Fox Sri Lanka trip cancelled amid rumours of row with Hague
By politics.co.uk staff
The defence secretary has cancelled a trip to Sri Lanka amid questions over its human rights record while battling Tamil groups last year.
The news comes after an alleged row between Liam Fox and the Foreign Office over the defence secretary’s planned visit.
Dr Fox was planning to make the visit in a personal capacity to speak at a memorial lecture in honour of one of the country’s former foreign ministers.
According to a statement the trip was cancelled “due to an extension to his scheduled official visit to the Gulf”.
But the Guardian suggested that foreign secretary William Hague was ‘appalled’ about the trip because of the questions remaining over the country’s human rights record and alleged war crimes.
Sri Lankan issues arouse passionate responses from human rights groups after the civil war which saw the Tamil Tigers defeated by government forces.
But the conduct of that war has been heavily criticised internationally, cooling relations between London and Colombo.
Reports of widespread human rights abuses led to thousands of Tamil demonstrators protesting in Parliament Square.
Labour’s Yvette Cooper highlighted the alleged tensions, saying: “William Hague must be spitting mad. This is a sensitive area of foreign policy. Who is in charge of policy on Sri Lanka, the foreign secretary or the defence secretary?
“Every member of the British government should be pressing consistently for the independent war crimes investigation Sri Lanka needs.”
According to Dr Fox’s statement, the trip has been postponed rather than cancelled entirely. It continued: “He intends to carry out an official visit to Sri Lanka next year during which he proposes to fulfil the speaking engagement that he had planned.”
The news comes as Wikileaks cable prompted fresh allegations about government complicity with paramilitary groups in last year’s offences.
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