National English daily said in its top story today that the UN officials in Colombo deliberately tried to cover up the abduction of two UN employees by the LTTE terrorists.
The incident was made known to the public by the newspaper itself on 20th April 2007 despite the attempts made by certain UN employees and NGO activist to cover it up. The island further says that the UN officials have had clandestine negotiations with LTTE the terrorists to solve the issue underhand without getting public attention. It is obvious, that such public attention will expose the true nature of the terror outfit and will be certainly disadvantageous to the LTTE propagandist.
Read below the full text of the headline news report published in The Island today (8th):
Representative and Country Director of the World Food Programme (WFP) and Acting UN Resident and Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Sri Lanka Jeff Taft Dick came under heavy censure from the Foreign Ministry yesterday over his office's failure to bring to the government's notice the abduction and detention of two UN staff members by the LTTE until April 27. Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama, who summoned Mr. Dick told him that the government was very concerned that the UN Colombo office had taken so long to report the matter.
The UN reported the abduction and detention of its employees to the government seven days after The Island exclusively reported the incident under the caption, LTTE detains UN workers (April 20), which was followed by two more exclusive reports, UN negotiated clandestinely with LTTE (April 23) and UN HQ admits Colombo office kept it in the dark (April 28).
We reported that the UN had had clandestine negotiations with the LTTE in a desperate bid to secure the release of its employees before the incident snowballed into an international issue, but in vain. The Colombo Office, we learn, was under pressure from some of its employees as well as certain NGO activists to refrain from making the incident public, as they thought it would provide some justification for the government's military campaign against the LTTE.
Minister Bogollagama expressed the government's concern about the term, 'arrest' that the UN had used instead of abduction and stressed that the circumstances relating to the incident could be perceived as an attempt by the UN authorities in Sri Lanka to the LTTE's criminal actions'.
Mr. Dick said the use of term 'arrest' had been a mistake. The UN, he added, classified that as an abduction. One of the staffers, he said, had been released and head of the LTTE political wing S. P. Tamilchelvan had agreed that the release of the other would be reviewed further.
The reason that the LTTE gave for the abduction of the two UN workers was that they had helped some Tamil civilians to flee the LTTE-held areas.
Minister Bogollagama told Mr. Dick that the failure of the UN to inform the government of the incident until April 27 had rendered the government unable to discharge its obligations under the 1994
UN Convention on the Safety of the UN and Associated Personnel, to which Sri Lanka is a party. He expressed surprise that even the UN Secretary General had been kept in the dark over the abductions at issue.
Mr. Dick said he would convey the concerns of the Sri Lanka government to the UN, a Foreign Ministry statement released last evening said.
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