Oceanic Viking asylum seekers 'emotional blackmailers'

SRI Lanka's ambassador to the United Nations has condemned 78 asylum seekers aboard an Australian Customs ship as emotional blackmailers.
The ethnic Tamils are still refusing to leave the Oceanic Viking, which has been anchored off the Indonesian island of Bintan for two-and-a-half weeks.
They were rescued in international waters inside Indonesia's search and rescue zone en route to the Australian outpost Christmas Island last month.
Sri Lanka's United Nations representative Dr Palitha Kohona on Wednesday condemned the group's stubbornness.
"It is wrong for anybody to go to a strange land and then exert emotional pressure of this kind on the intended destination and expect people to react positively,'' he told ABC TV.
"I think this is emotional blackmail.''
Dr Kohona said he didn't believe those aboard the ship were true refugees and called for them to be returned to Sri Lanka.
"They are economic refugees looking for greener pastures elsewhere,'' he said.
"I think they should be returned to Sri Lanka, that is where they belong, and if that happens it is quite likely that others will not make this journey again.''
Dr Kohona said Sri Lanka was working closely with Australian authorities to control "illicit migration'' from the south Asian nation.
But he denied the problem was significant, saying Tamils were simply using "push factors'' like the country's recent civil war as an excuse to seek asylum abroad.
Dr Kohona said reports of squalid conditions in Sri Lankan internment camps was the work of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam's "propaganda machine.''
Already the Sri Lankan government had returned 156,000 displaced citizens to their villages and towns, while he said 138,000 remained in the camps.
"We expect to have the bulk of the people in the camps back in their villages by the end of January,'' Dr Kohona said.
He defended his government's decision to expel Australian UNICEF spokesman James Elder from the country after he spoke out about conditions in the camps.
"I do not think it is UNICEF's role to advocate anything, they are an aid agency,'' Dr Kohona said.
"It is not for them to go out making statements which could embarrass a host government.''