Ambassador Claude Heller, the Permanent Representative of Mexico to the United Nations has accused Sri Lanka of inaccuracies in its statements emanating from the Foreign Ministry in Colombo.

The statement was issued by Colombo, after a meeting between Foreign Secretary Palitha Kohona and Juan Manuel Gómez Robledo, the Mexican Vice-Minister for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights.

It had stated that Mexico had given assurances that Sri Lanka will be kept off the Security Council agenda this month and also drawing an analogy between the conflicts in Chiapas and Sri Lanka.

When questioned this week, Heller dismissed the statement by the Sri Lankan foreign ministry as being inaccurate.

The Sri Lankan foreign ministry responded on Wednesday stating that it stands by its statement.

Chiapas is one of Mexico’s poorest and southernmost states and there was an insurrection in the state by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN). It was against the marginalisation of the indigenous population and they demanded social cultural and land rights. The group gets its inspiration from Emiliano Zapata, Che Guevara and Commandante Marcos.

According to the CIA factbook 2007, there are 5,500 to 10,000 internally displaced because of the conflict. The number of casualties of the entire conflict is estimated at less than 200, compared to 70,000 in the present Sri Lankan conflict.

As an analogy, it’s clearly a poor one.

Ambassador Claude Heller has had to defend Mexico against various allegations of abuse during his long diplomatic career and raising the issue of Chiapas would have placed him on the defensive.

Mexico holds the office of the President of the UN Security Council during the month of April and it passes to Turkey for the month of May. So, Mexico has just over a week remaining to place Sri Lanka on the agenda.

Ambassador Heller is under severe pressure from NGOs and Tamil lobbyists, who are carrying out an orchestrated campaign in the UN and in Washington to put Sri Lanka on the Security Council agenda.

There is also speculation that Mexico may be under pressure by the United States.

But then Heller is known to have chastised the United States as well. In 2003, Claude Heller who was even at that time the Mexican Ambassador to the UN, chastised the US for constantly insisting on a resolution against Cuba, to the exclusion of all other issues more appropriately brought before the Commission. It wasn’t that Heller was saying Cuba is perfect, but simply that the UN HRC was not set up to analyze the human rights situation in each and every country in the world. Its purpose, he noted, was to denounce and attempt to bring about changes in those countries where there existed massive, systematic, gross violations of human rights. And Cuba, whatever its shortcomings, simply never fitted that category.

Heller may have also been defending Mexico’s South and Central American interests.

However, this position is consistent with his assertion this week that "we were clear, in the case of Sri Lanka, there is a concern, there is a ‘responsibility to protect’ the population that is in (a) very difficult situation.".

Mexico will work to assure humanitarian assistance to population, the Ambassador further said.

Despite what the UN counts as 100,000 civilians still trapped between the Sri Lankan army and the Tamil Tiger rebels and an internal UN estimate of several thousand civilian casualties, Sri Lanka did not formally appear on the Council’s program of work for April.

While the Security Council is clearly concerned about the predicament of the civilians in the Vanni and the Human Rights situation in Sri Lanka, it is aware that taking up the issue will only prolong the suffering of the civilians in the Vanni by giving hope and a degree of legitimacy to the LTTE.

The UN Security Council holds the LTTE, using the civilians as human shields, is responsible for the predicament of the civilians. It wants the civilians released/liberated and the LTTE out of the equation so that the international community can concentrate on the post conflict scenario.