DESTROY BY LEAK
This appears to be the latest trend among international civil
servants of responsible global organizations these days -- damn
a country, malign her good name, and be damned the consequences,
all on the basis of a leaked report.
We carry below and on the front page, the External Affairs
Ministry's response to the leaked Petrie report, which seemed to
have surreptitiously sneaked out of some civil servant's drawer
in the UN, in the way some amoeba might get carelessly strewn
out of a laboratory petri-dish.
The sad truth about all of this is that the Petrie report, as
was the Darusman report, was a document meant for internal
circulation of the UN agency under whose authority it was
written.
The leak, then, one does not need a genius to tell, was an
inspired affair.
The report is meant to assess the workings of the United
Nations system in Sri Lanka, but then, it is now masquerading as
an indictment on the way the war on the LTTE was prosecuted in
the last stages of the armed confrontation.
The pattern is to leak the document first, and then release
it to the media the next day, on the basis that it has been
dispatched to the public domain anyway due to the leak ...
The report's censored part, not surprisingly quite favourable
to Sri Lanka, is itself testimony to the fact that some of the
casualty figures of the document for instance, are mere hear and
tell -- hearsay as they say in legalese.
Whenever there appears to be closure on the issue of damning
false allegations about the conduct of the last stages of the
war, a fresh ogre seems to be sprung out of the UN bottle
through these inspired leaks.
None of these leaked UN papers care to state that the LTTE
was firing artillery rounds from areas of civilian
concentration, making it imperative that the Sri Lankan forces
react with reasonable force, despite the possibility of some
civilian casualties.
Those who resort to such inspired leaks, at least ought to
make sure that there is credibility in the exercise of 'slash
and burn by leak.'
Not so, obviously, as parts in the Petrie report which have
been blacked out bear testimony to. The expunged areas
invariably deal with 'positive results' emerging over time
despite the extraordinarily trying circumstances etc.
It is not a joke that UN offices and agencies are hijacked in
this way, to up the ante on sinister and ongoing campaigns
against member states.
This is reprehensible spy/spook cloak and dagger behaviour on
the part of international civil servants who are paid from
contributions of all member states.
But yet, there is no dearth of international organizations -
entire countries - which wouldn't hesitate to quote chapter and
verse from these 'UN reports' which are neither 'UN' or
'reports' in the strict sense.
They are not 'UN' because they are not officially UN
sanctioned reports that are meant for the public domain, and
they are not 'reports' because they are mere advisory documents
for internal circulation within the relevant agencies.
The point is that there should be a set of UN and
international civil servants and international organization
guidelines that basically outlaw this kind of search and destroy
mission engineered stealthily from within UN offices.
The fact is that hearsay advice may be passable for internal
consumption and getting the respective acts of individual UN
agencies together.
But, are these reports willfully created and then leaked for
a more sinister purpose? Such a reaction certainly does not
sound as if it is paranoid when considering that from time to
time, there have been reports springing from nowhere, almost
mushrooming from out there in the dunes -- Darusman, Petrie, and
what else in the future?
A formal protest should be lodged within the UN system, to
outlaw the release of such internal reports in the public domain
and this step should be taken in concert among all friends of
Sri Lanka, as Sri Lanka may be the victim today and another
country tomorrow, of such stealth attacks that essentially
emerge from under the radar and plunder with the violence of
drones. |