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| Mr. Nambiar |
It was reported last week that Nambiar was scheduled to attend the latest talks with the KIO but according to a source familiar with talks who spoke to the Kachin News Group it has yet to be confirmed whether Nambiar will in fact attend. The delay appears to be related to a general reluctance on the part of the Burmese government to internationalize the proceedings which the government fears could benefit the KIO.
Nambiar, a former Indian diplomat who also served as Ban Ki-moon's chief of staff for a number of years has been the subject of harsh criticism from human rights groups concerned about his conduct as a senior UN representative during the final days of the Sri Lankan government's offensive against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the spring of 2009.
Ban, sent Nambiar a former senior Indian diplomat to Sri Lanka despite the fact that Nambiar's own brother, retired Indian army general Satish Nambiar, had previously worked as an adviser to the Sri Lankan armed forces.
The late Marie Colvin, a reporter with The Times of London, has written that on Monday, May 18, 2009, at 5:30 a.m. she called Nambiar at his hotel in Colombo to personally convey a message she had received from two senior members of the LTTE leadership that they were ready surrender to the army. According to Colvin the leaders she spoke with were hiding in a bunker and wanted “Nambiar to be present to guarantee the Tigers’ safety”.
Nambiar informed Colvin that the Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa had told him that those who wanted to give up would be safe if they were to “hoist a white flag high”.
Colvin claimed that when she asked Nambiar to go himself to witness the surrender he refused saying that it wouldn't “be necessary” and that “the president’s assurances were enough”.
Only a few hours after Nambiar's conversation with Colvin, the dead bodies of dozens of members of the LTTE leadership including the two men who had previously told Colvin they were ready to give up, were shown to the Sri Lankan media. Footage was later released showing several of these man being captured alive, suggesting they had been summarily executed.
General Sarath Fonseka, head of the Sri Lankan military at the time, told an opposition newspaper in December 2009 that the president's brother Gothabaya Rajapaksa who serves as Defence secretary and another brother Basil who served as Presidential advisor had “given orders not to accommodate any LTTE leaders attempting surrender and that ‘they must all be killed”.
Following the revelations made by Colvin and Fonseka about the failed surrender attempt, two human rights groups the Swiss Council of Eelam Tamils and the US based Tamil’s Against Genocide filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court accusing the Rajapaksa government of war crimes. The joint complaint specifically cites Nambiar and questions “whether VIJAY NAMBIAR was in fact an innocent neutral intermediary or in fact a co-perpetrator within the negotiation-related community."
The complaint however appears to have been ignored by the ICC, which so far has only pursued cases involving Africa whilst ignoring other conflicts like those in Sri Lanka and Iraq.
During a press conference last year Nambiar told Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press that Sri Lankan government authorities blocked his attempt to witness the surrender. "I asked to go, twice I contacted \[US diplomat] Bob Blake, the two of us were planning to go... the ICRC was not able to go by sea route. The Government refused to give us permission. There was no way we could just force our way in," Nambiar said during the press conference in New York which took place just days after his vocal critic Marie Colvin died while on assignment in Syria.
Matthew Russell Lee and Inter-City Press have been one of the few news organizations reporting from the UN in New York to provide regular coverage of the UN's involvement in the Kachin conflict.
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