IN BANGKOK
I JUST met Sir John Holmes, the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, who is in Bangkok for an internal regional meeting.
Not surprisingly, the situation in northern Sri Lanka where government armed forces are closing in on the remnants of the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), is top of mind as the frightful conflict draws to what looks like an increasingly bloody end.
Mr Holmes joined the clamour from the regional and international community including the UN Security Council, for an end to the conflict before even greater numbers of civilians are killed or injured in what is currently Asia’s greatest humanitarian crisis.
"What we've all been calling for is for the LTTE to let the civilians out. The vast majority seem to want to go. We've seen the evidence of that. They need to stop preventing people from leaving and indeed shooting at them as they have been doing, and stop recruiting civilians forcibly which is also what they’ve been doing," Mr Holmes told me on the sidelines of his meeting.
"It's clear that large numbers of people have got out of that very small, wrongly called 'no fire zone' in the last few days. It's hard to say how many; the government says 90,000, that may be right. Our own estimate might be nearer 60,000 but it’s hard to know because people are still in transit.
"It's also hard to know how many people are left still in the zone... maybe up to 50,000, and of course they are the ones in the most danger at the moment.
"We want the government to stick to the promise they’ve made many times, not to use heavy weapons in the zone. We believe they are using heavy weapons in the zone. And that's one of the reasons why there are so many casualties. Of course the LTTE is also using heavy weapons in areas where there are many civilians.
"People need to get at the top of their minds that the priority is now protecting the civilian population. I'm afraid both sides have been pursuing their military logics and not really caring about the civilians enough.
"This is a really, really dire situation for the people who are still left there. We are horrified by the number of casualties there have been in the last few months.
"We've always found it difficult to put numbers on that with any degree of confidence and we still can't do that, but we have reason to believe that probably around 5,000 people have been killed since the beginning of the year which is a huge number – and a correspondingly large number of people injured too.
"This is a very worrying situation, and we just want to bring it to an end as soon as possible, and we are willing to play any role that people will allow us to play, which is why we are so keen to get some people into that zone now and get the fighting stopped and bring this conflict to a peaceful and orderly end.
"The time has come to put an end to this fighting given the civilian casualties. The time has come for the LTTE to lay down its arms. There's no point in fighting on, it's just causing deaths to the civilians that surround them."
Read more about the situation in Sri Lanka: Tigers resist call to surrender.