It was unknown if Vijay Nambiar would actually be allowed to attend the peace talks Myitkyina due to speculation that the Burmese government didn’t want to allow international participants fearing this could benefit the KIO.

 Nambiar, a former Indian diplomat who also served as Ban Ki-moon's chief of staff for a number of years has been the subject of harsh criticism from human rights groups during his conduct as a senior UN representative during the final days of the Sri Lankan government's offensive against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009.

 Ban, appointed Nambiar - former senior Indian diplomat - to Sri Lanka, despite the fact that his own brother, retired Indian army general Satish Nambiar, previously worked as an adviser to the Sri Lankan armed forces.

 Two senior members of the LTTE leadership that wanted to surrender asked that Nambiar be present “to guarantee the Tigers’ safety”, according to the late Marie Colvin, a reporter with The Times of London, and who personally conveyed the message to Nambiar on May 18, 2009.

 Nambiar informed Colvin that Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa told him that those who wanted to give up would be safe if they were to “hoist a white flag high”. Colvin claimed that when she asked Nambiar to go himself to witness the surrender he refused saying that it wouldn't “be necessary” and that “the president’s assurances were enough”.

 Several hours after Nambiar's conversation with Colvin, the corpses of dozens of members of the LTTE leadership, including the two men who had previously told Colvin they would surrender peacefully, were displayed to the Sri Lankan media. Footage later released showed several of the same men being captured alive, adding to speculations that they were summarily executed.

 General Sarath Fonseka, who was head of the Sri Lankan military at the time, told an opposition newspaper in December, 2009 that the president's brother Gothabaya Rajapaksa, who serves as Defence secretary, and other brother Basil, who served as an Presidential Advisor, had “given orders not to accommodate any LTTE leaders attempting surrender” and that ‘they must all be killed”.

 The Swiss Council of Eelam Tamils and the US based Tamil’s Against Genocide filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court accusing the Rajapaksa government of war crimes. The joint complaint specifically cites Nambiar and questions “whether Vijay Nambiar was in fact an innocent neutral intermediary or in fact a co-perpetrator within the negotiation-related community."

 The complaint was ignored by the ICC, which so far has only pursued cases involving Africa, ignoring other similar incidents that occurred during conflicts in Sri Lanka and Iraq.

 During a press conference last year in New York, Nambiar told Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press that the Sri Lankan government authorities blocked his attempt to witness the surrender.

 "I asked to go, twice I contacted (US diplomat) Bob Blake, the two of us were planning to go... the ICRC was not able to go by sea route. The Government refused to give us permission. There was no way we could just force our way in."

 The press conference took place only days after Marie Colvin, who was his most vocal critic, was killed while on assignment in Syria.

 Matthew Russell Lee and Inner City Press are one of the few news organizations to provide regular coverage of the UN's involvement in the Kachin conflict for the UN in New York.