Ban Ki-moon will now eat crow on DRC

“The United Nations system failed to meet its responsibilities,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on November 14, as he released a United Nations report looking into the world body’s actions during the final months of the 2009 war in Sri Lanka and its aftermath.

Mr. Ban Ki-moon had to eat his words very soon after that.

There are many questions already being raised as to why the MONUSCO - United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) - stood by and almost gave a greeting or waved in the mutineers of the M23 (conveniently referred to as rebels) into the important city of Goma. The UN Forces virtually gave the green light to the M23 mutineers to enter Goma, despite earlier orders to resist them and push back the offensive launched against the forces of the DRC.

This new failure of the UN to protect civilians from advancing M23 mutineers, took place just days after the Secretary General spoke of the UN’s failure to meet its responsibilities in Sri Lanka, commenting on an internal report that particularly highlighted the roles played by the Secretariat, the agencies and programmes of the UN Country Team, and the members of the Security Council and Human Rights Council on Sri Lanka.

“This finding has profound implications for our work across the world, and I am determined that the United Nations draws the appropriate lessons and does its utmost to earn the confidence of the world’s people, especially those caught in conflict who look to the Organization for help,” he added.

Judging from what happened in the DRC, it is obvious that Mr. Ban, will have to more than double his resolve voiced for the world body to learn from its findings in order to better serve humanity, especially people caught in conflict, and also “to earn the confidence of the world’s people, especially those caught in conflict who look to the Organization for help.”

What is intriguing is what the UN officials, speaking for the Office of the Secretary General told the media when questioned after Goma fell to the M23 mutineers without the UN’s MONUSCO mission doing anything. On November 20, Inner City Press asked Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s spokesman Martin Nesirky to explain the inaction of the UN Peacekeepers. Nesirky, who was in Israel with Ban Ki-moon, deferred the question to his Deputy Eduardo Del Buey whom he said had been briefed by the Department of Peacekeeping Operations.

So what was the response?

Del Buey replied, “the Force Commander on the ground decides what is best for safety of civilians, if to risk a firefight or hold fire” or “make sure you are observing and keeping records.”

Of course the Force Commander on the ground has to see to the safety of civilians, but what raised many questions among journalists and many other commentators is the need to “make sure you are observing and keeping records.”

As Inner City Press stated: “Given the billions of dollars spent on MONUSCO and MONUC before it, one should be able to expect more than “record keeping.”’

To many it is not credible that this decision, this glaring failure of the UN, was left up to the force commander on the ground. M23 had been advancing on Goma, this time, since at latest November 15. It pulled back and gave the mutineers an additional 24 hours. If this is how the UN expects to “earn the confidence of the world’s people”, it is never likely to happen.

To get back to the Sri Lankan situation, the latest Petrie Report on the failure of the UN here, prepared by Charles Petrie an Assistant Secretary General, that took off from the contemptible “Darusman Report” by a trio of people openly ranged against Sri Lanka, which made no bones about it and had the least interest in following proper procedures on the conduct of a probe into such an important situation, as the bloody ending of a 30 year old battle against terror. The Petrie Report was leaked to a decisively anti-Sri Lankan media - in this instance the BBC – the day before it was published, just as the Darusman Report was also similarly leaked to a hostile media on the Sri Lankan situation. This aspect of leakage from the office of the UN Secretary General had been well commented on by Sri Lanka’s Ministry of External Affairs, and shows that such leakages of internal reports seem to be a well orchestrated system in the world body.

Petrie Report

Ban Ki-moon and others who continue to comment on the Darusman Report, and now its follow up by Petrie (where in a peculiar twist the UN’s fault is sought to be heaped on Sri Lanka) remain very silent on the Goldman Report, which held public sittings and followed the standards of an inquiry before it issued its report on Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity in the last Israel-Gaza war four years ago.

Interestingly, there are no questions of accountability, transparency, proportionality or any such issues about these findings that continue to be raised about Sri Lanka.

It is relevant in this instance to quote from the statement issued by the Ministry of External Affairs on the Petrie Report that made clear its findings were “regrettably unsubstantiated, erroneous and replete with conjecture and bias.”

“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.

Humanitarian assistance

“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.

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.”

Such leaks will not help to build confidence in the UN among the world’s people, amidst a multitude of failures both in Sri Lanka and the DRC…what next?