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.

Up to 30,000 Tamil civilians have been left severely disabled by Sri Lankan army shelling in the so-called 'no-fire zone', it has been revealed.

Aid workers said one in ten of the 280,000 civilian refugees who fled the Sri Lankan army's final onslaught against the Tamil Tiger rebels had either lost limbs or been so badly injured they urgently needed prosthetic limbs or wheelchairs to regain their mobility.

The scale of civilian casualties who have been maimed in the war was disclosed by the award-winning French charity Handicap International, which works with the victims of war throughout the world.

The charity, which has a small factory producing artificial limbs in Batticaloa in Sri Lanka's eastern province, has opened an emergency unit at one of the centres for people who fled the fighting, and is working with

other suppliers to meet what it described a "huge demand".

Aid workers said nearly all of the people had been the victims of relentless Sri Lankan shelling of the civilian safe zone, where the last of the Tamil Tiger leadership made its last stand before it was wiped out last week.

The disclosure of thousands of severely maimed and disabled civilian victims contradicts the claims of Sri Lanka's president Mahinda Rajapaksa, who has said his army rescued 280,000 "hostages" without any civilian casualties.

The injured are being held in hospitals throughout the country and camps in the north which are off-limits to journalists and open only to a small number of specialist aid workers.

Handicap International's Sri Lanka director Satish Misra said the number of maimed could be "about 25,000 to 30,000 people".

He said he had established an emergency centre at Vavuniya last year in anticipation of the demand, and that a team of specialist physiotherapists and occupational therapists were now working with the victims.

Their work has been hampered by a government ban on refugees leaving the camp which means the wounded cannot be taken to his factory in Batticaloa, on the eastern coast, where new artificial limbs are fitted and the patients are trained in their use.

"We can't start fitting the prosthetic yet because it's difficult while the people are not allowed out of the camps. The limbs must be fitting and people must be trained how to use them," he said.

One aid worker who has visited the refugee camps told the Daily Telegraph he had been shocked by the number of displaced civilians who had lost limbs in the recent fighting.

"We know of one person who lost his leg and his wife lost both her legs. They have an eight month old baby. They left the baby in the bunker to get food and were shelled when they came out. They are in Vavuniya camp," he said.

The conditions there and at other restricted camps in the north were the worst he had seen in a 20 year career of helping refugees in war zones around the world, he said.

Old people had died because they had lost their families and could not fend for themselves in the camps, while many children were alone without relatives to care for them. Many children were emaciated, he said, and skin diseases were widespread.

"There are 6,000 people in Polmoddai Camp. They're destitute, arrive in just the clothes they're wearing and put in tents which are excruciatingly hot. The camp is in the jungle, and there have been five people bitten by snakes. The camps at Vavuniya have open sewers, and have become a marshy mass of excrement.

"There are seriously injured people sent to camp in these unhygienic crowded conditions," he said.

(Edited for space)

Desperation is rife among the 280,000 Tamil civilians imprisoned in internment camps in northern Sri Lanka with countless civilians unable to locate or contact relatives missing or separated during the bloody chaos that ensued during the final weeks of the Sri Lankan military onslaught.

Many clutched a razor wire fence, desperately searching the crowds on the other side for a familiar face as they tried to discover whether their loved ones were still alive and at liberty, or in another of the camps, a British newspaper reporter describing the plight of the civilians in one of the camps wrote.

Some are still hoping to find relatives amid the rows of tents that provide a temporary home.

But others say relatives were separated out by the military, suspected of being Tamil Tigers.

One refugee said that thousands of fleeing civilians were separated from their families when they reached the army check-point, where they were pushed onto buses and taken to different hospitals and camps.

Navamani, 43, from Vattuvagal in Mullaitivu district, said she had lost her three children, aged 16, 18 and 21, in the chaos.

The task of tracking down lost relatives is complicated by the fact that inmates are not allowed to leave the camp because of the risk, the Government says, that LTTE fighters inside may escape.

The tactics of herding civilians into internment camps indefinitely has been widely criticised.

