affair”.

To her credit, Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, insisted that there needed still to be an inquiry into “very serious abuses”. Those abuses, it now emerges, are far, far worse than the outside world imagined. The UN estimated that 7,000 people were killed in the first four months of this year; the figure now appears to be at least 20,000. Thousands of these victims died as a result of the shelling by the Sri Lankan Army of the strip of coastline where the final remnants of Tiger resistance were trapped, along with at least 100,000 civilians.

Photographs taken by The Times present clear evidence of an atrocity that comes close to matching Srebrenica, Darfur and other massacres of civilians. In the sandy so-called no-fire zone where the trapped Tamil civilians were told to go to escape the brutal army bombardment, there are hundreds of fresh graves as well as craters and debris where tents once stood. This was no safe zone. This was where terrified civilians buried their dead as the shells landed - after the Government had declared an end to the use of heavy weapons on April 27.

Some civilians were probably killed by the Tigers, whose brutality and ruthlessness over the past 28 years has fully justified their depiction as terrorists. Finding out what happened, however, is impossible: the army has barred entry to all outsiders. Food is short, sanitation appalling; wounded and traumatised civilians are in desperate need of help. That much is clear from those who have been able to escape. More sinister reports are now circulating of systematic “disappearances”, of families separ- ated and young men taken away. But until the Government allows in aid workers, the presumption must be that it wants nothing to be heard or seen of what is going on.

This tactic was used in the final push to beat the Tigers. The army wanted no witness to the onslaught, no journalists to alert the world to human rights violations, no photographers to record the suffering. Sri Lanka, now basking in its victory, may set the pattern for other nations battling against insurgencies. For them, victory is all that matters. Most of Sri Lanka may rejoice at the end of a bloody civil war. But the UN has no right to collude in suppressing the appalling evidence of the cost. The truth must be told.

Ban Ki Moon the Secretary-General of the United Nations, visited Sri Lanka last week. He knew from his officials that at least 20,000 civilians had been killed by Sri Lankan troops in the offensive against the Tamil Tigers. Mr Ban never mentioned this figure to his Sri Lankan interlocutors. He saw, while travelling by air over a supposed “no-fire” zone, the evidence of a massacre of thousands of Tamil civilians caught between the army and the insurgents. Yet he has still not confirmed the authenticity of photographs taken from the same helicopter setting out that scene of carnage and mass makeshift graves.

There is a terrible augury for such inexplicable reticence. The day after Bosnian Serb forces seized Srebrenica, deemed by the United Nations to be a “safe area”, in 1995, Boutros Boutros Ghali, Mr Ban’s predecessor, was asked whether this represented the organisation’s greatest failure in Bosnia. He replied: “No, I don’t believe this represents a failure. You have to see if the glass is half full or half empty.”

The name of Srebrenica, in which 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were slaughtered, has become synonymous with insouciance and failure by the UN, and not only with the barbarism of the perpetrators.

Any parallel for the UN with what has happened in Sri Lanka must be scotched now. That can be done only by Mr Ban speaking forthrightly about what he saw. He is a civil servant rather than an executive; and the cause of historical truth as well as international protest depends on the UN Security Council’s having full and public knowledge of what he saw.

There is no case for restricting diplomacy to private channels. There is no confidential quality to what Mr Ban can testify. David Miliband, the British Foreign Secretary, was denied access to the north of the country when he visited Colombo a fortnight ago. He has a belated but important role now in pressing Mr Ban to speak.

There is no question but that the defeated Tamil Tigers were guilty of numerous depredations and horrific acts of suicide terrorism. Vellupillai Prabhakaran, the slain leader of the Tigers, denied, among other murderous acts, sending the assassin of Rajiv Gandhi, the former Indian Prime Minister; few doubt that he was lying. But the shelling of civilians in a supposed safe area and their deaths by the tens of thousands are not a matter for the Sri Lankan Government alone. UN sources have described the offensive as a war waged without witnesses. However just the cause and brutal the adversary, there must always be disinterested witnesses to military campaigns. That is particularly so with adversaries that practise indiscriminate attacks: there is always a temptation, in response, to suspend the laws of war and the observance of due process in the name of a higher necessity. And that temptation must always be resisted.

