UN chief Ban Ki-moon is due in Sri Lanka on a 24-hour mission to press for unrestricted humanitarian access to an estimated 280,000 people displaced by the war on Tamil rebels.
The secretary general was expected ahead of talks tomorrow with President Mahinda Rajapakse and Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama.
It follows the routing of the Tamil Tiger rebels and the death of their leader Velupillai Prabhakaran that ended a bitter decades-long war for a Tamil homeland.
Mr Ban's chief of staff Vijay Nambiar told reporters in Colombo that his boss would tour the sprawling Manik Farm area in the northern district of Vavuniya, where most of the people displaced by the recent fighting are housed.
The camps are ringed by barbed wire and those displaced by the fighting have no freedom of movement.
Weather permitting, the UN chief will also fly over the northeast areas where the final stages of the war were fought to see the devastation for himself.
The high-profile visit comes as UN and relief aid agencies complain about restrictions placed by Colombo authorities on vehicle access to relief camps.
International aid group Oxfam urged the Sri Lankan government to ease restrictions on access camps, warning that a ban on aid vehicles was putting thousands of lives at risk.
The International Committee of the Red Cross and UN agencies also protested about ‘curtailed’ access, including to Manik Farm, after restrictions imposed last weekend.
The Sri Lankan government announced on Monday that it had wiped out the rebel leadership and retaken the final patch of territory from the guerrillas who ran a de facto state in the Indian Ocean island's northeast only two years ago.
The conflict has cost up to 100,000 lives, according to UN estimates. The world body says the government's offensive against the rebels has claimed more than 7,000 civilian lives since the start of the year.