Sri Lanka has offered up contradictory explanations.

Officials and military officers at the camps variously claimed that the civilians were there for their own safety, for the safety of the rest of the population and because most "have been involved in some sort of activity for the LTTE".

Some officials said that screening of the civilians was taking place inside the camps.

However, other officials admitted that no such screening was taking place, raising questions over the purpose of the continued detentions.

“No formal screening at the camps, no,” Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara, the military spokesman, said.

International journalists who managed to speak to some of the Tamils held in the Menik Farm internment camp reported of heartbreaking stories of mothers searching for their children, elders unable to contact relatives and children, including infants lost without parents.

Bhuvaneswari, whose son and two daughters are missing, held photographs through the wire.

"Nine members of my family are missing, please help me find them," she asked Britain’s The Telegraph reporter.

"They've been missing since the mass exodus on April 20th. When the army entered the safe zone and cut the area in two, we were separated. We don't know if they've been killed by the army or what."

Thangarajah, 59, a carpenter, told telegraph that his family had moved 14 times since January as the Tigers retreated into the "no-fire zone" on the north-east coast.

"My son and daughter-in-law, my brother-in-law, my cousin, all died in shelling attacks. We built bunkers and kept moving from one place to another. Shells were falling everywhere. Four people died in my family while I was there. We just left their bodies in the bunker and filled them in," he added.

33-year-old Yogisuran’s, three children – Thuyamthini, Kuwanthini and Thusiyanthini - have not seen their mother for weeks, ever since a shell exploded next to the bunker where they had taken cover, ripping a hole in her stomach, reported the Guardian newspaper.

Medics rushed 29-year-old Sandi to a makeshift hospital, where doctors operated to save her life. All that Sandi's family know is that she was later evacuated on a ship by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

They have not seen her since, and trapped with tens of thousands of others in the Menik Farm camp they are powerless to do anything about it.

Another camp refugee, Threekanden, 27, is similarly distraught at the disappearance of a loved one. He produces a picture of himself and his wife, Pokonai, on their wedding day. They were split up last month, he said, when the army advanced on the last Tamil Tiger redoubt in northern Sri Lanka.

"Now I cannot find my wife or our daughter. The girl is only four and my wife was nine months pregnant. I don't know where they are. We need help to find them." He told the Guardian.

Navaratnam Rasapalen, 31, said he arrived at Menik Farm on 18 May. He lost contact with his wife, Jagadah, and three children, aged seven, five and three, on 18 April when the army advanced.

"The army cut off the civilians in a box and I could not find them," he told the Guardian.

"I just want to find them. I don't know what to do. Please help me to find them."

Several others in the same part of the camp had similar stories reported the Guardian and added that evidence of the brutality of civil war was everywhere.

One young woman, who gave her name as Banji, was carrying her 18-month-old daughter, Umarani. The child's head was wrapped in a tattered bandage and her right hand was bound up. She had been hit by shrapnel from a shell, her mother said, which had gashed her head and broken some of her fingers.

"The problem is that the government thinks we are all LTTE. There is nothing we can do," said Sivalingam, 63, a medical officer from Kilinochchi, who had recently arrived at the camp.

At Vavuniya's Zone Two, a few miles down the road, a mother and daughter who had been separated for five months had finally found one another, but were not allowed to embrace, according to the Telegraph.

Kandaswamy, 73, was weeping on one side of the razor-wire, and reaching out to her daughter, Laxmi, 45, who has been in detention since fleeing the final battle earlier this month. She needed all the comfort she could get – four of her five children had been killed in shelling – reported the Telegraph.

An army spokesman said that up to 6,000 families had been reunited to date, and that they were working to bring separated families together.

But he added: "At the moment we don't know how many families are separated or how many disappeared." 

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.

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.”

The United Nations deliberately hid the number of Tamil civilians being killed during the Sri Lankan government offensive against the LTTE, according to a report in the French daily Le Monde.

