Sri Lanka bloodbath was a ‘grave failure’ for world body: UN report !!

 

This handout photograph received from the Sri Lankan Ministry of Defence on May 18, 2009, is said to be of troops walking amongst debris inside the war zone on May 17, when they helped evacuate the last of the Tamil civilians from the area around the city of Mullaittivu. The United Nations failed in its mandate to protect civilians in the final months of Sri Lanka’s civil war, according to a draft of a damning internal UN report seen by the BBC on November 13, 2012. Sri Lankan forces finally crushed Tamil rebels in May 2009 following decades of brutal fighting. The conflict claimed up to 100,000 lives, according to UN estimates, and both sides are accused of war crimes.

Photograph by: MOD , AFP/Getty Images

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A draft United Nations report obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday said inadequate efforts by the world body to protect civilians during the bloody final months of Sri Lanka’s civil war marked a “grave failure” that led to suffering for hundreds of thousands of people.
The report accused U.N. staff in Colombo of not perceiving that preventing civilian deaths was their responsibility and accused their bosses at U.N. headquarters of not telling them otherwise. A separate U.N. report released last year said up to 40,000 ethnic minority Tamil civilians may have been killed in the war’s final months.
“This report is a benchmark moment for the U.N. in the same way that Rwanda was,” said Gordon Weiss, a former U.N. spokesman in Sri Lanka.
It accused U.N. officials and member states of being reluctant to interfere and leaving the conflict in a “vacuum of inaction.” It also said the political conditions after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S. made countries less likely to stop a government fighting against a group — the Tamil Tiger rebels — that many had branded a terrorist organization.
The official report was being released Wednesday at the United Nations in New York.
“The report concludes that the United Nations system failed to meet its responsibilities, highlighting in particular the roles played by the Secretariat, the agencies and programs of the U.N. country team and the members of the Security Council and the Human Rights Council,” said Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s spokesman, Martin Nesirky, on Wednesday.
The draft report was compiled by a committee headed by former U.N. official Charles Petrie. It investigated U.N. actions as the quarter-century war between the government, dominated by the ethnic Sinhalese majority, and minority Tamil rebels ended in 2009 in a wave of violence.
The BBC first reported on the draft report Tuesday.
The draft report painted a picture of a U.N. operation reluctant to criticize the government or accuse it of killing civilians with artillery bombardments, out of concern the government would respond by limiting U.N. humanitarian access — even through U.N. aid workers were barred from the northern war zone in late 2008.
Top U.N. officials in the country repeatedly worked to soften statements to remove casualty figures and accusations of possible war crimes against the government, the report said. When death tolls its staff was compiling were released, top officials dismissed them as unverified despite the rigorous methodology being used, the report said.
When U.N. satellite images confirmed heavy artillery shelling in the war zone and showed far more civilians there than the government claimed, the top U.N. official in Sri Lanka downplayed the evidence in a letter to the government, the report said. At the same time, member states did not hold a single formal meeting on the conflict in its final months in the Security Council, Human Rights Council or the General Assembly.
“The UN set itself up for failure, in Sri Lanka,” the report said.

The report also accused the government of working to intimidate U.N. staff, of withholding visas of those critical of the government and of planting false allegations against them in the media.
———
Nessman reported from New Delhi.

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Tamils demand foreign probe after Sri Lanka war report

Colombo: Sri Lanka's main Tamil party on Thursday demanded an international probe after the UN admitted it failed to protect thousands of civilians killed by troops in the final phase of the country's conflict in 2009.

The moderate Tamil National Alliance said the report published by UN secretary general's office confirmed its long-standing allegations of widespread killing and incarceration of civilians.

"Now that the UN has come with this report we want action," party spokesman M. A. Sumanthiran said.

"There should be an international inquiry. The government as the main accused party cannot be involved in the investigation."

Sri Lanka has resisted previous calls for an independent probe and instead appointed a domestic commission to recommend measures to prevent Sri Lanka from slipping back into ethnic war.

"We would like to see reparations, restitution and justice for the people who suffered," Sumanthiran said.
"No one can say that these allegations should not be investigated."

The UN report commissioned by Ban Ki-moon to look into UN's own role in Sri Lanka reinforced claims by international rights groups that up to 40,000 civilians could have been killed by government forces.

"Other sources have referred to credible information indicating that over 70,000 people are unaccounted for," the report noted while placing the death toll at about 40,000.

http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/tamils-demand-foreign-probe-after-sri-lanka-war-report-292827

http://www.channel4.com/news/un-leaked-report-sri-lanka-tamil-callum-macrae-killing-field

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/this-sri-lanka-massacre-shows-un-has-not-learned-from-its-failures-in-rwanda-8316883.html

This Sri Lanka massacre shows UN has not learned from its failures in Rwanda

The UN will never be a perfect  organisation: nothing so ambitious could be, and the organisation will tend to be blamed for the failures of its member states. But it has advanced many fundamental humanitarian principles, of which the responsibility to protect must count as one of the most important. Nothing can bring back the estimated 30,000 civilians who died in 2009 in the closing months of the war in Sri Lanka, but if the UN is to learn from its shocking failure to protect those civilians it must do more than mouth regrets and resolutions.

It is not the first such failure. In 2005, the UN determined that all member states share the responsibility to stop genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Since 2005, the principle has appeared in increasing numbers of UN resolutions, but this week’s reportraises serious questions about the commitment of the organisation to do more than talk. Hypocrisy is never attractive. Hypocrisy with lethal consequences is abject moral failure.

The failures detailed in the report are unequivocal: inexperienced staff, lacking support from New York, were intimidated by a government that was bent on perpetrating a massacre without witnesses. Everything the UN did connived at facilitating exactly that. Faced with government threats, they withdrew, leaving a huge, vulnerable population without recourse or witnesses.

They failed to publicise the details of the crimes and the government’s responsibility for them and to galvanise international opinion. They stood by as hospitals and refugee camps were shelled, civilians massacred and humanitarian aid withheld. They failed to fulfil the most basic requirements of their mandate.

If the words “never again” are to be more than an inscription on the gravestones of new victims, the UN must pursue this shameful episode to its roots. Its failures have enabled a triumphalist narrative  that the government of Sri Lanka continues to broadcast. Other regimes will draw satisfaction from the “success” of these scorched-earth tactics.

In 1999, the then Secretary General Kofi Annan resolved to ensure the UN never again failed to protect a civilian population, as it had in Rwanda. But failure was replayed in Darfur and Sri Lanka. The first step to restoring the UN’s credibility is to be implacable in holding the government of Sri Lanka to account. 

The UN is meant to enforce international moral authority.  It must use it to oblige the government of Sri Lanka to acknowledge its crimes and to punish those responsible. It must pursue justice and redress for the victims. And from the top to the bottom of the organisation, the commitment to protection, whatever the circumstances, must be paramount. Without that, it risks once again acting as window dressing to horror.