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.
Courtesy : Ministry of External
Affairs |