The report, translated by FRANCE 24, quotes several UN sources alleging that high-ranking UN officials, including Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, chose to keep silent about the high civilian death toll so as to avoid offending the Sri Lankan government and maintain UN operations in the country. A low figure was even leaked by the UN in mid-May, when it was known that the real toll was approaching 20,000 dead.

Speaking to FRANCE 24 from Sri Lanka, Philippe Bolopion, who wrote the piece in Le Monde, said he did not believe the downplayed figures were due to institutional incompetence.

“I would say their moral compass might have gone wrong,” said Bolopion, referring to senior UN officials.

“The most important thing for them was to stay in the country.”

According to Le Monde, a group of experts was put together by the UN to compile casualty figures for Sri Lanka, but only a partial total was leaked to the press.

This leak put the estimated death toll at 7,700 by mid-May, days before the Sri Lankan government declared victory in their offensive against the LTTE.

The 7,700 figure was then widely accepted and used by the international press right up until the end of the conflict despite the daily rises in civilian death tolls, according to the report.

But UN staff working on the ground informed Vijay Nambiar, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s chief of staff, that the final figures “would without doubt exceed 20,000 dead,” the report said.

“We knew carnage was brewing,” the paper quoted an unnamed UN official as saying.

“We rang the alarm bells for some months but no-one ever took the Sri Lankan government to task publicly.”

“Everyone is scared of having their agency removed from the country,” another anonymous source told the paper.

According to Le Monde, Nambiar even told UN representatives in Sri Lanka that the UN should “keep a low profile” and play a “sustaining role" that was "compatible with the government”.

In recent weeks, Nambiar’s role as the UN’s special envoy in Colombo has come into question, FRANCE 24 said. His brother, Satish, a former Indian general, has been a paid consultant to the Sri Lankan army since 2002.

Shortly after the Sri Lankan army’s official victory declaration, the local head of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), Amin Awad, told the Arabic TV station Al Jazeera there were virtually no civilians left in the conflict zone, the article notes.

But the very next day, some 20,000 refugees came out of the conflict zone, having suffered a sustained bombardment.

“It gave the government a blank cheque to carpet bomb the whole area,” a UN worker told the Le Monde.

The UN has defended its reticence to give specific casualty figures as the conflict was raging.

“We absolutely reject the allegation that the UN deliberately downplayed civilian casualties,” UN spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs told FRANCE 24.

“The UN has publicly and repeatedly said that the number of people killed in recent months has been unacceptably high. What we have are well-informed estimates and not precise verifiable numbers. But the UN has not been shy about the scale of human suffering and civilian casualties.”

But speaking to FRANCE 24, Bolopion said his sources informed him that the UN was not releasing the findings of its staffers on the ground “even though they were much more solid than those the UN has used in other conflict zones”.

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.

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.

The events of the past few weeks, while marking a dark phase of Tamil history and indelible shame on contemporary world leadership, have imperceptibly brought in new equations in global power politics.

The onslaught on Eelam Tamil liberation, wrongly chosen by a brutal alliance of the world to test the effectiveness of 'War on Terror' and the diplomatic con of 'Human Rights', aiming at world domination, not only backfired at the perpetrators, but has also paved way for the emergence of a counter alliance, worst in its outlook. The world will be witnessing the results very soon.

But, the unfortunate irony is that the Eelam Tamil question is always kept at the receiving end, as a 'punishment' for upholding the independence of the struggle.

The bias of the Indian Establishment towards the independence of Eelam Tamils and their liberation movement played a crucial role in keeping the genocidal Sri Lanka at the crest of the waves and the Tamils at the receiving end.

But this treacherous foreign policy of India is heading for the same disaster Krishna Menon led India into in the 50s and 60s on the question of Tibet and China.

The stubbornness of the Indian Establishment in refusing to recognise the need for the liberation of Eelam Tamils is what that paved way for the Co-Chairs meddling cum failure and the prolonged agony in the island. The 'punishment' meted out by India for Tamils accepting Co-Chairs mediation is massacre and incarceration.

Now, all those who were a party to the war crimes, especially the new Strategic Partners, India and China using UN, are busy in masking the war criminals and in abetting Colombo in treating all Tamils as Prisoners of War.

