UN accused of downplaying civilian death toll in Sri Lanka UPDATE

Most recently Ban went to Sri Lanka, and saw Tamils locked up in internment camps. Since returning to New York, Ban's Spokespeople have resisted commenting on the plight of these defenseless people, who are being locked up with UN funds.

 

UNITED NATIONS, June 2 -- With the UN already under fire for withholding and downplaying the number of civilian casualties in Sri Lanka, another ongoing controversy has opened up concerning the number of internally displaced persons detained in the IDP camps in northern Sri Lanka. Between the May 27 and May 30 reports of the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, over 13,000 IDPs simply disappeared from the camps.

   OCHA's May 30 report states that "276,785 persons crossed to the Government controlled areas from the conflict zone. This represents a decrease of 13,130 IDPs since the last report (Sitrep No.18) on 27 May 2009. The decrease is associated with double counting. Additional verification is required."

   But earlier, OCHA had praised the "improved, systematic registration being undertaken in the camps."

The Secretary-General also briefed on his recent visit to Sri Lanka. He noted that he had consistently and repeatedly raised the strongest concern over civilian casualties. In regard to some reports in the media, he said the final total is not yet known. Most of these figures do not emanate from the UN and most are not consistent with the information at our disposal. He went on to categorically reject any suggestion that the United Nations has deliberately underestimated any figures. And he again said whatever the total, the casualties in the conflict were unacceptably high.

Question: Michèle, I just… excuse me, but I wanted to get your response to these things that were reported in Le Monde about Sri Lanka. I heard your statement…

Spokesperson: The SG has [inaudible].

Question: …but there some very specific things. He quotes UN sources in Colombo as saying, for example, that Mr. Nambiar told UN staff and UN representatives to “keep a low profile”, that the UN should be playing a sustaining role compatible to Government. Those are quotes they ascribe to Mr. Nambiar. What I am wondering is, does that mean he didn’t say that? I mean, having looked at the article, as I am sure the UN has, and it also says that Neil Buhne, the country director said that the death statistics should only go to him, and should not be given to any other person. It sort of… it paints a pretty, you know, I am sure you’ve seen it. The Times of London has said, you know, Ban must do something, it’s like Srebrenica. So does the specifics…?

Spokesperson: These statistics that you mention, these statistics were estimates. As you know, starting in the month of May, absolutely no numbers could be verified, because the numbers we had were from the hospital people, and health people who were on the ground and were communicating with us, or our own people on the ground. In the month of May we had absolutely no way of knowing what the casualty figure was. The number of 20,000 is not a UN number.

[The Spokesperson later added that as regards to the media reports on the figure of 20,000 civilian casualties in Sri Lanka, it was verified with the concerned United Nations staff who were present at meetings of United Nations senior officials that no such internal report was made at those meetings. She emphasized that the United Nations had never underestimated the casualty numbers, nor engaged in any manner in manipulating them nor in soft-peddling the message that was communicated to the Sri Lankan Government on the necessity of avoiding civilian casualties.]

Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch, said the Le Monde article was "spot on" and The Times estimate was a "very conservative one".

"This has been the dirty secret in Sri Lanka for months," he told swissinfo.ch on Friday. "I know how frustrated the UN staff in Sri Lanka have been over the refusal of the UN leadership in Sri Lanka to take on their mandate to protect civilians and speak out against grave war crimes."

Bouckaert said the UN faced a Sri Lanka government that acted extremely aggressively against its critics.

"But the UN should have taken their international diplomatic status to speak out against what was happening in the Vanni war zone. They had dozens of their own staff stuck in the Vanni region as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) refused to allow them to leave. They were getting daily satellite calls telling them exactly what was happening there," he said.

Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International's Asia-Pacific Director, said:

'Amnesty International received consistent testimony indicating that war crimes were committed by both sides in the conflict, and has called for an independent international investigation.

'The Times report underscores the need for this investigation and the UN should do everything it can to determine the truth about the 'bloodbath' that occurred in northeast Sri Lanka.'

On Wednesday, the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution that ignored the plight of more than a quarter of a million displaced Sri Lankans now confined in internment camps by the Sri Lankan military. The resolution failed to call for a fact-finding mission to inquire into allegations of serious violations and abuses of international human rights and humanitarian law by Sri Lankan forces and by the Tamil Tigers (LTTE).

Amnesty International continues to receive consistent reports of widespread and serious human rights violations facing the displaced people, including enforced disappearance, extrajudicial executions, torture and other ill-treatment, forced recruitment by paramilitary groups and sexual violence.

Sam Zarifi continued:

'The UN must address the war crimes and grave human rights violations that have occurred, and could still be occurring, in Sri Lanka.

'The Human Rights Council established a fact-finding mission which will now look at violations of international human rights and humanitarian law by both sides in Gaza.  By not establishing a similar fact-finding mission for Sri Lanka, the Human Rights Council has demonstrated deplorable selectivity and double standards.'

The United Nations deliberately downplayed the number of civilians killed during the Sri Lankan government offensive against the Tamil Tigers, according to a report in a leading French daily.

 The report, which was published on Thursday in the Le Monde newspaper, quotes several unnamed UN sources alleging that high-ranking UN officials, including Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, chose to keep silent about the high civilian death toll in order to maintain UN operations in the country and avoid slighting the Sri Lankan government.

Speaking to FRANCE 24 from Sri Lanka, Philippe Bolopion, who wrote the piece in the Le Monde, said he did not believe the downplayed figures were due to institutional incompetence. “I would say their moral compass might have gone wrong,” said Bolopion, referring to senior UN officials. “The most important thing for them was to stay in the country.”

 

According to Le Monde, a group of experts was put together by the UN to compile casualty figures for Sri Lanka, but only a partial total was leaked to the press.

 This leak put the estimated death toll at 7,700 by mid-May, days before the Sri Lankan government declared victory in their anti-Tiger offensive. The 7,700 figure was then widely accepted and used by the international press right up until the end of the conflict despite the daily rises in civilian death tolls, according to the report.

 

“We knew carnage was brewing,” the paper quoted an unnamed UN official as saying. “We rang the alarm bells for some months but no-one ever took the Sri Lankan government to task publicly.”

“Everyone is scared of having their agency removed from the country,” another anonymous source says.

In recent weeks, Nambiar’s role as the UN’s special envoy in Colombo has come into question. His brother, Satish, a former Indian general, has been a paid consultant to the Sri Lankan army since 2002.

 

Shortly after the Sri Lankan army’s official victory declaration, the local head of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), Amin Awad, told the Arabic TV station Al Jazeera there were virtually no civilians left in the conflict zone, the article notes.

 But the very next day, some 20,000 refugees came out of the conflict zone, having suffered a sustained bombardment.

 “It gave the government a blank cheque to carpet bomb the whole area,” a UN worker told the Le Monde.

 

“We absolutely reject the allegation that the UN deliberately downplayed civilian casualties,” UN spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs told FRANCE 24. “The UN has publicly and repeatedly said that the number of people killed in recent months has been unacceptably high. What we have are well-informed estimates and not precise verifiable numbers. But the UN has not been shy about the scale of human suffering and civilian casualties.”

But speaking to FRANCE 24, Bolopion said his sources informed him that the UN was not releasing the findings of its staffers on the ground “even though they were much more solid than those the UN has used in other conflict zones”.