The Sri Lankan Government has much to account for. Yet it has responded with disingenuity and fantasy. It first denied the deaths of civilians and then claimed that the photographic evidence, repeated by independent witnesses, had been forged. In doing so, it is perpetrating sins of omission in order to obscure those of commission. Mr Ban must speak; the UN must investigate. Nothing else will demonstrate a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.

Sri Lanka yesterday faced fresh calls for a war crimes inquiry after reports in The Times that at least 20,000 Tamils were killed, mostly by army shelling, in the closing stages of the civil war. But as Colombo clumsily denounced the reports and the photographic evidence as propaganda, evidence has emerged that not only the United Nations but several Western governments knew of the slaughter weeks ago but kept silent for fear of upsetting the Sri Lankan Government. Such a monstrous collusion in covering up an atrocity must not go unchallenged. If the UN Human Rights Council refuses to investigate what has happened, the West must do so forthwith.

An abashed UN yesterday admitted that the death toll from Sri Lanka's civil war was “unacceptably high”. But spokesmen still refused to confirm the total, compiled from UN sources on the ground. The figures were based on meticulous reports of the daily deaths among the desperate civilian refugees hit by army shells, and the UN rebuffed Sri Lanka's claim that not a single civilian had been killed by shelling. The “well-informed estimates” of casualties, it said, had been passed on to governments and the UN had been “ringing the alarm bells” for a long time.

Those bells were certainly muted. No Western government made public the scale of the killing. Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General, flew over the beaches where thousands of bodies are buried in fresh graves. But he has yet to speak out on the slaughter or confirm the authenticity of pictures ludicrously described in Colombo as “fakes”. Has no one learnt the lessons of My Lai or Srebrenica? If diplomats and top UN officials are too timid to denounce atrocities as they take place, what hope is there of preventing future efforts at extermination?

To the charge that the West, and this newspaper, is playing down the atrocities of the Tamil Tigers or belittling Colombo's success in eliminating the terrorist threat, there is a clear retort: nonsense. For years the West and The Times have denounced the suicide bombings, assassinations, recruitment of child soldiers and terrorist violence that were the hallmark of this blinkered and ruthless organisation. The Tigers were proscribed as terrorists across Europe. Their uncompromising commitment to violence and intimidation of their compatriots abroad were denounced. The Sri Lankan Government's success in freeing the country of their ravages is not in question.

But callousness, indifference to civilian casualties, triumphalism and mass internment of civilians have been the price of victory. The Government clearly believed that the war would be more easily won if no one was able to witness the tactics. That temptation appeals to every military commander. And where governments have backed them, as in Chechnya or Gaza, the results have been horrific, the country's name has been stained and the body politic has been damaged by the tolerance of the intolerable.

The casualties of wars deliberately waged out of sight of reporters, doctors and diplomats are not only higher, but they include also the victors. Sri Lanka's determination to exterminate the Tamil Tigers behind a wall of secrecy will have made ostensible military sense, but at the price of deserved obloquy for a debased cause.

Warfare can never be sanitised and civil wars are especially vicious. But countries and governments fighting for their rights must allow as much transparency as possible about their aims and methods. To embed journalists with the armed forces may give only a partial picture, but this tells more of the truth than blanket censorship. Where there has been excess, it must be exposed - if only to give reconciliation a chance. The UN must cry out. 

Pointing to a report in the French paper Le Monde, which quoted Vijay Nambiar, chief of Staff of UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, as telling UN representatives in Sri Lanka that the UN should “keep a low profile” and play a “sustaining role" that was "compatible with the government," Francis Boyle, professor of International Law at the University of Illinois College of Law said Saturday that both the United Nations Organization itself and its highest level officials are guilty of aiding and abetting Nazi-type crimes against the Tamils by the Government of Sri Lanka, in violation of international law.

