the United Nations and president of the United Nations Security Council said, 'We demand that the LTTE immediately lay down arms, renounce terrorism, allow a UN-assisted evacuation of the remaining civilians in the conflict area, and join the political process.' He added that they 'strongly condemned the LTTE, a terrorist organisation, for the use of civilians as human shields and for not allowing them to leave the area'. He also urged the Sri Lankan government to "abide by international humanitarian law" with regards to access to refugees. The meeting was not a formal session of the Security Council and the president's statements were non-binding. Chris Patten In an Op-Ed contribution in The New York Times (12 January 2010), Chris Patten made the comment, ".....After all, both General Fonseka and Mr. Rajapaksa executed the 30-year conflict to its bloody conclusion at the expense of huge numbers of Tamil civilian casualties. By early May, when the war was ending, the United Nations estimated that some 7,000 civilians had died and more than 10,000 had been wounded in 2009 as the army's noose was being drawn tight around the remaining rebels and hundreds of thousands of noncombatants, who could not escape government shelling. The final two weeks likely saw thousands more civilians killed, at the hands of both the army and the rebels. David Miliband and Bernard Kouchner In "The Opinion Pages" contribution in The New York Times (20 June 2011), David Miliband and Bernard Kouchner made the comment, In April 2009, we travelled together as foreign ministers to Sri Lanka, as 25 years of fighting between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers neared its end. The remaining fighters were trapped in the northernmost part of the country – along with large numbers of civilians. U.N. estimates put the numbers of civilians there in the last few months of the war at over 300,000. We visited refugee camps that had been created to house Tamil refugees from Jaffna. Their stories were brutal and shocking. Random shelling in areas of fighting – including after the government had announced an end to fighting. Men and boys taken away from refugee camps – and now out of contact. Tamil life treated as fourth or fifth class. If foreign policy is about anything, it should be about stopping this kind of inhumanity.............Restrictions on journalism meant that there was a war without witness in Sri Lanka.............It