The camps and the 'rehabilitation' model adopted by Colombo and endorsed by the UN is explicit about it. The West backing a similar move in Pakistan's Swat Valley can afford to make only a verbal fuss of what is happening in the island, in making a whole nation as prisoners of war.

The trauma faced by Eelam Tamils everywhere, including in the diaspora, is immense. They have demonstrated a hitherto unseen solidarity with their cause. Now, their trauma has come to a stage of not merely denouncing all leaders of the world, but even cursing their own deities.

The world leadership, which didn't care for the will of the people didn't demonstrate its own will to bring in a solution either, other than confirming genocide. Therefore, the struggle is only further imposed on Eelam Tamils.

The sentiments expressed by the Eelam Tamils in the last few days show that they have not conceded 'victory' to Colombo.

The general thinking among them, is that the agenda for the catastrophe was set by the Indian Establishment with the connivance of M. Karunanidhi, and the coup de grace was served by the White House administration by its failure to act at the right time in doing what it was telling.

Tamils have still not seriously started thinking about the gravity of the treacherous roles played by China, Japan, Pakistan and some others.

The sentiments of the Eelam Tamils also show that Pirapaharan is not a mortal or physical entity, but a symbol for them. The symbol will be there and the 'file' cannot be closed as long as the issues are alive.

Colombo and the Indian Establishment, harping on the scenario created by them, are in a hurry to close the file and turn the hands of the clock backwards by talking about the implementation of the 13th Amendment as solution.

The Congress President Sonia Gandhi, even at the height of the election campaign, didn't move an inch from the 13th Amendment.

Tamils find it a mockery that it took decades of their struggle for India to come out with this half-baked solution and it took another two decades of bloodbath of Tamils just for India to talk about implementing it.

Adding insult to injury is Indian Home Minister P. Chidambaram's statement of sending the Eelam Tamil refugees in India back to join the already incarcerated people in the camps and the open prisons in the island.

Meanwhile, Eelam Tamils closely watch the various circles that come out with different shades of political formulas as solution, with an excuse that independence and sovereignty to Eelam Tamils is impossible in this generation, as the present world doesn't have 'appetite' for new nation states.

India's Home Minister Chidambaram himself, slightly differing from his party chief, has called for a federal solution during his election campaign.

Norway's International Development Minister Erik Solheim advocates federal with 'some autonomy'.

The main political parties of Tamil Nadu have said Tamil Eelam is the solution. But, one has to wait and see whether they would be sticking to that agenda in practice.

Now it seems that some well-wishers in India are embarked upon promoting a confederation model.

While thanking good intention, what the Tamil circles wonder is that who is going to deliver these verbal proposals, when all leverages of Colombo are forfeited.

The reality faced by Tamils today is multifaceted genocide by Colombo.

Political circles in Colombo tell that no solution will be forthcoming until the demographic and structural genocide of Tamils are completed. When something in the name of a solution is finally delivered to hoodwink, it will be only symbolic.

The Eelam Tamils and their political representatives have no obligation to anyone now, to engage in the deliberations of fruitless alternatives.

But the world has an obligation now to tell the Tamils whether its opposition is to what it has perceived as 'terrorism' or to Tamil nationalism.

Whether the need for another armed struggle, more effective than ever, is going to be imposed upon the Tamils or not, lies very much on the responses of the International Community to the precarious situation created by it.

It is also the responsibility of the International Community now to demonstrate in deeds, and not in words, the viability of political alternatives in the context of Sri Lanka that has beyond any doubt proved its genocidal capabilities during the current war.

Everybody knows that without the de-construction of the Sri Lankan state and its concept of 'Sinhala Only' sovereignty, no viable alternative can emerge.

Therefore, the Tamils are not at all impressed by any of the empty statements and diplomatic deliberations of the IC pleading Sri Lanka drunk with 'victory' to come out with 'political solutions', unless the IC directly takes over the Tamil provinces without caring for Sri Lanka's sovereignty, in order to bring in a political solution satisfying the national aspirations of Tamils.