"Unless this Momentum is reversed and all these U.N. Officials fired, the United Nations Organization shall follow the League of Nations into the "ashcan" of History," Boyle said.

Nambiar's statement made while the GOSL inflicted genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing upon the Tamils in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention, the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Two Additional Protocols of 1977, as well as the principles of Customary International Criminal Law set forth in the Nuremberg Charter (1945), the Nuremberg Judgment (1946) and the United Nation's own codification of the Nuremberg Principles (1950) for the trial and prosecution of the Nazis--all of which are now incorporated into the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court, Boyle said.

"In other words, both the United Nations Organization itself and its highest level officials are guilty of aiding and abetting Nazi-type crimes against the Tamils by the GOSL."

"The United Nations Organization and its Highest Level Officials did the exact same thing to the Bosnians at Srebrenica in July of 1995--Days that have lived in Infamy and Shame for the United Nations ever since then.

"By comparison, today the GOSL's genocidal massacre of the Tamils in Vanni could be about four times Serbia's genocidal massacre of the Bosnians at Srebrenica."

Further, The Times of UK revealed Saturday, that the top aide to the United Nations Secretary-General Nambiar was told more than a week earlier that at least 20,000 Tamil civilians were killed in the Sri Lankan Government’s final offensive against the Tamil Tigers.

"History is repeating itself with a vengeance for the United Nations. Unless this Momentum is reversed and all these U.N. Officials fired, the United Nations Organization shall follow the League of Nations into the "ashcan" of History!" Boyle said.

Adding further complicity to Vijay Nambiar's role as a special UN envoy to Sri Lanka is the involvement of his brother Satish Nambiar, a former Indian general as a consultant to the Sri Lankan government.

Satish Nambiar "was quoted on the Sri Lankan military's web page praising the Army's and its commander's conduct of the war in the north, despite all the civilians killed. It is, the [unnamed Security Council] diplomat said bitterly, all a family affair," a report of 11th May in the Inner City Press, said.

International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC) which was involved in evacuating injured civilians, announced on Wednesday May 27 that it was suspending its aid operations due to difficulties caused by “additional restrictions” placed upon it by the Sri Lanka government.

"Since last weekend there have been additional restrictions imposed on aid organisations, including the ICRC," Paul Castella, the head of the group's Sri Lanka operations, told Al Jazeera.

"The authorities have said that because of security they had to restrict access to certain areas,” he said. “What is the take of these civilians and what the conditions are we don't know because we are not granted access to the area."

“Restrictions have led to a temporary standstill in the distribution of aid” to the main camp holding 130,000 people, Monica Zanarelli, deputy head of operations in South Asia for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said on the ICRC’s Web site.

Until last weekend, the ICRC had delivered water, food, personal hygiene kits, baby-care parcels, emergency household items and kitchen utensils to the camp, known as Menik Farm, in the country's north, which housed more than 130,000 refugees, Zanarelli said on the Red Cross website.

“The ICRC is not in a position to provide figures or even to know whether all casualties are receiving the care they require,” Zanarelli said.

Restrictions on access are “having a severe effect on the thousands of newly arrived displaced people. The ICRC and other humanitarian aid agencies deplore this unacceptable situation,” she said.

Some of the liberals in Western policy establishments and the Sinhala chauvinists running Sri Lanka’s state have for several years had more than a little in common. Both have long laid the blame for the island’s crisis wholly on the LTTE and the broader Tamil national movement. And both have advocated a military solution to the conflict, irrespective of the catastrophic cost to the Tamil people.

For many years, many in the liberal policy establishments of the West have argued that the LTTE and Tamil nationalists are the single biggest obstacle to realizing a fully democratic, pluralist Sri Lanka. At the same time, they indulged Sri Lanka’s many and obvious failings and chauvinism, characterized this ethnocracy as a fledgling democracy heroically struggling to cope with a multitude of problems such as poverty and unemployment amidst a Tamil terrorist problem.

