External Affairs Ministry Statement on “Petrie report”
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
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Yes. Just for a moment assuming all these palava about intentional killing of the LTTE hostages are true, we should ask, if the UN is ever capable of learning a lesson, after leaving the civilians to be killed in Rwanda, there was an inquiry and a bigger report. Then why the UN did the same once again. The buck stops with the leader. It shows the inefficiency and powerlessness (also how so many civilians and civilian infrastructure was destroyed in Palestine few days ago)of the UN head, Ban Ki MOON. He should resign, instead of trying to create a cover of smoke by trying to throw mud at SL government. It behaved much better than Israel.
Most of the Tamil civilians who were held by LTTE unscrupulously as a human shield, a war crime, by LTTE, were rescued by the GOSL Tri-Forces, in a Humanitarian Operation. The Tamil civilian hostages were citizens of SL. They were not LTTE operatives. They were the unfotunate victims. The few hundreds that were killed were at the hands of the LTTE who wanted and conspired to kill them all in a massacre with the death of VP and his hardcore elements. There was nothing that UN could do to prevent their deaths in the hands of a ruthless terrorist. Infact, UN did the right thing to let the GOSL destroy the LTTE terrorists. UK and US imperialists on the otherhand wanted to rescue the LTTE terrorists through their helicopters and naval ships on the pretext of saving civilians, through ulterior motives.
Nicholas,
Were you present in the war theatre to observe these events? It’s not only you but majority of the poulation think on similar lines.
Ther’s a strong push to boycott the CHOGM on the basis of this UN report. Also, there is a growing call for the UN to institute independent investigations into alleged war crimes. Also, it is rumored Ban Ki Moon is on verge of resignation??
I think people those who read blogs should read them carefully.Opinions and facts are quite different things! On
Vernon,
When you asked Nicholas whether he was present at the war theater to observe these events, I have the same question from the UN and the west whom you appear to be supporting. Were they present at the war theater to observe these events and to count so called 40,000 dead bodies?
I guess you should ask that same question from those who call for UN investigations and from those who want to boycott CHOGM. If they do not want to answer that means there is no need to create an inquiry to find “nothing” based on “Weapons of Mass Destruction” type international lies.
In fact rest of the world must boycott those war criminals and countries who invaded foreign countries based on those terrible lies. Rather, UN should spend that money to re-build the lives of people destroyed by US, UK and Israel outside their territories. It is much more illegal to invade foreign countries and to kill people outside your own country. We’ll better push for “international investigations” for those invaders. Sri Lanka never did that.
Dear Vernon,
Your impertinent question put to ND is fairly answered by Manjula and I will not go into details to defend ND other than to say that everybody has a right to express his views and ideas within the norms of good journalism.ND has exactly done that. Of late you have been posting good contributions in these blogs but your poser from ND is unwarranted to say the least.We are at pains to see you dump us the majority as those on the same line. We gather knowledge and ind information mostly through print and electronic media.We humbly admit we are not in the scene of incident we generally speak of.
Manjula, thank you very much for your wonderful reply to Varnon, which said it all, as AUJ also said in my defence. Thank you my friends for upholding the truth and fighting for Motherlanka.
US, Britain, Israel and their imperial West Allies are today’s REAL war criminals by their massive invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, on one pretext or another, and the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians they have killed, as in Vietnam. They call it ‘colateral damage’ a euphemism they have coined themselves to sound ‘as if it is alright’.
The few hundreds killed during the War of Liberation, mostly by the LTTE themselves, have been exagerated by the TNA, diaspora Tamils, Tamil Nadu and the imperial West by dishing out whatever number in thousands that came into their heads, and by trying to pin the blame on GOSL, since our Hon President and Hon Defence Secreatary and the Heroic Tri-Forces did not play ball with USA and Britain. They are true heroic sons of Motherlanka. They have pointed out, GOSL has not invaded another country, as USA and imperial West has done, but fought terrorists forces within our own Motherlanka, in an operation to save nearly 400,000 Tamil civilians who are citizens of SL, held hostage by VP and the LTTE as a human shield, a war crime. USA, Britain and imperial West Allies should have condemned LTTE for their war crime and praised GOSL for the Humanitarian Operation, which brilliantly saved nearly 98.5% of the Tamil SL citizens from the evil claws of VP and the LTTE, and have re-settled them on fast track and re-built Jaffna and the East which for more than 20 years had been laid waste by the terrorist war.
USA and imperial West allies have caused chaos in Libya through Islamic extremists, with whom they are at war in fact, in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, they USE them whenever they want to create anarchy in Arab countries they at loggerheads with, in order to grab their oil. They are now causing anarchy in Syria and bracing themselves to do the same in Iran, on one pretext or another, using the Islamic extremists and Israel seceret service, CIA and MI6. This way their own troops are saved from death.They do this subversion and military uprisings to grab Syria’s and Iran’s oil wealth.
In Bahrain however, the imperial West dogs are supporting the evil royal regime of war criminals who have ruthlessly crushed the just uprising of the majority citizens of Bahrain to overthrow the evil Royal regime, who are related to Saudi Royal autocratic regime.
USA is the top dog in the world. China, Russia and the freeworld of minority nations like us have to put up with it at present, as they do not match the military strength of USA and the imperial West allies.
The old farts are at it again in this blog. What a shame; what a bore. A few top guns in SL are illegally launching a satelite with the conniving noodle eaters to spy on India. We are sowing the seeds of a possble external intervention by India; wonder how the noodle eaters will react to such an event. After all, the noodle eaters are lending us all this money to build white elephants at double the commercial interest rate. They are also rumored to have dished out $1.2b in komis. An excellent journey up the garden path. Nicholas, Shnali and Manjula and AUJ will be long gone when Gen X,Y,Z are paying the loans back to the noodle eaters. Up yours.
Who the hell is this CP? He is none other than the old f…, a Tamil diaspora c… s….er, who was banned from this channel by the editor for his uncivilised and uncouth behaviour. He has re-appeared under a pseudonym ranting on and on. What a bore! I say to him go back to TN you kallathoni.
Chandani,
Your name (given by your parents , I presume)denotes the fragrance and beauty promoting qualities of sandalwood and your other name may refer to a common fruit enjoyed by many.Name itself sounds as belonging to a feminine.Unfortunately I am grieved to see that your parents’ wishes are dashed to the floor by you.There is no beauty,fragrance or even a ladylike behaviour in your jottings.Words like ‘old farts (to open a dialogue )are not at all becoming of a good lady.They do sound as from a vulgar beginning. You definitely has a right to differ ,as much as we also have the same right.
I am ,I suppose ,the oldest of these bloggers at 82 yrs of age and I do not bargain for insults.
Had noodle eaters not been been there to help, when all the aristrocrats and beef eaters let us down, LTTE bayonetsthree may have been up Chandini Pera’s and everybody else’s …. 3 years ago!