The former UN Humanitarian Affairs Coordinator has stated that during the final weeks of the war in Sri Lanka, the international community was waiting for the inevitable defeat of the LTTE and hoped it “happened as quickly as possible”.
Ahead of the broadcast of Channel 4’s documentary “War Crimes Unpunished” on Wednesday evening, director Callum Macrae spoke to the then UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Co-ordinator, Sir John Holmes, who visited the island at least twice during the final few weeks of the war.
Macrae, described Holmes as “remarkably frank” and quoted him to have said,
"There was a bit of a diplomatic dance around all this, with everybody knowing that the end of this was going to be an inevitable military victory for the government and the inevitable defeat of the LTTE, and it was a question of waiting for that to happen, hoping it happened as quickly as possible and that it happened with as few civilian casualties as possible."
He then paused for a moment, as though considering what he had just said. Then he added:
"That may sound a bit cynical, but that is the reality of what I was observing."
See the full piece in the Huffington Post here.
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