These liberals had almost fanatical belief that once the LTTE had been crushed and the insolent Tamil nationalists put in their place, Sri Lanka would be well on its way to becoming an inclusive, democratic and peaceful polity.

Amid this unshakeable conviction, many liberals were eager to resume the war against the LTTE and when President Rajapakse did just that in 2006, fell enthusiastically in line. Indeed, only the Tamils and the LTTE protested the collapse of the Norwegian-facilitated peace process.

So now that the implacable liberals have finally got what they wanted, the military defeat of the LTTE, shouldn’t they be pleased? Apparently not. It seems Rajapakse’s military victory has not brought the island any close to a liberal peace. Indeed, Sri Lanka is further from a liberal peace than at any point in its bloody sixty year history.

Having “slaughtered” – in Human Rights Watch’s terms – 20,000 Tamil civilians in just five months, the Sri Lankan state has now interned the 300,000 people of the Vanni behind barded wire and machineguns. In brazen sight of the international community, Tamils are subject, at the state’s will, to murder, abduction and rape. Separated from loved ones, starved, suffering grievous wounds, they are clinging to their humanity amid the state’s deliberate and calculated violence. So much for liberal peace.

Meanwhile, in the north, Jaffna is still an open prison where paramilitaries and soldiers maraud at will. The island’s east, ‘liberated’ in 2007 to international acclaim, is a seething cauldron of ethnic tension, chronic insecurity and Sinhala colonisation. In the south, Tamils are harassed by Sinhalese on the streets and in their homes, whilst the police look on nonchalantly. So much for liberal peace.

Ironically, only the liberals are surprised. Everyone on the island – including even critics and opponents of the LTTE – have long well understood these are the dynamics that make up Sri Lanka.

So how did Western liberals, espousing peace and inclusivity, end up promoting a racist war that has wrought such destruction on the Tamils and fuelled a virulent Sinhala chauvinism?

It began with a persistent misreading and misinterpretation of the Sri Lankan conflict.

Liberals have long sought to characterize Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict as one that began when the LTTE attacked the Sri Lankan military in the early 1980’s. Until that point, liberals claim, Sri Lanka was a thriving if somewhat flawed liberal democracy. All of Sri Lanka’s subsequent ills, including below potential economic growth, societal tensions and political instability have thus been conveniently blamed on the Tigers - and Tamils for supporting it.

If only there was no LTTE, the liberals have argued (the literature is awash with this), then not only would Sri Lanka see rapid economic growth and development, but these would almost inevitably be followed by a liberal and inclusive political settlement and a thriving plural and civic culture.

This simplistic and reductive reading of Sri Lanka’s conflict is problematic, chiefly not least as it fails to take seriously at all the Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism deeply embedded in the state and Sinhala polity.

It thereby mistakes the LTTE, a symptom of Sri Lanka’s problems, for the cause. At the same time, it mistakes state chauvinism, the cause, for a symptom.

Tamils, of course, recall the three decades of violence, exclusion and persecution by the Sinhala-dominated state, thirty years of deepening alienation that resulted in a resounding mandate for an independent Tamil Eelam by 1976.

The LTTE and Tamil militancy more widely (there were at least five major armed movements in the eighties) are a consequence of the state’s structural and violent oppression of the Tamils, rather than an exogenous factor that arrived from nowhere and triggered ethnic conflict in an otherwise unproblematic polity.

Tamils confronting this Western liberal misreading of the conflict have tirelessly pointed out Sri Lanka’s history of oppression and repression that predated by many years the arrival of Tamil militancy. They have pointed to the disenfranchisement of Upcountry Tamils, the violent state-backed anti-Tamil pogroms, the state sponsored ethnic cleansing and Sinhala colonisation of traditional Tamil areas, the destruction of Tamil heritage (including the torching of Jaffna library with its irreplaceable and priceless manuscripts) and the deliberate economic neglect and strangulation of Tamil speakers and the Tamil speaking areas.

