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UN Chief gives top post to his IPKF son-in-law
View(s):UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who deemed it fit to sermonize to Sri Lanka during his visit this week, is under fire for appointing his son-in-law, Siddharth Chatterjee, as UN Coordinator for East Africa last week.
Mr. Ban is reported to have signed his appointment letter, according to media reports from the UN headquarters in New York. They had called it a “textbook case of nepotism”.Mr Chatterjee served as a major in the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) while stationed in the North of Sri Lanka. Inner City Press, a UN headquarters based news agency wrote a series of articles on how Mr Ban in late August awarded the top job in Kenya to Mr Chatterjee without recusing himself.
The UN correspondent for the news agency said that Mr Ban’s Spokesman Stephane Dujarric refused to answer all questions on his son-in-law, including about his activities in Sri Lanka as part of the IPKF. Inner City Press also said it has been told that Mr Chatterjee had posed with dead and disfigured LTTE cadres, which was a violation of the Geneva Convention, and therefore, a war crime.
Mr. Chatterjee, however, is reported to have praised the Sri Lanka Army for the way they defeated the LTTE. “The Sri Lankan Army deserves all our respect, gratitude and admiration,” he wrote some years back in an essay where he said the Sri Lanka soldiers “are men of sterling character, and I hope they overcome and demolish the LTTE, this organization of pathological tyrants and killers.”