United Nations Security Council:

Move to table motion on Sri Lanka fails

LAKSHMI DE SILVA

There was a move among a small number of members of the United Nations Human Rights Council to bring up a motion to discuss the situation in Sri Lanka, but for the last two weeks, they had not been able to muster 16 signatures to table the motion in the 48 member council. The deadline to submit the motion was today (12), Disaster Management and Human Rights Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe said at a press conference yesterday.

He said the move against Sri Lanka was influenced by certain INGOs and regional groups.

Some politicians in the west were involved in the affair with parochial interests as some of them will be facing elections next year in their own countries, the Minister noted.

There were more urgent issues in the world that the UN Council could discuss like Iraq or Afghanistan, but, the case of our country was only a democratically elected government facing a ruthless terrorist organisations and was also trying to free the hostages held by the terrorist group.

In any case it was completely an internal matter and we were not prepared to negotiate the issue with any outside party, he said.

The Government was not hiding anything and its foremost interest was the safety of its citizens. Other countries or INGOs or other external agencies could not be as interested as we were about our citizens. But we have kept our doors open to visiting VVIPs and UN officials and Foreign Ministers of other countries as we were not hiding anything.

These persons were welcome to come and see for themselves how we were committed to rescue the civilians and restore democracy, the Minister also said.

While implementing the humanitarian military operations to free the Tamil civilians in the North, the government had continued to send stocks of food to the No Fire Zone where the terrorists were in control. From February 17 up to now the government dispatched 2,442 metric tons of food and medicine to the No Fire Zone through the ICRC, he noted.

When there was a huge influx of civilians fleeing the LTTE area we had teething problems to see to their welfare but now we were coping with it even though there were over 191,000 civilians housed and looked after by the Government, he also said.