Leaving such matters to the conmen and the gullible, the Eelam Tamil mainstream has a historic responsibility on its shoulders to be performed right now, without wasting any time.

The foremost is the task of re-structuring the political struggle. All the anger, frustration and unfulfilled aspirations have to be now translated into positive energy of formulating a political idiom suitable enough for a global discourse to achieve liberation.

Among the very few classical as well as living cultures of humanity, such as the Chinese, Hebrews and Arabs, the Tamils, especially the Eelam Tamils, have become an endangered identity. The world neither protected them nor allowed them to protect themselves.

The response of Eelam Tamils to such a situation should suit their great cultural heritage.

If the present world system is working against them in toto and if the world doesn't have enough appetite to look into their righteous aspirations, then the Tamils matching to their civilisation should come out with introducing something innovative and creative to the world system itself.

If the oppression to their nationalism is trans-national, the Eelam Tamils have to respond by forming a trans-national government fully responsible to them based on democracy, to negotiate with the world and to look after their own affairs.

Needless to say, the appropriate beginning is re-mandating the fundamentals of Vaddukkoddai Resolution, and based on that democratically endorsed commitment, electing representatives for a trans-national assembly and government.

The Eelam Tamils democratically denouncing the shackles of Sri Lankan identity imposed on them is an important step.

Equally important is that the innovative models should originate from within the Eelam Tamil nation.

It may not be immediately possible to involve people who have no political freedom in the camps and in the open prisons in the island of Sri Lanka and people in the camps for over quarter a century in India.

But, the global Eelam Tamil diaspora is free to demonstrate this noble venture.

Eelam Tamils in Norway have already set a model for conducting democratic elections in diaspora context. A publication on the procedures experimented in Norway are awaited soon.

The Tamil request to the civilised world at this juncture is to support their democratic experiment and to listen to their democratic voices. 

A British woman who was working at a hospital helping victims of Sri Lanka's civil war has been interned in one of the island's detention camps, prompting her family to plead for urgent diplomatic help to secure her immediate release.

Speaking to the Guardian, relatives of Damilvany Gnanakumar – known as Vany – said that she was detained a fortnight ago as the Sri Lankan army moved in to finish off the remnants of the Tamil Tigers after a military onslaught that left thousands dead and sent many more fleeing for their lives.

The British passport holder, who has a background in biomedical science, called the family home in Chingford, Essex, on 19 May, to beg for help.

"She said: 'I'm in this camp, you have to get me out of here,' but then the phone went dead," said her sister, Subha Mohanathas, 29, yesterday. She said that her mother, Lathaa, 45, was desperately worried, but she believed that her sister would pull through.

"Vany is one of the strongest people, she can do whatever she likes because she is not really frightened of anything.

"I just want my sister back with me as soon as possible. My mum is crying and we need her back. We didn't have anything to do with the war."

Gnanakumar had spent the last few months working in temporary hospitals in the no-fire zone, where doctors have struggled to save the lives of civilians injured during intense fighting.

Diplomatic efforts to secure her release have so far been unsuccessful and last night her family appealed to the Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, to allow her to return to the UK.

She is being held in the Menik Farm camps outside the town of Vavuniya, a sprawling, sweltering expanse of tents across hundreds of acres of barren scrubland.

The family said that Gnanakumar had been staying in Mullivaykkal - the scene of some of the heaviest fighting - and had called in January to say that she had been caught up in the conflict and was unable to leave. On 12 May they saw her on a Tamil television programme working in a hospital.

"We had not heard anything from her until then, we didn't know whether she was still alive, whether something had happened to her," said Mohanthas.

Her father, Kandasamy Kumaran, 51, who has written to his MP, Iain Duncan Smith, appealing for help, said she had come into contact with some doctors and had said she was willing to help because of her background in biomedical science. She had also had training and work experience at a British hospital, he said.

"She was recruited by the Mullivaykkal hospital to help and nurse the injured. In fact, I saw her [on television] assisting and looking after the wounded patients," he said.

