Foreign Secretary expresses displeasure over UN statements

COLOMBO: Foreign Secretary Dr Palitha Kohona called in Amin Awad, the acting UN Resident Coordinator in Sri Lanka to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday to express the Government's serious concerns on the statement made by Sir John Holmes, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs on May 29 on the recent wave of bomb attacks by the LTTE targeting innocent civilians using public transport in Sri Lanka.

It was pointed out that neither the statement of Sir John nor the reported remarks of Neil Buhne, the UN Resident Coordinator in Sri Lanka had identified the perpetrator of the series of the massacres.

The killing of civilians was condemned only in general terms, which conveyed to the uninformed that the Government of Sri Lanka was somehow responsible for such attacks.

The Foreign Secretary informed Awad that it is incomprehensible that the UN which condemned at the highest level the killing of Kaushalyan, a terrorist leader, found it difficult to condemn the LTTE for its deliberate and targeted bomb attacks, which have claimed the lives of dozens of innocent civilians.