U.N.'s Ban visits Sri Lankan refugee camp

MANIK FARM, Sri Lanka (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon toured Sri Lanka's largest war refugee camp on Saturday during a trip to press for wider humanitarian access and political reconciliation.

In the highest-level international visit to Sri Lanka since the government declared victory on Monday over the Tamil Tiger rebels in a 25-year war, Ban later flew over the final battleground and was due to meet President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

Ban said he would encourage open political discussions between the majority Sinhalese and minorities including Tamils when he met Rajapaksa later on Saturday in Kandy, the historic seat of Sinhalese kings and a Buddhist holy site.

"I hope that President Rajapaksa and government leaders will reach out with inclusive dialogue with the minority groups," Ban told reporters.

Rajapaksa has already pledged to strike a political deal with Tamils, and said he does not want Sri Lankans viewing the victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as a defeat of the Tamil minority.

The United Nations wants full access to camps housing 290,000 people who escaped LTTE-controlled areas as a military onslaught bore down on the separatists, who had fought to create a separate nation for Sri Lankan Tamils.

Ban toured Manik Farm, home to 220,000 refugees, and visited a field hospital for civilians wounded in the war.

"I was humbled by what I saw," he told reporters.

Sri Lanka has pledged access to the camps and greater freedom of movement for residents, but says it needs time to weed out potential Tamil Tiger infiltrators. It plans to resettle most of the refugees within six months.

"We will try to work hard to keep that promise realised," Ban said as he toured Manik Farm, the country's largest camp. "They need to be resettled as soon as possible."

Asked what he thought of Sri Lanka's efforts running the camps, Ban said: "There clearly seem to be some limitations in their capacity."

The government has already asked for international help and launched a $151 million (95 million pound) appeal with the United Nations to improve the camps and care for those inside.

Shortly after, Ban took a low-level helicopter flight over the coastal strip where the last battle was fought.

A Reuters reporter on the trip could see craters filled with water, burnt-out vehicles, uprooted and smashed trees and closely packed tents that appeared abandoned hurriedly.

Ban and other U.N. officials repeatedly criticised the government and Tamil Tigers during the final months of the war, saying the actions of both had resulted in unnecessary deaths of thousands of Sri Lankans trapped in the conflict zone.

Unofficial and unverified U.N. tallies say more than 7,000 civilians were killed and thousands more wounded in the war's waning weeks. That has prompted Western calls for a probe into potential war crimes and humanitarian law violations.

Rajapaksa in a Friday speech dismissed the calls as an attempt to stop the final offensive, and said he was "not afraid of walking up to any gallows, having defeated the world's worst terrorists."

The Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council is due to meet this week on Sri Lanka and may want to launch a probe.

The United Nations said this week the civil war had killed between 80,000-100,000 people since it erupted in 1983. The military said on Friday it had lost 6,200 troops and killed 22,000 Tigers in the nearly three years of the war's final phase.

(Writing by Bryson Hull; Editing by Paul Tait)