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If today the United Nations announced that it had received unconfirmed reports of 50,000 casualties in a war off limits to journalists - wouldn't the world take notice and try and stop the killings? We now know the UN system had this information in 2009 about Sri Lanka and suppressed it. We know this because of an internal review, commissioned by the UN Secretary General, Ban ki Moon.
It's a report that concludes that the UN's conduct at the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka marked a "grave failure" that "should not happen again". The document cites the UN's role in Rwanda, saying some lessons there were not learned and proved relevant to Sri Lanka. Let's hope they're learned for Syria, but as the author of a book of survivors' stories from that war in Sri Lanka I am haunted by the thought of what might have been there.
The document concludes that, "in Colombo many senior staff simply did not perceive the prevention of killing of civilians as their responsibility. That's damning criticism but it's the nature of how and why they did this that's very hard to accept.
The UN removed the executive summary that was present in the draft version prepared by Charles Petrie. This said, "Some have argued many deaths could have been averted had the Security Council and the Secretariat, backed by the UN country team, spoken out loudly early on, notably by publicizing casualty numbers".
Petrie's report meticulously documents how senior UN officials continuously tried to blame the Tamil Tiger rebels - a proscribed terrorist group - for the killings even while their own international staff told them the Sri Lankan government was responsible for the majority of deaths. It was a bias that has slanted all coverage of the conflict since because it came from such an influential and reliable source - the UN no less.
On 9 March 2009 the UN did not share with a diplomatic briefing a casualty sheet their staff had prepared, "which showed that almost all the civilians casualties recorded by the UN had reportedly been killed by Government fire". They also failed to mention that two thirds of the killings were taking place inside "safe zones" unilaterally declared by the government, purportedly to protect civilians. Three days later the UN Resident Coordinator in Colombo, Neil Buhne, and several under-secretary generals refused to stand by their own casualty data, claiming thei were not verified. Charles Petrie puts the best gloss on the suppressing of vital casualty information, saying rather euphemistically that the briefings "fail to address the reality" on the ground.
Then when the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, struggled to speak out about potential war crimes by the Sri Lankan government, internal communications in the annexes reveal Ban Ki Moon's then chef de cabinet, Vijay Nambiar, strongly imploring her to tone down and dilute her statement. He even complained that her statement put the Tamil Tiger rebels and the government on the same footing. At this point Navi Pillay's statement is quoting figures the UN knew were low - the draft version of this report mentions much higher unconfirmed reports at the time of 5,687 killed and 10,067 injured.
These were figures coming out of the war zone collected by Tamil doctors, priests, NGO workers and the UN's local employees held hostage by the Tigers. The conflict was off limits to all independent observers so a few brave UN staff decided to set up a long distance data team in Colombo to try and corroborate the reports. They compiled casualty lists but only verified a death if there were three independent sources. The Petrie report says it was a rigorous methodology following best practice. In this way the UN confirmed nearly eight thousand civilian deaths before it became impossible in late April for people under heavy fire to get out of their bunkers and actually verify information.
Senior UN diplomats, still working in posts where they deal with conflict related issues, are cited in the report constantly trying to wriggle out of accepting the casualty data their own staff prepared, undermining it by questioning its reliability. Never mind that these figures were much more carefully checked than death tolls often cited by the media for Syria or Afghanistan. Or for that matter, the general death toll the UN always cites in official documents of 100,000 killed in Sri Lanka during the whole course of the war.
Buried in the end of the annexes of the Petrie report is startlingly new casualty information that UN staff received from informants in the field: unconfirmed reports of 17,810 killed and 36,905 injured during 2009. The UN team verified about half of these cases but knew their figure was an undercount.
Surely if the world had been told the scale of the killing at the time, international condemnation might have averted some of the deaths and abuses after the war. Subsequently a UN report has said reports of up to 40,000 civilians killed were credible. The Petrie report increases this to say 70,000 people could possibly have died in those final five months of hell.
That's little comfort to the shattered broken survivors who watched friends and relatives die in agony, abandoned and betrayed by the international community. Starving, dirty and exhausted, they lived in ditches being pounded by multi barreled rocket fire, only getting out of flimsy shelters in the lulls in fire to bury the human body parts they found lying strewn around their tents to prevent the dogs eating them. Families were so desperate they prayed that if they were to die it would be quickly and all together; loving parents contemplated suicide with their children because they couldn't see any chance of survival. By May 2009 people were forced to abandon their dead and injured just to save themselves, literally walking over corpses and dodging bullets. They emerged only to be detained in sub-standard internment camps, paid for and built by the United Nations and its donors.
The only way for the UN to set the record straight on Sri Lanka now is for Ban ki Moon to set up an international investigation into war crimes in Sri Lanka. It was the recommendation of a panel of experts he commissioned to write a report last year but the Secretary General hesitated to take such a step without strong international backing. We now know from this internal review that his own legal department advised him he had the power to do it, but backed off. After the revelations of this inquiry it's an essential step to restore the UN's tattered credibility on Sri Lanka. And it's the very least Ban ki Moon owes the families of the tens of thousands of Tamil victims.
See this infographic chart showing what the UN knew in 2009 about casualty data and what it actually said in public. Download file
Frances Harrison is a former BBC Correspondent in Sri Lanka and the author of Still Counting the Dead: Survivors of Sri Lanka's Hidden War, published by Portobello Books (UK), House of Anansi (Canada) and Penguin ( India).