However, rather than engaging with the historic and structural forces that culminated in violent conflict in the early 1980’s – i.e. with the ‘roots’ of conflict – many liberals have preferred to take comfort in simplistic frameworks whereby ‘armed groups’ – i.e. the LTTE – are the fundamental problem. Whatever the factors that led up to armed conflict, they asserted, the problem now was armed conflict itself.

Thus, the LTTE was pilloried and the state celebrated. The former was deemed unremittingly violent, incapable of reform and fanatically committed to a crude ethno nationalist ideology. (This, of course, is what the Tamils were saying about the Sri Lankan state and today’s Sri Lanka speaks for itself.)

When in 2001 the LTTE’s hard fought military stalemate with the Sri Lankan state created the conditions for a political process, the liberals seized the opportunity. Not to examine and address the structural causes of the conflict, however, but to crush once and for all the LTTE and the Tamil nationalist project.

The liberal hawks’ will to war was undisguised. Before and throughout the peace process, they repeatedly cast aspersions on the LTTE’s commitment and belittled its efforts to govern the areas under its control. Conversely, they papered over the state’s chauvinism with bureaucratic and technocratic excuses. They poured scorn on the LTTE’s attempts to reconcile international demands with its real and substantive security concerns, whilst ignoring the LTTE’s concessions at the negotiation table.

Within months of the 2002 ceasefire, the liberals had completely forgotten that it was the LTTE that had called for international mediation and, from a position of military strength, first offered a unilateral ceasefire. Instead they began to assert that the ‘reluctant’ LTTE had been ‘forced’ into a ceasefire because of the ‘war on terror’ and that it could only be kept on the straight and narrow by more or less open political and military coercion.

Despite Tamils’ pleas that a military balance was the only way to maintain stability in Sri Lanka, the hawkish liberals rushed to rearm the Sri Lankan state. Whilst actively working to militarily constrain the LTTE, they massively increased the Sri Lankan military’s conventional capability and provided the state with unqualified diplomatic support as it brazenly violated key aspects of the Ceasefire Agreement (all of Article 2 on normalisation, especially).

Having rebuilt and massively expanded the state’s economic base and conventional military capability, the liberals heaped blame on the LTTE for the failure of the peace process when it began to unravel amid the state’s new-found confidence.

Why compromise when you can fight and win?

Thus, the eventual resumption of war in 2006 should be seen as nothing but the logical consequence of the simplistic but dangerous frameworks through which liberals pursued peace in Sri Lanka.

This is also why the possibilities for a meaningful and sustained political process in Sri Lanka are the bleakest ever: Sinhala chauvinism is now untrammelled on the island.

As Tamils have long argued, without a credible military threat the Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism that led to the conflict and served to escalate it to this catastrophic point will unfurl in all its supremacist glory. In particular, the Sri Lankan state will not voluntarily move an inch towards a credible political solution to the Tamil question.

Indeed, arguing that because it has vanquished the LTTE, the Sri Lankan leadership now tells the world that it wants a solution based on the philosophy of Buddhism. Nothing here about a political solution compatible with the norms of liberalism and democracy for which the West backed a murderous military campaign.

Instead, the entire Tamil population is subject to militarised domination, internment and depredation (in the Northeast) or arbitrary racial violence (in the South). The Sinhala military is to be expanded by another 100,000 - even though victory has been declared. The 300,000 military is the basis for state-society relationship. Hardly liberal peace, then.

Sri Lanka’s future is not one of “ethnic reconciliation”, “peace-building”, “development” and “unity”, but one of deepening communal antagonisms, wholesale marginalisation of Tamil speakers (not just Tamils), as well as systemic abuse and violence by the state.

What is clear is that the belligerent liberals who enthusiastically advocated this war have little by way of a coherent policy response to this unfolding crisis.