Gnanukumar's uncle, Navaratnasamy Naguleswaran, said the family had decided to make a public appeal because they were concerned that attempts to secure her release through the Foreign Office had so far proven unsuccessful.

He said the family had received a call last Friday from the Foreign Office to say that it was seeking her release, but that information since then had been sparse.

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian from the no-fire zone on 12 May, Gnanakumar described the horrors of the final days of the 26-year war. A shell had exploded at the hospital where she was working, killing 47 people.

"This is really a disaster. I don't know really how to explain it. At the moment, it is like hell," she said at the time. "For us, shell bombing is just a normal thing now. It is like an everyday routine. We have reached a point where it's like death is not a problem at all."

The Sri Lankan government maintains that civilian casualties were the result of attacks by the LTTE designed to generate adverse publicity for the military.

But the UN has described the civilian toll as "unacceptably high". Estimates for the death toll this year alone range from 8,000 to more than double that number.

Sri Lanka has dismissed calls for an independent inquiry into claims of human rights abuses by the military, saying its own courts will investigate.

Foreign minister Rohita Bogollagama said the claims that heavy weaponry was used in civilian areas during the war with Tamil Tigers were "fictional".

He said the claims were being used to boost accusations of genocide against the country's Tamil minority.

Aid agencies and the United Nations have called for an inquiry.

The exact number of civilians killed in the final weeks of the long-running war has not been established, but one report put it as high as 20,000.

An unverified and unofficial UN estimate said that more than 7,000 civilians were killed and another 13,000 injured in the conflict from January to April this year, according to the BBC's Anbarasan Ethirajan in Colombo.

Mr Bogollagama said the allegations were intended to discredit the armed forces and embarrass the government of Sri Lanka.

Government forces were ordered to stop using heavy weapons on 27 April.

From that time onwards they were supposed to observe a no-fire zone where 100,000 Tamil men, women and children were sheltering.

"Those transmitted, unsubstantiated allegations against the military claimed heavy weapons in civilian areas being used in order to buttress the propaganda of genocide against the Tamil people," Mr Bogollagama said.

"This was both fictional and well-fabricated, with ulterior and sinister motives, in order to discredit the armed forces, as well as to embarrass the government of Sri Lanka."

He said now that the war was over, the country would seek to rebuild.

"Our people are weary of war, yet they are resilient and want to get on with their lives.

"Therefore, the post-conflict period will focus on rehabilitation, resettlement, economic development and holding free and fair elections."

The UN's senior humanitarian affairs co-ordinator, John Holmes, said that while the estimates had no "justification," the claims were serious and needed to be investigated.

Human rights group Amnesty International also called on the UN to investigate.

But Mr Bogollagama, speaking during a summit of Asian defence ministers in Singapore, told Reuters: "Sri Lanka is a sovereign country with its own legal framework.

"We have a very strong separation of powers (and) the judiciary is independent."

The foreign minister also appealed for international help in disabling, what he described, as the Tamil Tigers' powerful political lobbies outside Sri Lanka that were seeking to resurrect the movement.

"It is important for the international community to take all measures to assist the government of Sri Lanka, to track down the global network of the LTTE (Tamil Tigers)," Mr Bogollagama said.

Sri Lanka's president on rejected a call by the UN Secretary General to lift restrictions on aid delivery to overcrowded displacement camps, saying the army must first finish screening the hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians held in the internment camps in north of the island.

President Mahinda Rajapakse's statement, on Sunday May 24, came in response to an appeal by Ban Ki Moon during a 24-hour visit to Sri Lanka for unfettered access for aid agencies to the camps, where nearly 300,000 Tamils were herded during the final stages of the war.

Ban's hurried visit was intended to press the government to ease what aid agencies described as a humanitarian crisis in the camps, with inadequate food supplies and reports of epidemics because of improper sanitation.

But Rajapakse said security had to be assured "in view of the likely presence of LTTE infiltrators" among the refugees. "As conditions improved, especially with regard to security, there would be no objections to such assistance, from organizations that were genuinely interested in the well being" of the displaced Tamils, he said.

