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UN failure....resulting in death of thousands

So much for the UN being the international watchdog!    BBC News reports.

"The United Nations failed in its mandate to protect civilians in the last months of Sri Lanka's bloody civil war, a leaked draft of a highly critical internal UN report says.

"Events in Sri Lanka mark a grave failure of the UN," it concludes.

The government and Tamil rebels are accused of war crimes in the brutal conflict which ended in May 2009.

The UN's former humanitarian chief, John Holmes, has criticised the report.

Mr Holmes said the UN faced "some very difficult dilemmas" at the time and could be criticised for the decisions it had taken.

"But the idea that if we behaved differently, the Sri Lankan government would have behaved differently I think is not one that is easy to reconcile with the reality at the time," he told the BBC's Newshour programme.

The UN does not comment on leaked reports and says it will publish the final version.

The 26-year war left at least 100,000 people dead. There are still no confirmed figures for tens of thousands of civilian deaths in the last months of battle. An earlier UN investigation said it was possible up to 40,000 people had been killed in the final five months alone. Others suggest the number of deaths could be even higher."



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"The final months of the war saw hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians - 330,000, according to the UN Panel of Experts (PoE) report of 2011 - trapped in the territory held by the Tamil Tigers (LTTE).

As the LTTE retreated from the government advance, they forced the civilians to come with them. According to the PoE most, though by no means all, of the civilian deaths were caused by government shelling. The Tigers shot people trying to escape and continued forcible conscription. The government rejected the report.

The only international organisation left in the shrinking rebel zone was the International Committee of the Red Cross. Four days before the war ended the ICRC spoke of an "unimaginable humanitarian catastrophe".

Most of the media were completely excluded from the north. Five doctors in the rebel area who reported the casualty situation to the media were imprisoned by the government and in July 2009 paraded before the media and mysteriously recanted, saying fewer than 700 civilians died from January to May - a figure much lower than that the government this year admitted to."

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