Up to now, the usual response was to blame the LTTE for any and every problem in Sri Lanka and thus prescribe further violence and coercion against the Tigers and the wider Tamil liberation movement.

This has been the only liberal policy response. The LTTE has been proscribed by several Western liberal democracies, its members subjected to travel bans and its leaders have been openly targeted for assassination with international sanction. Meanwhile the wider Tamil liberation movement, both within Sri Lanka and in the Diaspora, has been subject to sustained assault using anti terror legislation, sanction and even direct violence.

Tamil civil society – when it holds the wrong political beliefs (i.e. an independent Eelam) – has been criminalised, its leaders and representatives imprisoned or murdered (the faceless killers could never be found, but no one, not even the Western liberals, cared).

The Sri Lankan state fully expects more of the same from the liberal West. Whilst subjecting 300,000 Tamils to hellish conditions of existence, it trots out the LTTE as justification: ‘infiltrators’. Meantime, it calls on the West to attack the Diaspora.

But what should be starkly apparent now is that none of this is going to produce liberal peace on the island.

Those who thought the LTTE could be brought to a hurting stalemate and a negotiated solution thereafter pursued, seriously misjudged the uncompromising Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism that has driven Sri Lanka for the past sixty years. The fiction the Sri Lankan state wanted meaningful political engagement with the Tamils has been destroyed, along with 20,000 more Tamil bodies.

For years, LTTE leaders such as Anton Balasingham, S.P Thamilchelvan and P. Nadesan attempted to engage seriously with Western liberals. Whilst the Sinhala chauvinists ridiculed the liberal peace or mockingly adopted its rhetoric whilst spending Western aid and drawing on liberal political support, these LTTE figures attempted repeatedly to explain that Tamil liberation is not illiberal.

Whilst the Tamils will mourn them and their comrades as heroes and martyrs, the international community will come to acutely feel their absence. Sri Lanka’s crisis will not stand still and it will not improve. The international project to secure a stable and lasting solution to Sri Lanka’s conflict thus stands at a crossroads. Will the liberals support further repression of the Tamils or will they finally confront the Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism that has brought the island to its present misery? Whatever course is chosen, any credible attempt to ensure a stable and lasting peace in the island will require not just a radical break from the past but also a critical rethinking of past policies. This is a liberal quagmire.

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.”

Calling for increased access so the international community could make a decision on war crimes, the outgoing US Ambassador to Sri Lanka gave a final press conference on Wednesday before his departure from the country.

"On the question of war crimes we think it's important for the international community to have more information about what happened on both sides during the recent offensive in northern Sri Lanka," said US Ambassador to Sri Lanka Robert Blake.

"And that's one of the reasons that we press for access for the ICRC and the U.N."

Referring to the current situation, Blake said this is a beginning rather than an end as now the process of national reconciliation should begin.

“For the country this is a new beginning. Now begins the critical process of national reconciliation.”

Blake also responded to reporters who questioned whether Washington had spoke out forcefully enough during the past few weeks when both the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers claimed the other was deliberately killing civilians. 

"They were trapped by the LTTE and were effectively used as human shields. But we also called on the government to abide by its own commitment not to use heavy weapons in the safe zone," he said. "I think there were some violations there."

The outgoing Ambassador said he “hoped” the Sri Lankan government would work cooperatively with the United Nations, the ICRC and non-governmental organizations to allow humanitarian access so that all of those organizations can help meet the needs of the nearly 300,000 displaced civilians.

He said his government is committed to help and had already provided US$ 21 million in assistance to help meet the urgent needs of the IDPs.

“We are assessing how we might help more,” he said.

Ambassador Blake has been nominated by President Obama to be the State Department's Assistant Secretary for South Asia, and on Thursday his selection was confirmed by the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs.

His nomination now goes to the US Senate for final approval, following which he would replace Richard Boucher, as the points man of the Obama Administration for South and Central Asia.