OneWorld.net (U.S.)

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 8 (OneWorld) - A prominent international humanitarian organization is calling for the United Nations Human Rights Council to investigate the killings of a group of aid workers in Sri Lanka.

Last Friday, 17 humanitarian workers, four of them women, were killed in the northeastern Sri Lankan town of Muttur, where government forces are engaged in heavy battle with the rebel Tamil Tigers.

The deceased workers were associated with the Paris-based international organization Action Against Hunger (ACF), which has been operating in the strife-torn country for the past 27 years.

They were found dead, lying face-down in their office compound, according to local aid activists. All of them--sanitation experts, engineers, agronomists, and project managers--were involved in post-tsunami relief and could not be evacuated due to the fighting.

Since both the Sri Lankan army and Tamil fighters have denied involvement in the incident and have laid the blame on each other, the group's officials say they have no option but to turn to the UN for help.

"It's baffling to us. We don't understand why it happened," Cathy Skoula, the group's top official in New York, told OneWorld.

Skoula said the aid workers employed by her organization had no tensions, whatsoever, with either side involved in the armed conflict in Sri Lanka.

"We are transparent," she added. "We don't hide anything."

The group, which employs three expatriates and 50 Sri Lankan workers in the district where Muttur is located, describes the tragedy as the "worst" in its nearly three-decade-long presence on the island.

The organization has decided to halt all of its activities in Sri Lanka and is currently examining its presence in that country.

The current fighting in Sri Lanka started after locals in an area controlled by the rebels shut off the water supply from a reservoir. Apparently, they did so to protest the government's failure to provide water towers for the region as it had promised.

As the government launched four days of air strikes in response, the rebels took the military action as a declaration of war.

More than 800 people are estimated to have been killed in fighting in recent months. The over-two-decade-long civil war in Sri Lanka has claimed an estimated 64,000 lives and displaced 1 million people.

Currently, both sides claim that their role in the fighting is confined to defensive actions and that they are in compliance with the 2002 ceasefire agreement.

Skoula and other aid activists say all of the deceased workers were wearing t-Shirts that clearly identified them as Action Against Hunger employees, a fact that leads them to believe that these were "execution killings."

The group says its human resource director has left for Sri Lanka to offer deep condolences to the families of the victims, adding that preparations are already under way to help the families bury the victims.

"This massacre illustrates again the difficulties encountered by humanitarian actors in conflicted areas," ACF president Denis Metzger said in a statement charged with emotion.

"The humanitarian values defended and everywhere shown by Action Against Hunger--neutrality, impartiality, free access to victims, independence--is yet again ridiculed."

The group has helped about 1,000 families in the Muttur area by providing healthcare and improving water and sanitation, especially access to clean water. It also organized agricultural rehabilitation programs to help victims of the December 2004 tsunami.

On Monday, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who is UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special envoy for tsunami recovery, said he was "shocked and saddened" by the deaths of the ACF workers.

Like Skoula and her colleagues, Clinton's office for the tsunami recovery in New York, however, has no clue as to who was behind the killings of aid workers.

"We have no idea who were the perpetrators," spokesperson David Singh told OneWorld. "It is an unconscionable act, and Mr. Clinton has strongly urged Sri Lankan authorities to do everything possible to apprehend the perpetrators."

In a recent statement, Mhinda Samarasinghe, Sri Lanka's human rights minister, said that a very high priority investigation will be undertaken.