External Affairs Minister Gamini Lakshman Peiris said he has summoned foreign diplomats to a meeting Thursday in Colombo to put the record straight about the United Nations' Expert Panel's report on Sri Lanka's accountability.

Last week Peiris addressed a group of British legislators, diplomats, bankers, political analysts and academics in London on Sri Lankan reconciliation, saying the government hasn't embarked on "triumphalism" over winning the war against the rebels. Sri Lankan banks are making loans to Tamil farmers to help rebuild their lives shattered by the war, he said.

But since Peiris' speech in London, Sri Lankan national media have leaked excerpts from the report that suggests Sri Lankan regular soldiers and Tamil Tiger rebels committed serious human rights violations as the bloody 26-year conflict was ending in May 2009.

The report's authors want an independent inquiry into the acts of both sides during the war.

The United Nations estimates that around 100,000 people were killed, including around 7,000 in the final, particularly brutal, year of fighting. Tamil Tiger rebels were struggling for a separate homeland for Tamils in the northeast of the island nation that lies only several miles off the southern tip of part of the Indian subcontinent.

The report also accused Tamil Tigers of keeping civilians in dangerous conflict zones and using them as hostages and human shields.

Government troops eventually won the extended war and both sides are attempting a rapprochement.

But the government says it fears the U.N. report, based on 10 months of work and handed to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last week, could kindle nationalistic flames and destroy trust on both sides.

"Among other deficiencies, the report is based on patently biased material which is presented without any verification," the External Affairs Ministry said in a statement.

Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa called for people to demonstrate in the streets on the traditional May Day celebrations in what he said would be a "show of strength" against the report.

"The time has come to show our strength and this should not be confined to expressing worker solidarity on this day but also to demonstrate against the injustice done to the country before the world," Rajapaksa said.

"I am prepared to face any punishment on behalf of the motherland with great honor."

There have been "well-orchestrated" threats against the Sri Lankan government which has spent millions of dollars on reconstruction, he said. "But today the picture being painted is of displaced persons and the blatant falsehood of child soldiers being tortured."

Gordon Weiss, a former U.N. spokesman in Sri Lanka during the final years of the island war, told British television program Channel 4 News that the leaked report into "credible allegations" of war crimes represent Sri Lanka's "Srebrenica moment."

His comment was a reference to the massacre of 7,000 men during the Bosnian war in 1995, notably in the town of Srebrenica.

Weiss also said the report criticizes the United Nations itself for not taking "actions that might have protected civilians."

Casualty figures collected by the United Nations should have been made public at the time because that "would have strengthened the call for the protection of civilians while those events ... were unfolding," the report concluded.

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