The
Ministry of External Affairs refers to the “Report of the Secretary
General’s Internal Review Panel on UN action in Sri Lanka” or the
“Petrie Report” which was leaked to the media the day prior to its being
formally handed over to the Secretary General on 14th
November, and officially made public the same day. While this Report is
an internal review of the UN’s action in Sri Lanka during the terrorist
conflict, the Ministry’s attention has been drawn to certain issues with
regard to allegations directed at the Government of Sri Lanka, which
are regrettably unsubstantiated, erroneous and replete with conjecture
and bias. The Ministry, therefore, wishes to state the following:-
The
Ministry, through its Permanent Mission in New York protested against
the leak of the Report on the very day after this questionable action,
to the Office of the Secretary General. The “Petrie Report” is an
internal document to assess the working of the United Nations system in
Sri Lanka during a given period, following a recommendation in the
Report of the advisory Panel of Experts appointed by the Secretary
General, known as the “Darusman Report”.
While
noting that both these Reports are internal advisories to the UN, it is
disconcerting that the Darusman Report came into the public domain
initially through a leak, and in this instance of the Petrie Report too,
the unacceptable procedure of leaking has been resorted to,
establishing a disturbing pattern which brings into question the bona fides
of the authorship of the document and its underlying motivation. It may
be recalled that following the leak of the Petrie Report, while the UN
Spokesman took the position that he could not comment on a leaked
Report, the author stated to the media that the penultimate draft “very
much reflects the findings of the Panel”. Following formal discussions
on this issue by the Permanent Representative in New York, with the UN
Secretariat, the latter characterized the Report as a document prepared
by an independent body over which the Secretariat and has no control.
However the expectation of a sovereign Government, quite legitimately,
is that the accepted procedure of first consulting with the country
concerned be rigidly adopted when commissioning experts. It is pertinent
to recall, in the context of a recurring pattern, that the Darusman
Report was formally made available by the UN to the public on the basis
that it first leaked through the media, and in fact the Petrie Report
also was formally released to the media the day after its leak.
The
Government of Sri Lanka does not intend to comment on the entirety of
its contents. However, some of the issues raised in the Report are of
grave concern to Sri Lanka, and should not be construed as the accepted
position.
This
Report seems to seek to endorse the baseless and discredited
allegations in the Darusman Report, of an exaggerated civilian casualty
figure during the last stages of the terrorist conflict, which has not
been agreed upon even among the senior UN officials at the time, because
of the speculative nature of the information which could not be
verified. The statistics in the Petrie Report are based on “unnamed
sources” quoted in the Darusman Report and unsubstantiated allegations
made by NGOs and certain lower level UN officials. However, a censored
section of this Report refers to a meeting of the Policy Planning
Committee to discuss Sri Lanka where several participants including the
then Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and the Resident
Coordinator did not stand by the casualty numbers, saying that the data
were ‘not verified’ and questioned the proposal by the Office of the
High Commissioner for Human Rights to release a public statement
containing references to the numbers and possible crimes. No mention has
been made of the intransigence of the LTTE which held the people as a
human shield, and even shot in cold blood those who tried to escape to
gain their freedom.
While
the Report admits that the LTTE positioned its artillery among
civilians, the allegation of Government shelling into civilian
concentrations does not take into account the principles of self defence
or reasonableness of retaliation, proportionality, or a technical
analysis of the trajectories of the shells allegedly fired, to determine
their source.
The
allegation relating to the Government deliberately restricting food and
medicine to the North is another unsubstantiated statement which, as in
the Darusman Report, is repeated in the Petrie publication. The
attempts of the GOSL to demonstrate the fallacy of this contention from
the time it emerged seem to have been dismissed in cavalier fashion in
the Petrie Report. It is a well known fact that food and medicine sent
to the North were monitored regularly by the Consultative Committee on
Humanitarian Assistance (CCHA), which comprised officials from the
Government, the UN and other humanitarian agencies, and representatives
of the diplomatic community based in Colombo, including Japan, USA,
Norway and the European Union. The efforts of successive Governments to
provide food and medicine to the North, despite the definite knowledge
that a major part of it was ending up in the hands of the terrorists,
have been appreciated from the early stages of the conflict by the UN.
This is amply corroborated by contemporaneous statements by the UN in
Sri Lanka at the time. Further, the alleged intimidation of UN staff for
delivery of humanitarian assistance is completely baseless, a position
which has been endorsed by the former United Nations USG for
Humanitarian Affairs and reported widely at the time in the media.
Repeated
characterization of the welfare villages without any basis as “military
run internment camps” demonstrate the ignorance on the part of the
author of the Report, as well as resolve to ignore the efforts taken by
the Government to provide basic needs and essential services to the
thousands of displaced civilians who fled from the stronghold of the
terrorists to the Government side. Without the assistance of the
military at that juncture, the GOSL could not have handled the magnitude
of the humanitarian task at hand. The military’s role in responding to
any humanitarian crisis is well established the world over. It has been
in this sense that the military has been engaged in Sri Lanka to
overcome the challenges of the terrorist conflict.
Furthermore,
while it refers to the military campaign to defeat the LTTE, the Report
makes scant reference to the long series of negotiations engaged in by
successive Governments to arrive at a peaceful settlement, while all
those efforts and brief periods of ceasefire were used by the LTTE to
regroup and rearm, to be subsequently unilaterally violated.
The
Report appears to be another attempt at castigating Sri Lanka for
militarily defeating a ruthless terrorist group which has held the very
people it claimed to represent as human shields. The basis for blacking
out sections of the Petrie Report is unclear and it is left to the GoSL
to surmise that references which may serve positively are those which
have been censored. In this context, attention is drawn to the following
blacked out sections, inter-alia :-
- The Policy Committee met two days later on 12th March 2012 to discuss Sri Lanka. Participants noted variously that “this crisis was being somewhat overlooked by the international community”, the policy “of incorporating a series of high level visits seem to have produced some positive results”, and that the possible involvement of the Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide would not indicate a suspicion of genocide but may add to the overcrowding of UN actors involved……..”.
- On 30 July the Policy Committee met again at UNHQ to address “follow-up on accountability” in Sri Lanka discussing whether or not the Secretary General should establish an international Commission of Experts, many participants were reticent to do so without the support of the Government and at a time when Member States were also not supportive…..”. The Secretary General said that the Government should be given the political space to develop a domestic mechanism……..”.
This practice of redacting clearly brings into question, yet again, the sincerity and objectives of this entire exercise.
Finally,
the Report, which is critical of the Member States, seems to forget
that the United Nations is an inter-governmental organization whose
members are equal in terms of sovereignty and dignity. We remind the
author of the Report that they must act within their given mandate and
the Charter, and be equal and fair in their dealings with all Member
States. A Report of this nature could serve to dangerously have the
statistics and unsubstantiated information acquire a life of their own.
In fact, the initial statements emanating from some countries seem to
disregard the fact that the basic purpose of the Report was to engage in
a critical appraisal of the UN system’s performance. Ignoring this
vital aspect, they have taken the opportunity to resort to criticism of
the GoSL in a manner that reflects patent bias and unwillingness to
examine the developments with any degree of objectivity.
Ministry of External Affairs
23 November 2012