The bluntness of the president's statement contrasted with the milder tone of a joint communique with Ban, released almost simultaneously.

In that statement, Ban said the U.N. would continue providing humanitarian assistance to the displaced people, and Rajapaksa promised to "continue to provide access to humanitarian agencies."

Meanwhile, the Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), one of the UN agencies operating in Sri Lanka expressed concern about the fate of people newly arriving at the camps.

The UNHCR reiterated calls for more assistance, citing the lack of services available for aid workers assisting the refugees who have left the former conflict zones.

"There are several issues that need urgent attention, including overcrowding and the limited services available at the camps,'' said Ron Redmond, the UNHCR spokesman.

"Civilians coming out of the conflict zone are sick, hungry and suffering from acute malnourishment and dehydration,'' he said in Geneva.

Redmond said he did not know why the authorities were blocking access to the camps.

"It's urgent that assistance gets into those camps and that we are able to deliver. We've got lots of humanitarian supplies that need to be delivered," he told the briefing.

“The latest massive influx of people, who have endured extreme conditions, will put an even greater strain on the internally displaced people sites in Vavuniya, Jaffna and Trincomalee,” he said.

The UNHCR is concerned about government restrictions that are hindering the agency’s access and delivery of aid supplies, particularly in Vavuniya district, the UN said on its Web site.

"We need to have access, I repeat, total access, without the least let or hindrance, for the UN, for NGOs and for the Red Cross," Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman for the U.N. Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told a news briefing.

Byrs said NGOs (non-governmental organisations) were encountering difficulties getting into camps for displaced people, even though the military authorities in the Jaffna region had promised them total access.

Sri Lanka faced fresh allegations on Friday, May 29, that its army had killed huge numbers of civilians during its offensive against the Tamil Tigers, as well as complaints it was continuing to block aid workers.

What precisely happened in the last weeks of the war is the subject of a growing number of international inquiries, even as Sri Lanka rejects those queries and continues to celebrate its victory.

Britain's Times newspaper said its investigation into the blistering war on the Tigers pointed to more than 20,000 Tamil civilian deaths, most of them killed by army shelling in the final weeks of the conflict.

Citing aerial photographs, official documents, witness accounts and expert testimony, the paper said the final stages of the conflict saw 1,000 civilians killed each day up to May 19, when the war was declared won.

An angry Sri Lankan government has dismissed criticism of its actions as absurd and maintains that it did not shell civilians and not a single civilian dropped blood during the conflict. Sri Lankan officials, in interviews, said they should be getting international praise, not punishment.

"These figures are way out... What we think is that these images are also fake. We totally deny the allegation that 20,000 people were killed," defence ministry spokesman Lakshman Hulugalle said.

The renewed international concern surrounding Sri Lanka's defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) came after the island managed to torpedo Western demands for a probe into alleged war crimes.

At a special session of the UN's Human Rights Council in Geneva, Colombo managed to lobby Asian support and push through a resolution hailing the military victory.

Nevertheless, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay maintained her demand for an investigation.

“Establishing the facts is crucial to set the record straight regarding the conduct of all parties in the conflict,” said Navi Pillay, who is also a former U.N. war crimes judge.

“Victims and the survivors have a right to justice and remedies.”

Supporting Pillay's, call for the investigation of war-crimes of both sides to the conflict, the New York Times, in its Wednesday editorial said:

"The government claims it must screen out rebels hiding in the camps. But aid workers suspect other motives, including a desire to deny access to witnesses who may have seen abuses by government forces."

The editorial pointed out that the Tamils were "long oppressed by the Sinhalese majority," and added, "Most Tamils were driven to the guerrillas as a desperation move after decades of abuse. Until the government treats all of its citizens fairly, there is no chance for the peace that President Rajapakse has promised his country."

Emily Wax writing on Washington Post says that there were clear signs of heavy artillery shelling on the strip of beach where tens of thousands of civilians huddled during the conflict between Sri Lankan government forces and the Tamil Tigers.