Follow Frances Harrison on Twitter: www.twitter.com/francesharris0n
Needless to say, we all soiled ourselves and ran inside. Once we were in our rooms, however, we could see from the windows that it was just a fireworks display celebrating some local holiday. Exactly who thought this would be a good idea at the height of a civil war is still beyond me, but it kind of typified the Sri Lankan attitude towards the war. Every morning our tour guide would tell us stories of famous local people, invariably the story ended with that person being assassinated by the Tamils and yet it was told with such nonchalance.
Everything we saw tended to suggest that the majority of the Sinhalese population weren't particularly interested in the war (at least not as much as you would expect), which would suggest to me that they either approved of everything the government was doing to put the Tamils down, or that they simply weren't being told what was going on.
“Writing back in September, Thomas C. Mountain, an independent journalist currently living in Africa who was a member of the 1st US Peace Delegation to Libya in 1987, estimated that NATO had dropped over 30,000 bombs on Libya, with an average of “two civilians killed in each attack.” Thus, Mountain has estimated that some 60,000 Libyan civilians had been killed by NATO air strikes alone by the end of August. Shortly thereafter, when rebel forces began the siege of Sirte, Moussa Ibrahim, a spokesman for the now-deceased Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, told Reuters via telephone on September 19 that “in the last 17 days, more than 2,000 residents of the city of Sirte were killed in NATO air strikes.” As of today, some 26,000 NATO sorties and 9,600 strike missions have been conducted by NATO, with an average of four bombs used per attack. “Though it may never be known just how many died in “the most successful operation in NATO history,” the alliance has shown little interest in rebuilding a nation that has in many ways been wrecked by its seven-month military campaign. “
simply because they are conscripts. I am alive to the fact that many of these Tamils may have
thought that they were civilians because they were not wearing uniforms and because it was
volunteer or conscripted work in a situation of exigency and thus implicitly short-term in
duration. However, building bunkers for the LTTE frontlines and carrying supplies places them
in the engineering and supply corps respectively. So, my analytic fiat locates all such
personnel within the category “Tiger personnel”. This means that those referred to above as
“auxiliaries” were part of the LTTE army defending Thamilīlam (a shrinking space).
Read in these strict terms, if one assumes the LTTE death toll in 2009 to have been circa
5,000, the rough estimates for “strictly civilian” deaths provided by Sarvananthan, Nadesan
and Narendran work out respectively as:
1. 10,000 – Sarvananthan
2. 6,000 – 10,000 – Narendran
3. 11,000 – Nadesan.
funding a useless, toothless entity who seems unable to arbitrate successfully in any conflict around the world. An organisation that is effete should be dismantled and alternatives for policing the world found! Banke Moon looks so helpless and inadequate with his attempts at arbitration during his visits to the so called conflic zones. He might as well talk to the wind for all these people care! Why wasn't the Sri Lankan government investigated?
http://tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=71&artid=35660
Her conviction to push for an international inquiry is refreshing. It is good to call a spade a spade. Closer to 70,000 Tamil civilians (old, young, children, women, mothers) were massacred to save a racist county from disintegrating into two states? What is so sacrosanct about unitary state. Sri Lanka is a failed state, and call a failed state a failed state, and move towards a smarter solution.
However the consensus was that no one wanted to help the Tamil tigers, so we let it happen. The net result was a massacre followed by peace. The tigers lost and now there's a semblance of peace.
Whereas in Syria we're inclined to poke our nose in, so the net result is more massacres and no peace. I'm not sure how that's better?
In Syria too innocent people are killed, building are destroyed and people flee to neighbouring countries. How can a leader kill his own people and destroy his own country? How can the ruler claim legitimacy when he kills the people he claim to rule? UN must stop killing and bring real peace. Members of UN SC play political games to support the respective friendly countries.
Outside forces helping the weaker side just prolongs the war and increases the suffering.
US and India must feel ashamed of their passive role in not doing anything effective to make Sri Lankan state took any genuine step for accountability. US imprisoned 34 LTTE suspects for collecting money and trying to buy anti-aircraft missiles. Now they know 70,000 people were killed by the Sri Lankan state, but, up to now not a single person responsible for such killings is either investigated or punished. The SLG encourages human rights violators by not arresting any of them . Only international community bring some rationality into the minds of SLG leaders.
The genocide of the Tamils did happen since independence and peaked in 2009. The world better come to terms that genocide of Tamils is still continuing unabated - though some interested parties in the West still do not concede. Let us see whether this will report will prick the conscience of the international community to offer justice to the Tamils who are increasingly getting disillusioned by the moral standards followed by the world
Let's not forget who really commands the UN.
Unscrupulous officers from the US and other Western Nations facilitated these crimes. Don't just blame the UN, but the people who REALLY control it.
Every time the international community raises the issue of accountability, Sri Lanka establishes a commission that takes a long time to achieve nothing,"
"US should put an end to this game of smoke and mirrors and begin a process that would ensure justice for all the victims of Sri Lanka's war.
Govt may well be continuing its Draconian laws and human rights abuses with these arbitrary arrests and executions.
Many Journalist who questioned the government have been killed, and so far nobody brought to books yet.
The level of democracy in the island was best illustrated by the opposition presidential candidate called for the intervention of 'outside governments' to prevent dictatorship and to protect democracy in the island. "There is no law and order in this country,there is nothing we can do about it" he said.
Colombo still seeks to hold back the truth. Tamils right for political self determination has been brutally twisted and crushed.