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— Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is sending the U.N. political chief to Sri Lanka to press the government to step up the release of nearly 300,000 Tamil civilians who have been detained since the South Asian nation's civil war ended in May.
Undersecretary-General for Political Affairs B. Lynn Pascoe said Monday he will also press the government to keep its pledges to Ban to promote political reconciliation with the minority Tamils and tackle human rights issues, including establishing a body to determine accountability for abuses during the 25-year civil war.
Pascoe told reporters that Ban decided to send him to Colombo after he spoke Monday to Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who approved the visit. Pascoe said he will leave Tuesday to keep up the U.N.'s "high level of engagement" on "critical issues" and return over the weekend.
"We have been concerned about the pace of progress since the secretary-general was out there" in late May, Pascoe said. "There were a series of commitments made to the secretary-general ... including movement of people out of the camps, and including the eventual political process and ... some kind of an accountability mechanism."
He said the United Nations is "particularly concerned" about the nearly 300,000 Tamil civilians still detained in government-run camps and wants them out and home "as soon as possible."
Last Friday, Sri Lankan authorities sent home nearly 10,000 war refugees from the overcrowded, military-run camps, where their movements are restricted and sanitation is poor. The government said it previously resettled more than 5,000 people, and aimed to return 80 percent of the displaced Tamils to their homes by the end of the year.
International rights groups have said holding the civilians is an illegal form of collective punishment and urged the government to allow them to leave to live with relatives, friends or host families in the area. Aid workers fear conditions will become dire when monsoon rains start next month.
The government says it cannot release the civilians until it finishes screening them for potential rebel fighters, and until land mines are cleared from their villages in the north.
Ban said earlier this month that he was worried about civilians in the camps because their living "conditions have not improved." The U.N. has pressed for family reunions and Ban said the Tamils should be allowed out of the camps to stay with host families.
Ban raised the issue of two U.N. staff members still being held in the camps and the government's expulsion of the spokesman for the U.N. children's agency, UNICEF, in his discussion with Rajapaksa on Monday, Pascoe said.
The U.N. political chief, who visited Sri Lanka with Ban in late May, has stressed the importance of political reconciliation and the need for accountability, which he said would be best done internally rather than externally.
The U.N. knows that accountability "will take some time ... but it's something absolutely critical for the people of Sri Lanka, I think, and it's a critical part of the political reconciliation process," he said.
"I don't think that any objective accountability procedure will put all of the blame on one side in this issue," Pascoe said. "There's plenty there to go around, I think."
Tamil rebels fought for a separate state for more than 25 years, claiming decades of discrimination by the Sinhalese majority. The U.N. says between 80,000 and 100,000 people were killed during the war.
