Sri Lanka criticizes U.N. on war report

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Sri Lanka’s government criticized a United Nations report on the conclusion of the island’s civil war, saying Friday that the allegations against the government are “unsubstantiated and erroneous.”

The External Affairs Ministry said the report “appears to be another attempt at castigating Sri Lanka for militarily defeating” the Tamil Tiger guerrillas who fought for a separate state.

The U.N. report said that the world body’s own inadequate efforts to protect civilians in 2009 during the bloody final months of the civil war marked a “grave failure” that led to suffering for hundreds of thousands of people.

The report also accused the U.N. staff in Colombo of not perceiving that preventing civilian deaths was its responsibility and accused its bosses at U.N. headquarters of not telling it otherwise. A separate U.N. report released last year said up to 40,000 ethnic minority Tamil civilians may have been killed in the war’s final months.

The report also accused the government of working to intimidate U.N. staff, of withholding visas of those critical of the government and of planting false allegations against them in the media.

Those accusations against the government drew Friday’s rebuke from the Sri Lankan foreign ministry.