This observation noted after helicopter inspection of the site by independent journalists, interviews with eyewitnesses, and specialists who have studied high-resolution satellite imagery from the war zone. 

That evidence Wax says, contradicts government assertions that areas of heavy civilian populations were no-fire zones that were deliberately spared during the final weeks of military assault.

According to the Washington Post report, officials in the Justice Department in Washington are considering whether to seek criminal charges against Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka’s defense secretary and a U.S. citizen, and Sarath Fonseka, Sri Lanka’s army commander and a U.S. legal resident who holds a green card.

After dragging his feet on a visit to Sri Lanka at the peak of the conflict to try and save civilians lives, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon finally visited Sri Lanka after the conflict came to a brutal end with the massacre of tens of thousands of civilians.

According to media reports, Ban told reporters on his flight from Frankfurt to Sri Lanka: "This is going to be a defining trip, a very crucial trip for the future of Sri Lanka and peace and stability in the region."

However, Ban who was seeking full access to the internally displaced persons, languishing in the camps returned without knowing when Sri Lanka would allow UN and other relief agencies full access to all camps.

Ban who was who was in Sri Lanka on Saturday, May 23 was taken on a guided tour of Menik Farm, the most presentable of Sri Lanka’s squalid and dangerous internment camps for Tamils civilians, and a helicopter tour of the no fire zone where tens of thousands civilians were killed and wounded due to Sri Lankan army shelling and bombing.

While visiting the largest internment camp in Vavuniyaa, Manik Farm, on Saturday for three hours, Ban stressed the need for freedom of movement and immediate resettlement of the more than 300,000 Tamils held in camps.

The IDPs told Ban Ki Moon that they would want the U.N. to take full responsibility for the welfare of the refugees, sources accompanying Moon on his visit said.

"The UN has failed in several measures in preventing egregious human rights violations by Sri Lanka against unarmed civilian Tamils during the last several months, and this is the last opportunity to take bold action to repair the damage to UN's reputation. UN should shed its rhetoric on sovereignty and assume full responsibility for the Tamil people," an aid worker told a reporter after Moon's visit.

Reporters who accompanied the Secretary General unexpectedly received some space to talk to the refugees without any attending Government officials, sources said.

The IDPs complained to the reporters that Sri Lanka military, during its harsh filtering process, has separated many children from the parents.

They also complained that a selected set of refugee personalities coached by the Sri Lanka military was routinely selected to engage with the visitors to the camp, pointing to a former Voice of Tigers employee, and said they were happy to have had the opportunity to talk to the reporters this time.

During his visit to Manik Farm, Ban went to a small field hospital, where he saw severely emaciated elderly people attached to saline drips and children with shrapnel wounds.

But UN officials told Reuters the most severely injured Tamils – amputees, victims of mine explosions or heavy artillery blasts – were at other hospitals Ban’s delegation was not shown.

Ban Ki-moom was accompanied by UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordination John Holmes, Chief of Staff Vijay Nambiar, UNDP Resident Coordinator Neil Buhne, UNICEF country representative Philippe Duamelle and UNHRC Country Director Amin Awad.

Mixed Message

Ban made contradictory comments in the presence and then in absence of Sri Lankan officials, demonstrating he continuing policy of pleasing Sri Lanka.

Speaking to reporters in the presence of Sri Lanka’s foreign minister, Rohitha Bogollagama, Ban said: "As I was flying over the war zone, I thought the fighting must have been very severe and inhumane for the people trapped," said Ban, who called the destruction "very sobering, very sad, very moving."

Ban was asked if he saw evidence of “massive bombing” during the flight over the former battle zone referring to accusations of Sri Lanka firing shells at civilians. Ban avoided answering the question by saying “the fighting must have been severe.”

Commenting about the humanitarian conditions prevailing in the camp, Ban praised the Sri Lankan government for the help it was providing the Tamil civilians, while saying it lacked capacity – a subtle way of saying more can be done.

However, when speaking to CNN later Ban said, referring to the IDP camp he visited: "I have travelled around the world and visited similar places, but this is by far the most appalling scenes I have seen,"